هذه المبادرة من حزب الأمة ربما هي مخرج من الهرجلة الحالية

News stories need to be clear. They all too often are anything but.

These sorta tidbits are not very helpful:

"A message left on McCarl's answering machine wasn't immediately returned, and jail officials say they have no record of an attorneyfor her."

Who the hell cares? Look closely - and you'll find plenty of news stories chock full of them.

Or what about this gem: "The man told police the incident occurred in November. It wasn't immediately clear when it was reported."

Huh?

Here's another: "Police said they did not know if she had an attorney and a phone listing for her inDilworth could not be found." Wow - THAT's some hard-hitting news reportage. Now we know the rest of the story. Sorry, Paul - R.I.P. and all...

But there's a lot of this fluf - padding out otheriwise fun wacky news. Each of these ids from one of those got-drunk-got-stupid-got-busted kind of stories I love to read.

And all of them suffer from the same sorta shit: "His name and condition were not released."

I could barely hang on to the last sentence - "Panus isn't sure why he was naked, or why he jumped." This is great copy - fucked over by the inclusion of inane non-information. Why?

The last line of the story is "The official had no attorney information and a phonelisting for Jones could not be found."

The FIRST line of the story "Deputies say they found a toddler wandering alone on a Texas street and methamphetamine and more than a dozen snakes in his mother's home" does NOT deserve to be slaughtered by the little anti-paragraph about how we don't know about a lawyer. It's a shame.

One need not even know that there's a rest of the story - the double-speak is so stultifyingly stupid. "Dvir is being held at the Jefferson County Jail under $100,000bail. The jail had no information on whether she had an attorney, and no home phone could be found. Nedlin has remarried." That one borders on a lie. No phone could be found? Bullshit. We didn't find one.

These nuggets of nonsense often wrap a story - the last bit to meet a word-count quota. But sometimes they show up right in the header. "A man armed with a black handgun tied up a female employee and fired shots during a robbery." - Clarifying it wasn't a silver hangun, or say green.

I tried to make a few phone calls to find out what fucked-up quasi-rule dictates such dumbass dogma but "A woman answering a phone listing for Amber Carter inBellefontaine hung up on a call seeking comment Wednesday."

Welcome to the Metric Shitload. More to come...