The 81st Carnival of Ohio Politics, tastefully assembled by Ben Keeler, is here.

Just read this, this, …. and this (HT NixGuy).

UPDATE: The story got major coverage on the Today Show this morning (Nix notes the video here). The prosecutor claims he would have had to prove “recklessness” and not “mere negligence” to have been able to charge her. Given actual prosecutions in other similar circumstances, consider me very skeptical.

UPDATE 2: This is the second hornet stirred from what will surely be a very large nest.

UPDATE 3: Given the background of the underlying story in Update 2, I wouldn’t bet against the Slaby situation and a similar one in St. Louis (HT Cincinnati Black Blog) being mentioned at Michael Vick’s sentencing hearing on December 10. Yeah, you just read that. I’m not saying I agree with it, or that it’s going to sway the judge. I’m saying that the opening for the opportunistic argument is there, and that it sadly has some justification.

August’s federal receipts look like they will come in 5% or so above August of last year, if the Treasury Department’s August monthly report tracks the numbers in August’s final daily statement:

The nice increase in receipts from tax withholdings is consistent with other indicators of decent income growth, as is September 4’s impressive $20.1 billion in withholding collections. The corporate and not-withheld decreases aren’t important, as the big amounts for these items come in during the months when quarterly estimated taxes are due (Jan., April, June, and Sept.). These items, in those months, have consistently had percentage increases close to or exceeding double digits for several years.

August’s Monthly Treasury Statement will come out a week from today.

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In case you missed it — A few weeks ago, disgraced former Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong, forced to mail his law license to the State’s Bar, included a note decrying “the fundamental unfairness” of how the bar had treated him. The unfairness of what he put three innocent Duke students through in the name of political expediency and divisive national publicity clearly isn’t weighing on him. The one day he will have to spend in jail is nowhere near enough.

The unapologetic lynch mob of Duke faculty known as the Group of 88, whose unconscionable statements have been chronicled by the indefatigable KC Johnson since the travesty began (his latest relevant post is here), were apparently unavailable for comment.

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Apple has been cavalier about its first adopters for years, but the just-announced $200 (33%) price drop on the iPhone only 68 days after its debut has to be some kind of record (HT on the news to Data Poobah via NixGuy). People who have bought iPhones for $599 in the past 14 days can get that $200 back.

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Hillary Hillraiser Hsu (he’s still on her Hillraiser list, which, though less than ideal in appearance, has been saved for posterity), who first fled and then otherwise avoided jail for previous crimes for about 14 years, was allowed out on bail last week. He has disappeared. Words fail. At least with her husband, we didn’t have donors and others fleeing the country until AFTER he was elected.

Update: Since words fail, this pic is worth 1,000 of them:

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Those who appear almost gleeful over the prediction that the US economy will slow to 2% this year aren’t mentioning the growing negative expectations drag the possible expiration of the Bush tax cuts is beginning to exert on forward-looking investor behavior.

For the naysayers to get their 2% or lower full-year GDP growth, second-half growth will have to slow to less than 1.7%, since first-half growth before final the second quarter’s final revision has been over 2.3% annualized (0.7% in the first quarter, 4.0% in the second). I doubt very much that the second half will come in that low, but now you know where to lay much of the blame if it does.

From Fond du Lac, Wisconsin:

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Jeanna Giese, like many other teenagers entering college, admits to being nervous about classes and meeting new friends.

But Giese isn’t your average freshman. She is a medical marvel who has been studied and chronicled for nearly three years as a one-of-a-kind case: She survived rabies without vaccination.

Her new classmates, and anyone else who runs into her on the Marian College campus, will be hard-pressed to tell that she had to relearn how to talk, walk and function.

Giese doesn’t dwell on her past.

“I’m going to school just like anyone else,” the ebullient 18-year-old said Tuesday, the first day of classes. She lives at home and commutes two miles to the private Catholic college of about 3,000 students.

Doctors report on her progress in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. She has recovered “remarkably well” and should continue to improve, said Dr. Kenneth Mack, a Mayo Clinic neurologist.

Rabies, a viral disease spread by the bite of an infected animal, attacks the nervous system and is usually fatal once symptoms develop. The other five people known to have survived it after symptoms appeared either were vaccinated in advance or received vaccine soon afterward. All but one ended up with persistent movement difficulties.

But Giese was not hospitalized until a month after she was bitten by a bat that had flown into her church. She had picked it up to take it outside.

In a desperate attempt to save her, Wisconsin doctors intentionally put her in a coma and gave her a slew of antiviral drugs and other medications to prevent a cascade of events that causes nerve cells to die. She spent two months in intensive care before returning home on New Year’s Day, 2005.

Then the hard part started.

A tutor helped Giese finish her sophomore year of high school so she could rejoin her classmates in the fall. Physical therapy helped her overcome speech problems, weakness in her left hand and foot, and abnormal movements in her arms and hands.

She can drive a car, scored above-average on a national college achievement test, and has normal cognition, doctors report in the journal.

She still has slight difficulty enunciating words, awkwardness using her left hand and trouble lifting her left foot so that she looks a bit uncoordinated when she runs.

The biggest thing she misses is sports. She used to be a high school athlete, playing basketball, softball and volleyball. When she returned to school her junior year, she worked as a manager for the volleyball team. But unhappy with not being able to play, she quit in her senior year.

“I’m pretty at peace. It still bothers me and will probably always bother me. But I’m starting to kind of let it go and go on with life,” she said.

Giese said she tends to be more emotional now and her body overheats easier, but she recovered so well that she finished in the top half of her high school class and received college scholarships.

Go here for the rest of the story.