Fun gets mileage

from Dragon Boats

Thursday, July 12, 2007 11:36 PM CDT

With gasoline prices once more shooting toward the roof, this might be a good weekend to stick close to home in southeast Wisconsin. Lucky us, there is plenty of summer fun at hand - highlighted by the Rotary Club-sponsored Great Midwest Dragon Boat Festival. The 68 gasoline-free people-powered watercraft teams will be competing beginning at 8:30 a.m. Saturday off Samuel Myers Park, just down the hill from Gateway Technical College. In addition to the paddling competition, the event features bands, food from 11 different restaurants and vendors, and children's activities at the park where the gates open this evening at 5 p.m. There's a parade down Pershing Park Drive at 6:30 p.m. and opening ceremonies at 7:30 p.m. today. While you're at the lakefront, you might also want to check out the early catch at the Big Fish Bash at Racine on the Lake Festival Park. The fishing competition begins Saturday and concludes on June 22, while the family festival starts on Thursday.

Over a barrel.

That, unfortunately, was the position of Racine area motorists once again this week as they saw an overnight jump in the pump prices of gasoline. If you were lucky enough to fill up on Wednesday you could still find gas prices as low as $3.09 per gallon in the area, and on Thursday you could still get it for $3.19 per gallon - but the signage was changing rapidly from Chicago north to Milwaukee with prices as high as $3.49 a gallon being reported in Milwaukee and Madison. The culprits, according to news reports, are blips in production at two Midwest refineries - one in Whiting, Ind. where a pipe crack has halved output and another in Kansas where a refinery has been flooded. Repairs are expected to be completed at the Indiana plant before the weekend, but if you're traveling, you might want to keep the speed down a bit and be a little easy on the accelerator.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff

was getting a verbal drubbing on Capitol Hill and late-night talk shows this week after he told the Chicago Tribune he had a "gut feeling" the nation faces an increased terrorist danger this summer. The White House backed away from Chertoff's "feeling" the next day saying there was no credible intelligence to suggest that there is an "imminent threat to the homeland." We hope that's the case. But this was not like Homeland Security was raising the color code on terror alerts; Chertoff was just giving an unvarnished assessment of the nation's risk. His assessment was echoed two days later in a new intelligence report that warned Al Qaida forces have been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border and had rebuilt their operating capabilities to levels seen just before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The new report, prepared as part of an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate, contends Al Qaida's training actities have also increased, faults U.S. intelligence for having some gaps and warns against porous travel security protections with four European countries that have less-restrictive visa policies with Pakistan. That's enough to give anyone a few butterflies of worry. We'll take Chertoff's blunt takes over the bad burrito jokes of pundits and politicians any day - and hope we have enough time to respond to those worries.

The most recent round of compliance checks

on underage alcohol sales in Racine showed � surprise � no difference. A violation rate of 20 percent occurred with five of 25 stores selling to a minor. That's about on a par with past violation rates. Still, we're hoping for some traction here since the fines this time were levied against the businesses and not the clerks. Plus. the city's Public Safety and Licensing Committee is summoning the license holders to its July 23 meeting to explain the sales. Perhaps that will be the first step on the road to accountability and compliance. We've got a thumbs up just waiting for that to happen.

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