Category: News

The Washington Post today contains an oped piece by the hysterical widow of one of the Beltway sniper’s victims. Her beef: Congress has begun to pass laws to indicate gun manufacturers are not responsible for the misapplication of their products.

I won’t go too into detail with this piece, except to perhaps excerpt the first paragraph, which says:

With little public notice, the House of Representatives voted this month to give an extraordinary level of legal immunity to an industry whose negligence helped kill my husband. Now the Senate has the responsibility to stop this atrocious bill from becoming law.

An extraordinary level of immunity? But, lovey, no one’s even tempted to sue Hostess for a misapplication of its products if someone chokes a victim by stuffing pink Sno Balls(tm) down the deceased’s gullet. The gun industry needs extraordinary immunity because Litigating A Left America (LALA) people are extraordinary eager to use lawsuits to slap America into the safety-from-violence Renaissance such as Great Britain is experiencing, as well as into a lawyers-rich-from-industrial-trough Renaissances that grant an extra ski cottage in Vail.

Oh, yeah, but:

I am confident that the criminal justice system will work to punish the people who killed my husband. But the civil justice system must also be allowed to work. Those who share responsibility for my husband’s death must also be held accountable.

Message: Show me the money! We’re not only out for justice, we’re for making sure that we can have bodyguards licensed to carry to shuttle our newly-enriched selves around while the Middle Class and below are easy marks for any whack job with a piece.

I and families of other sniper victims have sued these gun sellers. I hope that by holding them accountable, we can cause others to behave more responsibly, and that future tragedies such as mine will be prevented. I understood when I filed the case that I was not guaranteed victory, but that’s okay. All I wanted was my day in court. But if S. 659 is enacted, the courthouse door will be slammed in my face.

So enact it, already. Close the door slowly, but firmly. Otherwise, we’re going to have to sue all manufacturers whose products are used in unintended ways. Detroit will get theirs for hit and run deaths, Ginsu and Cutco for stabbings, Louisville Slugger for all baseball bat beating deaths, ad absurdum.

And then when We The People have survived the federally-mandated detoothing and declawing programs and have only our piteous mewlings to protect us from human nature as demonstrated by predators who’ve never even studied Hobbes, perhaps we can sue the media and the unthinking tanks that made it all possible.

I have heard about the 24-hour news cycle and its impact on current events and their perceptions, but now the Washington Post is reporting that historians are taking their first cracks at The George W. Bush Presidency and What It Means.

Welcome to the short attention span society. George W. Bush (some hope) is history now, and after he returns to civilian life and returns to the title of Governor Bush (not President Bush or ex-President Bush, you pikers; there’s only one president) he’ll be forgotten by most, idolized and vilified by some (typically different somes), and we will have moved onto whatever sixteen year old song ostrich is gracing the cover of Entertainment Nanosecond.

Fidel Castro’s put the blame quite squarely where it belongs for the fact that his old style of executing and jailing dissidents has come back in style again. Although some American leaders are saying it’s not really our fault, I cannot keep silent. America, the hegemon, does cause unrest, dissidence, and optimism.

America still stands as an example of what freedom, limited government, and capitalism can do to a society. Ours is the highest standard of living in the world, where even the poor people watch television, and we do it without having to shoot citizens who disagree with the prevailing government. We just don’t elect those people, and if their feud with the government spills into another crime, such as bank robbery or terrorism, we try them.

America provides an optimistic example to some oppressed people around the world, a template for the way their lives can be. So they resist or oppose their governments, so their governments have no choice but to act for their own corrupt survivals.

If only our regime were as oppressive as Not In Our Name, ACLU, and AI say, then people would not be foolishly goaded into disagreeing with their governments and getting shot, tortured, and jailed, not necessarily in that order. We are responsible for executions in other countries just like rich riverbed loam is responsible for tall tiger lilies that get thoughtlessly plucked by some damn punk teenagers who are skipping school.

The editorial columnist from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an interesting cartoon about the state budget crunches.

Tag line: “We had a pretty fine country going here till some darn fool let all the states go broke.”

You know who that fool is, buddy? Each voter who doesn’t hold his or her legislators accountable to control spending. All the states are breaking themselves, and they think the Deus Ex Federa’s going to pull them out. That’s foolish.

Why is driving with 5 calves illegal in Arizona?

(From Fark.)

Frequent reader willr points out a story about a teenager who was dumped at a Kansas hospital after a party with a blood alcohol content of .425, which is five times the legal driving limit and 42 times the limit that MADD is undoubtedly going to try to mandate at the Federal level, tying some highway funding into it in that neat manner in which republics learn to subvert themselves.

According to the story:

KCTV5 News used an Internet calculator to determine how much a 160-pound man would have to drink in an hour to have that much alcohol in his system.

Drinking 5 percent beer, he would have to drink 14 and a half beers or almost eleven glasses of wine or 18 shots of 96-proof alcohol.

Fourteen and a half beers? Obviously, he drank an Anheuser-Busch product. No one would even want to down that many delicious Beer Smoothies, also known as Guinness Draughts, without savoring them. But I could understand the impulse to down a Bud Light in one swallow to minimize the damage to my taste buds and esophagus.

Although it seemed a good idea to those legislators that like to bump up on additional tax revenue, New York Governor says no to a tax “surcharge” that the state would have applied to people making more than $100,000 a year.

Good to see an executive pushing himself away from the table.

Steve Chapman in today’s Chicago Tribune (registration required) discusses the means by which teachers in Illinois will soon have tenure in three years instead of four.

While the rest of us out here in the real world have to worry about at-will employment, it’s good to see our teachers are safe from the economy and, in some cases, their own incompetence.

Next step: inherited tenure. Primogenitenure!

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch loves its crusades, particularly its crusades for simplistic issues and individual concerns. This morning it reported a shocking case of PREJUDICE against a man with a disablility. A man with a stutter alleges that a nationally-syndicated radio show refused to play his request because he stutters. The Post-Dispatch, with its characteristic fervor, describes the travails of this guy who cannot get his bit on the air because of his disability.

The crusading story describes how the man tells them the producer or call screener slurred his stuttering nature and uses that allegation as its reason d’outrage. Of course, the article also mentions that the protagonist of the “story” has repeatedly called the program and has made on-air dedications before. Further, this dedication is another one for the man’s ex-wife and the man himself is a repeat criminal offender. In the Post-Dispatch’s eyes, he is the Little Man to cast against the Big Media Empire.

Now, I wasn’t there, and unless the gummint powers-that-record release the tapes of the conversation, we’ll never know whether the screener told the guy to buzz off because of his speech, or because he was a weepy repeat caller who wanted to send his estranged ex-wife a different song every hour. However, based on the information in the story, I cannot judge in favor of the alleged stutterer. As a matter of fact, I would have to trust someone who has a reputation and an audience to protect.

As a result of this micro-crusade, though, the local radio station that carried the national show has stopped carrying the show based on this outrage. Well, no, they were going to drop it next month (i.e., in seven days) anyway, but they’ll pay a DJ for a week to cover the extra week of dead air. Message: They care about their individual listeners.

Everyone wins! The stutterer gets his revenge, although I suspect the revenge he wanted remains to be decided by a civil court. The paper wins because its crusade on behalf of the little guy has gotten results. The radio station wins because it sacrifices little to Support the Wronged Little Man.

Of course, producers of the radio station and skeptical readers everywhere are saying “WTS (What the Schnuck)?” and wondering if something in the water stripped from the Missouri River and lightly chlorinated makes St. Louisians this whacky.

The secret’s in the psychadelic Iowan sewage. Who needs shrooms?

Forbes has coverage of an annual report by a group called Citizens Against Government Waste that outlines some of the more distinctively foolish government programs upon which the government lavishes money. The late Senator William Proxmire did a more limited run of this sort of thing with his Golden Fleece Award, but apparently takes more detailed view of the complete budget.

This sort of thing would make an excellent checklist for a line-item veto, ainna?

A new ad campaign has been launched in seven states to “inform” public opinion on the pitfalls of capping malpractice lawsuit lottos.

Here’s a bit from the article describing the plight of one set of parents:

One of the new ads features the mother and father of a 2-year-old boy who died of dehydration. The child is shown in an oversized cowboy hat, drinking from his baby bottle while his parents mourn their loss.

“All he needed was an IV … It’s unheard of in the United States. You don’t lose children to dehydration,” says the child’s mother, Shawnna Gardner.

“They lose one of their sons or daughters to medical malpractice, they won’t be concerned about putting caps on damages,” says the boy’s father, Vern Gardner, referring to the bill’s critics.

Message: Little Billy was priceless, but we’ll take two million for him.

Get a clue, people. Sometimes accidents and oversights happen, and money should not alleviate your suffering. An accident calls of this sort calls for a thorough inquiry and perhaps a warning to the attendants if they were not grossly derelict or malicious, but not a chingchingching payout for the bereaved at the expense of everyone else left paying into the system.

I mean, get a load of this ad:

In the third commercial, a young boy buying a candy bar is told the cost is $14.03. “But it’s only a candy bar,” he says. “Yeah, but my investments lost a lot of money. So, I’m gouging my customers,” the store owner replies.

What the store owner needs to say is, “Yeah, but little schnucking Charlie on the next block put a whole schnucking chocolate bar into his mouth before riding his bike down the embankment from a freeway overpass and ramming head on into an electrical utility pole whereupon he choked on the candy bar. So now I have to pay malcandy insurance because I can’t be sure you’re not part of the same chocolate-choking death cult, kid, take it or leave it.”

But I guess that runs longer than thirty seconds.

A St. Louis judge will be asked to resign for using a word that someone who heard it doesn’t understand. Because niggardly sounds like nigger, someone wants the skirt to resign.

So now in the game of Sensitivity Charades, even Sounds Like is thought to be grounds for an excommunication from public life, even when committed by another minority persecuted through the ages.

A wonderful addition to my quiver of insensitivity quarrels! So now phonetics, elision, and the book-learned-vocabulary mispronunciation that I call my “Wisconsin Accent” can now get me in trouble when the random collection of syllable tumblers click into a combination that sounds naughty to a random listener. I call that alignment of the forces against me a hostile universe environment, but nobody’s listening unless I howl, Lee.

I better be careful the next time the St. Louis Blues play the Nashville Predators. My position as Doc-U-Matic 3000 would be in jeopardy were I to appreciate the goalie’s play. Tom Vokoun is a twofer.

Shocking! Apparently, Saddam Hussein was paying off at least one person in the west that opposed the war against his regime.

You mean they bought off members of the opposition so they wouldn’t fight? Whereever did he learn that trick?

(Story discovered via Little Green Footballs and Den Beste.)

In Coral Gables, Florida, you cannot park your pick-up truck on the street or in your driveway between 7 pm and 7 am lest you be mistaken for someone who actually has to work for a living. The city enacted the law in the 1970s to preserve its sense of uniquely fake Mediterranean decorum, to keep property values and tax assessments suitably elevated, or simply to thrash property rights whereever it can, and most of Coral Gables was fine with it until recently.

The pick-up owners have rebelled. Now that pick-ups have evolved from utilitarian cargo haulers to 250 XXL Buses-With-Lidless-Trunks-For-Beds, the pick-up owners think their trucks are no different than SUVs, so the SUVs should be banned from driveways and streets at night. And the powers that fill the city’s coffers with ticket revenue agreed. Dadgum, SUVs are trucks!

So now the fifty percent of the city who violate the new interpretation of the law decide they want the law changed, or at least clarified so only the minority who own unsightly, disgraceful pick-up trucks are punished for their combined choice of vehicle and residence. After all, the obvious intent of the law was not to infringe upon their property rights, but upon the property rights of others. So until the law was interpreted to affect them, it was okay.

All righty, then. They used to call this sort of thing fascism before they devalued the word.

I mean, the crime is harrowing enough: two parents strangle and then decapitate their four children, either because they’re too poor to afford children, or because the children are possessed by the devil, or because Hollywood called for “Andrea Yates meets Selena.” Bad juju, no doubt.

But buried within the story, hidden in the plain sight of the second paragraph, we find this nugget:

A grand jury indicted Maria Angela Camacho and her common-law husband, John Allen Rubio, on three counts of capital murder, and a fourth count was filed against them Wednesday under a state law allowing an additional charge if two or more people are killed at the same time.

In Texas, it’s not only illegal to murder people, but it’s even more illegal to kill them more than one at a time.

I expect this is a well-formed law, too, with exact standards that describe the cooling off time period you must wait between homicides to not trigger the additional penalty, which I assume is something along the lines of desecrating the body as it’s unbuckled from the lethal injection table.

I can only assume this is not what legal experts call a Deceased Equidae Cudgel (DEC) law. The goal of these laws is twofold. First, to rationalize the need for a full-time legislature, or a nine-month-a-year-for-more-than-a-working-man’s-salary legislature, legislators need to pass laws. Factories are judged on their productivities, and bicameral representative bodies are, too. Publish or perish, legislate or languish, but show the People they’re getting something for the money. As a result, we get more laws upon laws covering the same basic acts.

Secondly, DEC laws give prosecutors a Old Country Buffet from which to choose which felonies go with their appetites when confronted with a given act and criminal. This end run around Double Jeopardy protections ensures that prosecutors have plenty of statutes with which to prosecute for the same misdeed, for a different “crime,” until they receive a conviction. Let’s see, killing three people with a handgun used illegally in the commission of a felony on a Sunday while washing your horse with a garden hose–a prosecutorial pentathalon. Commit three crimes, get the fourth charge free! Yankee ingenuity overcomes the obstacles of starchy old English common law traditions.

Of course, this law serves not so much a retributive value–Texas executes killers with satisfying regularity–but a deterrent value. Thoughtful and legally-savvy mass murderers will choose less mass-murder-friendly states, like Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico, when planning getaways to the American South by Southwest.

Here’s a motto for license plates in the Lone Star state (with apologies to Rachel Lucas): Ordnance AND Ordinance.

It came right down to the wire today, but the Association of Professional Flight Attendants decided not to garrote itself. Its members decided they could concede some money and benefits to keep American Airlines out of bankruptcy this quarter. I am disappointed. Bankruptcy would save the United States taxpayers a lot of money.

However did air travel ever become the tax pit it has? Taxpayers fund the airports, they pay for the security, and they frequently apply an unsanitary gauze of several billion dollars to staunch a sucking chest wound. What are our billions buying? CEOs and their Aspen homes. God Bless America.

What is it about the romanticism of airplanes that makes the government pour money into the big carriers? Pork for the piglet constituents who work for the airlines? To protect a couple thousand jobs, the government shovels billions of dollars a year into these slot-machine companies, hoping for three cherries of some sort. Here’s a radical idea, gov: if you’re so damn worried about the little voters who push the drink trays, instead of keeping the dinosaurs that employ them, how about buying 100,000 airline employees an engineering degree at a state university? You could do 100,000 airline employees per pork barrel, or 100,000 a year. They could find better jobs in markets that make money.

I mean, the hub business model doesn’t work. In fields that don’t use bbbbbbbrrrrrmmm! airplanes, the Move Less Than A Full Container Between Arbitrary Hub Warehouses model didn’t work so well for Consolidated Freightways, but the government just let that company collapse. Maybe the terrorists have won now that we cannot ship Less Than Truckload (LTR) shipments nationwide. Or maybe smaller companies that can fill the niche using economically sound principles won. To Keynesians, entrepreneurs and terrorists look a lot alike.

So what happens if the government lets American, United, and their ilk go bankrupt? Air travel becomes more expensive, which is to say the companies have to cover their own costs. Smaller carriers with fewer routes make more money. A lot of cheap used planes come on the market, spurring expansion for these small companies. We the People have to ride AMTRAK, which might stop suckling on my paycheck, or drive. Corporate types who absolutely have to go coast to coast in hours still soak The Company for it, and the celebrities that pass over our Midwestern heads continue to do so just like the invisible celestial bodies they are.

And the United States Federal Government has a couple billion dollars a year to refund to we taxpayers or, more likely, to study the homeland security threat of poison dart frogs.

Check out this photo of celebrating Iraqis.

Here in beautiful St. Louis, a woman is suing her hairdresser for unspecified damages after the hair treatments she received led her to feel unhappy. No kidding.

After the bad hair appointment, er, “treatment” (for her “aesthetical follicle arrangement system,” no doubt) on August 9, 2001, the plantiff became distraught at her appearance, took an early retirement from her job, and morphed into a despondent recluse who probably no longer travels abroad.

Because her hair was different in the autumn of 2001. By the second week of September, no doubt it was a total loss.

Why don’t our special forces grab this Iraqi Minister of Information during one of his “Nonsense! They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist….” news conferences?