Category: News

The AP wire is a–twit–ter after Ted Nugent apparently said, how delicately they put it:

the words “g—-” and “n—–” on live radio

Do you suspect the words are not goof and niggardly? Instead, I reckon, he might have used the words gook and nigger. (Let the insensitivity shine through! Brian J. typed the words without hyphens or cute, non alphanumeric cartoon-swearword characters.) I don’t know what he used, because the news accounts are very clipped, not offering much context but instead focusing on the act of using the prohibited words.

What we do have for context is this:

Rick Lewis and Michael Floorwax, morning talk show hosts on KRFX-FM, said that during an interview Monday, Nugent said one of the members of a group called the Funk Brothers years ago complimented his guitar playing by using a racist term for blacks.

Would that be these Funk Brothers? If so, a majority of them appear to be black. If one of them said Ted Nugent was his nigga, or something along those lines, odds lean toward a black man calling Ted Nugent the N-word. In which case, it wasn’t used in the sense of a racial slur. And Ted Nugent reporting the word use is a not a racial slur, either.

Sorry. I understand these “special” words have magickal significance to aggrieved covens of the afflicted, but they are just words. Perhaps Ted Nugent was using them to draw attention to the fact that they’re just collections of glyphs on the page or voiced velar stops, alveolar coronals and other articulations and not anything more. Actus reus without mens rea. As our society fundamentally shifts from criminal intent to strict liability template, it’s no longer necessary to mean harm with words, just speaking the words is the offense.

We’ll probably never know how Ted Nugent meant to use the words or how he really used the words. It’s not like the inflammatory news article presents the context or a transcript. Don’t bother going to the the Web site of the radio station 103.5 The Fox, or the dee jays with whom the Nuge was communicating, Lewis and Floorwax. Instead of information about this heinous crime, you’d just see the “sunken treasure chests” contest in which one woman with small breasts will win free breast augmentation! At least these holders of the moral high ground took the opportunity of this new-found celebrity to remove the photo of one of the morning show participants vomiting into a trash can after smelling rancid dog feces as part of some morning hijinks. Some marketing flack must have known the attention the Web site was about to receive. Any publicity is good publicity, especially when you’re enlightened defenders of feelings AND you don’t have puking interns on the Web site.

Ted Nugent’s Web site probably won’t glorify this “scandal” with a response. I cannot say I blame him. The whole thing smacks of a publicity stunt by a couple of drive-time losers with declining marketing share, deciding to pillory an outspoken conservative figure for fun and ratings.

Unfortunately, it will probably work.

And another thing, why does the AP article bear this line:

Nugent is past president of the National Rifle Association and is known for his outspokenness.

No kidding! I think it would be more relevant, considering that he was on the phone with a rock and roll music station, apparently discussing rock and roll music, to mention:

• Nugent is a former member of the Damn Yankees, who charted with the song “High Enough”, which sounds like a Rave song, but given Nugent’s eternally anti-drug stance is not about drug usage.
• Nugent’s solo career was built on musical hits designed composed to celebrate the human condition, particularly Procreative Drills, featuring several colloquial representations of male and female genitalia in the titles.
• Nugent is the founder of Ted Nugent Kamp for Kids, an organization designed to train kids in safe hunting.
• Nugent is the founder of Hunters for the Hungry an organization dedicated to providing meat harvested in hunts to homeless shelters.

Oh, but no. Nugent is the past president of the National Rifle Association.

I guess the point is a free-association of racial slurs, and those who would use them to denigrate (author insensitivity alert!) other races, with the National Rifle Association, whose stance on the Second Amendment runs counter to that of the author of the piece, the Associated Press in general, and “enlightened” people everywhere. The sooner those louts are tarred with the same pot of pitch, the better to round them up and pelt them with animal entrials–no, wait, they might like that.

And let’s not let the facts step in front of an onrushing good Nexis-Lexis search phrase. Nugent’s own biography does not list him as a former president, but he does sit on the board of directors at the NRA.

A Brazilian police station turned out a confessed drug dealer because they think he made the whole thing up for the free prison time.

Perhaps he should emigrate to America. Although conditions might not be described as cush, the United States doesn’t turn prisoners away.

Our motto: Over 1.4 Million Currently Being Served!

Richard Roeper’s got a point in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Laci Peterson is the latest member of the pantheon of people who were anonymous while alive, but became national celebrities after murder, eligible for emotional deconstruction upon which to project something of our own lives and losses so that we can all together regrieve.

Shouldn’t we just get the heck over it? It just depends upon what the meaning of closure is.

The Washington Post reports that the Department of the Treasury will no longer sell paper United States Savings bonds. Instead, all bonds will be maintained through electronic accounts. Wow, this is so much a bad idea that I can briefly foam at the keyboard in the scant minutes I have to refuel the Doc-U-Matic “Mr. Digestion” Portable Energy System (MDPES).

It’s undemocratic. People without computers or accounts can no longer just walk into a bank and buy a bond. The official explanation is that a large portion, as a percentage, of investment dollars that pour like a broken dam into the nation’s coffers are done electronically. And by very large funds and corporations, no doubt. It’s a bad symbolic move to suddenly make the common stock in America preferred, with only big investors or little investors with computer accounts eligible to participate.

In the story about USA Interactive’s acquisition of LendingTree.com, the author or someone misadvertently casts it thus:

The LemonTree deal is the biggest financial services website acquisition, apart from online stockbroking deals, since the height of the boom.

LemonTree?

(Thanks to /. for the link.)

One of the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission is named Swindle?

In his column on CNet, Declan McCullagh says it with a straight face, his accompanying photo depicting his normal look of concern that indicates he fully agrees with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner vision of the future, starting about 2007.

Me, on the other hand, I cannot. Orson Swindle! Orson Swindle! Haw haw!

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Jim Stingl tried out the new mask chic that SARS is spreading in Asia.

I don’t know what havoc the police thought this 94-year-old jogger was seeking, but they got right to the bottom of it. Turns out she had not garrotted the night orderly with a jump rope, flailed the nursing supervisor with an un-Velcroed one pound ankle weight, and choked the nursing home warden by feeding him his enterprise’s own Ensure in her Buy-It-Now for freedom and the start of a new crime spree.

Nope, she was just jogging.

But you can never be too careful.

To alleviate any confusion, and to put our municipal authorities at ease, I shall remain in the recliner. Thank you, that is all.

After a climber gets pinned under a boulder for five days, he cuts his own arm off with a pocket knife, puts on a tourniquet, rappels to the floor of a canyon, and walks up to his rescuers.

Most of us men would like to think we could do the same thing, but I am not so good with setting anchors and rappelling. Of course, this sort of thing keeps me off of mountains in the first place.

Whoever would think of looking for Saddam Hussein onstage in London? What a place to hide out! And a steady paycheck. He might be on the next fishing boat from Damascus and plane out of Greece!

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!