Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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?