Category: Uncategorized

President Bush just put it into clearer perspective for the slower minds among us (primarily Democrats).
Time to kick some Iraqi butt. Faster, please.

…as a Jew, I’m not culturally-disposed to carry weapons anyway. Must be my Lutheran side.

Over on Rachel’s blog a gentleman from Australia commented:

I love your [Rachel’s] site and agree with most of your sentiments. I am however not sure you are right about this issue as we in Australian urban areas have effectively been without guns for about 5 years now, as the Right Wing government legislated against them after a young man called Martin Bryant went on a similar rampage and killed about 30 people.

Seems to me like it would have made more sense to make sure the population was armed. If two or three of those thirty people had been armed, I’ll bet Mr. Bryant would have died of lead poisoning long before he managed to shoot all thirty of them. The Right Wing in Australia must be like our Democrats here.

It may be too early to tell but we haven’t had a repeat of such an incident since and the crime rate is heading south.

Oh, really? The overall crime rate in Australia may indeed be going down, but non-gun crimes appear to be on the increase, from what I’ve read — knife crimes in particular, apparently; see this link. The article in question also notes that “assaults increased 13 per cent per 100,000 people.” This is just in Victoria state of course. And if you read the article you see at least one politician who says they are living in a more violent community than the year previous. And yes, he’s an opposition politician whose job it is to make the Government look bad, but still, hyperbole and all, he has a point.
You can also take a look at this link (careful, Rachel; this is a gun control advocate site) where it is reported that in Australia, since the new gun control laws were implemented, “robberies involving weapons such as a knife or a stick have increased by nearly 20%, which indicates that other weapons are replacing firearms.” And all this Gun Control Alliance group can point to is the fact that there are fewer deaths because the weapons being used are less lethal. And they have the gall to view this as a victory. Feh. A real victory would be when all crime goes down, not just one type of crime associated with a type of weapon one doesn’t like. But let’s not worry the GCA with details; all they seem to care about is that fewer people are dying from gun crime, without appearing to care one way or the other about the crimes being committed overall with other weapons. I’m sure the average mugged Aussie appreciates the fact that his mugger hit him on the head with a stick instead of threatened him with a gun.
So basically it sounds like all the Gun Grab Down Under did was shift the M.O. to simpler weapons. It didn’t do much to lower the incidence of crime at all, and I’d bet that the crime rate ends up rising pretty much back to where it was before guns were outlawed, eventually. (One in five crimes in Australia are still committed with guns, sez the GCA.)

On the other hand it seems that the USA has always had a far more potent gun culture than we mild mannered Aussies.

You know what? Define “gun culture”. I would define it as “guns being visible everywhere, and a vital part of everyday life”. I mean, I am culturally an American and fly the flag, I am culturally a Jew and observe most of the major holidays and have various implements of Hebrosity in my home…but culturally a gun owner? I don’t think so. The guns are safely put away and all I really do is talk about them in terms of my right to have them. And I think most Americans who have guns are the same way about them. Americans don’t have a gun culture by just about any means of measurement.
However, if you really want to see a gun culture, try Arab countries (and in particular, the Palestinian territories in Israel, but according to friends who have travelled in that part of the world, you see them EVERYWHERE; traffic cops in Cairo carrying AK-17s while directing traffic, for crying out loud). Those puppies have guns everywhere. They even take pictures of their kids holding them. Yasser Arafat takes pains to wear one on his belt. I suspect they’d take them to the mosque if the imams would let them (and for all I know, they do). Owning a gun is strictly equivalent to being a man in that society. Don’t start with me about how owning a gun is anyway equivalent to the same thing in the U.S. And furthermore don’t start with me about how the Israelis carry guns everywhere as well. They do it to protect themselves from the kill-crazy Arabs.
Funny though that I don’t see people like Sarah Brady or the Gun Control Alliance noted above trying to disarm the Palestinians. They’d be a lot more likely to be trying to get the Israelis to give up their weapons.

I saw this yesterday but George Neumayr over at the Prowler does it better than Fox. This isn’t a Fisking; I agree completely with Neumayr, I’m just commenting interlinearly.

Twenty-eight billion dollars is quite a penalty for selling someone a product that they demanded. Bullock enjoyed the pleasures of smoking for decades, played dumb to its obvious dangers and risks, didn’t listen to her daughter and doctors who told her to quit, and then, upon getting sick, decided to sue the source of her pleasure.

Exactly. I don’t see how you could have been a smoker for the past 40 years and NOT KNOWN that THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT SMOKING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. I knew this when I was six and reading my Dad’s Camel cigarette packs (non-filtered). Dad knew it, too, and he smoked a lot more years than this stupid woman, so you just can’t tell me that she didn’t know.

Consistency and minimal personal honor are clearly not requirements for plaintiffs, still less for Los Angeles juries. Before heading off to lunch with Bullock’s attorney, jurors explained their Solomonic reasoning to the press. “It’s just a year’s revenue for Philip Morris,” juror Jose Farinas said casually.

Fine that man a year’s pay for being an asshole on the job.

According to the Los Angeles Times, jurors “had a spirited debate over the amount of the award, with individual jurors suggesting awards ranging from $5 million to $100 billion.”
How did they end up with $28 billion? The Times said they settled on that number because “jurors had been told that only 1 in 28,000 lung cancer victims gets his or her day in court, and the panel in effect decided to impose $1 million of punishment on Philip Morris for each of the 28,000.”

So in other words, they made it up as they went along.

The jury had been instructed that the amount of damages should “bear a reasonable relationship to the injury suffered.” But egged on by [Bullock’s lawyer Michael] Piuze, they ignored that instruction.

And they should all be fined for disregarding the judge’s instructions, barred from ever serving on a jury again (or running for elective office, either, for that matter) and the verdict should be thrown out as a result.
[Update: When I originally typed this, I was so mad I typed “ATTORNEY GENERAL” instead of “SURGEON GENERAL” without realizing it. Mea culpa. I fixed it.]

USSC denies a stay in the Torricelli replacement case.

Chicago will now require companies that did business in the slavery era to confess their sins before they can do business with the city.
This includes corporations that may not themselves have had any relationship to slavery (eg corporations that did not exist at the time) but may have in any way become related to such corporations (eg by merger, purchase, etc).
Can you say “unfunded mandate”? Does the city of Chicago have any idea what this sort of thing is going to cost the corporations that do business with it?
Frankly, any company that does business with the city of Chicago should tell them to go fuck themselves. Then the city would have to sue them, and then there would be a test case that would probably overturn the new ordinance as placing an onerous requirement on city contractors. I’m hoping this is exactly what happens but it probably won’t.
It’s just another way to force the reparations non-issue to the surface again.

Via The Corner, here’s an article entitled “Hollywood goes to war” from the Telegraph. Look at this in particular:

R Lee Ermey, who made his name as the fearsome drill sergeant in the film Full Metal Jacket, told The Telegraph that Streisand’s views were far from representative of Hollywood as a whole.
“Once again, Barbra Streisand has opened her alligator-sized mouth wide before her humming-bird brain has had a chance to catch up,” said Ermey. “Of course, she has the right to her opinion, but what she does is use the ‘bully pulpit’, helped by her fame, and people think she’s talking for Hollywood.”
Ermey, an ex-marine and outspoken supporter of Mr Bush and the war on terror, continued: “We need to do something about the situation before it turns round and bites us in the ass. Democrats are criticising President Bush for not spotting signs that 9/11 was coming. But they don’t want him to act to stop the next disaster. Ms Streisand does not speak for me or many other folks in this business.”

No kidding.
I hope Mr. Ermey continues to get roles now that he’s dissed Her Bitchesty.

Item on Fox says that Santa Monica, CA, has passed (or is in the process of passing) an ordinance that will stop the 3-times-daily meal handout to the city’s 1000 homeless in the city parks. Naturally this is causing some people (although notably not “some homeless advocates”) to kick. However:

The city of Santa Monica says it isn’t pushing the homeless out. The city still intends to spend nearly $2 million this year on homeless programs even though studies show the money has done little to ease the problem.

Amazing how you can throw money at a problem and it DOESN’T GO AWAY. Kind of like the war on poverty, or the war on drugs.
At least the war on terrorism is showing some results.

Mr. (or Ms.) pool-162-84-241-93.ny5030.east.verizon.net Googles and asks:

http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=linda vester blonde or not&hc=0&hs=0&ac=

She was a brunette when she worked at NBC. And as my wife would say, she’s got awfully dark roots to be a real blonde.

I hope this helps.

See this Fox News article. It’s too sickening to Fisk.
If Maryland hadn’t outlawed guns, you wouldn’t have these outlaws doing what they’re doing. Because some caring, carrying citizen would have popped them by now. (Maybe if they had headed for Virginia…and they may have, so what was wrong with you gun nuts in Fredericksburg?)
Well, OK, a little fisking. Ehrlich and Townsend are, respectively, the Republican and Stupid (er, DemocRATic) candidates for governor in Maryland.

Ehrlich and Townsend, who have been running about even in recent polls, appeared together Friday at a conference of the Maryland Municipal League in Annapolis.

Far, far from the field of battle, of course. Oh, and don’t forget: Townsend is a Kennedy.

“I’ve always been a strong supporter of getting assault weapons off the street, but today’s not a day to politicize the event,” Townsend said before the conference. “Today’s a day to pray for the victims.”

No. Today is a day to pray for the survivors. Since the survivors aren’t armed, they can’t protect themselves.

Ehrlich, who called on U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio to step up prosecution of Baltimore gun violence in July, said the Montgomery shootings have nothing to do with gun control laws.

Gee. For a Republican, you’re pretty stupid; maybe you’ve been talking to Rep. Connie Morella, who’s barely a Republican herself but who represents Montgomery County. These murders have everything to do with gun control laws. Because a citizen can’t pack an equalizer to take on one of these fuckers, you’ve got every cop in the county out looking for them instead of the coroner cleaning up the mess from someone giving them a little of their own back.

“I think it’s time to reassess people who have guns who shouldn’t have them,” he said. “What we’ve been trying to do in this state hasn’t worked.”

Right. But the reassessment needs to be of citizens’ rights to defend themselves. And it needs to be positive to the extent of allowing concealed carry to Joe Blow who just wants to protect himself and his family.
And the Brady Campaign needs to kiss my ass and die the death of a thousand screams.
But now, bonne nuit, I have a sick wife to tend.