While Louisiana law now forbids post-Katrina style disarmament, North Carolina General Statute 14-288.7 requires it. WXII has more.

Much political hay has been made of late over the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which is commonly but wrongly dubbed the “antitrust exemption” for insurers. Past efforts have been made to repeal McCarran-Ferguson entirely (Patrick Leahy is big on this), but the latest incarnation, H.R. 3596, would make piecemeal changes to the Act for health and medical malpractice insurance only. Decent arguments can be made pro and con, but for reasons that don’t lend themselves to sound bites, few of them are.

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If there’s one thing worse than a school having crappy test scores, it’s expelling the few students you have who get good test scores for complaining about your low test scores.

I never thought joke candidates won elections, particularly long shot ones, but Rhode Island Senator Patrick Kennedy thinks Scott Brown’s successful candidacy for U.S. Senate was a joke. Not sure whether to chalk this up to “takes one to know one” or whether Kennedy himself is in on the joke. After all, here’s a guy representing a state so puny and inconsequential that its very statehood is something of a national joke, and who owes his entire political career to sharing a surname with a dead guy who owed his entire career to two other dead guys, neither of whom would even be all that famous today if they had lived. And he’s also the guy who, during the special election our joke candidate handily won, could not even get the name right of the candidate he heartily endorsed, and who herself couldn’t spell the name of her own state. So I guess St. Patty is the authority on joke candidates.

Of all the pseudonyms I could have picked, why oh why did I settle for “Xrlq,” when Akbar Zeb would have been sooooooo much better?

What he said.

Criminal conversations is neither a crime nor a conversation.

Discuss.

“Si tratta con tutta probabilità di una bufala, e anche vecchiotta. L’originale era su www.ananova.com, ma non è più online, per una disamina vedi http://xrlq.com/2004/05/17/ananova-to-blogosphere-youve-been-punkd/”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m not sure why this (h/t: Sister Toldjah) is even controversial. By all accounts, the ad is not going to argue that women have no right to abort; it will merely urge them to choose not to. Which, one might think, would be A-O-K by all those self-described “pro-choicers” who steadfastly deny being pro-abortion. Well, if pregnant women are really such helpless, delicate flowers that one single, solitary ad urging them to choose Option A over Option B will compromise their ability to choose on their own, the obvious remedy would be for the pro-choicers to cough up a few mill of their own and run a competing ad urging women to abort. With the “choose life” ad focusingon one Heisman winner who clearly should not have been aborted (though this fact was anything but clear to doctors at the time), perhaps the “choose death” ad could focus on a somewhat less worthy Heisman winner, O.J. Simpson, or perhaps a more recent Heisman wannabe like Michael Vick.

Via Anwyn, a new study shows that laws prohibiting drivers from talking on hand-held cell phones, but not hands-free devices, have not reduced auto accidents in the four jurisdictions studied. On a wholly unrelated note, another study concluded that laws forbidding drivers to drive under the influence of scotch, but not bourbon, have failed to reduce the number of drunk driving accidents appreciably.