John McCormick of Bloomberg “News” has an uncommonly silly piece on the poor, downtrodden gun-grabbers whose continuing efforts to blame the gun lobby for the failures of their own unconstitutional gun ordinance are being largely ignored. I counted five flat-out lies in the article, which are in addition to the overall whiny tone, but what I’d really like to know is, does writing for Bloomberg actually require the reporter to be as obnoxious as Bloomberg himself?

UPDATE: Insty has more. Or less, actually, unless less is more, in which case he does have more.

Your “radio” concept is kinda neat, but would be a bit neater if it worked with Firefox, and neater still if you’d lay off on the [censored]ing censorship. And for [censored]‘s sake, if you must [censored]ing censor [censored], at least be honest about it and have your mascot “meep” the [censored] cuss words out overtly rather than just making the singer stutter and hope no [censored] listener will [censored]ing notice. Dumb[censored]s.

Whenever you hear the H-word, check twice, and a third time. Usually it’s some liberal screaming “hypocrisy” whenever a conservative proves to be human on an issue where liberals and conservatives generally agree (and where liberals are every bit as prone to failure as conservatives, but somehow their hypocrisy doesn’t count). When the right plays the H-card, we generally at least try to limit it to issues where the left and right disagree, e.g., when anti-gun zealots like Carl Rowan or Roland Burris end up owning the same guns they say no one else should be allowed to have.

Unfortunately, “try” does not always equal “succeed.” Insty links to a forum alleging that “anti-gun” State Senator R.C. Soles had shot an intruder in self-defense. What a hypocrite! Maybe, if by “hypocrite” you mean “guy whose record on guns is ‘not excellent’” according to NC’s leading gun group (whom Insty pooh-poohs as “these folks”), even if he is good enough to warrant an A rating by the NRA.

Move along, people. There’s nothing to see here.

A recent Texas case raises an interesting issue: if your home state says you aren’t married, but another state where you don’t reside says you are, can you get divorced anywhere?

[Pete] Schulte said Texas was the only place where they could file for divorce because they live in the state and have established residency.

“I have a feeling there are going to be opponents who say this is going to allow the floodgates of gay marriage to open, and I disagree with that,” he said. “Gay marriage and gay divorce are two seperate [sic] things.”

Indeed they are. Whoever came up with the brilliant idea that any young and stupid couple can marry anywhere in the world and have it recognized everywhere, but the same older and wiser couple can’t undo that marriage in any state but their state of residence – not even the state that solemnized the marriage in the first place?

And since I’m ranting about stupid laws aimed at inconveniencing the dissolution of marriages that weren’t going anywhere, anyway, maybe now is a good time to ask a question I’ve been sitting on for a while. For those dinosaurs who still support “alienation of affection” lawsuits on the theory that they protect marriage, which of the following best summarizes your position?

1. Allowing the ex to sue the next preserves the original marriage because we’d all divorce someone who annoys us slightly, but no one would ever divorce someone vindictive enough to sue your next SO.
2. Allowing the ex to sue the next protects marriage because North Carolina’s divorce rate is __% lower than that of South Carolina, Southwestern Virginia or Tennessee, which don’t have alienation of affection laws anymore [or a similar comparison between downstate Illinois and Indiana or Iowa.]
3. Allowing the ex to sue the next – but not to sue the departing spouse – makes sense because if the cheating spouse is a woman, well, women can’t really make choices for themselves, anyway. And if the cheating spouse is a man, well hell, what man could resist a chance to bang some hot chick who wants to lure him away from his wife. It’s not his fault for violating his own wedding vows, it’s her fault for giving him an opportunity to violate vows she herself never agreed to at all.
4. OK, I admit it, allowing the ex to sue the next but not the cheater himself is downright retarded, and there’s no evidence that allowing anyone to sue either his ex or his ex’s next will do a fracking thing to preserve the institution of marriage. Never mind that. The law is meant to protect marriage, so who cares what the frack it actually does?
5. Other (specify).

Last century, while in law school, I learned of an amusing case where some joker ended up on the wrong end of a trademark suit for registering “bellsouthstinks.com” as a web domain. It struck me as one of the most ludicrous trademark cases around, save for those where it is the trademark itself that is ridiculous (“Realtor,” for example – can I trademark “Lawyer” too?). I mean, seriously, what customer could possibly think a web site called “bellsouthstinks.com” was owned, operated, controlled or licensed by Bell South?

Fast forward to this century. I moved to North Carolina in 2007, and closed on my house in early 2008. Since then I was an AT&T Bellsouth customer, both for standard phone service (a.k.a. “plain old telephone service,” or POTS) and for DSL. The POTS was regular but the DSL was not. Too many times to count, the Internet would vanish into oblivion, only to return if and when it felt like returning. Each call to Bellsouthstinks.com (and least I guess that’s their real name, seeing as they prevailed in the suit) resulted in a half hour of hold time, some trouble shooting, and then an “aha, some dumbass who works for us set your account as an ‘Erblakistak,’ which they never should have done since you’re on the ‘Imflopistop’ plan instead. I’ll put in a work order to have that fixed and your Internets should be up and running in the next 25-30 business days.” It was at this point where I realized why Bell South guarded the “bellsouthstinks” name so jealously: the very concept of stinking is the crown jewel of their business model.

Each his own, they say. I’m sure one man’s stink is another’s aroma, but for me stinking just … well … stinks. It started to stink even more when I installed Ooma and was reminded the hard way that voice over IP can only work as well as the IP over which your voice … um … “overs.” So I went on to RoadRunner’s site and ordered cable Internet instead, only to get an email a few hours later saying they didn’t think my rural home is within their service area, but would investigate further. Figuring DSL might be the only game in town (other than satellite, which is far worse), I looked into the procedure for retaining DSL, such as it was, while porting POTS to VOIP. I learned that to do so requires you to “dry loop” your line, i.e., to split out your DSL from your POTS so that a company can port your phone number without making your Internet go away at the same time. After three calls to Bellsouthstinks.com, I finally got someone who seemed to know what she was doing, and she told me the phone and DSL lines would be separated in one month’s time, and that any earlier attempts to port the phone number would not interfere with this process; the porting would just be delayed by it.

Well, last week the Meep-Meep company finally figured out that I am in their service area after all, so when the Bellsouthstinks.com guy arrived to dry loop the DSL line, I told him not to bother, seeing as I was now going to get rid of my DSL before the POTS number would be ported away. He said OK, he’d cancel the order. Then yesterday, the Meep-Meep company arrived and installed cable Internet, and my POTS mysteriously vanished. Initially, I blamed everyone from Meep² to Ooma (who was and is having service issues of their own) to everything else under the sun except … you guessed it … Bellsouthstinks.com. In the evening, when I finally was able to talk to Ooma tech support while in front of the hub, I learned that I hadn’t just lost Ooma, I’d lost POTS, and that was the reason neither was working properly. So I figured “of course, when I told the Bellsouthstinks.com guy to cancel the order, he must have thought I meant to cancel my service altogether.” So I called Bellsouthstinks.com the first opportunity I got, and was assured that the service would be restored by the end of the day. No problem, I figured, once it’s restored, I’ll just do call forwarding one last time, and forward all calls to the temporary number Ooma gave me while the port is pending. So I got home, tried to forward calls, and found out that feature had been disabled. As had caller ID, as I would learn when someone else called an hour later. So I called Bellsouthstinks.com yet again, asking them to restore the services they had cut off, and was told I would have to call back earlier in the day when the Pooch-Screw Office would be open. So here I am, with my POTS service back, barely, but with none of the functionality I had previously ordered and could really now use, if only for a minute or to so I could forward calls to the number that is actually working. I am counting the days until my home number is fully ported and I no longer have any more connection to Bellsouthstinks.com than … er ….

1. Intelligent design has to science?
2. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villar has to Corina Raigosa?
3. Michael Moore has to reality?
4. I have to hair on my head?
5. Other (specify).

In other news, as far as the web is concerned my switch from Bellsouthstinks.com to the Meep Meep company caused me to inadvertently to move from Greensboro, where I don’t live, to Elkin, where I really don’t live. Go figure.