Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Thursday, October 08, 2009
 
Bryan Burwell's Litmus Test for NFL Ownership
To own an NFL team, you should think like he does:
    I know how those words play out in Idiot America. They are embraced as gospel. But inside the locker rooms of the NFL, where the overwhelming majority of the players are descendants of slaves, Limbaugh's ignorant ramblings resonate with entirely different emotions.

    His money might be green, but his words are colored with hate and intolerance.
Got that? According to Bryan Burwell, if you listen to Rush Limbaugh, you are an idiot-American. But it's Rush Limbaugh whose intemperate words are colored with hate and intolerance.

Perhaps Burwell's career in sportswriting has left him incapable of addressing Rush Limbaugh's views instead of dumping on Rush Limbaugh as though he were a slumping left fielder. Or maybe he never had that intellectual acumen to begin with. However, make no mistake, trying to bar someone from a profession or from acquiring property based upon his views is not the American way.

Not the old American way, anyway.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:43 PM   2 comments
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
 
US Department of Fish and Wildlife Needs a Reality Show
You know what we need to see? How about a reality show about the tough guys in the US Department of Fish and Wildlife conducting their raids in defense of helpless orchids?
    "You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

    The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

    The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

    Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

    That's right. Orchids.

    By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary - based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.
He failed to fill out the proper forms. He's lucky not to get shot inadvertently resisting regulatory violations or not to get placed on an orchid offender registry.

After that reality show debuts on Animal Planet, maybe we can get one where people get thrown to the ground and beaten with batons for signing the wrong date on a form where they've said they've not knowingly entered fraudulent information. Because they know today is Tuesday, October 6, not Tuesday, October 5, dammit!

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:40 AM   0 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."