Standard Mischief

Michele, in her blog, had a few choice words to say about what happened after she left comments over at Say Uncle’s. She wrote to disagree with the interpretation of the law that everyone else had jumped on the bandwagon with. Then she said that after that, she received a bunch of nastygrams from irate readers in her inbox.

Although Say Uncle requires an email address to post, that blog, as well as this blog, does not publicly display that entered in email address. The email address further does not seem to appear over in her blog. Never-the-less, she claims to have received “quite a bit of email in my inbox” and that she spent “close to an hour getting rid of them”.

Then she goes on to say that she, despite everyone else, actually read the whole law that was passed. “…unlike these bloggers, I READ THE WHOLE DARNED THING! All 242 pages! …”

Well, I’ll just have to accept that. At least she didn’t claim to have read every single word in Atlas Shrugged.

Anyway, she’s pretty sure the law does not apply to comments left anonymously in a blog. She didn’t cite her legal certifications, but unless her middle name is SCOTUS, it’s anyones guess what exactly this law will shake out to being applied as. So, who wants to be a test case?

She does, however raise a few good points about the whole thingy, and she does properly admonish people for taking the word of the MSM, without verifying the whole thing independently.

OK, so I’d like to lay out some ground rules here. Whenever someone blogs about a law, a rule, regulation, a bill or an amendment, they should:

1. Cite the bill, (or whatever), number, AND the name of the bill, and,
2. Hyperlink to the text of the bill, and
3. Make a bona fide effort to count the approximate number of words in the bill, and,
4. (Optional) make fun of the excessive length of the bill/law/whatever.

So, let me try to comply with that rule now.

The original news story that started the brouhaha

The Say Uncle posts are here, here, and here

Michele’s response is here

Declan McCullagh’s (the original news-critter) response (although not directly addressing Michele by name).

The bill, HR3402, “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005″, that was passed by congress and signed into law (thanks Michele):

1.go here: http://thomas.loc.gov/
2.push the “radio button” for “Bill Number”
3.enter in “HR3402.ENR”

The total word count of that bill (using wc -w file.with.the.saved.bill’s.text) is 73,788. (hah!)

The law that the above bill modified. Sorry, but I am unable to get a proper word count, I bona fide tried. This is where you will find “annoy”.

Finally, I have a proposed a law to properly “well-regulate” the future writings of the Peoples of the united states of America. Why, there oughta be a law!

§ - Section 1 “Short Title”

This law may be referred to as the “Michele-Mischief Blogger Law Orating And Typing act” or “MM BLOAT” for short.

(a-z) Bloggers are required to name and hyperlink to the laws and bills that they blog about. In addition, they are to make a effort to count the total number of words in the laws and bills they cite.

(subsection A) This law applies to bloggers, online newspapers, newsletters, sandboxes, wiki-wikis, and government employees.

§ - Section 2 “purpose”

This bills sole purpose it to narrowly define how a blogger is to cite pending legislation, bills, law, case law, government regulations that carry the force of law, pending government regulations that carry the force of law, and any other legalese type crap.

§ - Section 3 -Definitions (TBD)

§ - Section 1789 - NOTE: This section explains where congress gets the authority to write law that overrules the plain language that is contained in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, AKA “Tamara’s Law”

“Commerce Clause“

§ - Section NCC-1701-BS - Regarding Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, Theories in the Hard Sciences.

Subsection 6.02214199 * 10^23 - Regardless of the what ever else might be contained in this law, no blogger shall be required to cite and hyperlink any Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, or Theories in the any of the Hard Sciences unless congress, fed-gov executive branch or any other type of government, pseudo-government, or poly-government is actually trying to repeal via legislation, any Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, or Theories in the any of the Hard Sciences such as, but not limited to, the “law” of gravity, the value of “pi”, or Avogadro’s number.

§ - Section 2038-01-19 § Rough word count

(a) As a rough guide, and to display the obfuscation potential inherent in long passages of legalese, bloggers are required to make a bona fide effort to produce a word count of the subsection of law they are blogging about. Exceptions for users of Micro$oft versions of operating systems are exempt if they have made a bona fide attempt to use an operating system based on some kind of unix, including, but not limited to OS X, Linux, Knoppix live CD, etc.. within the last 366 days (except on leap years, where it shall be 367 days).

(x) Non exempted bloggers are to make an effort using any available tool, to count the number of words in a passage including, but not limited to the core utility, under unix, called “wc”.

§ - Sectionn 1337 5p34k4g3

Irregardless of misspellin’, commas and; other punctuation, and irregardless, of the, original intent, of the written law, the law, means exactly what the judge, wants the law ? to mean, instead of what it actually says…

§ - Section 1337 congress-critters

Regardless of any other section of this law, the law shall never be considered to apply members of congress, or their assistants and staff, in any official or unofficial capacity, whether said blog is written anonymously, pseudonymous, ghost written, or written in an official or unofficial capacity.

I’m actively seeking amendments and revisions in comments.