Archive for June, 2006

Constitution Going to the Dogs

I realize that what I’m about to ask is the intellectual equivalent of taking your date to a monster-truck rally, but where oh where in the U.S. Constitution is the national government empowered to govern the treatment of pets?

The New York Times has some details.

Do Senators Stevens and Lautenberg — who introduced the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act into the U.S. Senate — and the 349 U.S. House members who’ve already voted for this bill, understand what they did when they pledged to uphold the Constitution? Did they read the document? Are they illiterate? Dead-dog stupid? Or are they simply, well, politicians?

Filed under: politics

Paid matchmaker $125K, sent on dud dates

On the expectation that leisured multi-millionaires would be lining up to spend time with her, 60-year-old Erie, Pa. grandmother and social worker Anne Majerik paid big bucks to Beverly Hills, Calif. matchmaker Orly Hadida. The dates were duds, but her consolation prize was an L.A. jury’s $2 million award. Both sides had been in court before fighting matchmaking-disgruntlement actions against other parties. The jury forewoman said her colleagues wished they could punish Hadida without rewarding Majerik, but an award to charity wasn’t an option. (Jessica Garrison, “Woman Gets $2 Million in Matchmaker Lawsuit”, Los Angeles Times, May 31; Lattman, May 31).

Runs away with online chum; mom sues school

Upstate New York: “The Honeoye Central School District failed to keep a teenage student off the Internet as her parents requested, and she ran away with an 18-year-old Syracuse man she met online, the girl’s mother claims in legal papers.” The 15-year-old used school computers to meet Michael Macbeth, three years her elder, on MySpace; the Ontario County sheriff’s office later arrested Macbeth “on charges of endangering the welfare of a child after he picked up the girl at Honeoye Central High School.” Now her mother, Luann Waden of Bloomfield, has filed a notice of intent to sue, saying she had asked the school not to let her daughter use the Internet. (Gary Craig, “Mom plans to sue school over Web”, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, May 29).

Filed under: schools

Mass. high court: use of cigarettes inherently unreasonable

On May 18 Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court “rejected one of the tobacco industry’s most successful defenses in wrongful death lawsuits, ruling the companies cannot shield themselves from liability simply by claiming that smokers should know cigarettes are dangerous.” (Denise Lavoie, “Mass. High Court Rejects Tobacco Defense”, AP/Forbes, May 18). In particular, the court declared it to be “obvious… that cigarettes cannot be used safely and therefore that cigarette use is unreasonable” and ruled that accordingly “public policy demands” that liability be placed on cigarette manufacturers. (Childs, May 18). Jacob Sullum comments at Reason “Hit and Run” (May 22).

In other news, Sullum (May 17) also brings word (via tobacco control movement whistleblower Dr. Michael Siegel) of how “at least 68 anti-smoking groups” — the American Cancer Society most prominent among them — “are falsely claiming that a half-hour’s exposure to secondhand smoke can cause atherosclerosis and heart attacks.”

Filed under: Massachusetts, tobacco