Monday, June 3, 2013

Today's moment of schadenfreude

Am I a bad person for smiling when I read this?
Frank Lautenberg, 5-Term Senator From New Jersey, Dies at 89 - New York Times
Considering how many gun-grabbing statist like Lautenberg routinely wish death and worse on me and mine, I don't care if you think it does.

Edited to add:
I didn't realize just how much he was the statist's statist:
Mr. Lautenberg’s first major victory came in 1984. A freshman senator in the minority party, he pushed through a provision to establish a national drinking age of 21, a measure that threatened to cut 10 percent of a state’s federal highway money if it did not comply.

Mr. Lautenberg followed that move 16 years later with another condition on highway spending: States must designate 0.08 percent blood alcohol as the level that would constitute being drunk.

In 1989, he led a successful fight to ban smoking on all commercial airline flights.

He later pursued legislation that prohibited smoking in federal buildings and in all federally financed places that serve children.

Mr. Lautenberg’s other legislative achievements include a 1996 law denying gun ownership to people who have committed domestic violence.*

He won an important victory in 2008 with legislation that nearly doubled Amtrak’s subsidy, and he advocated for federal money to help build another commuter rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan.

Another Lautenberg measure gave refugee status to people from historically persecuted groups without requiring them to show that they had been singled out.

Mr. Lautenberg contributed heavily to his own campaigns, using the wealth he had gained after joining with two boyhood friends to develop a payroll services company, Automatic Data Processing, now better known as ADP.

Mr. Lautenberg was a strong backer of motorcycle-helmet laws. Mark V. Rosenker, who led the National Transportation Safety Board from 2003 to 2009, recalled on Monday that the senator had kept a broken helmet in his office and showed it to visitors.
*Fact check:  Should read "To people who have been convicted of even a misdemeanor count of DV."    I knew a kid in the Army who had been run in for a fight with his brother, he needed a waiver to enlist, and could only be assigned to shoot crew served weapons.

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