Bull Moose Strikes Back

Overall, I liked the Packers draft.
I was hoping we’d draft AJ Hawk (on the assumption that Williams would be gone by pick 5). I like him. He seems like he really has his stuff together in a way a lot of star college athletes don’t. The Packers have also had some luck with players from The Ohio State. Now if he could only get his girlfriend off TV.

As for the other areas, I think it was smart to convert Walker to a pick (good riddance) and then convert that pick and another to four picks. The Packers need talent right now, and the shotgun approach may work. I’d say the linebacking corps has been significantly strengthened. We’ll see about those WRs, but it looks like McCarthy and Thompson are looking for WRs that can run the routes and catch the ball first, cause seperation by speed second (signals a return to the pureer West Coast offense?). And if just one of those under rated O-linemen turn out, it is a success.
The only pick I’m not sure about is the QB/punter Ingle Martin. Maybe they saw some raw talent that they can work with, but it seems like there are plenty of problem areas to address before adding what will have to be the emergency QB. Maybe he was just the best athlete available.

Only four and a half months to football season!!

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Someone dropped a copy of the Rolling Stone (the latest?) in our break room. The cover story is “The Worst President in History?” with a caricature of Bush in a dunce hat as the cover art. The story is written by Sean Willentz, “one of America’s top historians.” There is the first problem with the article: any historian that 1) tries to assess a presidency in historical view within 5 years of the end of the presidency, much less within the presidency, and/or 2) writes stories for “Rolling Stone” is automatically disqualified from being one of “America’s top historians.”
As to point 1, take Clinton for an example. I may get run out of right-wing circles for saying this, but when he left office I felt he was a slightly better than mediocre care taker President. Sure, he had a congress keeping him in check, and he had his scandals (and scandals and scandals) but the country seemed to be in OK shape. Then one day in the September following his term we learned the damage his administration’s milquetoast foreign policy had done.
I think everyone thinks that Bush’s place in history is tied into what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by extension the Middle East in the long term. It’s just too soon to tell in a lot of ways.
Plus, there are a lot of things Bush still has to deal with that may impact his place in history – Iran and its desire for nuclear weapons and the destruction of Israel, for example.
This line kills me, “No other president — Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle.”
Give me a break. Seconds after the Senators finished holding hands and singing “God Bless America” the Democrats began looking for an excuse to jump ship. The president’s job is to protect the American people, not make Teddy Kennedy feel good about doing it. Plus, let’s get straight who failed to embrace who. It is hard to envision any Republican congressman going on a “fact finding” mission to Japan or Germany in 1941, and publicly talk about how Hitler and Tojo could be trusted, but not FDR.

Here are a couple of my candidates for worst president:
Jimmy Carter – Let the Russians push us around. Let the Iranians push us around. The way he dealt with the Russian Afghan invasion is part of the problem today.
LBJ – His half-assed approach to Vietnam killed a lot of good men. His “great society” is still killing people.
Woodrow Wilson – His pacifistic tendencies allowed him to become a tool of the isolationists and WWI roared on until we finally, inevitably, entered it. The stalemate resulting from our late entry led to The Treaty of Versailles and WWII. That’s a lot of death.
Andrew Johnson – Screwed up Reconstruction resulting in 100 years of racial chaos and poverty in the south.
James Buchanan – Drove the country to a point where the Civil War was just about inevitable.

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I look forward to watching Tony Snow spar with the White House “press” corp. I generally like Snow. I like him better than Fox’s other stars, O’Reilly and Hannity. I was kind of surprised to hear his name tossed around as press secretary in the first place. He had his own radio talk show and Fox News show. It must be a heck of a pay cut he’s taking. But I suppose this only builds his credentials for a future return to the meida arena. It’s refreshing to see a guy like Snow put his money where his mouth is and return to service for what he perceives as the good of his country.

The one down side is that it gives the left more ammo for their charge that Fox News is a mouthpiece for the administration, (ignoring Snow’s pre-Fox credentials) a charge which is hilarious from my point-of-view. Sure, they’re a little right-of-center, but no more than CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks are left-of-center. In fact, they’re probably less right than CNN is left, but what are all the stories about this saying today? “Conservative Fox News.” Which is fine if they start referencing CNN as “liberal.” Of course, they won’t…

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And that makes me happy.
Hopefully, he’ll have a better season to go out on this year.
Plus, it’ll be nice to see him in person one last time, even if it is at Qwest Field.

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The one is either refers to the number of classes done for the semester, or the fact that Legal Writing One is done.
I turned in my final paper about 1 PM today.
It was kind of a fun ceremony – I e-mailed the paper to the prof, then I removed the Legal Writing texts from the “currently reading” links. In two weeks, I’ll have all the legal texts down and can hopefully get back into Knife of Dreams, which I have been itching to finish since Christmas.
Anyway, like I said, even if I fail this paper – which I didn’t – I’ll still get a C+ (I recalculated), so I didn’t get too nervous about it.

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It’s the nicest day of the year so far – sunny and about 70 degrees – and I’m stuck inside trying to get the last Legal Writing memo of the year written.
The prof sent me the last memo I did, graded and critiqued, this morning. I did well enough where it takes the pressure off this last one. In fact, even though this last memo is worth 30% of my grade in the class, I could not turn it in and still get a C. Hmm….
Nah, I just have to tell myself there are plenty of nice days ahead. I just need to put my head down and go. OK.
Here I go…

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On the ferry home last night I was trying to find a table with a power outlet. As I was walking around, a lady with a small daughter along side of her and another one in one of those Kelty Kids backpacks – much like the one we have for Baby Moose – walked past a group of women. One of the women said to her friend, “How can you treat a child like a piece of luggage? I would never wear one of those.”
Irritated because all the power outleted tables were being used by slackjawed idiots that didn’t have even one thing to plug in – much less the mobile CIA ops center I carry around – and because of the fact that she was indirectly criticizing my parenting, I asked her if she had any kids. She said she didn’t so I remarked, “Then shut the hairy heck up.” (Only I said something other than “hairy heck.”)

Why is raising kids one of those things everyone thinks they can comment on before they’ve actually done it? If you don’t have kids and want to criticize someone else’s routine parenting skills, you better be Jo frickin’ Frost and have some credentials to back it up, otherwise shut up.
I can tell you, much like a battle plan never survives the first contact with the enemy, plans of how you will parent never survive first contact with an actual child. Kids are unpredictable. You may have the best plan for raising a smart kid, and then your kid turns out to be an idiot. There’s nothing you can do but improvise.
A lot of the time people without kids don’t think in terms of 24 hours. They may think they know how they’d handle a kid who was screaming for a piece of candy. But put in context of having to handle that kid day in and day out, 24 hours a day, the actual response may be to pick a different battle.
And this lady, the one who made the snotty remark, has no idea what it is like to cart around a three year old and a baby. Three year olds can vanish quickly on something like the ferry if you don’t watch them like a hawk. If having the baby in a backpack made it easier, so be it.

And you know what? The same goes for marriage. I had a co-worker that used to love to give marriage advice to my boss and me. I’d been married four years at the time, and my boss 10 years. Her longest relationship at that point had been for a year-and-a-half with no cohabitation. Shut up. It turns out my boss desperately needed marriage advice, but from someone who’d actually been there, not from someone wearing rose colored glasses.

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I’m starting to wonder if Baghdad Jim isn’t just an attention whore. I used to think he was just a Kool-Aid drinkin’ moonbat, but this really takes the cake.

Maybe he’s performing an experiment on how openly he can despise his country and still have the wack-jobs in Seattle’s Capital Hill return him to Congress.

I’m going to a dinner on Saturday and Senator Cantwell (or as I affectionately call her, the lesser of two evils) will be there. I’ll see if I can get her to criticize this move by Baghdad Jim.

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After meeting with my advisor yesterday, I pretty much have my 2006-2007 classes picked. This is the “work you to death” year (well, more like year and a half for part-time students like me), and I think this slate reflects that.
(The old saying being that during the first year of law school they try to scare you to death, the second year they try to work you to death, the third year they try to bore you to death.)

Fall: Intellectual Property (3 credits), Legal Writing II (required – 3 credits), Consitutional Law (first half – requited – 2 credits), Bioethics and the Law (2 credits).

Spring: Copyright Law (2 credits), Trusts and Estates (3 credits), Basic Real Estate (3 credits), Constitutional Law (second half – required – 2 credits)

Summer (2007): Evidence (required – 4 credits), Professional Responsibility (required – 2 credits)

That will finish up my required classes, then I can just pick around for the last 34 credits doing things that look fun or at least like not much work (hence, the bore you to death).

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Out of all the articles I’ve read about the relationship between Favre and the Packers this off-season, I think The Onion’s satirical article is the one that rings most true on the situation.

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…was not so good. In fact, other than a very few moments with Towlie, it was bad.

How did they take the return of Towlie and the target of Oprah and screw it up? I’ve been waiting for them to take on Oprah for a long time, and when they finally do, they have her vagina take hostages and kill itself? OK, on paper Oprah’s vagina killing itself is pretty funny, but they just didn’t execute it.
The rare episodes where the boys don’t show up are always shaky propositions. Half of the laughs in a normal episode derive right from Cartman, so taking him out of the equation is bound to hurt.

Oh well, they can’t all be brilliant. Of the last four episodes three have been very good and one (Smug) was great. I guess maybe they needed to clear the slate for the last half of the season.

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There’s only one more class of new material left in Property class. We finished up our discussion of the Fair Housing Act last night and will brawl over the Kelo decision on Thursday. Nothing like using the last class for the building of bad feelings between classmates.
I finished reading the Kelo decision this morning in addition to the “Notes and Questions” added by the prof and textbook company.
Lest I thought I might be in for a fair discussion, all of the Notes were hostile to the dissenting opinion while not once picking at some of the dubious points of the majority opinion. But the prof did warn us that we need to have an “open-minded, civil discussion.” So maybe I need to keep an open mind about setting up a one-sided discussion.

At least this discussion will give us a break from race. Wait, that’s a silly thing to say. I’m sure someone will find a way to cram racism in via the Berman case that was precedent to Kelo (though not properly followed, as O’ Connor points out in her dissent.)

We spent about a day on the Fair Housing Act. Here was the place to talk about property and race. Instead it popped its head up every class period in some form or another. The class really should be called “Property and Race.” Judging by the text and secondary materials, I’m guessing that Property is taught the same way at all law schools. I thought I’d enjoy Property for the same reasons I enjoyed Contracts: Those classes apply to everyday life in contrast to the other required first year courses of Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, and Torts. Instead the race hang-up just made Property tedious.

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I’m pulling through my Peeps induced stupor just in time for Civ Pro to begin.
Easter isn’t a good weekend to get anything done. Church took half the morning, and then the kid was wound up from sugar.
Plus, my Xbox 360 got delivered… more on that later.

OK, gotta take notes.

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Over at Something Awful readers submitted their college pet peeves as depicted in MS Paint.
Two of these have nailed my 1L experiences so far:

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I think so. Others don’t.

Last night’s episode was the second part of a two-parter that was about the fall out of “Family Guy” wanting to show an image of Mohammed. The build up was that this week they would show Mohammed on Family Guy (on South Park) unless Comedy Central “pussied out.” (The irony being that Mohammed was featured in an episode of South Park that aired in season 5.)
When Mohammed did show up, he was blacked out, as he had been earlier in the episode.

Here are my reasons that I think it was a joke:

UPDATE:
There has been “confirmation” that it was a Comedy Central decision to censor the image of Mohammed.
So maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t ring true to me. Comedy Central could easily be in on the joke, and there still has been no griping by Matt and Trey reported in the media, which would be a first.

UPDATE 2:
OK. In this article it looks like a little from column A, a little from column B.
Sounds like Stone and Parker were told in advance that they couldn’t air Mohammed, so went ahead and prepared this episode with the censoring.
Either way, I think their point got across better as is.

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Yesterday evening I went to a panel on careers in intellectual property. Three experienced lawyers in IP fielded questions.
At one point some long-hair raised his hand and asked, “Is there any opportunity to do public interest work in the field?”
Groan.
Hit the road, hippie. The IP club is the one place I can go to hang with students who are interested in making money (at least openly interested) not saving the world through “social justice.”

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It’s time to roll out one of my favorite Teddy R. quotes. It’s been thrown around a lot lately, so why should it be missing on a blog named after the Bull Moose himself?

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the persons becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isnt an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

There were a lot of Mexican flags being waved around at those rallies yesterday. And a lot of Spanish on signs. If you want to convince me that you deserve to be American citizens, the first thing to do is lose the flag and learn English.

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Congratulations to the local hippies for having the sense to keep their pro-illegal alien rally out on the other side of my route between work and school. Though I am kind of curious as to how well my Harley would plow through a bunch of hippies blocking traffic, I’d rather not find out.
What is with these Seattle rally organizers and their apparent disdain for people trying to get home after a day of work. They always throw these things just in time to snare traffic at rush hour.
“The Seattle Police Department, anticipating between 4,000 and 5,000 people, will restrict traffic in the area as necessary, spokesman Sean Whitcomb said. The department advises drivers to seek alternative routes.”
Screw that. Make these idiots seek alternative routes for exercising their 1st amendment rights. Why do the rights of these people, who are always rallying around some group of criminals – Baathists, illegal aliens, always trump the rights of Joe Lunchpail trying to get home to spend dinner with his kids? It’s ridiculous.

Organizers in Dallas, on the other hand, screwed up morning traffic instead. Micelle Malkin had this picture on her site:

Ah, Che. I knew he’d make an appearance. Why wouldn’t we want to let a bunch of people who worship a vile, murdering, commie into our country?
As for their question, I’ll answer for this particular honkey: Europe wouldn’t want my ass or any other part of me. Seattle hardly wants me and they aren’t even as European as San Francisco.
Besides, I stand on the shoulders of some great men in my lineage that fought to make this country what it is as far back as the Civil War. My daughter can trace hers back to the Revolutionary War. That doesn’t make me any more American than anyone else naturalized or born here, but it does make me American. This is my country. If you want to come in, you have to do it the way my government says you have to do it.

UPDATE:
Ran into some of the protestors after school as they were making their way back up the hill. In addition to the usual suspects, there were a lot of Mexicans with a lot of Mexican (and US) flags.
What these protests have shown me is that we have a HUGE problem with illegal immigration in the country, something I had hardly thought about before.
Just the ones (and I’m assuming a large chunk of the ones I saw are illegal, I don’t think that’s unfair) I saw represented a lot of jobs being taken up (or at least wages being depressed by) illegal aliens. If the Democrats were really the friends of the working poor, they’d be the ones leading the charge to deport millions of illegal workers. As it is, they are more worried about importing a net of 4 million votes, costs be damned.
I’m willing to grant that we likely need some Mexican agricultural workers, but the answer is not to rewardt millions of people who broke the law to get into this country with amnesty.

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