Bull Moose Strikes Back

A few days ago I got virtual eyes rolled at me on Facebook when I said in a friend’s thread that Earth Day was the day we celebrate the astonishing accomplishment of the mainstreaming anti-human nihilism by packaging it as “Environmentalism.” Notice the capital letter. Of course I said that both partially tongue-in-cheek and in the most inflammatory way possible, because that’s my style on The Internets (see, e.g. this entire blog).

I consider myself an environmentalist – someone who believes in a good-sense balance between conservationism and use of the environment and between protecting the common resources of air and water and acknowledging that there is a tolerance limit of less than 100% pure. But I can’t use that word anymore because it’s loaded, so I tend to refer to myself as a conservationist.

Big-E Environmentalists, on the other hand, err in one way – towards mother earth. (At least when such erring doesn’t affect their lifestyle, that is, but that’s a different post.) The easiest example is DDT. DDT was one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th Century, but it was demagogued out of use. Rather than bothering to figure out how to best use DDT and prevent its overuse, it was just made politically untenable for even the most afflicted countries to use.

But when one sees quotes like “Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, ‘Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.’” (Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company.) one wonders how much of it was really about the birds.

But this post isn’t about DDT, there are plenty of places on the web where people are flaming each other about DDT. This post is about something similar that I expereinced that I thought about when I recently had my prescriptions refilled.

I have very mild asthma that is brought on by strenuous exercise. I take a puff of an albuterol inhaler prior to exercise and don’t worry about it. About a year ago I refilled my puffer and had this conversation:

Pharmacist: OK. One albuterol inhaler. That’s $40.

Me: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I want an albuterol puffer, not the cure to AIDS. That’s $5.

Pharmacist: Nope. We had to stop selling the old kind because of environmental regulations. [Walgreens must have made the change a little early.] The new kind of puffer isn’t generic. You have to pay eight times as much if you want to breath. Be thankful your insurance is picking up the balance.

I’m no fan of CFCs, but humans have been doing a good job of phasing them out over the last few decades. So why was so hellfire important that we just needed to get rid of the CFC inhalers before the HFA inhalers are both generic and perfected?

$35 four or five times a year isn’t going to put me in the poor house. But what about the kid who has crappy insurance who needs a refill twice a month? That kind of money could add up fast.

My experience with the HFA inhalers, and this is acknowledged by the manufacturer, is that they tend to clog and they tend to clog frequently. A user has to take the medication chamber out of the inhaler, run water through the inhaler, wait a few minutes, then put the medication chamber back in. Again, what is a slight inconvenience to me may be life-or-death to someone with severe asthma.

Once again another regulation came down to protect the “environment” with real human consequences. Was there any thought to the balance between the amount of CFCs released by an albuterol puff versus the consequences of making an HFA puff vastly more expensive, if it happens at all? I actually hope not, because if the bureaucrats deciding to enact this regulation did consider those factors, they enacted the regulation with malice.

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Wait, Arlen Specter was a Republican? Huh. Maybe he can take Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe with him.

Specter can take his idiotic questions about “super duper precedent” and how the Eagles dealt with TO and ask them as a Democrat.  That’s what he is anyway, a moderately liberal Democrat.

Specter’s comments on this are hilarious:

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

Yes, George W. Bush was a hard-line conservative compared to Reagan. Sure. Let me translate that: “I rode Reagan’s coattails into office, and now I have made a deal with the Pennsylvania Democratic machine to ride Obama’s coattails to stay in office in exchange for the 60th Senator since I won’t be able to beat the challenger in the GOP primary.”

I have to kind of admire his foresight. He knows he’s done as a Republican in the ‘10 elections – Pat Toomey was going to beat him like a drum – so he made a trade to the Democrats – vote #60 in exchange for backing in the Democratic primaries.  I don’t think the people of Pennsylvania have any right to be too mad – they did elect Arlen Specter. You play with snakes eventually you’ll be bitten.

Specter is doing the Republican Party a favor. The GOP is in desperate need of a reboot, and the more Specters they can shake out as part of that reboot the more likely they are to return to their conservative platform and in turn the more likely conservative voters are to return to GOP.

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Bar results will be mailed from Seattle on Friday, that means I should have them on Saturday. Though with my post office’s track record that isn’t a guarantee. But right now I’m going to assume that I will be getting them on Saturday in order to maintain my sanity.

So, one more week in limbo at work. Hopefully that means one more week of having to have someone else sign the pleading or brief that I wrote and one more week of having to bite my tounge in conversations with clients lest my words drift into the realm of “legal advice.”

But even if it doesn’t at least I’ll know that I’ll have to plan my summer around the July bar exam.

It’s an interesting feeling having a definite time or date that you know will be a major “yes or no” event in your life. It usually doesn’t happen like that.  No matter which way the results go it won’t be the best or worst thing to have ever happened to me, but it will probably be the best or worst thing that I knew was coming exactly on a date three months off. Maybe we’re supposed to know what it’s like waiting for a jury decision.

I just have to make it to Friday without killing anyone for looking at me funny. Then I can hole up in my house until I hear the mailman the next day. Then I have to find a place away from everyone to open the envelope. I’m actually thinking about going to a forest park nearby, hiking in a mile or so and opening them.  I watched “A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar” last weekend, a documentary about students taking the California bar, and finding out you failed with family and friends around seems awfully humiliating.

However, I’ve heard that it is easy to tell from the size of the packet whether you’ve passed (if you fail they send the test and your answers back to you), so maybe I’ll just have to make sure I get the mail alone.

In any case I will tweet and Facebook status my results when I get them after I first inform my wife and boss.

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About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.

-Elihu Root – Attorney and then Secretary of War and Secretary of State under fellow Nobel Peace Prize (back when it meant something) winner Theodore Roosevelt

It doesn’t sound like much has changed. It feels funny taking someone’s money to try to talk them out of what they want to do, but the customer is not always right in the law business, and if I can talk them out of wasting $20,000 for $150 it’s a fair trade.

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The US News & World Report Law School rankings are out, and for the first time ever they ranked part-time programs.  I’m happy to report that my alma mater’s part-time program, the program that I was enrolled in, came in a respectable 12 out of 87.  Seattle U’s overall ranking also shot up 5 spots to #77 (out of about 300), which I will note is almost 20 spots higher than it was when I started. Why, you’re welcome, SU Law.

As I discussed here, law school is one of the few things I would advise people to choose solely on the ranking number. Some people will tell you that it should only be part of your consideration. Those people are either naive or lying.  So it’s nice to be able to have this conversation “I went to the #12 -cough- part -cough- time -cough- law school!” “What? You went to the #12 law school?” “Sure.”

I will admit that the deck was kind of stacked in SU’s favor to have a highly ranked part-time program. Part-time programs are much more common on the East Coast. New York and the DC area each have multiple schools with part-programs. Washington State has three law schools total, one with a part-time program.  I think Lewis and Clark in Portland also has a part-time program, but that is all for part time programs in the Pacific Northwest until you hit the Bay Area.

Seattle has a lot of people who had good GPAs and are capable of generating high LSAT scores. A good portion of these people make the mistake of thinking that going to law school would be a swell idea, especially if they can keep their jobs. Since there is no competition for students, SU gets the cream of Seattle part-time applicants which are probably already better than most part-time applicants in New York or DC to start with, and voila, we’re #12.

[UPDATE: Turns out there is no statistical evaluation involved in ranking the part-time programs. However, the same reasons our part-time program was rated high in a qualitative sense is the same reasons it would have been rated high in a quantitative sense: No competition for quality students.]

Of course, since we’re out here in the northwest corner of the continental US, no one in New York or DC has heard of the city of Seattle, much less the law school there, so our judge and lawyer prestige rankings suffer. So maybe it all evens out.

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I’m not sure what the big hubbub is. When I was 13, I would have killed for an excuse to display my bare ass to the school administration. I guess maybe that’s the difference between being a 13 year old girl and an obnoxious 13 year old boy.

It looks like the school is going to be beat like a drum on this one, and I’m kind of torn on the issue. On the one hand, the 9th Circuit said the school was wrong, so the school almost has to be in the right. On the other hand, I think the Constitutional protections of students from search and seizure are much easier to overcome, I don’t know if I like the idea of some frustrated-with-life assistant principal – the kind I tormented in high school – having the power to order strip searches with nothing but weak hearsay to back him up.

I know if my 13 year old daughter was stripped by school officials without so much as a phone call to me or her mother because there was a rumor that she gave an Advil to another student I’d be furious. Not suing in federal court furious, school officials in hiding furious.

Search their lockers and bags, make them use plastic bags, walk through metal detectors… whatever. I’m just not sure about stripping them without some damn good reason.

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If you went to a tea party spending protest, more power to you. but for some reason I had no desire to go to one. I’ve analyzed my reasoning. In order of decreasing importance:

1. I’m violently cynical about the impact a street protest can have. I thought the ones against the Iraq war were a waste of time and just an annoyance to everyone trying to go about their business; that didn’t change just because I’m mostly allied with the message of the protestors.
2. I only gets paid for what I bill. I decided I’d rather get the money for my time today than be part of a crowd whose population will be rounded down.
3. The only message Congress is going to listen to is the one delivered at the ballot box. We screwed that up last time, now we have to wait another 18 months. Obama and this Congress told us what they were going to do in September and October of last year. We (collectively) elected them anyway mostly because we (collectively) disliked a guy who wasn’t even on the ballot. I’m supposed to get mad about it now?
4. I don’t exactly know why, but I get kind of a creepy vibe from some of the parties. Besides the Ron Paul nuts, there seems to be a good deal of Glenn Beck/Sean Hannity worship going on in some of the tea party circles.

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I’m beginning to suspect more and more that Glenn Beck is a lightweight boob. The past couple times I’ve watched his show, he’s expressed his outrage – rightfully – at what the so-called progressive movement is doing to our federal government right now. He then declares that “it all harkens back to the progressives Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” To hear Beck talk, I might as well have named my son after Karl Marx instead of Teddy Roosevelt.
So what about TR? Would he approve of what is happening today?

No doubt that Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive – even running for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912 after failing to win the Republican nomination over Taft. But a progressive in 1912 compared to a progressive in 2009 is a lot like a car in 1912 compared to a car in 2009. The older model looks a very stripped down, slow, and utilitarian.

Here is the quote from TR that best sums up his progressive tendencies:

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service… When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit… Now, this means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics… For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

At the time Roosevelt made that speech the American economy into one that allowed for greater wealth than could have been imagined a half-century before. Roosevelt was rightfully worried about corporations acquiring so much power that they squashed the rights of citizens. Establishing anti-trust laws the Pure Food and Drug Act – the basis of laws we all still count on to be sure that we aren’t feeding our kids rotten meat or buying snakeoil from our pharmacist – was the kind of action that made TR a progressive in the early 20th Century. He recognized the need to check corporations.

Note that TR calls for the “equality of opportunity” for each citizen, not for “equality” for each citizen. There is a not-so-subtle difference there. The current progressive movement is working for the latter.

Is it fair to say that the path to Obama firing the head GM and the feds forcing bailout money on businesses so they can dictate how they are run started with TR? Perhaps. But it has been a long and winding path and has led into territory that TR would not recognize and did not intend to enter.

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Seals 3, Pirates 0.

And props to President Obama for letting the Navy do their job.
I’m sure the conversation went like this:

Obama: Commander, I authorize you to use force if Captain Phillips’ life is in imminent danger.

Commander: I understand, Mr. President.

-Hang up.-

Commander: Is Phillips still being held by pirates?

Some ensign: Yes sir.

Commander: Well, sounds like imminent danger to me, get those snipers on the fantail.

The pirate community (the Somalian one, not the Seattle Capital Hill one) is talking about retribution, but I’m guessing they’ll avoid the US flagged ships in favor of some paying flags for awhile.

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OK, I don’t want anyone to take these as blasphemous, though I could see the argument. A while ago I thought, “What if the present day American legal system had been in place on the first Good Friday,” and these comics kind of sprang to life:

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First, let me preface this by saying I realize this is one incident caught on tape, and I realize that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” But…

If “get your kids the hell out of college because they’re being brainwashed” is going to be the rallying cry of the conservative movement, we’re in serious trouble. Look at about 5:00 in in this video:

The anti-evolution stuff has irked me for awhile, but I considered it a generally distinct distraction from what I consider the real issues of the American conservative movement: The way the government handles our money, federalism, and national security. Perhaps this is why I’ve never been too excited about the rise of Glenn Beck. Aside from all the crying, he’s managing to amalgamate the people irritated with the fiscal policy with the far right book burners with this 912 project. (Aside from Ann Coulter, who I’m convinced will say anything for money, is there a big-name conservative who embraces the anti-evolution movement? And I mean other than the “let’s teach both sides” lip-service politicians give it. I don’t know, I’m asking.)

I wonder how Bill Buckley would feel about people who consider themselves conservative badmouthing higher education. I’ll readily admit that the faculties of major universities tend to be left-wing think tanks. On the other hand, that doesn’t really matter when you are learning about math, physical sciences, engineering, or reading Homer or Shakespeare. One does not have to become brainwashed in college. Take me for an example: I have three strikes. (1) University of Wisconsin – Madison followed by (2) law school at (3) Seattle University. On paper I should be a flaming left wing zealot. But I have this thing called my own mind. And it is able to process information from all over the political spectrum and come to its own conclusions.

Perhaps instead of worrying about who is brainwashing college kids, we should worry about laying a foundation for their own minds so they can come to their own beliefs. I don’t think that’s been done real well in the last couple of decades in America. If parents are concerned their kids are being brainwashed they only have to look as far as the mirror to find the person responsible for letting that happen.

Besides, real life has a way of grinding out some of the things that a professor of sociology can convince some kids of. (The classic Onion piece “Marxist Student has Capitalist Parents” is still one of my all time favorite examples of satire with a biting element of truth.) To wit, Bush actually won the “some college” and “college degree” demographics. That’s a lot of “brainwashing” overcome. (And, actually, if you take the lawyers out of post-grad study, he probably would have come close to winning that, too. Damn lawyers.)

The far right mirrors the far left. The mainstream left endorsed the far left crazies during the Bush years: Code Pink, the Kos kids, the maniacs at the Democratic Underground, more or less anyone willing to use the phrase “Chimpy McBu$Hitler.” If the conservative movement gets tied up with the people like the man and woman in that video during the Obama years my disenfranchisement will be complete.

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Protest puppets! My favorite subject. Thank you, Onion.

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I started training for my second half-marathon yesterday. I think this go around will be much more pleasant since this time the training is going into summer instead of out of summer. Running 5 miles after work in November in the dark and rain was not so much fun.I’m using the Novice half program again, even though this will be my second half. I skipped a lot of the cross and strength days since I was in school last time. This time I think I’ll try to pick those up.

My wife has decided to run this one with me, too. She saw my gloriful crossing of the finish line and being handed a medal last time and wanted in. We’re training on alternate days due to kids, but it will be good to have a partner in the sixth or seventh mile this time.

The other good news is that I think I’ve hit on some good habits that will help me lose some pounds this time. I’ve stopped eating anything solid within 3 hours of going to bed. (This also gives me a chance to drink more MGD 64 in lieu of a snack, so it’s win-win.) That in combination with my food journal seems to be a winning combination.  I’m on target for my Labor Day goal, and now I’m going to throw half-marathon training on top of it. It’s nice to have my evenings back to myself so I can actually control my own life.

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While I was participating in the Special Olympics over at Facebook earlier today on a friend’s thread. (Facebook is a terrible place to discuss politics, by the way. The format is not conducive to it.)
I came across this quote that the more I thought about, the more I realized illustrates the chasm between me and a good deal of those who voted for Obama.

I feel safer and more proud to be an american [sic] under Obama then I ever did with Bush. So to answer your question, this is the change and hope I wanted.

What kind of puzzled me was the statement that she was more proud to be an American. (OK, the “safer” thing puzzled me too, but I only have a couple gigs of server space.) The reason I didn’t get it is that I’m not any more or less proud to be an American now than I would be if McCain had won in ‘08 or Kerry in ‘04, or whatever.

Then it hit me: I don’t consider Americans a function of the government, whereas I think this Obamanite does. And I think a lot of Obamanites do. It fits into the soft stateism (soft fascism is what I’d say if fascism wasn’t such a loaded word).
In fact, other than a few things like World War II and the Apollo program, most of what should be a source of pride in the country doesn’t have much to do with the government. (And even in World War II it was the citizen soldiers and American industry that allowed the government to be victorious.)

We have a great governing document (especially when it is paid attention to) that was meant to keep the government off the back of the citizens and allowed them the opportunity to be great. That’s what should be a source of pride to Americans, not the identiy of whatever boob is sitting in the White House right now. Danielle Boone, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Steven Speilberg, Mark Twain, dare I say Oprah Winfrey, and so forth: Their accomplishments and the accomplishments of millions of people who work hard to make something for themselves are what make America great.

I’ll grant the fact that Obama rose from a rough childhood to go to Columbia and Harvard Law to become president is something to be proud of as an American, but I don’t think that’s what she was talking about. (Besides, it’s been done. Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, etc.)

This head-of-state-based pride will contribute to what is shaping up to be the tragdey of the Obama years as the government creeps ever further into our lives and suffocates our innovation and productivity, the things of which we should be proud.

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Before:

After:

MoveOn had a good point in the first video, RedState has a better point in the second video. But It’s funny I haven’t heard MoveOn.com, their true believers and associated ilk complaining about the deficit lately even though Obama plans on making it much worse.

I do remember, however, being the target of some anger when I said that I thought it was cute when Obama supporters pretended to care about Bush’s deficit spending in order to use it as a criticism of the policies the money was being spent on. (On the other hand, I criticized Bush for his expansion of entitlements and failure to use the Republican majority to trim the size of the federal government, and I’ll criticize Obama for bloating it beyond recognition.)

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