Bull Moose Strikes Back

When I hear fellow Federalists / conservatives urging for a fight to the death over Judge Sotomayor, this comes to mind:

Here’s why I don’t want to waste a lot of time and energy fighting her:

1. It’s an even exchange. Obama is just renewing Souter’s term for 30 years. Not great, but the politically charged decisions will still be 5-4 one way or the other.
2. She’s going to be confirmed. If she isn’t confirmed, someone as bad or worse will be confirmed eventually. This was decided in November when we elected Barack Obama and a Democratic Senate. It is one of the main reasons I threw in with McCain despite my reservations. It is the main reason I pleaded with fellow conservatives / Federalists to overlook his flaws. But that’s neither here nor there. Obama is President, the Democrats have the votes in the Senate.
3. Conservatives lose every time they get drawn into a game of race or gender politics with the left. The left is better at it because it’s been their bread and butter for so long. Plus they have control over what gets blown out of proportion or taken out of context on most TV and newspapers. (Where’s the outrage over the Sotomayor “Latinas are better judges then white men” quote? Oh yeah, no where.) The day is coming where the cry of “Racism!” will no longer mean anything, but that day is not here yet.
4. Given 1, 2, and 3, it’s not worth handing Obama and company the (brutally edited) soundbites they need to woo the increasingly important Hispanic votes.

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• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: This movie was of particular interest to me because I’m aging like Benjamin Button, but in reverse. Fincher needed to cut about 25 to 30 minutes out of this meandering story. I realize the slowness of the movie was a way for Fincher to get the lifetime span of the movie across, but I checked my watch.  I went into watching it very cynically, but it won me over at the last second. B.
• The Wolverine Origin X-Men Movie: The problem with this movie was that the first three X-Men movies were pretty much just Wolverine movies with a supporting cast, and Wolverine isn’t interesting enough on his own to support four movies in ten years. The interesting part of the Wolverine story was wrapped up before the opening credits ended. Plus, I don’t really understand what Gambit was doing in the movie. C-.
• Night at the Museum 2: The first Night at the Museum movie wasn’t exactly a classic, but it was cute and clever. The makers of the sequel forgot that and just crammed as many “exhibits coming to life” moments they could think of into the movie, story be damned. Two things keep this movie from a grade of “F”: 1.  Amy Adams running around in tight slacks; and 2. A few good Hank Azaria moments, especially his criticism of Darth Vader. D.
• “The Goode Family”: The first episode was the funniest thing I’ve seen on TV in quite some time. (”It’s not important that you wasted gas, it’s important that you feel guilty about it.”) I don’t know what future a TV show that makes fun of the people who elected Obama has in 2009, but I guess if “American Dad” could survive in 2005, there might be hope. Plus, if you don’t live in the Seattle, Bay, Boulder, Austin, or Madison areas you might not fully get it. In any case, I’m going to enjoy it while I can. A.
• Guns ‘n’ Roses “Chinese Democracy”: When G’n'F’n'R released their last studio album, er, albums, I was 17 years-old, had all of my hair, weighed 70 pounds less and could bench 100 pounds more. I’m afraid that Axl and company aged like me. There’s a few good things left on the platter, but not like there once was. It is kind of hilarious that Axl jammed every musical cliche that came and went in that time on the album somewhere. (Break it down!). C+.
• Bruce Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream”: The awful “Devils and Dust” aside, The Boss had a creative upswing in the Bush years. Unfortunately, that was due to inspiration derived from 9-11 and the darkest days of the Iraq War – (”The Rising” and “Magic”). Throw in the very fun but oddly named “Seeger Sessions” (odd because there were no Seeger songs on the album) and the Bush years were good to the Boss. “Working on a Dream” begins the downslide to what will surely be the lazy Obama years (like the Clinton years were). There are some good songs – “Outlaw Pete” especially – but it is as meandering as “Magic” was tight. The title cut – used at Obama rallies – is tainted by a self-congratulatory feel. Otherwise there is a lot of “meh” on the album. Fortunatly for Springsteen, his “meh” is masterwork for most musicians working in popular music today. B.

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I was really hoping President Obama was going to go with Diane Wood for the SCOTUS vacancy, but not because I would have expected her to be any better than Sonia Sotomayor. I’d expect them both to be terrible Justices in the Souter mold, though Wood probably has less chronic back pain from only carrying the “woman” chip on her shoulder and not the “hispanic” one as well.

No, I was hoping Obama was going to nominate his University of Chicago crony Diane Wood because she went to law school at the University of Texas. The court will remain a Harvard-Yale club with one guy from Northwestern. (Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law but attended Harvard Law.)  Just four years ago there was at least the “diversity” of a couple Stanford grads on the bench. Now they can’t seem to find anyone who went to law school outside of two schools.

Sure, Scalia and Souter both are HLS grads as are Roberts and Breyer – they couldn’t be further apart. On the big visible issues that get reported in the papers like aborion. But what about administrative law, patent law, copyright law, admiralty law, Indian law, and all the other areas of law where the court spends most of its time?

Throw in the fact that President Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, many notable members of Congress – Barney Frank – are Harvard Law grads and I start to get a little concerned about how much power the world view of the faculty of the Harvard Law School has on the way our government functions.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a reason Harvard and Yale are overrepresented on the SCOTUS. Those schools attract the hardest workers, the most ambitious, and those with the ability to score high on the LSAT.  But since Sandra Day O’Connor (Ginsburg aside) they couldn’t find anyone qualified who went to law school at Stanford, Michigan, Chicago, NYU, Duke…

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• I’ve got two long pieces I’ve been peculating for a long time. I just need to get the time and motivation to write them out. Go figure that when I sit around writing bullcrap all day for work I don’t feel like sitting around writing bullcrap in my free time.
• My wife is traveling to DC on business this week. “Baching it” used to be a lot more fun when I didn’t have a 4-year-old and a 20-month-old left with me. The only time my Xbox 360 has been turned on so far is to stream “The Water Horse” through the Netflix function for my daughter.
• The “No dishes dinner plan” tonight was KFC. Tomorrow we’re going to the Chinese buffet. Wednesday will probably be Costco pizza – Canadian bacon and pineapple since we can’t get that when mom is home. Thursday is pending.
• I also told my daughter I would buy her a Topsy Turvy at Walgreens if she didn’t give me much grief this week. She might have gotten her grandpa’s green thumb. However her grandpa is also the one that killed any green thumb I might have had.
• Here’s one from last week: “The budget deficit has been revised up to $1.84 trillion. The Democratic Congress and President are spending…. ZOH MY GAWD WANDA SYKES SAID SHE HOPES RUSH LIMBAUGH DIES IN A COMEDY BIT!!! OUTRAGE!!!” Let’s not be so easily led around by the nose, people.
• I’m finally getting around to watching the last few episodes of “Life on Mars.” After it ended I had no motivation to keep up. It’s nice to see that how much I like a show is still directly proportional to the chance that it will not survive the season. Now where am I going to get my Harvey Keitel fix?
• I was swore into the bar on Friday. Surprisingly I haven’t been forcibly relocated to Bainbridge Island nor has Satan been by to collect my soul.
• 70’s and sunny for Memorial Day weekend in Western Washington? Sounds too good to be true.
• Who the hell are these people that still have questions about the digital TV transition?
• I’m back to the portion of the half-marathon training where 5 miles feels like a short run. The Seattle Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon sold out, so we needed to move the training up three weeks to the North Olympic Discovery Marathon, which seems like a nicer run anyway. Plus it will give us to do a 5k circuit run around the bridges right near my house. I do that 5K during training anyway, might as well do it for a good cause.
• I don’t think there’s much chance of the drive-in theater playing Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation as the double feature this weekend.
• If a school my kid went to showed “The Story of Stuff“, they could expect to have a long conversation with me. And my first question would be why they don’t understand things like “prices”. My second would be why they don’t questions statements like “More than 50% of our tax dollars go to the military.” (It does… if you take out Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. However, if you take out military spending, it takes up 0%. Makes as much sense) or “We have less than 4% of our original forests left.” (We have about 80% of the forest land that we had in the lower 48 in 1776 (PDF). I know it is hard for an East Coast Liberal to imagine, but fly out and I’ll show it to you.) And of course: Why the hell are you showing a video which tells kids that it is the government’s job to “take care” of the people? And that’s just a few of the questions in the first few minutes.
• Governor Gregoire just signed the “Everything but marriage” bill into law. It gives gay couples the same rights as married couples without using the word marriage.  Much like California, a group is going to try to overturn the law by referendum. It’s going to get noisy around here.

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I knew that bar exam was weird.

The pass list and stats for the bar exam I sat for came out right before I left on vacation.

What grabbed me was the overall pass rate: 64.8%. That number has hovered between 70% and 75% for the last three years and probably longer.

I really think the unexpected subject selection threw people – less real property than usual, more criminal and civil procedure than normal, no commercial paper, the “rarely tested” limited partnership, and that bizarre agency hybrid. (One of my classmates missed the agency issue but still passed. She must have killed on everything else.)

I’d heard from a lot of my classmates on Saturday and Sunday, and they’d all passed, so I expected the rate to be higher. I guess who goes around screaming “I failed!”?

The other weird stat: First-time general applicants pass rate was 56.2%  That rate is always higher than the overall pass rate; often it is much higher. Not this year. That, I think, is also an indication of the unexpected subject weight. We relied on the bar review to tell us how to allot our time and some of us got burned.

I guess I should just be happier that I passed since a lot of people seemed to have been led down rabbit holes.

I wish I would have gotten the name of my table-mate from the last day. I’m curious as to whether she passed her PR exam. I think she was from Virginia (our IDs had to sit out during the test) and the only people listed as passing from Virginia are men, so I’m guessing she did as well as she thought. Good.

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Had a pretty swell time on vacation. Saw my youngest brother graduate college. Shot a bunch of clays (and missed a bunch more) a few steps from the front door with my siblings. Took advantage of the hot tub. Let my kids experience a bunch of farm animals.

On Monday my sister, my kids, and I left for the Omaha airport. We planned our trip so we met up on the way in and parted ways on the way out in Denver’s airport from San Jose and Seattle. My Blackberry buzzed at 5 PM while we were on I-29 telling us the flight was on time, but by the time we got there it was 30 minutes behind schedule – already a problem for my sister’s connection. The kids and I were supposed to continue on the same plane to Seattle, so there was less concern.

Then it quickly fell to an hour, two hours, and two and a half hours behind schedule. So I started to doubt they’d be using the same plane to Seattle.

Sure enough, I was going to be spending the night in Omaha. Since it was mechanical failure, United had to put us up. I got the gate agent to change my sister’s plans to – she was going to spend the night in Denver – so she could help me wrangle the kids. I wasn’t too thrilled about wrangling them and the bags to the airport and through security again, but it would have been nearly impossible without my sister along.

We gathered up everything and headed to the shuttle to get our two rooms at the Hilton – Omaha’s only 4 diamond hotel, they say – which is when it hit me. At a Hilton I was going to be expected to tip the driver, the bell hops, the maid, and anyone else who said anything to me. I looked in my wallet. The only thing I had was two singles, a couple of fifties and a hundred.

I gave the driver my singles when we got there. He looked at me like I should have given him nothing instead. We stiffed the bellhops, stole one of the luggage carts, checked in (after convincing the lady at the front desk to take my vouchers because the gate agent had put my daughter’s name on them – my four year-old daughter with no ID).

Then it was decided some food was in order. Because the Hilton is downtown, there is no food available at 9 PM on Monday night. So we ate at the hotel restaraunt. $20 for some mac ‘n’ cheese, $25 for meatloaf. Plus tip. At least I was able to break a big bill so I could tip in the morning.

After getting up at 3:30 AM to  make the 4:30 shuttle back to the airport, lugging my stuff back to the ticketing coutner, explaining that I already paid the $15 per suitcase, struggling through security with two kids again, we were out of Omaha. When I got to Denver they told me they couldn’t put my two seats together. I didn’t object. I was just going to put my daughter by herself and let hilarity ensue. (Un?)fortunatly they managed to find two seats together to Seattle.

Once in Seattle, since my wife wasn’t able to pick us up as planned since she was at work, we had to take another shuttle with ticket and tip expenses.

We finally made it back to my house 24 hours after I left my parents’ house. I can drive it in 20. (Of course, that doesn’t account for my smooth trip out, but it is still rather annoying.)
At some point I need to add up the extra costs associated with United’s plane breaking and present them with a bill. They should at least split it with me.

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I’m on the Great Plains of South Dakota right now. My brother is graduating from South Dakota State University, so I brought the kids out and left the wife at home to get some rest.

Posts will be spartan over the next few days, likely.

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The next person who wishes me a “Happy Cinco de Mayo” is getting punched in the throat. I don’t celebrate foreign military victories, unless they were allied with the US at the time of the victory.

I certainly don’t celebrate foreign national holidays, especially when the foreign country in question hardly celebrates the holiday in question.

Well, I guess I do celebrate Bastille Day. Viva la revoution!

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Thank God…

It’s over. Now  I can get on with my life.

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It’s just waiting for the postman now. Butterflies in my stomach. I just re-read my blog postings from the exam. That actually made me feel a little better. The longer I had to wait the more any mistakes I think I made are amplified in my head.

Mail usually gets here around 10:30 or 11 on Saturday, but has been known not to show up until 3.

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I don’t understand this move by Washington Democrats. I understand Democrats don’t like the electoral college because they want the 10 biggest cities in the country to pick the president, but how does this help the Democrats? If a Republican wins Washington, he has won the popular vote by a landslide. However, in a 51 to 49 vote in favor of the Republican, this costs the Democrat 11 electoral votes.

This law is very likely unconstitutional, but if it takes away Seattle’s power in the election of a president, I won’t complain too much.

UPDATE: OK, upon further review I get it. They need 270 votes to activate an unconstitutional compact. Washington is throwing its 11 hippie votes into the pool.

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