The Holiday For The Rest Of Us

Well, here it is. It's finally arrived -- the big holiday! Happy Festivus to all the Loyal Readers!

May your aluminum pole be simple and unadorned. May your dinner be rich and delicious, and drink deeply of the Festivus Wine! (Enjoy the Festivus Ice Cream for dessert, too!) May your Airing of Grievances smooth the way for a year of harmony and resolved conflict, and the best of luck to you in the Feats of Strength!

I understand that in protest to Michael Richards' racially offensive rant at the Laugh Factory, Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin is not going to celebrate Festivus this year and has given away his pole. But this is a mistake. Leaders of Christian organizations have done and said some pretty bad things, yet no one seriously suggests not celebrating Christmas or Easter in protest. One can condemn Richards' inappropriate remarks while still remaining true to the spirit of the holiday.

So Happy Festivus to everyone!

News Choices

Turning to CNN.com this morning, I scanned the headlines to see what articles interested me.

The lead story was "Rape charged dropped against three Duke lacrosse players". Pass.

Then the #2 story was "Denver blizzard snarls air traffic". Certainly a story worthy of attention; it's affecting a lot of people. But not me or anyone I know.

Then there's "Rosie v. The Donald". This is news? I'm not even going to dignify it with a link. Rich people behaving badly sounds like my work; if I wanted to get more of that I'd go to the office.

Probably the most significant item on the entire page was "Britain, France push for U.N. vote on Iran sanctions". But no, I didn't read that one first.

A look lower down the items revealed two items I thought were interesting enough to warrant a closer look: Rice says black President possible and Researchers film live giant squid.

Guess which one I picked to read first, Loyal Readers.

Santa Sassy

Karma The Reindeer

Getting Hitched in Tennessee? Not So Much...

In order to protect the sanctity of marriage, Tennessee voters passed the Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment. That way, no same-sex couples will be able to be married in Tennessee. That way, the sacred and ancient institution of marriage will be protected in Tennessee. Because, as has been seriously argued on the political right, if same-sex relationships are legally recongized, fewer opposite-sex couples will get married.

Or, um, maybe not. As it turns out, Vermont's marriage rate has remained more or less the same since the state began recongizing civil unions for same-sex couples -- representing a higher marriage rate than the national average. Massachusetts' divorce rate has fallen to the lowest in the nation since same-sex marriages were recongized there. In the meantime, Denmark, the first European nation to recongize same-sex marriages, has experienced an increase in heterosexual marriage rates, while the UK and Belgium, nations which have not recongized same-sex marriage, have suffered a decline in heterosexual marriage rates.

So, of course, what's happening back in Tennessee? Hamilton County, in which Chattanooga sits, issued half as many marriage licenses in 2006 as it did ten years ago. Part of this has to do with the relative ease of getting a marriage license across the border in Georgia because in Georgia, there is no requirement that couples get four hours of marriage preparation counseling prior to the issuance of the license.

Premarital counseling may not be a bad idea, at least in theory. As Knox County's forms make clear, the state permits a wide variety of providers to give this counseling -- and it's not at all clear exactly what kind of qualifications the providers need to have or what the contents of the counseling might be. (The actual law suggests things that "may" be in the counseling, but there are no required subjects and it seems that it could be nothing more than a four-hour lecture on Biblical injunctions about marriage and divorce.)

If Tennessee's goal is to promote marriage, it's taking all the wrong steps towards making that happen.

Big Charity

An interesting observation in the New York Times: Of the top four charitable givers in United States history, three were or are nonbelievers (self-described atheists or agnostics): Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Andrew Carnegie. The fourth is John D. Rockefeller, who was a Baptist. According to the Times' contributor, Buffett’s recent charitable activity — which, including pledges, total about $37 billion — are more than double that of Carnegie and Rockefeller combined, even after accounting for inflation.

I was not aware of this. I have not done any kind of fact-checking to verify if this is true (particularly the math of the present-day value of Carnegie and Rockefeller's remarkable charitable donations). There are other ways to measure a particular group's participation in charity; clearly, religious folks give to charity, too.

It may well be that a higher percentage of religious folks give to charity than non-religious folks; or perhaps they give more regularly; or perhaps not. The article does not really say. All the same, it's an interesting observation.

Trial of the Century

Today, I finished a two-day unlawful detainer trial. Two days? You ask. How can an unlawful detainer trial possibly take two days? Well, I'll tell you.

The defendant has the right to propound discovery, which they did. They have the right to subpoena witnesses and documents for the trial, which they did. They have the right to demand a jury, which they did. They have the right to have the case heard by a "real" judge instead of the commissioner normally assigned to hear such cases, which they demanded.

Now, these defendants failed to post jury fees, so they lost their right to a jury trial. But other than that, they exercised nearly every procedural right that they have to try and slow down the eviction.

Keep in mind -- this was an eviction based on a thirty-day notice. There are virtually no defenses to a thirty-day notice. We did it that way because my client wanted to sell the property, and felt that it would be easier to sell the property if the house was vacant. This is what we call in the legal field a business decison.

They found one of the only defenses out there, though: retaliation. They did their level best to try and come up with some theory that the eviction was the result of their complaints about the way that their septic tank had recently been replaced when it had failed. They pored through every law they could find, and offered about nineteen affirmative defenses (many of which did not apply, such as alleged violations of laws regulating the sale of timeshares).

And also keep in mind -- these people were representing themselves in court. Pro per parties have a hard time of things, because legal procedures are quite complex. The rules of evidence, for instance, are very easy for people to run afoul of when offering testimony, particularly the narrative testimony that pro per parties necessarily must offer. But to make the matter worse, there was a "conflict resolution counselor" who was "assisting" them. Whether this went over the line into unlawful practice of law or not is unclear as I did not inquire about relations between this "counselor" and the defendants -- but at least she did not attempt to speak on behalf of the defendants during court appearances.

Now, consider that the judge in this case gave the defendants a very wide berth to explore and offer pretty much whatever evidence they wished. I was, I admit, not a lot of help to the judge, as I had my client there and I had to put on a show for my client. So that meant I had to make an appreciable number of legal objections to the testimony and proceedings -- and that was not assisted by the defendants' assertion of a variety of legal rights, to which I had to respond with appropriate legal argument.

So not that it was wrong for the judge to have done so, but the result was that the defendants were given a lot of slack to explore highly irrelevant areas of evidence, and they did so cumulatively (meaning they offered the same evidence over and over again). I understand why the judge did it the way he did it -- he wanted to make sure the defendants felt like they got a fair trial.

None of this was particularly upsetting to me, and the trial caused me no anxiety other than the amount of my time that it consumed. What bugs me, though, was that we made a very generous settlement offer to these people before the case started. They demanded ample time to move out, and they demanded money. So, we offered them forty-five days to move out and we offered to pay them $2,400 to help them move. But some people just can't take "yes" for an answer. They insisted on at least sixty days and $5,000.

The result, after two days of trial? A writ of possession to issue forthwith (meaning as soon as the Sheriffs get to it, which will be within one week) and a lockout to take place within five days of the issuance of that writ. And they are now liable to my client for nearly the $5,000 that they wanted to be paid, for holdover rent and the attorney's fees they made my client incur by demanding a two-day trial of an issue that could have been resolved in ten minutes.

What frustrates me is that these are older folks, who obviously will be particularly susceptible to the cold winter weather into which they are facing imminent ejection. They could have taken a very generous deal but let their emotions get in the way of doing so. They could have probably worked things out with my client before I ever got involved. It seems like such a waste. It's some consolation to remind myself that they are the architects of their own destruction, but nevertheless it leaves me feeling unhappy, because the whole thing was such an unnecessary waste of time, resources, energy, and opportunity.

Shooting the Messengers

It's puzzling to me why this isn't getting more press in the U.S. media.

A Palestinian doctor and five nurses from Bulgaria, on a mission in Libya, diagnosed an outbreak of pediatric AIDS in 1999. They were promptly charged with, and then convicted of, infecting the children with the disease, and they were all sentenced to death. The primary evidence offered against them at trial were confessions extracted under torture. Eventually their appeals within the Libyan justice system produced orders for retrials. Those retrials, concluded a few days ago, have now produced fresh death sentences, based on the same evidence offered by the prosecution -- but this time after Western epidemiologists testified that the outbreak for which they were sentenced began before any of the medics had been given visas to enter Libya in the first place.

I suppose I can accept that the U.S. and European nations are held to a different and higher standard of behavior than that to which less well-developed nations are held. But this fresh outrage is also quite disappointing. Libya had been making gestures about wanting to join the community of nations that know how to behave themselves. This is a huge step backwards.

Now, let me be the first to say that if, improbably, a sqaud of nurses and doctors did infect infants with AIDS, that would be truly horrific. But the claim is so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. Doctors and nurses, as a rule, tend to want to save children from terrible diseases. Perhaps one might be a psychopath or a serial killer -- but six of them, working together like the Hannibal Lechter Death Squad? It just doesn't make the remotest bit of sense.

I don't know what the appropriate response to this would be. Diplomatic, I suppose, but if the death sentences are carried out, there must be some more stringent sanction than that, and merely clucking our disapproval is neither going to be effective at changing anything. Given that we've just normalized our relations with the country, and relaxed economic sanctions on it, strengthening those sanctions seems to be counter-productive. Perhaps a more focused kind of sanction, like preventing any U.S. medical personnel from staffing Libyan hospitals?

Oh, You Think I'm Bitter?

Check this out. A friend said at lunch today, "You know, I can't wait for the bird flu to hit. You know, thin out the herd a bit." Then we talked about the effects felt by Western civilization as a result of the Black Plague and the Great Fire of 1666. And did you know that the most new cases of AIDS last year was in India? I would have thought Botswana, Zimbabwe, or South Africa -- but that may be new cases as a percentage of the total population.

Happy Holiays, everybody!

Grading Assignments

I hate grading papers. It's very time-consuming, it's tedious, and it drains my hopes for the ability of college students to properly function in the real world after they demonstrate substantial deficits in critical thinking skills. In turn, my students get frustrated with me.

So I've been looking for a different way to go. I think I've found one. This technique may very well expedite my future grading endeavors. If real law professors do it at real law schools, why not me? Why didn't I think of this myself?

Bitter Snow In The Desert

It snowed Friday night in the hills. In our neck of the woods, the snow came down to about 100 feet above us, and continues to linger even now, three days later, and will almost certainly still be there tomorrow. At these altitudes, it was just a dusting, so it's not like anything catastrophic. It's kind of pretty, at least a nice change from the usual dull brown. The Tehachipis and the San Gabriels, somewhat farther away, have got a more heavy, proper coat of snow as one would expect in the wintertime.

Cold weather, however, is no fun. I would rather it was cold and dry than cold and snowy, to be sure. Still, it's always seemed odd to me to have to keep winter clothing in Southern California, and particularly in the desert where it is so often uncomfortably hot. The wind, particularly, is biting and not fun at all in the desert during the winter, and out in the flats where the courthouse is, it gets up to about twenty-five miles an hour, really pushing things around. When I leave for work in the morning, there is frost and ice all over the lawn.

So that's winter in the desert for you. Snow, not quite at the level of human habitation, and really cold wind. Unpleasant, not unbearably so. I remember the winters we spent in Tennessee and they were miserable. I was reminded of that today, seeing so much ice and frost built up on the windshields of cars that had been left out overnight.

(Spring will be nice. For about a week, after the February rains, the desert will bloom in purple and orange with the clover and poppies in abundance; the cacti will bloom and sprout prickly pears; and the grass itself will be green. After a rain, even the Joshua trees look clean and vibrant. I'm looking forward to spring -- best two weeks all year in the desert.)

So maybe I'm in a sour mood after a ninety-minute long bad customer service experience with the cellular phone company. Maybe I'm in a sour mood because my old insurance company in Tennessee still just doesn't get it -- we sold our house and moved half a year ago. Maybe I'm in a sour mood because our bank won't let us buy the television set we wanted to buy for ourselves. Maybe it's because I just don't buy in to the Christmas thing anyway. But for whatever reason, the holiday season just isn't penetrating into my consciousness. Images of winter beauty seem like so much cold, white, bleak, barrenness and I just want them to go away. And maybe I'm bitter because my fantasy football team's once-commanding hold on second place (like all fantasy teams not presently in the lead, we lack LaDanian Tomlinson) has evaporated to merely six points. This week only one of our position players scored any points at all.

And people start being silly with their holiday decorations around this time of year. Strike that -- Christmas decorations. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, secular humanists, and Wiccans don't seem to do a lot of decorating their houses with ostentatious displays of lights and lawn sculpture. It's the Christians who celebrate the birth of their Messiah with images of Santa Claus, reindeer, angels, and a variety of generically-nice messages like "Noel" and "Peace on Earth." (Talk about taking a controversial stand!)

But my favorite Christmas decoration so far has to be near the intersection of 30th Street West and Avenue L. There, the property owner has ringed white lights around twenty-foot high plywood picture of Mr. Hanky, the beloved Christmas character from South Park. This is a heavily-travelled street, and located just two blocks away from a Christian elementary school. Subversive, yes; socially appropriate, no. Whether anyone has complained about this or not is a good question, one which I intend to ask the editor of the newspaper when I have dinner with him Wednesday night.

Making the Pitch

At least part of the pitch to the right wing becomes clear -- Rudy cut taxes when he was mayor; he cleaned up crime; and most powerful of all the arguments, he can beat Hilary Clinton.

Of course, as of right now, John McCain beats Hilary Clinton in the polls, too, and McCain has been making pitches to the right wing, too.

It's too early to know that these kinds of numbers are reliable, but the argument that "Hey, I can beat Al Gore" worked for Bush the Younger in the 2000 primaries. One wonders if these two centrist candidates are underestimating the RR -- McCain at least has the advantage of being pro-life, which is more than Guiliani can claim.

How Green Bay Can Make It Into The Playoffs

Yes, it is still possible for this to happen. Here's how it would work:

Green Bay, of course, must defeat Minnesota and Chicago (which is not so far-fetched; Chicago already has locked up homefield advantage so they may as well rest their starters).

Then, in Week 16, Philly beats Dallas, New Orleans beats the New York Football Giants, Atlanta beats Carolina, and St. Louis loses to Washington.

In Week 17, Altanta must beat Philadelphia; Washington must beat the Giants; St. Louis must beat Minnesota; New Orleans must beat Carolina.

Somewhere in there, Santa Clara must lose to either of Arizona or Denver.

If all that happens, Green Bay gets the #6 playoff seed, behind Philadelphia, and would travel to Dallas for the wild card game.

Hey, it could happen!

Some Reason For Hope

Politically, we have little reason for hope at home -- but abroad, at least, the proponents of hate, fascism, and rolling back the Enlightenment have suffered a moderate setback.

Christmas for the Critters

Yesterday, The Wife and I bought treats and toys for our pets.

The cats got a "crunchy tunnel," a five-foot long cloth tube with a cat-access hole in the middle, a ball dangling on a string inside, and some crunchy stuff inside the lining so the tube makes noise as the cat walks through it. We also got a collapsable fabric "cat-cave" for them. Both got lined with catnip and the cats have been quite pleased. Unfortunately, the replacement laser pointer does not work. But, the cats have new places to hide from the dogs and each other, and they seem to like their new toys.

For the dogs, we got a couple stuffed animals with squeakers. These are extra-tough ones, since the Sassafras is what dog experts call an "aggressive chewer." One looks like a Canadian goose and the other looks like a pheasant. The squeakers sound like duck calls. The dogs also got mammoth bones -- cow tibias with a little bit of roasted, salted meat left on. The dogs were dumbstruck by the size of these things. Karma is not much longer, from nose to tail, than the bones. We had to take the bones away from the dogs after about an hour; they would have sat there and worried the bones all night if they had the chance.

Buying for the critters is fun and the great thing about it is, every day is Christmas for critters when they get big bones to eat and new toys to play with.

Thursday Night Football

Thursday Night Football has been nothing but bad. It has to come to an end.

I can't watch the games because they're all on NFL Network, which Time Warner Cable does not carry and which comes with a heftier price tag than I would be willing to pay even if I could get it, which I can't because Time Warner bought out Adelphia in this area so the game is unavailable at any price and I don't want to go to a sports bar to watch a game I probably don't care all that much about anyway.

It advances the dates on which I must make my fantasy football picks. This is problematic because it forces me to choose my players for the week before injury reports are published and I can have some idea of who will play and who won't on Sunday. This has played havoc with my standings in my fantasy football pool; ever since Thursday games started, my team partner and I have been leaving astonishing numbers of points on our bench and playing guys who, if we had access to the information we had before the Thursday games forced us to make our decisions prematurely, we would have known to have sat. So this is potentially costing me money, too.

If I could get it, and I were willing to pay for it, and the reporting problems could somehow be circumvented, then I'd have to deal with The Wife being bugged by me spending another three hours a week parked in front of the TV watching a football game. She gets agitated enough on Sundays -- she hides in her office, doing crafts or playing games on the computer, while I watch the game that's on TV and follow the internet reporting of other games, and she can't wait for the instant the play clock reaches zero so she can switch the channel to one of her shows about lampshades. It's tense enough on Sundays, and adding another day of that to the mix -- especially late in the season when pro games start to bleed over into Saturdays to fill the void left by the completion of the college season -- is a recipie for having more days than not (Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday) filled with football, and that's just too much for my pretty young wife to handle.

Dallas and Detroit should each play a game on Thanksgiving. And that should be it for Thursday Night Football for an entire year.

Here's a Novel Idea

Interpreting a provision of the Constitution so that it means what it says. Why is this such a refreshing new insight on the part of the academy? Not to knock Prof. Barnett, of course -- somebody had to say this.

The problem, of course, is that we don't know exactly what "other" rights were meant by this phrase: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." But clearly it means something, and it was important, or else the Framers wouldn't have bothered amending the Constitution to put it there.

An open invitation to judicial policymaking? Apparently. But also apparently that's what was intended.

It's Coming Back!

This Could Get Ugly

The New York Times reports that Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota just had a stroke.

He is a Democrat, up for re-election in 2008. That means that if he is unable to continue serving, South Dakota's Governor, a Republican who was just re-elected and is term-limited out after this term, will appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of Johnson's term, who will undoubtedly be a Republican. That would throw control of the Senate back to the Republicans, because the 51-49 split will become a 50-50 split, with ties broken by the Vice President.

Of course, everyone should wish Senator Johnson well for a speedy recovery, at least on a personal level. But for Republicans in particular, the fact of the matter is that a stroke is serious business, and a part of the balance of national power hangs in the balance. Odd, indeed, that something like this should come to pass.

For me, it's hard to know at this point whether a Democratic or Republican Senate is a better choice. On the one hand, the people at large did vote to put in Democrats (barely) in power, and the Democrats at the moment look more trustworthy than the Republicans on issues of civil liberties and ending the war. On the other hand, I still can't make myself believe that Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility, and I also believe in the fragmented, multi-layer system which, in this case, gives a Republican Governor the power to appoint one of his cronies to the Senate instead of a Democrat. If the Democrats want to maintain solid control over the Senate, they need to get themselves elected by more than one-vote margins. Hugh Hewitt says of the Democrats, "They can't cheat if the vote isn't even close," and that bromide goes both ways.

So, I guess we just watch the game and see how it plays out.

Another Post-Mortem

Consider this observation from the linked article:

Because libertarians tend to be younger and better educated than the average voter, they're not going away. They're an appealing target for Democrats, but they are essential to future Republican successes. Republicans can win the South without libertarians. But this was the year that New Hampshire and the Mountain West turned purple if not blue, and libertarians played a big role there.

Let's take that second sentence and add a word: "Republicans can only win the South without libertarians." Not precisely true, of course, but there's something to that idea. Your typical Southern Republican probably is concerned with the implications of other people having sex, guns, and immigration. Your typical western-states (or New Hampshire) Republican is more concerned with low taxes, minimizing the power of the Federal government, a balanced budget, and, well, guns.

It should come as no surprise that I prescribe a substantial reduction in emphasis on the other people having sex, and more on the balanced budget and low taxes. I'm not the only one suggesting this. Guns, immigration, devolution, and probably a little educational reform thrown in there, seems like it would make for a good strong domestic policy platform.