Category Archives: WTF?!

Yes, we have a voting problem, Part Deux

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Just last month I was being cynical about Republican efforts to prevent voting fraud by making sure that students and poor people don’t vote.  But thank goodness the Republicans are on the ball, so we could catch poor student Charlie White and punish him for his voting transgressions.

Oh.  Wait.

Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges

Do you love that his name is Charlie White as much as I do?   And it’s really a Republican hypocrisy two-fer, because it turned out that his vote fraud, er, “confusion” was, well, I’ll let IndyStar.com break it to you gently:

The charges stemmed from confusion over where White lived when he campaigned for secretary of state in late 2009 and 2010. White claimed that he lived at his ex-wife’s home on the east side of Fishers. But the jury convicted him based on allegations that he actually lived in a townhouse on the opposite side of town that he bought for him and his then-fiancé. The townhouse was outside his Fishers Town Council district.

Note that it’s “confusion” when a conservative politician bails on his wife, shacks up with his fiancé, and fails to notify the secretary of state so he can stay on the city council of the city in which he no longer lives, but potential “fraud” when an 84-year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1948 doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in 1927.

In which my friend Susie does good things for my brain.

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Expand & protect.

Lunch yesterday with my awesome friend Susie Greene, who has just produced/published this multimedia investigation into solitary confinement.  Extra bonus awesomeness, it features ass-kicking DU clinical professor Laura Rovner.   The video will expand your brain into the toxic arena of solitary confinement.  You thought it was just a few days “in the hole” for bad behavior.  Think again.

And, um, protect.  After lunch — at the (perfectly appropriate) prodding of Susie and Tim — Susie took me ski-helmet shopping.   I have been trying to convince myself that having skied for 40ish years without a helmet, I was somehow grandfathered (grandmothered?) in.   But even I had to admit, finally, that this made no damn sense.  So now I’ll look like this when I ski:

Lindsey Vonn skiing at top speed

Or more realistically:

Amy in a red ski helmet

File under “o” for occasionally we make some progress

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One of the (many many) things I love about legal research is that you can get swept up in the interesting stories that cases tell, many of them totally irrelevant to the point you’re researching.   This is also a happy by-product of ADD.   I think of it as the legal research scenic route, and have no fear, I don’t bill for it.

Today’s scenic route was not so scenic, but was instead a startling history lesson.  I’ll let it speak for itself:

The Court notes that until 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) counseled its members to maintain segregated neighborhoods in the interest of maintaining property values. The Code of Ethics of the NAREB provided until then that:  ‘A REALTOR SHOULD NEVER BE INSTRUMENTAL IN INTRODUCING INTO A NEIGHBORHOOD A CHARACTER OF PROPERTY OR OCCUPANCY, MEMBERS OF ANY RACE OR NATIONALITY, OR ANY INDIVIDUALS WHOSE PRESENCE WILL CLEARLY BE DETRIMENTAL TO PROPERTY VALUES IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD.’

Zuch v. Hussey, 394 F. Supp. 1028, 1054 n.12 (E.D. Mich. 1975).

So, yeah, we’ve made some progress.

Gratuitous political comment:  and this is what Ron Paul would take us back to.

I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.

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Newt Gingrich asks: “Do you want to move towards American exceptionalism, reassert the Constitution, reassert the nature of America, or do you, in fact, want to become a secular, European, sort of bureaucratic socialist society?”

Evidently his own answer is, “neither, thanks; I prefer a dictatorship.”

How do we know this?  Because he has decided to abandon the rule of law, one of the key things that makes America exceptional.

On “Face the Nation,” Gingrich announced not only that court decisions that are out of step with popular opinion should be ignored, but that as president he might have judges arrested by the Capitol Police or the U.S. Marshals.

Ignoring court decisions and having judges arrested is what dictatorships do.

He was referring to a decision to keep a public high school graduation secular, something required by the Constitution.  But ignoring unpopular opinions would not only let us establish government-ordained religion and reinstitute racial segregation, it would let undermine one of the pillars of our economy.   I’m thinking foreclosures are fairly unpopular decisions these days — shall we be allowed to ignore them?  How about evictions?  Don’t want to pay a judgment for breach of contract?  Form a mob and show how unpopular it is!

In my field, decisions tossing ADA cases based on procedural grounds such as standing or mootness are unpopular.  Shall we ignore them and bring our sledgehammers with us when we visit inaccessible facilities?  (Do NOT tempt me!)

Or are we only allowed to ignore decisions that are unpopular with conservatives?

And this guy is supposed to be the brain trust of the Republican party?

What’s funny is that Gingrich is smart.  He knows how important the rule of law is, which also means that he knows he’s full of shit.  But he has apparently decided that the only way to win this time around is graft the arrogance that has always been a side effect of his intelligence to some sort of random right wing slogan generator to create a FrankenCandidate who would be immensely entertaining if he weren’t so frightening.

And finally we have the Republican party 2011:  proclaiming conservative values while embracing a someone with three marriages and multiple affairs; decrying elitism while embracing a pompous windbag with a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s; and proclaiming American exceptionalism while rejecting the rule of law.

Things that are inexplicably OK, part 2

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The New Yorker recently published an article on premature birth that inspired this thoroughly appalling letter:

So let me get this straight:  Instead of ensuring that our educational system teaches all of our children, we should “accept death,” lest we be excessively sentimental to the detriment of . . . the special education students to whom we so desperately — but  apparently inappropriately? — want to cling.  What does Linda Bonin of Kirkland Washington think we should do instead?   Administer the PSAT prenatally?   What really frosts my shorts is that Ms. Bonin was almost certainly regarded as a good person — someone who liked to help people — possibly even by the parents of the special education students whose very existence she regretted, unsentimentally.

Who the hell is Ms. Bonin to decide that her students didn’t deserve to live.  Who are any of us?