“President Bush is asserting the right to change the law by executive fiat.” ⇒

“I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war,” said Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer who was a White House associate counsel under Bush from 2001 to 2003. ⇒

1. You go to the coffee shop and some guy gets a phone call and goes outside to talk, leaving his 15″ Powerbook and assorted peripherals just sitting on the table unwatched and unattended for approximately 10 minutes.
2. In the same coffee shop, dad buys daughter (approximately 7 years old) a hot chocolate and a muffin, sits the girl down to eat/drink, then goes next door to the liquor store to make a purchase, leaving his child all alone for at least five minutes.

These things would never happen in a city, would they?

(” Signs your country is in trouble
#112: Open public discussion on how to resist riot control. “)

And signs your country has already become dangerously fascist:
#113: Protective devices are made available to the police, but not to all the citizens. ⇒

It’s not a threat, it’s a misfortune cookie. Scary, isn’t it?

Here’s my favorite:

You have great insights about matters of little consequence.

So true.

I’ve spent much of the last three weeks writing motions about the right to a speedy trial, the State’s duty to prosecute its cases diligently (pre-indictment delay), and constitutionally infirm DUI convictions. In other words, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how incompetent prosecutors can be. That incompetence often means our clients languish in jail too long, but it also sometimes means our clients eventually get released w/out a conviction b/c the cases get dismissed. I think another misfortune cookie is apropos:

Someday this will all seem funny. Oh, not to you. Did you think we meant to you?

I wonder how that would go over at the jail….

We just had a three-day weekend. L. and I both went to work every single day of that three-day weekend. Sad.

I don’t know how to get all my work done in a 40-hour week, but I’m realizing I have to try harder b/c I don’t actually end up getting that much done when I go in on weekends. How do other people do it? How do you do the best job you can for my clients and still have a bit of a life?
[tags]work, balance[/tags]

I had a random dream about law school last night — the first I can remember in a long time. Class was getting out and I was stuffing my notes into a big accordian file when another student asked me if I thought maybe it was time to try to organize my things a little more. In my mind I realized that this student knew that I was just stuffing every note and paper I got from law school into this file and never looking at it again. So I confessed to that. I said, “Sure, but that would mean I’d have to spend time on school outside of class, and I never do that.”

“Well, that exam next week is going to be pretty tough,” this student said seriously. I smiled and nodded and got the heck out of there but I woke myself up with the miserable anxiety of “OMG, I haven’t studied! That test is going to kill me! I don’t know any of this stuff! OMG! OMG!”

Sometimes I miss law school (mostly all the “free” time it offers). Not today.

Assuming that the winner of the Democratic primary were to automatically win in the general election, who would you support? ⇒

If trips are less than 40 miles (which most daily commutes are) the car doesn’t use a drop of gasoline. So the majority of trips will use absolutely no gasoline at all. ⇒

E.g.: a folding Dahon mountain bike with front shocks and disk brakes, and added a Subaru 4-stroke 33.5 cc engine that is set up to run on E85. ⇒