Overdressed Anarchist

In Defense of the Oxford Comma

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Sat, 26 May 2012 21:46:00 +0000

I am a vigorous defender of the Oxford comma, and experience has shown me that the best ~~most outrageous~~ way to win an argument is to invoke a dictator comparison. Fortunately, the Oxford comma rises to the occasion:

Friday Links! (Mega Backload Edition)

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:15:00 +0000

I haven't posted any of the various links I accost my friends (and enemies) with in over two months, so in the interest of chronicling all the stuff I found interesting on the web, here's an intimidating list of links:

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Red Sox legend Curt Schilling preached small government and individual responsibility, then coaxed Rhode Island into giving him a $75 million loan for his video game company. Now, the company's broke, 400 people are out of jobs, and Rhode Island is on the hook for $112 million. The Boston Globe merely called him a hypocrite; Boston Magazine went a bit further.
Catholic churches have been doing any number of very silly, very outrageous things.
The Daily Beast suggests the liberal champion Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is hurting the liberal cause by remaining on the Supreme Court.
A report by CNN suggests that video games and porn are destroying men, making them unable to have real-world relationships. Considering men have enjoyed naked ladies and physical violence for centuries, I'm not sure banning Nintendo and filtering the internet is going to solve the problem.
The Eagle Forum concedes that America is becoming non-white . . . and that this "is not a good thing. The immigrants do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers." So American values equal Republican values? Oy!
I want to take well-lit photographs like this DCist picture of the day.
NFL prospect decides to go to law school. I cannot actually say that a lifetime of concussions and brain damage is categorically worse than attending law school, wherein you really only have a 50% of becoming an honest-to-goodness lawyer anymore.
Did you know President Obama continues to carry on the proud legacy of President Calvin Coolidge? (In other words, the White House has inserted President Obama into the biographies of numerous prior presidents.)
According to NPR, new baby names now reflect the partisan divide between red and blue states. "More progressive communities, Wattenberg says, tend to favor more old-fashioned names. Parents in more conservative areas come up with names that are more creative or androgynous," Alan Greenblatt reports.
The male Avengers in Escher-girl poses.
Joel McHale does a very bizarre video advertisement for Nintendo 3DS. Is Nintendo really trying to be cool? Women in bikinis and Mario seem very strange.
The gorgeous, ahem, BP gas station right around the corner from my studio in SoHo has been declared an historical monument. Makes sense to me . . .
Balkinization has a post about Justice Kennedy and his divinations about the looming police state.
The Center for Public Integrity put out an amusing report in March detailing how accountable (or not) each of the 50 nifty united states are.

. . . and considering that last link is from mid-March, I think that is about as far back as I should go. Happy long week, internets!

Scott Walker's Imaginary Voter Fraud

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:38:00 +0000

From The Weekly Standard via David Weigel:

Why are they so adamant about reversing a voter ID law?
"I’ve always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud. One or two points, potentially."
That’s enough to change the outcome of the election. “Absolutely. I mean there’s no question why they went to court and fought [to undo] voter ID.”

Except there absolutely no evidence to support this notion, and as Professor Rick Hasen notes, it must be convenient for Governor Walker that such dastardly (if utterly imaginary) fraud always helps the Democrats.

Professor Justin Levitt has frequently (and thoroughly) debunked the notion that voter fraud is rampant anywhere in the United States. Analyzing data collected before the Supreme Court's decision upholding an Indiana voter identification law, Professor Levitt found that since 2000, there have been only 9 votes caused by fraud that in-person ID can stop out of some 400 million total votes cast. "[T]ha amounts to a relevant fraud rate of 0.000002 percent. Americans are struck and killed by lightning more often. And every year, there are far more reports of UFO sightings," he writes.

Republicans, as a party, have mastered the art of finding bogeyman behind every single door, and in the case of nonsensical voter identification laws, the bigger tragedy is the public's willingness to accept the baseless tall tales of dead voters and illegal aliens at the polls without much serious thought.

Republican Priorities

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:59:00 +0000

From HuffPost:

"We increase the spending for defense due to the priorities that we feel are most important and the constitutional requirement we have to provide for the common defense," Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said. "But we will cut in other areas of the budget so that we comply fully with the deficit reduction act."
...
Among other unasked for changes, the bill keeps aging aircraft and ships the military wants to phase out, keeps the Army and Marines at larger force levels and orders construction of missile defenses.

What is there really left to say? Digby does a great job explaining the welfare component to the military industrial complex. I'd love to make some flippant comment that Republicans trust the troops on the ground with everything except determining spending priorities. But really, all I can muster is a weak eye roll that Republicans fell compelled to invoke our "constitutional requirement" to war-making even as the rest of the country starves, crumbles, and otherwise falls apart.

At least it's the weekend...

Lindsey Graham's Bipartisan Spending Cut Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:15:00 +0000

It is no secret that the modern day Republican Party has embraced a scorched earth policy to governing in the minority. Just last week, one Republican candidate publicly admitted that "bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view."

With that in mind, I was struck by a particular piece of reporting on the increasing public backlash to government austerity in the HuffingtonPost today:

Graham, the South Carolina Republican, said that American politicians should learn from the Europeans and make sure that both parties are on board for spending cuts. That gives voters nowhere to flee.
"We're going to need a Ronald Reagan-Tip O'Neill moment, because what you see in Europe is a breaking apart of consensus. The centrist parties took a beating, and now everybody's running for the hills," he said. "Here's what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did: They held hands, and they did it together."
In the 1980s, President Reagan and House Speaker O'Neill famously cut a grand bargain with a mix of entitlement reform and tax increases.

It is curious that Sen. Graham's solution, as phrased here, is to turn spending cuts into a bipartisan mission. (Meanwhile, tax cuts would assuredly remain the sole providence of the Republican Party?) As written, the Senator completely distorts the "Ronald Reagan-Tip O'Neill moment" which was a grand bargain. Bargain being the key word.

Considering my political inclinations, I am predisposed to assume Sen. Graham actually does believe a solution involving exclusively "bipartisan" spending cuts is his ideal. Of course, considering HuffingtonPost's ideological bent and the lack of a direct quote on the matter, my skeptical nature forces me to wonder if this piece merely is trying to portray Sen. Graham as embracing Richard Mourdock's definition of "bipartisanship."

More reporting is needed.

Tea Partiers' "Mastery" of the Constitution

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:36:00 +0000

I hate on lawyers all the time, but when average people try to explain what is (and is not) constitutional based off nothing but their guts, it's just sort of tragic. Let's see one of these where people try to unravel the jurisprudential mysteries of "probable cause."

Boston University's Earnest Response to an Image Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Somber article about my alma mater in The Boston Globe this morning. Boston University has a had a rough go of it over the past few months with "an undergraduate badly injured in a fire, the arrest of two hockey players on sexual assault charges, two episodes of what appeared to be extreme hazing, and a student practical joke gone so badly awry it drew international media attention." The Globe reports that the school has taken the novel public relations strategy of ::gasp:: being open and honest about all the bad news.

That's a lesson my second academic stop, NYU, could learn.

But Boston University's primary problem is, and has long been, a profoundly detached student and alumni body. (It was a discussion-worthy problem when I was but a college freshman.) One of my good friends, who loved her time at BU, admitted just not caring what BU does for some unknown reason. Another acquaintance more or less summed up my thoughts about the place:

Dear BU,
I really loved my time there. All six years of it. But really, you've sold out academics to athletics. Bring back things like UNI, stop borrowing millions for arenas and then maybe you'll have the cache of NYU again, okay? But for now, I'm disgusted with you. And I'm a third generation Terrier.

However it makes a school look for U.S. News, seeing my schools (and NYU is equally to blame) expand their campuses, offer all sorts of obscene luxuries, and then charge $50,000 for a wide-assortment of increasingly useless liberal arts degrees is just . . . disheartening.

As ever, I'd like to see more transparency by college administrators with students. Being forthright about murder death kills should hardly be the first step, but maybe it's a start to opening a dialog about the not-so infinite promise of higher education?

My Crisis of Constitution

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:27:00 +0000

In my continuing, haphazard efforts to get out, meet people, and make a difference, I have decided to take another turn teaching the young'uns about our mighty Constitution. I hope this endeavor will leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling, though I fear I'll end up simply more concerned about the dreary state of civic engagement in this society.

Americans worship our Constitution. We revere our amorphous system of checks and balances. Our Founding Fathers are routinely invoked as something close to gods as men. The obvious tragedy is most Americans haven't a clue what the four thousand some words of the document actually say, let alone mean. I consider my friends to be an educated, disproportionately legal-minded lot, but I imagine most of them don't even know what's in the Tenth Amendment. The majority of this country insists that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, yet I doubt they could identify the legal theory behind why that might be so. I doubt the minority of likely progressives that support the law can name two, let alone three of Congress' specific enumerated powers.

So teaching the Constitution is a good thing. There's likely no way to make our lazy, television-addled populace more engaged or thoughtful, but certainly helping people understand their constitutional rights and responsibilities is unequivocally a helpful thing, right? After all, most everyone's comprehension of how to deal with the police comes from Law & Order; there's no real understanding of the value of the right to remain silent.

But as always with me, there's a caveat. I'm not sure how satisfactory our Constitution is for the modern world. Justice Ginsburg got in hot water for saying something similar in February, and I recognize I could be dooming my future political aspirations for writing such a statement. However, the truth is that we simply do not have serious conversations about our Constitution anymore. Instead, we revere a faded document, housed in a near dark room behind thick glass, and forget that it was a document of harsh political compromise, written by flawed men centuries ago. We can admire what the Constitution represents without subscribing to the notion that the document is divinely inspired.

Like too many, I went to law school out of some misguided love for the Constitution. I couldn't wait to parse out the First Amendment, to learn the contours of the Fourth Amendment, and finally be able to speak intelligently about our separation of powers. And, truth be told, con law didn't disappoint.

Yet over time, I came to question to sanctity, let alone the modern value of our founding document. I could expound upon the ways I find its protection of individual liberties lacking, but that's nothing new to anyone with a progressive bent. More alarming, as we've seen our political process erupt into a money-filled shell game of epic dysfunction, I came to question the structural value of the Constitution, as well. So much time and energy is spent on the amendments that few people question whether the institutions crafted in the text's body even make sense anymore.

I've been reading Sandy Levinson's Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance out of a mixture of work-related obligation and history-seeking fun. He makes a compelling case for that structural deficiencies in our governing documents are a large part of what ails this country. Increasingly, I'm on board with this project. There's little question that politics and the art of governing has utterly fallen apart in this country. You can blame the Democrats; I can blame the Republicans; but no one seems very satisfied with any aspect of our government. There's too much money in politics! The parties are too partisan! Thomas Friedman, another one of The Times' all-star op-ed writers, last week bemoaned the busted escalators in the Imperium, demanded that "our country needs a renewal," and deduced that a third-party effort by independent kleptocrat Mike Bloomberg could do the country a lot of good. Really? A self-funded billionaire president will save us all?

Constitution worship is such in this country that luminaries like Friedman seem unable to grasp that maybe the Constitution itself is the problem. After all, the damn document is so impossible to change that we've had all of fifteen amendments in the past 200 years. Instead, "amending" the constitution has become the sole work of the Supreme Court, creating an institution that has to divine new law out of thin air.

To return to the Affordable Care Act, our broken system of checks and balances produced a hopelessly messy piece of legislation to address a problem everyone admits is a pressing national concern. The solution presented by ACA may not be for the best, but it's all we got--and everyone knows should the law fall down, our governing system is so broken that health care costs will never be legally addressed anyone. But the entire law's fate rests upon how five people believe our wonderful Founding Fathers defined "commerce" over two centuries ago.

What's problematic from my perspective is that I work for an organization ostensibly dedicated to the vitality of the Constitution, but even it understands something is profoundly wrong. The problem is Republicans, of course, and the insidious damage they've inflicted upon the Supreme Court. That's the argument we have in this country. Over and over again. As everyone well knows, I'm all for aborting anything that lives, but even I can admit only a tortured reading of the Constitution--as it was written two hundred twenty five years ago--has some "right to privacy" that permits all measure of sodomy. Maybe, as Justice Ginsburg suggests, there's an equal protection argument to be made, but what the hell does equal protection even mean in a world where, yes, no joke, corporations are (legal) people.

However the Supreme Court comes down on ACA, someone will blame them for their decision. They will blame Congress and the President. They will blame the creeping federal bureaucracy and the insurance companies which, to paraphrase Sen. Dick Durbin, own the whole damn house of cards. No one will blame the U.S. Constitution for creating a system of government that just doesn't work anymore.

Maybe they should. Maybe I should. Instead, in an effort to improve my social standing, I'll be informing the next generation about the contours of the Four Amendment, the protections its brings to bear, and the rhetorical glory of our Founding Fathers, the racist rich white guys that wrote the thing under protest. When I was sworn into the Massachusetts state bar, I had to swear to protect and defend our great and glorious Constitution. As part of the cult of lawyers, I wonder if this is all some tragic scheme to ensure the social order, an order that I find increasingly pointless.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things...

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Yesterday poor Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen suggested that Ann Romney had "actually never worked a day in her life." The statement may have been less than politically correct, but it was by no means inaccurate.

"I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys," Ms. Romney responded. "Believe me, it was hard work."

And, of course, everyone agreed. Denying a broader war on women, Republicans insisted this was just part of the Democrat's general war on mommies. Even the President piled on Ms. Rosen, suggesting there's "no tougher job than being a mom."

But this is why the vapid political cesspool in which this country swims ensures we can't have nice things: no one involved things being a mother isn't "work." No one.

But Ms. Romney's "choice" is one an increasing number of Americans simply do not have. Being a stay-at-home mom is increasingly either a luxury or a proxy for being at the bottom of Ms. Romney's husband's vicious economic totem pole. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 66% of mothers work in this country. Those who don't? They are usually younger, have less formal education, and golly gee, have lower household incomes than working mothers. Less than a quarter of them are college graduates.

But who cares about economic reality, nevermind that's all Mitt Romney is running on. Let's instead chastise a strategist who said something stupid on the endless storm of stupid that is cable news. Let's all admire Ann Romney, a woman who made the "tough choice" to stay at home and raise five unruly rugrats while her husband brought home the bacon (often at the expense of other families).

This argument is absurd. Sure, every mother should be afforded the choice to stay home with their children. So, too, should every father. But we have no legal structure to allow this, no economy to support this, and no real political will to encourage this behavior.

Exploring the Cosmos, One Block at a Time

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 22:48:00 +0000

My cousin posted this interactive sliding-scale of the universe on Facebook, and whether it's the sublime music or the sheer size, large and small, of the cosmos, I'm left feeling oddly out of the sorts. I did learn something new about Minecraft: it's physically bigger than Neptune!

Minecraft World
64,000 km / 6.4 x 10^7 m
Stretching from coordinates +32,000,000 to -32,000,000, the Minecraft world spans a total of 64,000 kilometers. This world has approximately 130 quadrillion blocks in it. That sure is a lot!

Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Modern America

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Friday I assisted with an event discussing the project of turning civil rights discourse in America into a campaign for broader "human rights." Not one to toot my own horn for assembling people far more intelligent than I, but it was a surprisingly entertaining discussion. When a hundred man crowd is hooting and hollering at the invocation of commodity capitalism, you know you're in a fun environment. Yet what struck me was that I while I had pitched the discussion as "forward looking," a discussion about how America could finish the Civil Rights Movement, everyone on the panel bemoaned the fact that America seemed to hit a "brick wall" in 1980 or so, and has been trapped as the wall's defenders have been building the wall ever higher. Hearing my civil procedure professor, one of the few men in law school I don't wish pain upon, say that he really doesn't have much hope for America was disheartening--even for me.

Then I woke up to the latest round of analysis about the indentured servitude of law graduates, and Esquire's profile on "The War Against Youth." I am not sure my spirits are going to recover. Staring at my mountain of debt and the limited opportunities in front of me, I still may be better off than a lot of my contemporaries, if not my classmates at the law school which broke my bank. That said, there's not much hope for me in the immediate future, and by immediate, I mean until I can suck on the teet of whatever broken social safety net exists in three decades. As Esquire put it, "For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That's not just an expression."

On Friday, my panel's laments largely turned on the continuing perversity of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that if we all just "work harder," following the mantra of Animal Farm's Boxer, the sky's the limit. But American's do work harder. They are productive. They are efficient. They are also, increasingly, less needed in anything resembling a comfortable job.

Which makes me wonder how we continue to rationalize the decaying American Dream. If we look at the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, both tragically derided by my circle, we see two extreme responses to similar concerns that something in America has gone wrong. Their aims may be dissimilar and equally absurd, but there seems to be increasing anxiety by all races and ages of the population that something is amiss. People in a better position are quick to throw these alternatively lazy or racists simpletons to the vagaries of the all-powerful market.

The market, a being revered nearly as much as God himself in this country, is doing the Devil's work, however, eating people up and spitting them out. Certainly, I now know this firsthand, and it's easier to stop fighting my broken, slow internet and just embrace a beer and a bag of chips, and the warm comforts of ignorance that come with them.

Wii's Last Story

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:58:00 +0000

Hironobu Sakaguchi’s The Last Story is both literally and figuratively the perfect game to mark the end of the Wii’s improbably, confounding reign. When I waited in the cold for hours to grab a Wii at its launch a half-decade ago, I assumed I’d be getting more games like The Last Story that would take advantage of the well-worn hardware powering the games to deliver genre-redefining experiences. Instead, as everyone has long lamented, the Wii provided a whole lot of waggle. So leave it to a JRPG of all things to showcase my hopes for the console after it’s been gathering dust for years.

From the medieval art design to the somber soundtrack, The Last Story looked like my sort of game since it first popped on my radar two years ago. Like so many, I was dismayed when Nintendo appeared to utterly ignore the game at last year’s E3, and I was so eager to try the game that I splurged for the limited edition across the pond—a real swell example of decent value for a collector’s package if ever I’ve seen it. Of course, days after its European release, The Last Story was finally announced for a stateside release, but I can at least report that minor-quibbles aside, The Last Story is well worth a purchase for anyone who still has a Wii.

Reuniting the mastermind behind Final Fantasy with composer Nobuo Uematsu, The Last Story shows us what that franchise may have been in a world where Tetsuya Nomura didn’t transform it into cotton-candy emo. In place of existential angst, we are given convincing political intrigue, racism, cowardice, and, oh yes, class-struggle. While The Last Story weaves a predictable yarn, it isn’t afraid to use its compelling cast of characters to effectively embrace the clichés which regularly strangle JRPGs. When the story’s hero and heroine develop their requisite romance, there is nothing so cringe worthy as Final Fantasy X’s “laugh.”

The entire experience is a clinic in how to streamline the JRPG. The plot moves briskly, and the game’s forty-four chapters clocked in at just under twenty-five hours, just as the gameplay began to wear out its welcome. The game’s battle mechanics are a halfway successful attempt to merge simplified action-RPG styled button-mashing with the active time trappings of a Final Fantasy-style turn-based battle. The main character dashes around, attacking from behind cover and taking advantage of elemental spells the computer-controlled party members send out all over the battle field. It sounds sophisticated, but it ain’t. A protip: I dug around the game’s menu and switched combat control to “manual” just so I could have the pleasure of button-mashing enemies to death during more routine encounters.

Each party member is afforded five lives for each battle, which quickly gives off the impression of hand-holding the player, but the entire battle system comes together in the game’s elaborate chapter-ending boss fights. The plot-dictated party can range in size from one to six characters, and the player’s ability to send out fireballs of destruction and various buffs and debuffs is constantly fluctuating. The game’s signature “gathering” mechanic allows the player to direct all enemy attention onto him, and there’s some real strategy to be had as a monster weighs down on you while you attempt to drop a sword swinging from the ceiling onto the baddie.

But as refreshing as the gameplay feels, so much of the combat feels as if it is on autopilot, and try as it might, the game is unable to free the genre of the need for the occasional level-grind. As expected, the hardware limitations inherent to the Wii also rear their ugly head. Battles can become a slideshow as a dozen enemies surround your team, particle-effect laden magical spells ripping all around.

In a larger sense, The Last Story reflects the gaming conundrum posed by the Wii itself. It’s a game that tries to break convention, even as occasionally falls flat on its face. I’m loath to use the expression that a title looks “good for a Wii game,” but The Last Story could actually pass for an HD title—if the poor Wii itself weren’t making all manner of painful grinding noises as it wheezes to load the game. Though the game simplifies the mess of menus and equipment so prevalent in JRPGs, it’s notable that it does this without the aid of the much-dreaded motion controls. In fact, playing the game with the Wii-mote and Nunchuk combo can be downright painful; stick to a Classic Controller.

Still, the game does the little things so well. Like that awesome “ka-ching” effect upon discovering new places in Fallout 3, the process of picking up randomized loot in The Last Story is equally addicting. Then there are the burps in battle from one always-hungry party member and the completely optional story chapters involving vampires and barroom cults. The game even affords the player the option to routinely fail to woo his romantic interest to great comic effect.

When I packed the game away after twenty-five hours, I was more than ready to get back to the Mass Effects of the world, but for a guy whose adventure with the Wii began at a Gamestop parking lot in the middle of the night, it was nice to have one last story with my often underwhelming, glorified motion-controlled Gamecube. If nothing else, it was nice to walk away from a JRPG and not feel a little bit embarrassed about myself…

Cherry Blossoms in DC, Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:15:00 +0000

I am hardly a real photographer, but I get a strange sense of dedication when I want a certain shot. When it came to the cherry blossoms, I wanted a nice cloud-strewn sunrise that had cherry blossoms and the Washington Monument reflected in the tidal basin. Had to have the shot. Was willing to wake up at five every morning just for the opportunity to see if the weather would cooperate.

It never did. Peak bloom was midway though last week, and by the end of the week, just coughing on the cherry trees would send a host of petals raining to the ground. Time was of the essence if I were to get my shot--and every weather forecast I looked at all weekend projected a week of "mostly sunny" sunrises.

After carefully following the weather forecasts all week, I can safely say that no amount of fancy Doppler radar has done anything to make weathermen more reliable. I woke up day after day to find the DC mornings full of nothing but fog and clouds. By Friday, I gave up and settled for a regular ol'boring sunrise:

Cherry Blossoms in DC, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:44:00 +0000

My photographic saga with the cherry blossoms continued throughout peak bloom week. Anyone who's been reading this blog over the years (or who knows me personally) should have an inkling that I really love cloud-tinged sunsets and sunrises. Sadly, over the years, I have become something of a sunset snob. A mere orange sunset without bands of magenta just won't do!

My obsession for getting the perfect sunset (and sunrise) required me to trek down to the tidal basin a good half dozen times over the week. I did get manage to see one dynamic sunset, but I foolishly stuck to only one side of the tidal basin:

Cherry Blossoms in DC, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Cherry blossoms in the Imperium! I haven't been fortunate enough to be in the city while the cherry trees were in bloom since a trip in grade school, so I resolved to wake up at dawn the weekend before peak bloom to scope out the tidal basin. Braving a chilly morning and a host of intoxicated St. Patty's day revelers, I got down to the Mall last Saturday well before the sun was on the horizon.

And because I wanted to see if there had been any progress moving the reflecting pool back to, you know, a reflecting pool rather than a gross pile of dirt, I stumbled over the Korean War Memorial, as well. So here's a bonus shot:

Mitt Romney's Cognitive Dissonance

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

From Mitt Romney's speech last night after his victory in the Illinois primary:

They see government standing in their way. We once built the interstate highway system and the Hoover Dam.

There was no break in that chain of thought. Evidently, Mitt Romney is suggesting that government stood in its own way of building projects it championed.

Or perhaps, while he was busy gaining a "learning the unique genius of the American free enterprise system" or destroying American jobs while at Bain Capital, he utterly failed to learn history, a history full of government-led efforts to build things, things like the interstate highway system and the Hoover Dam.

My Response to NYU's Rebuttal

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:31:00 +0000

Today comes more news that the Law School Bubble comes nearer to bursting, as LSAT applicants have declined a further 16% in the last year. As Gawker so kindly put it, "we will never ever tire of directing your attention to the accumulation of evidence that 'law school' is, by and large, a massive fraud perpetrated upon society's most overacquisitive young driftabouts, and one whose effect is to turn out a massive class of highly indebted functionaries whose skill set is not only undeveloped to the point of worthlessness, but that, when developed, is, for the most part, detrimental to the function of justice."

With all of these numbers flying around, I submitted the following letter to the editor at my ol'stomping ground, The Commentator, in response to NYU's own rebuttal:

Dear Editors:

As a recent graduate of the law school, I have no idea what to make of NYU's recent rebuttal to claims that the school is distorting the employment prospects of its graduates. On one hand, I appreciate the school both providing a public response to this important issue and aggressively defending its reputation. At the same time, the response strikes me as shockingly defensive in its tone and substance, and it misses an opportunity to position NYU at the forefront of the law school transparency movement.

When the law school is suggesting Professor Paul Campos is using "tainted numbers," daring him to independently audit NYU's stats, and calling another critical article in The New York Post an "inaccuracy wrapped in innuendo inside omission," one cannot help but think someone struck a nerve. Frankly, it's about time. NYU and its peer schools have managed to avoid much of the criticism being directed at law schools today. However, facts on the ground suggest that the law school bubble is impacting not only lower ranked schools but also NYU. It is long past time for NYU to recognize the part it plays in placing students into tremendous debt and forcing them into an increasingly violatile legal job market.

The reality is that the number of Big Law jobs have decreased, even for NYU students. For the class of 2010, only 56% of graduates worked for firms larger than 250 attorneys. A quick look at the pie charts NYU provides shows that only 55% of the students in my class worked for firms during their 2L summers, so this percentage is going to continue to decrease. No matter how NYU slices it, with fewer Big Law jobs, there's less big money to be made to pay for an NYU education.

When I started law school, the ramifications of the recession on the legal job market were not yet apparent. It was a tremendous shock for me to realize that as prestigious as NYU is, the opportunities for which I came to law school simply would not exist by the time I graduated. I only recently found employment yet, today, for many of us employment still does not always equate to financial security. I do not blame NYU for my situation, but I do take umbrage at the school's subsequent behavior.

As the legal job market worsened and was ruthlessly transformed during my time at NYU, the standard response from the school was that everything would be okay, that NYU graduates were still a cut above the rest. I understand if the school was trying to cushion the blow to my class or to avoid a panic, but it was tremendously upsetting for me to see this response being used with the students that came after me. During admitted students days and information sessions for prospectives, there was very little honest discussion about the price of an NYU Law education and one's prospects upon graduation. Just try to find NYU's graduate employment statistics on its website. While they are currently on the front page via this rebuttal, most of the time the stats are buried; they certainly aren't easily advertised to prospective students.

When I spoke with the Office of Career Services about how it compiles its statistics last year, I was told that NYU gathers statistics based upon "how NALP, the ABA, and U.S. News guides us." In other words, NYU does only what it is told to do. I would offer that NYU should do more. The law school prides itself as being an education leader, and it should be leading the effort to increase transparency when it comes to discussing the value of its education, as well.

Currently, NYU provides a mess of statistics to show what graduates are doing nine months out from graduation. At least 8% of graduates in this time frame are taking advantage of funding provided by the law school itself to kick start their careers. An untold number are in transition from short-term employment or in clerkships. Even the Office of Career Services will admit that numbers nine months out don't tell the whole story. NYU should endeavor to provide graduates, current students, and prospective students data on what its graduates are doing one year, three years, and five years out. I recognize this is a big burden on the school, but it's a good first step to demonstrating exactly what NYU graduates are doing with their highly-priced degrees.

NYU continuously strives to provide the best it can to its students in all facets of their educational experience. Compiling and releasing these numbers would be no disservice to the school and would further demonstrate how NYU continuously strives to provide the best it can for its students in learning and student support.

Republicans Ought to Read Their Scripture

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:12:00 +0000

From Ezra Klein on Rep. Paul Ryan's new budget:

Here’s the basic outline of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget in one sentence: Ryan’s budget funds trillions of dollars in tax cuts, defense spending and deficit reduction by cutting deeply into health-care programs and income supports for the poor.

I never thought I'd be quoting Scripture, but here's one of those examples in life where one should never say never. After all, we know Rep. Ryan is a religion man, a Catholic even. In a letter to Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, he insisted the "paramount goal" of his prior, failed budget was "sustaining national moral character and human dignity." Perhaps he ought to read Proverbs 22:16?

He that oppresses the poor to increase his riches, and he that gives to the rich, shall surely come to want.

NYU Law Plays Defense (or Offense?) on Employment Statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:56:00 +0000

NYU Law released a curious statement today about recent criticism that my alma mater is cooking its employment statistics:

Truth can be hard to pin down. Who, for example, first uttered the phrase from which the headline above is taken? It appears that Mark Twain popularized it, and he attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but there is debate about whether this is accurate. Regardless of its origin, the point of the phrase is apt: assigning statistics to matters tends to wrap them in a presumptive validity, when in fact numbers can be subject to interpretation or debate, or be flat out wrong. So it is with the many statistics that journalists and others are offering up these days about law schools. We’ve decided to post this item to discuss the data as it relates to NYU Law, in particular, and to correct it when it is in error.

As a onetime, utterly embarrassed unemployed law graduate, I am not one to hide my occasionally hostility toward NYU. That said, I have to admire the school going on the offensive when it comes to its reputation--as a better NYU is, selfishly, better for me.

Part of the problem remains a lack of transparency with all these different reporting mechanisms, and, alas, an unfortunate eagerness by law schools to hide behind the confusion. Part of my sincere problem with the way NYU handles statistics is its willingness to go along with everyone else "just because." NYU Law is a real leader in the field of legal education in a lot of ways, but as a student there, I admit to being dismayed at the school's hesitation in being more forthright about what its graduates--aside from its star clerks and associates--are doing.

Certainly trying to determine employment numbers for graduates six, nine, of even twelve months out can be a hassle and doesn't actually say a lot about the "value" of the law school's education. NYU Law could be a trailblazer if it provided a more thorough breakdown of what its graduates are actually doing one year, three years, and five years out from graduation.

Such honesty could cause the school to take a hit in the all-important rankings, but considering the school's already dropped a peg since I first signed up, I know I'd prefer honesty and transparency to craven attempts to get over on Columbia.

In Case Anyone Thought We "Won" in Iraq...

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:10:00 +0000

In the wake of civilian killings allegedly perpetrated by a U.S. Army solider in Afghanistan, George Packer has a fantastic write-up on the status of our last, forgotten war in Iraq for The New Yorker:

The Christian population is well below half of its pre-war level, and now even the Kurdish north is no longer safe for Christian refugees, who are fleeing Kurdistan to Turkey, Jordan, and—if they can—the U.S.
Shiite gangs have gone on a killing spree aimed at young Iraqis who dress in the style known as “emo,” and whom many Iraqis believe to be gay, or even devil worshippers. The victims—the number may be as high as ninety or a hundred—have had their skulls crushed with concrete blocks.
Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government continue to be targeted in their own country, while the doors to American immigration remain shut tight to them.
Bombings and assassinations continue to be daily realities in Baghdad and elsewhere.
In foreign policy, Iraq has positioned itself as the only Arab friend of the Iran-Syria axis, while Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army continues to slaughter civilians, and the theocratic regime of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, consolidates its hold on every lever of state power and plays nuclear brinkmanship with the region and the world.

In other words, while the Administration suggests we left Iraq with our heads held high, the situation is very very bad. It is easy to argue that the world is better place merely because we toppled a very nasty dictator in Saddam Hussein, but it is simplistic and tragically ignores the devastation we caused to be rid of the man. And as a matter of realpolitik, we strengthened our enemies and made a mess of a region we're economically dependent upon.

The best thing that can be said for the looming disaster in Afghanistan is that it might not be that bad for us. For the Afghans? Just look at what happened to the Iraqis as a result of our effort to democratize the populace.

Rick Santorum's Constitutional Litmus Test

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:10:00 +0000

Rick Santorum tells Fox News that if elected, he'll introduce "a litmus test that [judicial appointments] should follow the Constitution." And what does it mean to "follow the Constitution" according to Mr. Santorum?

According to the former Senator's website, his definition pretty much means do the opposite of what Justice Kennedy did in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision which decriminalized gay sex. Mr. Santorum insists that "judges should not in any way rely upon any form of foreign law or international law for the purpose of interpreting the United States Constitution and laws" and of course, "judges have no authority to legislate from the bench and must never do so."

While it's understandable a homophobe like Mr. Santorum would decry a case like Lawrence, is anyone still up in arms about the end result in Roper v. Simmons, another Kennedy opinion which surveyed international law and found that the subjecting children to the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment."

What is so dismaying about Mr. Santorum's litmus test is that it profoundly misunderstands both what it is to be a federal judge and also how our current political process functions. For example, take United States v. Jones, a recent decision that explored Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches in a world full of GPS units and new-fangled technology unimaginable to our hallowed Founders. The decision clearly "legislates from the bench" — unanimously so. It also punts the more nuanced question about what the law should be back to legislators.

That tends to be the paradigmatic mark of the judicial process. Brown v. Board of Education says "separate but equal is bad" but doesn't prescribe how to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, Congress doesn't legislate in specifics. The hyper-partisan political climate created by people like Mr. Santorum doesn't help the problem either, but reading the laws of Congress require patience, dedication, and more than one giant leaps of faith. On a host of contentious issues, Congress punts the details to the courts, with their mysterious methods of legal interpretation and construction, to actually iron out. Just look at the judicial volleying going on regarding the Voting Rights Act, a law passed by a Republican Congress to tremendous bipartisan support.

It is, as Chief Justice Marshall put it, "emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is." Sometimes Mr. Santorum will disagree, and surprise surprise, sometimes he won't.

Of course, Mr. Santorum never talks about judicial decision-making in any sort of educated way. Instead, lamenting the "dozens of left wing, radical judges, liberal activist judges in Massachusetts" like he has a clue what that even means.

Massively Suckered by Mass Effect 3

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:19:00 +0000

A little over four years ago, I was walking home one chilly evening when I decided to take a detour through the Boston Prudential Center. I had just acquired a new Xbox and hungry for games, I swooped up a hidden copy of the limited edition of Mass Effect. Spending the weekend alone with the game, it was something of a revelation for me at the time. I'd never played a game that presented such powerful moral choices, and the retro sci-fi stylings of the game quickly endeared the game to me like few in the past decade have. Two years later, when Mass Effect 2 came out, it was something of a personal holiday. A fateful snow day allowed me to avoid the pesky responsibility of actually attending law school to delve back into my world of blue aliens, evil interplanetary corporations, and Martin Sheen.

Fast forward two more years and Mass Effect 3 came out yesterday. Oddly, I wasn't nearly so enthusiastic for the game. I had just imported the decidedly more medieval-styled Last Story from across the pond, and I simply couldn't get excited for the end of the Mass Effect trilogy. To me, the game was overexposed. Its developer, Bioware, hasn't produced nothing I've been remotely interested since the second game. To make matters worse, the brand's corporate overlord, Electronic Arts, the peddler of Madden, has grossly commodified part of the Mass Effect experience.

The game's strength is as a single player adventure: I, and I alone, chart the moral course for my gun-toting space woman. For Mass Effect 3, Bioware bolted on an unneeded multiplayer battle mode, which allows players the pleasure of spending another $100 to unlock content. It's peddled "exclusive" downloadable content for the game behind every action figure and strategy guide it can find. They've walled off part of the game as "release day" downloadable content. To make matters worse, after getting the limited edition versions of the first two games, I found most of the content--featuring a "premium fabric N7 patch"--of the third game's collector's edition to be decidedly not worth the $20 premium. The whole enterprise behind the latest installment of my favorite franchise left me feeling hopelessly nickel-and-dimed.

This is all a prelude to say I broke down and bought the game anyway.

I feel pathetic. I feel manipulated. I caved to base-consumerism. I tried to hold out. I didn't preorder the limited edition. As one retailer after another stopped accepting new orders, I thought I had saved myself from the game. Last Story arrived just yesterday, and I told myself I didn't need Mass Effect. I could wait the few weeks until the regular vanilla version of the game dropped to two Jacksons.

Then I contemplated getting up at dawn, racing to Columbia Heights so I could have a shot at an "in the wild" limited edition at my choice of Target, Best Buy, or Gamestop. What else did I have to do this morning? Eat a cinnamon roll.

Somehow, as if some higher power compelled me, I woke up at 5:45 a.m. I didn't even set an alarm. I looked at my new copy of Last Story and dismayed by my foolishness, tried to go back to bed. Unable to get to sleep, I got to work an hour early, resolving not to use my lunch break to seek out Mass Effect.

Then as often happens, the limited edition Mass Effect 3 came ever-so-briefly back into stock on Amazon. A painful lump developed in my throat.

As I'm currently sitting on $225 in Amazon credit, my heart started racing. I didn't really want the game, but I had to have it. It was only two clicks away. I left my office to visit the water cooler. I took a deep breath, a big gulp of ice-cold water. I came back to my desk to see the remaining number of limited editions tick into the single digits. I clicked. I clicked again.

I felt a wave of relief come across me, just before the sense that I had become some sort of dirty whore followed. There's still a chance my order won't be fulfilled; it's slated to arrive in a few weeks. But I couldn't help myself. Perhaps this is the most damning sign yet of my addiction to video games, not as something I play or even do, but as something I buy, just to have and to hold.

I feel utterly ashamed by my weakness, but at least I slept easy knowing my limited edition fabric patch is on the way.

The ACLU's $1000 Voter Fraud Bounty and the Problem with Voter ID Laws

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Last month the ACLU of Minnesota offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find a case of bona fide voter fraud. Today, Minnesota Majority found their case of voter fraud:

[Minnesota Majority] offered a 2010 Anoka County case filed against Barbara Ann Nyhammer of Andover. She was charged with signing an absentee ballot on behalf of her college-age daughter in the 2008 general election. . . . She entered an Alford plea in August of 2011, and agreed to pay $200 in attorneys fees.

Advocating for an amendment to Minnesota's constitution to require voter photo identification, Dan McGrath, executive director at Minnesota Majority, offered the following: "You can't know for sure who actually cast the ballot when we allow names to be made up on the spot on Election Day."

Except Minnesota Majority's example of voter fraud would not be cured by requiring photo identification. Again, Ms. Nyhammer was charged with signing an absentee ballot on behalf of her college-age daughter. This is not the sort of in-person identity fraud that the ID laws protect against. Ms. Nyhammer did not make up a name on the spot on Election Day; rather, she incorrectly filled out an absentee ballot.

Requiring college students, minorities, and the elderly to show some sort of photo ID at their polling place wouldn't cure the only sort of voter fraud Minnesota Majority could actually identify. Stupid policy gets in the way of sensible logic once again.

Obviously...

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 23:58:00 +0000

From Maureen Dowd:

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

Oh really? That is some astute strategery there.

Maryland Marriage Alliance thinks gay marriage causes poverty?

noreply@blogger.com (Average Joe) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:13:00 +0000

With Maryland recently joining the parade of states embracing marriage equality, the Maryland Marriage Alliance has mobilized evidently to blame all social ills on gays:

When marriage ceases to have its historic meaning and understanding, over time fewer and fewer people will marry. We will have an inevitable increase in children born out of wedlock, an increase in fatherlessness, a resulting increase if female and child poverty, and a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.

The only evidence the Maryland Marriage Alliance can concoct to support this absurdity is the words of David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values. The MMA goes to great lengths to suggest that Mr. Blankenhorn is a "self-described liberal Democrat." They forget that conservative Republican judicial appointee Vaughn Walker found Mr. Blankenhorn to be entirely non-credible. Why? "None of his relevant publications has been subject to a traditional peer-review process, he has no degree in sociology, psychology or anthropology despite the importance of those fields to the subjects of marriage, fatherhood and family structure, and his study of the effects of same-sex marriage involved “read[ing] articles and ha[ving] conversations with people, and tr[ying] to be an informed person about it."

Even if you can stomach Mr. Blankenhorn as an "expert" on the matter, the MMA's suggestion that single-parent households and female and child poverty is the result of gay marriage--an institution that only started in Massachusetts in 2004--is just silly.