On hiatus for a bit.
Catholic, Husband, Father, Lawyer, Professional Quibbler. #DefundPP
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Oct 8, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This weird Kabuki play I see so many performing, in which things that have been true for decades are suddenly apparent and disqualifying, does not reflect badly on the object, but on the subject.
Next, they will discover the Ronald Reagan refer to the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and decried abortion as a terrible stain on our nation's soul.
Oct 7, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I didn't vote at the top of the ticket in 2016 for the first time since I turned 18. I didn't vote in the primary this year, also an adulthood first. Still not wildly inclined to vote for a serial adulterer who is almost certainly still pro-choice. But man I gotta vote this year.
Honesty compels me to note that I am fully aware that I'm disinclined to skip voting as it is, so only a marginal push was needed to get me off my "to Hell with all of them, I'm following the wife's lead" vow. But I just got a more-than-marginal push.
Oct 6, 2018 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
You know, insofar as Kavanaugh is the vote that swings the Supreme Court in the direction Republicans have promised since <checks calendar> 1980, I can legitimately understand how some older Republicans find him a bridge too far.
That sounds dry, but it's serious: If you assumed the Republican Party was the party of (sort of, this is a stretch but let's assume) fiscal responsibility and social moderation, while also keeping abortion legal, etc., with a wink and nod over the rubes' heads, you'd be livid.
Oct 3, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ah, the joys of not having sat through a deposition or interrogation. I once sat through two days of, "I don't remember," and, "I'm not the right guy to ask."
It's always the stupidest cases the produce the most hot air.
Oct 2, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
My brother and I greet each other with quotes and the like from Tha Dogg Pound's epic, "Dogg Food," lines from Gang Related and Bad Boys, and weird, insulting things from the 80s.
As I've mentioned, I have friends who ask about the state of my wife's endometrium. I have friends who will start a call, "Hey, is [she] pregnant again? Playing the odds." I have friends who ask if I'm still trolling libraries, albeit the question is cruder.
Oct 2, 2018 • 54 tweets • 7 min read
Ok so now I'm going to explain why it's a good idea to have the federal judiciary have some institutional respect, even if the Branch itself is determined to burn it all away.
I'm basically reminding myself, mute as needed.
First, and this is a thing both ordinary humans and Article III tend to forget too often, much as The Police Are The Government, The Judges Are The Government, Too.
Oct 2, 2018 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
People who voluntarily choose not to have children are missing out in a hundred ways. For example, my current project is convincing my children that I was a child star of a short-lived sitcom based on my life.
We got crushed by the wave of similar shows then on television, including Different Strokes, Webster, and Silver Spoons.
Oct 2, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Top Five Pocket Books Star Trek (The Original Series) Novels, Ranked:
5:
Sep 28, 2018 • 36 tweets • 4 min read
I have been reading Ms. McArdle's work for over a decade and a half because she is always struck me as intelligent, serious, and in good faith. Her premises here, however, are fundamentally flawed.
Last night, she opined that the left cannot fathom the right's rage over late notice, and the right cannot fathom the left's rage over Kavanaugh's confirmation.
Sep 28, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I am sincerely impressed by the level of unseriousness to which some folks aspire. "An investigative organization that had six bites at the apple of Brett Kavanaugh's past must be given a seventh to find what it may or may not have missed each prior time."
Do you people not understand how police and the FBI work? (Rhetorical question.) If you tell them, "You missed this thing every time and now look kind of foolish," guess what they'll find on Try Seven. HINT: NOT NOTHING.
Sep 27, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
As someone else noted, trial lawyers are used to seeing this in ways other people aren't. I just had someone testify movingly and convincingly that he was on a tech-free prayer retreat on the same day I have emails from him to my client.
I had one of my own clients break down on the stand after his business failed, explaining how he and his wife had put everything into it, and the defendant had withheld critical materials needed to run the franchise.
Also, I withdrew 20 minutes later because it was not true.
Sep 26, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I am not, by nature, an angry person. I tend to smile a lot and joke more. I have a wife and two hands' worth of kids. I have faith in Christ as taught by my Church. I didn't vote Trump because doing so seemed a species (lesser) evil.
I'm rapidly approaching pissed-off.
I've been able to sit back and just ruminate on the destruction of the Republic, but it's one thing to see it decay and quite another to see it actively disassembled. I love this country and it's being turned into a pot of boiling merde that will trickle down.
Sep 26, 2018 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
I sort of wonder how much popular culture has not so much given us a unified culture, but rather the illusion of one, that is the worse for the shattering.
To take salient examples from the news today, I think a lot of people imagine that what we see on TV or in the movies is true, when usually, it's just convenient plot devices.
Sep 25, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Despite Bork, despite Thomas, despite Alito, Republicans smilingly rubber-stamped an egghead, an activist, a dolt, and another egghead to the Supreme Court. I can, without being snide, understand why the left was so aggrieved they didn't rubber-stamp Garland on as well.
From their perspective, everything they did was good and right, and Republicans had implicitly conceded this for decades. To actually respond without the histrionics and more effectively breaks the rules the American left thought everyone had adopted.
Sep 25, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I went to school with the largest group of high-end playas ever
There was this guy who had totally scored with every girl in our college/dorm, even the lesbian, and they'd just agreed not to talk about it; he went to the college/dorm next door when he got tired of multiple stories of action.
Sep 25, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I was gonna add Galavant to our list of shows we killed even before we discovered they existed by liking them, but based on the second season so far, as my wife puts it, it should have been the first season plus an episode or two.
The second season is what happens when you start off a campaign with like four or five amazing adventures and you don't have any truly huge thing in the offing and suddenly everyone's just futzing around and so you have to launch a global cataclysm to keep interest up.
Sep 25, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A Republican president would have to be either insane or politically suicidal to nominate me to the federal judiciary; but if nominated, I would categorically refuse to serve or, more accurately, go through the confirmation process.
I have neither done anything terrible, bad, naughty, nor even very exciting, but I have no desire to put my family through a gauntlet of pain just so I can hear criminal drug cases most of the year.
Sep 23, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
We treat Supreme Court seats as political footballs and the Presidency as a winner-at-all-costs proxy war because ultimately -- in the literal sense of finally -- meaningful politics only occurs in the national government, and only in those two branches.
Our states are provinces of the national government rather than co-equal sovereigns with limited exceptions, and Congress is a money dispenser and executive stamping/blocking mechanism that does theater for the plebes.
Sep 22, 2018 • 50 tweets • 8 min read
Gonna file this away for when I get back: A live-tweet, tweet-by-tweet, of my first 12 hours with #BardsTale4. Those of you who know me, know this may be a bit wordy. I'm using the wretched Threaded Tweet feature because this way I won't be tempted back on Twitter early.
So my computer just crashed during the initial boot screen. My box was good for middle-of-the-road new boxes in late 2017 -- I can run The Witcher III with no hiccups -- but I doubt this is replicable.
Sep 18, 2018 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Apropos of a lot of things, I'd like to mention one of the many reasons I was (and am) a huge fan of the late Justice Antonin Scalia: The man was a devout believer in the Confrontation Clause.
Everything is more muddled than it was before, but for a very long time, the stereotypes -- which existed for good reasons -- were that conservatives/Republicans were "tough on crime" and Democrats were "soft on crime."
Sep 18, 2018 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
@cyamas remind me that it's been a while since I offered you little glimpses into into my life brought to me and you by my children. I will try to rectify that on Twitter today.
I will take as my first reading the first weekend of my hiatus. To set the stage, I had planned on getting some rest on a Saturday morning for a change and so tried to sleep in. SPOILER: MY WIFE SUCCEEDED.
