Hypocrisy, exhibit # 1256899912A

So it turns out the U.S. military has been holding AP photographer Bilal Hussein without charge for the past five months.

How in the world are we to expect Iraqis to trust the "security" that we are aiming to provide, or their own legal system if we sweep up thousands of Iraqi citizens and hold them without charge outside of the legal system that we expect every Iraqi citizen to respect? I understand that there are, and always will be, security threats, but arresting and holding people without charge is not a good way to win the hearts and minds of anyone.

We are sending Iraqis and the world a horrible message. We have (post-hoc) justified this awful war by claiming that we are going to stabilize Iraq and bless it with democratic institutions and the rule of law. Yet, we ignore those same principles in our own actions. We are, in essence, saying that the rule of law and due process is good policy for YOU, but as long as we're in your country, they don't apply to US. Acting above the system of law that we ourselves have put into place is not only incredibly patronizing (and Iraqis, having lived under colonial rule before, are no strangers to despising a two-tiered system), but it also demonstrates that the system's creators do not truly believe in their own creation. This is like the principal of a public school sending his kids to boarding school.

I have no doubt that some of the people swept up in these things might have ties to terrorist organizations. But if they do, the government (as in the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government)should be forced to put forth that evidence. Keeping all of this "confidential" does nothing but render any sense of justice a farce. If you want to win the hearts and minds of the people, put those who can be proven guilty on trial, and show the Iraqi people and the world the evidence against them. Acting just will win the war on terror, not doing our best imitation of the regime we claim to have justifiably replaced.

Dear "first year"...

As I have been banished to the commentary hell that is Blogger Beta, I cannot actually comment on your ethical delimma. But if I could, this is what I would say,

Jeeze, that is not the enviable position to be in.

Part of why I had to kick out "Craig," was because I was worried I might eventually have to give a statement or give testimony against a roommate/friend. Well, that, and he was just an unbearable dickface....

As unsavory as it might be I would do the interview, cooperate, and be as honest as you can (as in honestly honest). Otherwise, worst case scenario you might wind up being charged with obstructing justice or perjury or something down the line, and that would be problematic for when you have to go through the "moral character" background check the state bar does. But you're in D.C. so I'm not sure how that works. But it can't be good, and no "friend" would ask you to take that risk for him/her.

That said, there's no need to state anything that you don't recall, and you shouldn't speculate. Perhaps your friend didn't tell you stuff, or at least no details. Be honest, but you don't need to go out of the way to opine as to what may or may not have happened if you weren't there and she didn't tell you.

That's my two cents (as in not legal advice). Good luck and I hope it works out.

"Bloody Hell" or "The Perils of an Unwritten Constitution"

The United Kingdom's Constitution is not actually a single written document. It is rather a collection of old gentlemens' agreements and written laws that carry no greater authority than do regularly passed statutes; constitutional law can be overturned by a mere act of parliament. This stems from the idea of "parliamentary sovereignty," which if you think about it, is ultimate "people power." If sovereignty comes from the people, as it purports to do in most constitutional democracies, the the will of the people should be able to trump a rather vaguely written instrument conceived of over 200 hundred years ago, right?

In practice, however, the idea that constitutional law can be overturned as easily as any other statute makes me, and I believe I speak on behalf of most other americans here, VERY uncomfortable.

Case in point. On September 12, 2006, a man confessed in open court (the "Old Bailey," to be exact) to having murdered a girl over 15 years ago. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

The man actually admitted to having murdered the girl six years ago, but charges could not be brought against him because he had already been tried and acquitted for the girl's murder in 1991. Similar to the prohibition in our Fifth Amendment, the UK prohibited "Double Jeopardy." Generally one cannot be charged and acquitted more than once.

Until now. Based on this one case, and because of the extremely determined family of the dead girl (understandably), British Parliament decided to toss the Double Jeopardy rule, originally enshrined in English law in 1187 (that's not a typo folks) out of the window in its "Criminal Justice Act of 2003." Well, to be fair, it only applies to about 30 odd crimes and just makes the exceptions to the rule a whole lot bigger. For instance, there needs to be "new" and "compelling" evidence. "New" does not, as it does here in our habeas statute, refer to evidence that could have been previously discovered. "New" means just that. Anything "new." So if a cop thinks of something "compelling" 10 or 15 years later, I guess the previously acquitted suspect is pretty well fucked.

To paraphrase our administration, this seems like an activist parliament. Throwing out an 800 year-old rule on criminal procedure based on one case? This seems like "result-oriented" thinking to me. In the long run, this might not make much of a difference. After all, there are a myriad of exceptions to the rule here, most of which escape me right now because I don't practice criminal law and I have forgotten to take my ginkgo biloba. I guess it's the principle of the thing. What if Congress could just get rid of one of the amendments? Does that frighten anyone else?

I almost forgot

Here is my date and I on our way to my high school reunion. Nothing like that wind-blown look for your coat of wool. I mean hair...wind-blown look for your hair.

That wasn't so bad....

In fact, my high school reunion was rather fun. I don't think I want to stay in touch with any more of the people than I already do, but it was nice to have everyone in the same place at the same time. There was only a few inappropriate ass grabs, but I think it was from a girl who thought I was gay anyway.

This is a picture of a dear chillin in my mom's front yard. Did I mention that my home town is a bit..uh, in BFE?

This was a happy accident. A friend couldn't figure out how my camera worked. This is actually me and my friends from high school. A guy who was one of my better friends in high school showed up who I hadn't seen since graduation. He was Mormon, but had no problem mixing drinks for the rest of us at our parties. Good guy to have around. He's doing well, but it was good to hear that he had fallen off the wagon for a while...after the mission...and going to BYU. I'm the one rockin' the H&M blazer.

This is a good example of what a bar in this town looks like. Snowboarders and random drunks all in a bar with a vague pan-island theme. White people get bored in the mountains.

Here we go...

I'm off to meet up for my ride to my home town for my reunion. I've been asked to give a toast during dinner. At first I thought I might try to be serious, but I don't want to stand up there like an asshole. I decided to share a few memories, take the piss out of a few of my friends and then sit down.

10-year highschool reunion

Oh my fricking god. My high school reunion is this weekend. I am so old. There's a part of me that doesn't want to go. Not because of any pent-up or repressed feelings, but my hometown is just a pain in the ass to get to from San Francisco. It's about a 6 and 1/2 hour drive.

BUT, I have a full head of hair, no belly, and a job, so really....I have to go, right? I'm actually looking forward to it. I keep in touch with a few of the guys...and I can't remember the last time we were all in the same room together.

Once again, I get f*cked by the curve

Sorry to bring down the average everyone. Maybe I should move to a city where a degree is a bit more...um...scarce...I remember something about diminishing returns from my old econ classes.

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While I am still jaded...

I decided to change the display name. Apparently "jaded j.d" was the name of a blog in Virginia. Much apologies, I never did google it, and just assumed that I was being creative. So I decided to now call myself "the default attorney."

This is not just totally random.

I feel that this is the role I play at my firm. This past week two of the other associates were on vacation. Another one was sick. And then there's this senior associate who doesn't really seem to have to do anything he doesn't want to do, and only works on one case. So when all hell breaks loose on a case, they come to me.

None of them were large projects, but several of them have been on-going for some time and I have no background knowledge what-so-ever. I don't like working when I completely lack any sort of big picture context. So inevitably I have to do some background into the case, find the template for the pleading, who are co-counsel is, who has to be served, etc. What would have taken the attorney who is normally assigned to the case an hour takes me three. And since they're coming to me in the first place, that means that it's always some sort of crisis, and the filing is time-sensitive. This makes me stressed.

So I am now the default attorney, because when no one else is around, they just give crap to me. Now I really sound like a jaded j.d.

P.S. I might also have to work this weekend. The fact that the partner did not get the irony of working on labor day is what pains me most.

P.P.S. Go Bears!

FU Craig

To be fair, I have bought a few file cabinets off of craigslist without incident, and have found several great roommates over the years, many of whom I still stay in touch with, even from my college years. Two of my latest adventures with craig, however, have ranged between frustrating disappointment and a truly horrid experience. Let's start with a roommate that my flatmates and I found off of craigslist.

Let's call him Craig. Craig seemed cool at first. He was funny and quick-witted. He had tattoos but a real job...and he was a D.J. on the weekends. Cool, but not too cool. He seemed like a good counter-weight to the other three roommates who were all different shades of boring professionals.

Little did we know.

Fast forward a few months. I get a call from Craig in the middle of the day, saying that if the cops contacted me regarding a female friend of his, to say that I didn't know anything. Which was true. I didn't. Apparently a former friend of his had started to consider pressing charges for rape. He said that it was all just a lie. I didn't know what to believe, but I knew that this was not good.

Then the drugs really started. He would fairly regularly be on something at any given moment. His favorite was acid, which meant that on Tuesdays (yes, Tuesdays) I would often come home to pounding industrial trance (or whatever the fuck his sub-genre of music was), with him running around the flat with no shirt on, but a fuzzy vest and a woman's wig, and toilet paper hanging out of his ears.

It became a chore to go home. I didn't want to see him, I didn't want to hear that "dope new track." A good day was when I would come home and he would still be passed out from the night before.

Then one day I came home and he had bandages all over him. One was around his head. It reminded me of cartoon characters from when I was a kid. You know, when they had a toothache and they would have that bandage around the bottom of their jaw, and it tied at the top?

"What happened?," I asked.
"I got into a fight."
"Really, with who?"
"Nah, I'm just kidding...I got plastic surgery"

Now at this point I thought the fight story sounded the more plausible, but I was wrong. He had gotten some liposuction and a chin tuck, or whatever it's called.

"Hey man, would you mind keeping your phone by your bed? I might need something during the night, and I might not be able to get up."

Something else I learned...the wounds left over from lipo? They seep and ooze. For the next week, there were soiled gauze bandages spread around everywhere.

Then the coup de resistance. A few months later, he tried to solicit a prostitute. How did he go about this, you ask? Why the great bazaar that is craigslist of course! The girl came over, took his money and said that she was under age and that if he ever said anything, she would go to the cops. Later in the day, she came back with some "friends" asking for more money. Nothing else ever happened, but we kicked him out.

She must be a real looker

From SfGate:

HIT-AND-RUN: Within half an hour, 14 pedestrians picked off one by one on streets of San Francisco

A day of hit-and-run horror that started with the death of a Fremont pedestrian and erupted into half an hour of chaos on the streets of San Francisco ended in the arrest of a 29-year-old driver described by some relatives as mentally disturbed but by police as apparently rational and unrepentant.

At least 14 people were hospitalized Tuesday in San Francisco after the driver of a black 2004 Honda Pilot cut a path of destruction from the Tenderloin to Laurel Heights, striking pedestrians and a bicyclist in at least 11 locations starting at about 12:45 p.m.


...

Wow, glad I moved from the Western Addition. In a report last night, a member of the driver's family stated that the driver was "stressed out" about his arranged marriage in Afghanistan. I guess this is just another reason to question arranged marriage. Jesus.

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My girlfriend just moved to New York City

for grad school and I feel 1) sad that my favorite activity partner in crime is gone and yet 2) incredibly relieved. Her impending move had been hanging over us for the past month or so and led to many arguments ("you're not prioritize me enough") and just over all stress. I think I'm relieved to have some time to myself. As soon as she left, I went and took the placement exam at our local Alliance Francaise and I'm going to start up salsa classes again.

Now, does this demonstrate that I did not feel comfortable leading my own life and doing things that I wanted to do, which I think is a bad sign, or is it that I just have more free time now?

I will say this. She is joining me for a wedding up in Sonoma in September, and I said that I would come out to visit her in October. The French class I would take is only offered on Saturdays. When I told her that I would come and visit her when my French class was over in mid-October, she said something like "you don't want to come visit me sooner?" This irritated me.

Am I selfish?

Gracias Manu Chao, mille fois merci!

In my past life (circa 1998), when I lived in Paris and led a much more interesting life, mes amis introduced me to Manu Chao. It was some of the most innovative and eclectic music I had ever heard. He is one of the more famous musicians in the world (outside of the U.S. at any rate, can't get it on itunes for example) and I would put him in the "living legend" category. He is a wonderful musician who sings in several languages and infuses his music with a postive message of solidarity and social consciousness. Not like "we are the world" but more like a french resistance song. It gets you excited about seeking out injustice. This summer, Manu Chao traveled through the U.S. for the first time in 4 years. I hopped on Bart over to the People's Republic of Berkeley to see him at the Greek Theatre, and it was the best concert ever. It lasted for over 3 hours and it was too short. He had the crowd excited, entertained, and dancing. I don't even know how many encores they did. You could tell that he and his band enjoyed performing and that they were (I think) pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm of the crowd and how familiar we all were with his music. At one point, someone threw a EZLN flag on stage and he wore it for the rest of the show. Je ne me rappelle pas d'un autre concert qui m'a autant fasciné ou amusé. Merci beaucoup beaucoup Manu Chao.



P.S. Manu Chao also produced an album for Amadou and Miriam, two blind musicians from West Africa. Beautiful.

An apology to Lebanon

Belated, but sincere.

I find the United States' unwillingness to seek an immediate cease-fire to be disgusting. Truly, unequivocally, disgusting. The justification given, needing to find a way to a "sustainable" ceasefire, lacked any sort of logic. Why does the search for a sustainable ceasefire necessitate the continuance of violence? And by violence I mean the death of Lebanese civilians. Was the United States hoping that Israel would eventually just destroy Hezbollah, and that this was worth the civilian death toll? Mission decidedly unaccomplished. While I in no way condone the military arm of Hezbollah, Israel's knee-jerk and incredibly disproportionate reaction to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers was destructive and accomplished nothing. In the end, Hezbollah has emerged the relative winner of this war with no victor. As soon as the bombing stopped, Hezbollah was in the streets, assessing the damage and arranging funds and materials for those Lebanese who had lost their homes. What was that about winning hearts and minds?

Poor Lebanon. So lauded by the west when it had kicked out the Syrians and used by the U.S. as an example of a Middle-Eastern country on the righteous path. Yet we stood back and watched while Lebanon, with its new and fragile government, was pounded by Israeli attacks. See what you get for good behavior Lebanon? Nothing. You get American made bombs...dropped on you. What have we done? Created another reason to hate us, that's what.

An email from a lebanese friend of mine

She sent this to me during the conflict.

"Just minutes ago, Israel dropped 20 bombs within a 5 minute period on a residential neighborhood in the heart of beirut, a 10 minute drive from our apartment in beirut. Six residential buildings were brought to the ground, the number dead is unknown at this time. What goes through the bombers' mind??"Lets kill as many people and destroy as many homes in Lebanon as possible...after all we unfortunately will have to stop bombing tomorrow per the UN resolution...at least for a short time before we can come up with another excuse to eliminate our neighbors, Muslims and Christians alike."What is wrong with them???"

Club Cocomo or Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

As I was browsing through my itunes the other day at work, I noticed that a coworker also had her itunes up. We are a small office and this was the first time I had seen anyone else sharing on our network.

To preface this I should say that this coworker, I'll call her Eliza, is a very quiet and unassuming attorney. She also managed to become a CPA somewhere along the line which suggests not a little studiousness and (<<yawn>>) ambition..... zzzzzzzz. SNORT...huh Oh, right...Anyway, another coworker of mine attended law school with her, and he told me that everyone thought that she was a foreign exchange student for the first month of classes because she never spoke up in class. She is very quiet in the office as well, and while never mean, she had never been exceedingly nice either. As a senior associate, she once sent me a rather curse email about how to format my client memo and attached a memo about it. Considering I had just started working here at the time and no one had ever shown me the memo before I had drafted it, I thought it was a little rude.

So anyway, back to the itunes. I open up Eliza's itunes, and what do I see? Oodles and oodles of salsa and merengue...and NOTHING BUT salsa and merengue. I was surprised...and intrigued....


As Eliza is leaving one day, I told her that I saw her music collection. She seemed a little startled, but then admitted that she enjoyed the music and that she and some friends would go to Club Cocomo from time to time to dance. They were going on thursday, and I was invited. I said "sure."

Now, I have taken salsa classes over the years, and made it to the end of the "intermediate" level in the last series I took about a year ago. I can hold my own generally, so i thought I would be in the clear with the silent Eliza and her friends.

What I didn't know however, was that Club Cocomo is not a place for novices. Sure, they have a class at the beginning, but this is the place where instructors come to social dance.

So we show up for the class at the beginning...and...hey...this is just the basic step....I know this stuff, this is easy, just a turn with opposing hands?...no problem...I'm better than all these people.

Then the class ends and the music gets louder and people start to fill the dance floor. The novices I was feeling superior to seem to have disappeared, being replaced by incredibly coordinated latin dancing machines.

I felt like I was in that scene in Dirty Dancing when all the people who work at that resort, or whatever the fuck it was, were dancing after-hours, and Baby walks in and is totally overwhelmed. That was me. I was Baby.

p.s. If there wasn't a scene like that in Dirty Dancing (I haven't seen it in awhile, ok? I'm straight for f's sake), there totally should have been.

Ahem....

I was so in over my head. I just kind of stood there and drank beer while men took Eliza and her friends out for a spin. Which was fine with me...I had no business on that dance floor. The girls did pretty well. I wasn't about to ask them to dance after they had been out there with Sexy Eyes Rodriguez. It would have been like having sex with someone after they've been with someone who has a really huge penis. They will compare you and you know in advance that you won't measure up.

That said, the experience (as well as the number of pretty latin girls) has inspired me to seek out new lessons. Club Cocomo, I will return triumphant!

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

So I know it's been a few weeks since this case came down but I have to say that it's pretty significant. The Supremes held that the President does not have the authority to establish military commissions as he has in Guantanamo without Congressional authorization and that (maybe only 4 here, I don't think Kennedy joined in this part) Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions Apply to persons detained in the war on terror and with Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that the latter is not a high contracting party. Pretty amazing stuff.

The implication of the Geneva Conventions is also interesting, because another portion of CA 3 prohibits torture. If the portion prohibiting torture also conveys an individual right to is enforcement, what would the remedy be? Would evidence obtained through torture be supressed, as evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment? If the courts-martial or whatever the president comes up with to try the Guantanamo detainees post-Hamdan allows for the admittance of evidence obtained through torture, would the Supremes still uphold the enforceability of CA3? Would they have to per stare decisis?

I just love this picture

I just really really do. It's natural photoshop....amazing.

Sometimes at work I go into the bathroom stall....

even when I don't have to....uh...."go."

Sometimes I'm hungover, tired, or I just ate a bunch of carbohydrates. It's a dark quiet place where I can close my eyes. If it's really bad, I can fall asleep.... but talk about crazy dreams.

I discovered that on really hot days like today, I also enjoy to go in there, pull my pants down and air out a little bit. It's hard being cooped up in wool slacks all day.