The Man, the Myth, the Legend

Black bean or pinto?

You know you're a regular, "always order the same meal," creature-of-habit patron when your Quicken 2004 recognizes the repetitive price receipts for Moe's Southwest Grill and asks you if you would like to "schedule this transaction as a recurring bill?"

Spellign

Where do you get your news?

We like ESPN.

At least, we like them when they do what they're good at.

Sports.

For the most part, ESPN provides us with good coverage of all the breaking news in the world of sports, and ESPN.com is our number source for all things sports. When it comes to sports, ESPN are experts.

So stick to what you know. Please. Keep up with your 24-7 over-the-top sports commentary and analysis, but leave the political punditry to the folks who have actually studied things other than a play book and sports almanac.

More and more, we seem to find ESPN writers commenting on things other than sports, or worse, using a sports related story to advance a political perspective.

Consider this story from ESPN.com, where Pat Forde uses a story about Rick Majerus as a back-door promotion of stem-cell research, abortion, and (maybe?) even Hillary Clinton. Think its just a coincidence that Majerus' pro-choice views were highlighted during the week of the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade? We doubt it.

That's not all:

• There was the article (and Sportscenter segment) on the firing of the Univ. of Missouri lacrosse coach, which was unapologetically pro-gay in its emotive reporting.
• Speaking of lacrosse, how can we forget their coverage of the Duke lacrosse scandal? ESPN often seemed less concerned with the lacrosse team and more interested in exploiting the racial tension in Durham and pointing a finger at the white, middle class lacrosse players at an expensive private university
  
• Or this story about a kid athlete from Atlanta, in jail for having oral sex with a 10th grader. A moving story, no doubt. Nevermind that he broke the law -- ESPN finds it necessary to write this story using the oft-used political template of a "backwards South" with "archaic laws" that just can seem to catch up with the modern progressive society that ESPN lives in.
  

We thought ESPN had decided that sports and politics just don't mix. Isn't that why they fired Rush Limbaugh from Sunday NFL Countdown?

Yet it doesn't get much more political than this. When ESPN commentator Ivan Maisel reported on the alleged sexual improprieties recently surrounding (now former) Arkansas football coach, he wrote this:

A self-described supporter of Arkansas athletics acquired Nutt's cell phone records through a Freedom of Information Act request. Media members across the nation, including this one, received pdf files detailing Nutt's communications.

The innuendo came at no extra charge. Nutt's detractors have put him in the impossible position of proving a negative--he must have cheated on his wife because there is no proof that he did not.

It is a maneuver borrowed from national politics, Rovian in style and execution. Karl Rove, the chief political advisor to President George W. Bush, made his career on attacking an opponent's strength. In the 2004 presidential election, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth eviscerated Sen. John Kerry's stature as a war hero. Kerry's candidacy never recovered.

Rove had no visible affiliation with the Swift Boat Veterans, except that a tactic he made famous benefited his candidate.

Three years later, the tactic has been imported to Arkansas and used against Nutt.

Really, Ivan? We thought the openly biased anti-Bush reporting was something only the New York Times did.

Guess we were wrong.

Guess ESPN is no longer just an Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

Judges, our jurisprudential nannies

Who said this, and what was he/she talking about?

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old . . ."

That would be Obama. And he wasn't talking about the head of a non-profit organization, or the Pope, or even a charismatic presidential candidate. We'll let Obama tell you what he was talking about:

— and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

So much for the rule of law.

As Jonah Goldberg put it, "Supreme Court justices are supposed to decide what the written law requires, not pick winners and losers based upon some sense of noblesse oblige. That’s why all of those statues of Lady Justice show her standing blindfolded, not bent over kissing the boo-boos of the unfortunate and the downtrodden."

Feel Good Story of the Spring

We got tears just reading it.

I guess that maybe because compared to everyone on the field at the time, I had been playing longer and knew we could touch her, it was my idea first. But I think anyone who knew that we could touch her would have offered to do it, just because it's the right thing to do. She was obviously in agony. -- Mallory Holtman

Mind Boggling

In the 2006 Fiscal Year, the United States Government was paying approximately $46,347,031 per hour on interest payments to the holders of the National Debt.

Sowell on Obama

Once again, Thomas Sowell shows why he is one of our favorite modern thinkers/writers.

No doubt it is only a matter of time before there is a black president, just as it was only a matter of time before Paul Waner got his 3,000th hit. The issue is whether we want to reach that landmark so badly that we are willing to overlook how questionably that landmark is reached.

What's so questionable about Obama? Is he the candidate of change--which is something we all would like to see?

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of “change” endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s . . ..We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed . . . [while the 1930's foreign policy] approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

We are Deipnosophist

We can't tell if we're supposed to be electing the person who is best qualified and most capable of leading the greatest nation on earth, or casting our votes for the next big celebrity or pop entertainment icon.

Judging by the way they portray themselves, it appears to be the latter.


I am:


I am:


My name is:


My name is:

Dr. Nancy Pelosi, Prof. of Old Testament Bull S--

The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, 'To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.' On this Earth Day, and every day, let us pledge to our children, and our children's children, that they will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to experience the wonders of nature.

- Nancy Pelosi, Earth Day 2008 Press Release

Evidently it's not the first time she's done this.

The Tabletalk is now offering a reward to anyone who can find this "quoted" passage in the Old Testament. Or the entire Bible, for that matter. Don't bother - it's not in there.

This passage, on the other hand, is:

"A false witness will not go unpunished, and [she] who pours out lies will not go free." Proverbs 19:5

Oh yeah, and it warns about this too:

[T]hey exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the [creation] rather than the Creator . . .

Keep up the good work, Professor P. With this kind of track record, we certainly trust you with our Congress.

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity have in the past, are now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

A Glimpse Into Yesteryear

A Modest Plea to P.B.T*

Ruth!
I feel it time we both came clean in one mighty exfoliation of the soul, unmask our heart’s visage, and let our true Passions for each other collide into a fiery Apocalypse of love!

TO wit:
It is imperative that you attend the magnificent ritual known as P.B.T: the Coupling, so that I may reify my perfervid Passion through the rhythmic gyrations and systolic palpitations known as: the Dance.

I must exonerate myself of any slight I may have caused by the seductively silky, yet entirely masculine, parameters of my caress. Let me lull all your cares and worries and extrapolate all your torrid ambitions!

No! No! We must set aside our differences and injurious behaviors (born no doubt of our mutual suppressed Passion which stings us so) and parley our sexual duel through the wondrous raptures and endless pleasures of the Dance!

Come! We must ply our savage game of tease and taunt no more. Let us be taken up together into the heady rushing wind of revelry, and in that place, disgorge our flaming hearts—consumed with the same-sick desire!

Come sweet Tricky, concupiscence is no crime with us!

Please arrive promptly at nine, tonight, on the Balcony of Dreams, in whatever attire you deem necessary. Eighties power ballads, boogie, ghetto love, and Passion to ensue.

Your Guillermo,**


P.S. Reow!


*Personal Boogie Time
** Macey, The Progenitor

Copyright 2008, The Progenitor

Political Life Imitates Saturday Night Live

"Lay off me, I'm starving!"
- Chris Farley, Gap Girls, Saturday Night Live



"Why can't I just eat my waffle?"
- Barack Obama, Election 2008

Did you know . . .

. . . that the first black man to graduate from Harvard University received his law degree from the University of South Carolina?

Equal Opportunity Blogger

For those of you who think we've given too much attention to ol' Barack (after all, we did give him his own Blog label - "Obamania"), we give you this exciting bit of Youtubery.



Here's how Hillaryous defended her words at this week's Debate:

Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things, but I'm not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you're right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And, you know, I'm embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I've said it was a mistake. And it is, I hope, something that you can look over, because clearly I am proud that I went to Bosnia. It was a war zone . . . So I know that it is something that some people have said, "Wait a minute. What happened here?" But I have talked about this and written about it. And then, unfortunately, on a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past....

...So I will either try to get more sleep, Tom, or, you know, have somebody who, you know, is there as a reminder to me. You know, you can go back for the past 15 months. We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate. You know, that happens when you're talking as much as we have talked.

But you know, I'm very sorry that I said it. And I have said that, you know, it just didn't jibe with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

Really? Is outright lying just an embarrassing thing for her, sort of like accidentally admitting that she still wets the bed? And is a complete fabrication such as this really just the result of sleep deprivation?

Let no one accuse us of being unfair and unbalanced. Even if she is.

The Three "R"'s

Gold Digger Alert

This just in: young, beautiful barista still single.

If you remember this encounter from last year, and the story that came of it, then you've surely been wondering for the past 12 months - whatever happened to Sara Schenck?

She's available. We just saw her the other morning, whipping up some latte something at the Starbucks on Gervais St.

Don't all go at once.
Actually, do, because that'd be a lot more entertaining.

Baseball - the Conservative sport

From National Review Online:

Baseball is meritocratic. Only about 25 percent of the teams qualify for the playoffs, as opposed to more than 50 percent in most major-league sports. If you can consistently make the playoffs by finishing at .500, as is true in the NBA and NHL, there’s no real incentive to improve. But in baseball, if you want to play in the postseason, you have to find a way to make your team better.

Baseball is federalist; its central government is the weakest of any major professional sport. The NBA’s commissioner, David Stern, controls discipline, marketing, franchise shifts, and union negotiations with an iron hand. But Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, is a nonentity beholden to the club owners (of which he was one himself until recently). In 14 years as commissioner, his greatest accomplishments have been giving World Series home-field advantage to the league that wins the All-Star Game, and retiring Jackie Robinson’s #42 on behalf of all major league teams.

Baseball is sartorially libertarian. The NFL has extensive rules governing even the tiniest details of players’ uniforms; socks, for example, must be only white from the shoe to calf and only team colors from the calf to knee. In baseball, you can show just a sliver of sock at your ankles or wear them to the middle of your calf, like Alex Rodriguez and Orlando Hernandez, and no one will stop you.

Baseball handles immigration the right way, with foreigners recruited for specific skills and all legal requirements taken care of. The next time you hear that a player’s arrival at spring training has been delayed by visa trouble, think how much better America would be if every industry were so scrupulous with its workers.

Baseball is the closest thing in professional sports to a free market. Most sports are socialistic, with a salary cap that prevents competition based on spending. Like the tax code, these caps are fiendishly complicated and riddled with exceptions that create market-distorting behavior. In baseball there’s no salary cap. (True, there’s a “luxury tax” on payrolls that exceeds a certain amount, but at least it’s a flat tax.) To be sure, along with this simplicity and freedom to innovate go huge imbalances in payrolls between teams, yet baseball still manages to have at least as much parity as other sports.

Baseball has no affirmative action. Lefthanders are virtually disqualified from half of the fielding spots. You don’t like it? Tough noogies. If diversicrats ran baseball, they’d make half the games go around the diamond clockwise.

Baseball maintains a lean bureaucracy for its on-field decisions. Umpires make calls on their own, with no replay rule adding an extra level of officials whose only job is to supervise other officials. Contrast this with the NFL and NHL, where on-field and on-ice calls are subject to booth review during the game, and by bureaucrats in the league office. The result: Instead of arguing over whether a call was correct, fans and broadcasters wait several minutes and then argue over whether the video-review call was correct. Baseball gives you the human error in real time.

Rick Roll

As many of you already know, we're not the biggest fans of the New York Times. In fact, when it comes to good journalism, they rank fairly low on our list of sources to consult.

Which is why we like it whenever they make a mistake. It's juvenile, to be sure, but we can't help but laugh when they screw up.


With that in mind, you can imagine our glee at discovering the Times' latest goof. Evidently, the Times' ever cautious, ever careful, ever checking all the facts before reporting writers got punked by a couple of undergrads, when the NY Times reported on a current internet phenomenon called rickrolling. Turns out, it was the Times who got rickrolled.

You can watch an explanation of the phenomenon here.

The End of an Era

The man who is perhaps our favorite professor thus far in our legal education retired this past month. We were thankful to have studied under him twice, once for Business Corporations and then this semester for Business Crimes (White Collar Practice).

He has dedicated his life to two things: bringing down corrupt people and developing a lengthy list of hilarious one-liners used to pepper his class lectures.

This semester, we made it a point to write down as many of these sayings as we could. So now, as we study for our final examination next week, we give you those sayings that made it into our notes:

"You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas."

On why conspiracies are a unique threat to public safety:
“We’ve got people out there blowing themselves up left and right. Do you think the decision to blow yourself up is for or against your own self-interest, self-preservation? Huh? Ok, in a multiple choice question, check the “against” box.”

On the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals:
Ha. You'll get to Richmond and wish you were in Pakistan or somewhere like that.

On the Federal mail fraud statute:
“All we’ve got to prove now is whether there was a scheme to defraud. Think that’s hard? Guess what – You’ve got a lot of people with their pants down around their ankles, who you de-pants-ed, who are really hurting right now. It's not hard. Na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

There are certain people out there who would rather trace laundered money than eat. They are hardwired, by God, to straighten stuff like this out. Find them.

Nobody ever takes a bribe. They just borrow money, or take loans…that are never paid back.

You want it? You got it. Toyota.

Comma, however, comma . . .

Do you know what the definition of a strip mall is? Grocery store and one end, drug store at the other end, and 11 Chinese restaurants in between.

You know the saying about trying to teach a pig to dance? It doesn’t work, and it annoys the pig.

Just before abruptly ending class 25 minutes early:
Any questions on this, I’ll be happy to take any questions? [whining] “Weee wannnaaa go, John.” Ok. Go.

Commenting on a case where the Criminal drove a Volvo:
Just goes to show you, bad people can buy Volvo’s. It’s not just soccer moms.

“Martha Stewart thought she could charm the dog off of the meat wagon.”

Chiarella was going to be hung up on the cross to pay for the sins of Wall Street.

After calling on a third year student who knew the answer to his question:
God bless you. Somebody read the case here. What’s this case about? Food. Is food important to sustain life? Yes, John. What do you do with food? You eat it, John. You put it in your body and it sustains you, John.

Anyone ever been at a place when the FBI raided it? Guess what -- it's a big deal. In other words, get the H out of here. This is not kids stuff…this is not “ohh, the FBI was here today, it was fun, we had a cup of coffee and a donut and then they went home.” Uh-uh. This is for real.

Freud gets to heaven, St. Peter welcomes him. Says, “We’re so glad to see you here, you’ve come at just the right time. God is having delusions of grandeur.” Freud answered, “Why is that, what do you mean?”
St. Peter replied, “God thinks he’s a federal district court judge.”

If you’re an expert, don’t look like a whore. “Yeah, I’ll testify on whatever they want me to for some money.”