Please reconcile the following

1) Candidate Obama in Dover New Hampshire pledging not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year:




2)  President Obama's brief filed last month defending the Constitutionality of his health care mandate:

"The practical operation of the minimum coverage provision is as a tax law," reads the administration's Supreme Court brief filed last month. "It is fully integrated into the tax system, will raise substantial revenue, and triggers only tax consequences for non-compliance."

3)  OMB Director Jeffery Zients this morning testifying before Congress that the mandate penalty for not purchasing health insurance does not constitute a tax:




Ok.  So let me get this straight.  Obama says he won't raise taxes, but he says he can impose the health care law under the power to raise taxes while his OMB Director says it isn't a tax.  Even though that is the Constitutional power which makes the Health care mandate legal.  But he isn't raising any one's taxes.  Huh?

Separated at birth?

Sargent Schultz: "I know nothing!"

Eric Holder when asked about Border Agent Brian Terry's death by a firearm supplied by Attorney General Holder's Justice Department:

"When you were informed about that within 24 hours, did anyone inform you or allude to the fact that the weapons found at the scene were from Fast and Furious?" Issa asked Holder.
"No," Holder replied. "I didn't know about Operation Fast and Furious until the beginning parts of 2011 after I received that letter from Senator Grassley, I guess at the end of January and then that was about Operation Gun Runner. I actually learned about the Fast and Furious operation in February of that year."

 

OK, enough is enough, this global warming crap has gone too far

I like Ben Stein.  I actually have a signed Ben Stein picture in my office (long ago birthday gift from Borepatch).  Maybe I like him because he is a lawyer, a conservative and has a good sense of humor (two out of three is hard enough to find and he is all three!).  He was a speech writer for Nixon and Ford.  And he shoulda won an Oscar for Ferris Bueller's Day off (Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?).  Ben Stein is not just a pretty face either.  He graduated with a degree in economics from Columbia and was valedictorian of his law school class at Yale.  Apparently he is also someone you do not screw with.  Ben has filed suit against Kyocera Corporation and the New York ad agency Seiter & Miller.  He has alleged, among other things, breach of contract, wrongful discharge and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.  It seems that Kyocera terminated the contract for him to be featured in an advertising campaign after they found out that he isn't sure that humans are responsible for climate change!  Ben is bright, but I think he should amend his pleading to add a civil rights claim.  Obviously they fired him for holding a different religious belief than they do because the definition of faith based belief systems is acceptance of scientifically unproveable hypotheses. 

Sometimes you have to tell your lawyer "no"

And I say that as a lawyer. Your attorney may have figured out a great path to victory, at least at trial. But sometimes winning can be a bad loss. Or maybe a really bad marketing fail. Take for example the case of Ball v. PepsiCo, et al.. It is alleged that poor Mr. Ronald Ball purchased a can of Mountain Dew. However, rather than refreshingly quenching his thirst, Mr. Ball alleges the following befell him:

"After purchasing said can of Mountain Dew, plaintiff opened the can and immediately became violently ill, such that he began to vomit," the suit claims.

The suit claims he poured the soda into a Styrofoam cup, "wherein the mouse was found."

But wait, the tale (pardon the pun) gets better. Rather than pay some hush money, PepsiCo hires some pit bull litigators who come up with a brilliant legal strategy. Gizmodo sums it up well:

Pepsi has moved to dismiss the case, according to the Madison St. Clair Record. Why, you ask? It cited expert testimony that the mouse would have dissolved in the soda before Ball ever had the chance to drink it.

Wait, so, is Pepsi's defense basically that you'd never know if there was a mouse in your soda? Kind of.

Pepsi's expert says the mouse would have become a "jelly like" substance long before Ball ever popped the top.

That's not mouse. It's just mouse jelly. Which also sounds delicious! Let's all drink a soda.

As I said, brilliant. PepsiCo can never be found liable for your drinking a soda with a mouse they packaged in a can because it would have dissolved to mouse gel by the time it got to you!

Archeologists find evidence of a 4,000 year old beer tab



Being a lawyer and a life long amateur historian, I was vaguely aware of the law code of Ur-Nammu. He was a Mesopotamian king about 4 millennia ago. His laws pre-dated the more famous Hamurabi's Code by three centuries. Well, recent discoveries have shown just how advanced that civilization was. They had a statute to deal with paying your bar tab:

[T]he fact that this is the earliest known edition [of the law code of Ur-Nammu] allows researchers to compare it with later copies and see how it evolved. For instance, the copy sheds light on one of the oddest rules governing what you should pay a "female tavern-keeper" who gives you a jar of beer.

Apparently, if you have the female keeper put the beer on your tab during the summer, she will have the right to extract a tax from you, of unknown amount, in winter.

"If a female tavern-keeper gives [in] summer one beer-jar to someone on credit its nigdiri-tax will be [...] in win[ter]..." (Translation by Miguel Civil)

No word yet if Borepatch's beer tab in ancient Mesopotamia was as much as he used to run up at Pat's Tap Room in college.

God I love the law



Better still, as a lawyer, I love wise ass clients.  So here is to the man formerly known as Rotem Guez.  It seems the former Mr. Gutez is an enterprising computer/internet engineer who lives in Israel.  He started an online business he called the "Like Store."  The idea was to enhance companies on-line reputations by offering free content when a Facebook user clicked on the "like" button.  But Facebook does not like anyone else to make money when they can, so they had their lawyers send a nastygram threatening to immediately bring suit if the then Mr. Gotem did not forthwith cease and desist his activities.  What did he do when faced with bevy of high priced lawyers backed by the mega-multi-colossal social networking monolith?  Cave?  Plead for mercy?  No way.  He legally changed his name to "Mark Zuckerberg" so Facebook will now have to bring suit against Mark Zuckerberg if they want to pursue the matter.

How about a little common sense in the defense of liberty?

Believe it or not, I consider myself not a conservative, but a libertarian.  I am not shy about expressing what I believe to be correct.  However, I will defend to the death the right of anyone to disagree.  My political philosophy has at its core the principle that everyone can express anything and we are all free to agree or disregard the thoughts expressed.  True evil, I believe, is when people seek to suppress differing thoughts from their own.  True stupidity is when we leave common sense out of any decision.  Those two basic postulates came together this week in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama.  Fortunately, free expression and common sense prevailed.

The children in grades K-2 at the G.W. Trenholm Primary School decided to put on a play entitled "The Reindeer Rebellion" for their Christmas Pageant.  As part of the production, the children were to sing the traditional carol Silent Night.  Then the school received a letter from an organization called the  Americans United for the Separation of Church and State demanding that the song be dropped.  They do not live in Tuscambia, or even Alabama.  They have no children in the G.W. Trenholm Primary School.  No one in Tuscambia complained about the song being in their play.  If the inclusion of the carol made one of the participants feel excluded, then I would have to consider how to best address the situation, including by perhaps, but not necessarily, cutting out Silent Night.  But near as I can tell, the sole reason for the group's existence is to try to bully people from saying "Merry Christmas" or printing "In God We Trust" on currency.  If you do not like hearing Silent Night, then don't go to the pageant, but let other people say (or sing) whatever they want--especially if it is part of a LONG accepted holiday tradition.  As I said, fortunately common sense prevailed and the school told the interlopers to go screw (more nicely than I put it, I assume).  The tough choice facing the school administrators was undoubtedly not whether the complainants were morally or legally correct, but whether the school district could afford the costs of doing what is right instead of capitulating in order to preserve precious school resources for the actual education of their students.  Thankfully, the good people at the Alliance Defense Fund came to the rescue and offered to provide free legal counsel to the school in defense of the ridiculous complaint.  I am not admitted to the Alabama bar, but please let me know if I can be of any help.

Corzine shows up at the House hearing, cameras roll ... and he gets served!

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...



I do not know who served him while the cameras were rolling, but that was great!

We've all heard "the butler did it" as an explanation



But an Owl!?  Really?  The answer is yes.  Or at least maybe.  Best selling author Michael Petersen was just granted a new trial for the murder of his wife.  He was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife in 2001 by pushing her down the stairs in their family home.  The prosecution's theory was that his wife, Kathleen, was angry with Michael because of alleged homosexual activity.  He hit her on the head and pushed her down the stairs.  At trial, Michael's defense was that she had a 0.7 blood alcohol and had taken a Valium.  The end result was a conviction.

In 2009 two things happened.  A new and novel theory emerged of the cause of death and evidence of prosecutorial misconduct arose.  It turned out that microscopic owl feathers and a sliver of wood were found during the forensic examination by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation of a clump of Kathleen's hair that was found clutched in her hand.  Plus, the SBI apparently thought the blood splatters were going up the stairs and not down as would have been the case had she been pushed from the top.  A 2008 re-examination of the forensic evidence found more feathers, which were of the type that cover the claw of an owl, and slivers of cedar needles in the skin of her knee--both of which would be consistent with an attack from an owl and an ensuing fall outside.  Finally, the defense had a scientist at the Smithsonian look at the cuts to Kathleen's scalp.  The ones the prosecution said were evidence of Michael's attack while throwing her down the stairs.  The expert found that the scalp wounds were tri-lobed and paired consistent with marks left by talons.  Did I mention that the SBI found Kathleen's footprints in her own blood at the base of the stairs (meaning she could not have died after being thrown down unless she arose from the dead only to lie back down again in a sprawl) and the blood drops outside the house?  Apparently, the prosecution forgot to mention those facts also.  Oh, and there was one more thing that may have been in the back of the judge's mind when he granted the motion for a new trial.  The lead prosecutor on the case?  Michael Nifong, the disgraced, disbarred and sentenced to jail former prosecutor of the Duke Lacrosse case who made up or omitted a lot of facts so he could get a high profile conviction at election time.