IRONCITY TEMPORARILY CLOSED

I am currently trying to bang out a seminar paper and deal with preparing for a couple final exams... and I am horribly behind schedule on all fronts at the moment.

Justice Scalia to college students: Get over it

Last week, the Washington Times reported on a speech about constitutional interpretation given by Justice Scalia to students at the University of Michigan. When an audience member began asking whether, given the chance, he would revisit his approach to Bush v. Gore, Scalia cut off the question and responded by saying, "I'm inclined to say it's been four years and an election. Get over it." The crowd quite appropriately responded to this with loud booing.

"Get over it" is not a very strong response to a legitimate question from the student. Though I don't agree with all of Bush v. Gore, I think the principles espoused by the Court in that case are a little more intelligent and better thought-out than "get over it."

And after the booing, Scalia went on to say "The issue is not whether the decision should have been decided in the Florida or U.S. Supreme Courts, but that the Constitution had been violated... the only decision was to put an end to it after three weeks and looking like fools to the rest of the world. It was too much of a mess."

What the hell?? I'm not one of those people who is still bitter about Florida 2000, but I am generally bitter about Antonin Scalia's 18 years on the court. And one of the hallmarks of his tenure on the Court is that he constantly reminds litigants and his fellow justices that the Court should not cater to outside influences or trends. Basically, he professes to not give a rat's ass about what Europe, Canada, or the rest of the world thinks. He's an American purist when it comes to legal matters.

So how on Earth did Scalia conjure up the balls to at least partially justify overruling the Florida Supreme Court based on "looking like fools to the rest of the world?"

Anyway, the whole episode was of no real consequence. Except for the awesome fact that Scalia got booed by the University of Michigan audience. Nice work Michigan... Go Blue!

this is fantastic

(new lead story from The Onion)

Post-brawl marketing of the NBA

Here's my suggestion for a new catch phrase for the league-

The NBA: At least we're not the NHL!
   Now stop whining, enjoy the fact that we even have a league,
   and strap on your helmet before taking your seat.

The Bus

Take a look at the top 12 on this list. There's one thing in common with pretty much everyone there except for Jerome Bettis. They made careers out of making defenders miss. On the other hand, Bettis made a career out of contact. Sure, he is strikingly nimble on his feet for a 260 pound man, but I think its also pretty safe to say that Bettis has been involved in more physical contact than any player in the history of American football (other than offensive and defensive linemen, of course).


Can you imagine trying to tackle this? Courtney Brown couldn't

And the guy is still going strong. During the last three weeks with starter Duce Staley injured, Bettis put his stamp on the Steelers season by carrying the ball an absurd 91 times for 381 yards during his fill-in stint. And to nobody's surprise, he did not fumble once. That's the most remarkable thing of all about Bettis-- despite the insane pounding he dishes out and takes, he fumbles less frequently than almost any back to ever play the game. And for the first nine years of his career, an eternity for a starting running back in the NFL, he was also injury proof.

When the time comes for his Hall of Fame induction, ESPN won't have a highlight reel full of 40 yard touchdown sprints or triple-juke escape maneuvers to show you. That's just not the Pittsburgh Steelers... Consistently blasting for four yards through defensive ends and defensive tackles is not pretty, but that's Jerome Bettis and smash-mouth football at its finest.


One fool-proof method: use half your defense to bring him down

In terms of numbers, this is about all that is left for him to accomplish:
  - 137 yards from being the fifth player in NFL history to crack 13,000
  - 228 yards from reaching 10,000 during his nine years in Pittsburgh
     (he ran for 3,091 with the Rams during his first three seasons)
  - 397 yards from passing Eric Dickerson, currently fourth
    on the all-time list
  - one 100-yard game from tying the Steelers record held by
    Franco Harris (Bettis has 57, including 46 as a Steeler)

Even if The Bus never starts another game and this turns out to be his final season, the first two milestones are likely to happen in the next six games. And even if he never plays another down or gains another yard, keeping the Steelers ship afloat over the past three weeks of this remarkable season will always be remembered in Pittsburgh.

wow

I hate to diss such a class act, but what's going on over at Talking Points Memo?? The dispatches there usually fall into one of two positive categories ("worth reading" and "must read"), but over the past few days, the guy has gone overboard covering these Tom DeLay shenanigans. Upon visiting a few minutes ago, I counted 10 straight posts about it and like 19 out of the past 20 at which point I just gave up on counting.

I'm not a fan of what went down within the GOP and I agree that its not something you want to allow them to sweep under the rug and forget about, but damn, Josh Marshall has really flipped! This isn't THAT big a story.

You'd think from reading TPM that if DeLay had not been protected by the GOP there was a chance that Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) was going to magically take over leadership of the House.

Or am I just missing the big picture? Is this actually a significant story?

To continue the sciency/astro theme of the week...

Tonight is the fifth anniversary of the great Leonid meteor storm of 1999 which Mary and I witnessed from Kibbutz Sde Nehemia. The Kibbutz was a few miles outside of Kiryat Shmona, up in that little northeastern nub of Israel sandwiched between Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Pretty much the middle of nowhere.

We had actually left the Kibbutz a week or two earlier to begin other travels, but after meeting up with a few Kibbutz friends down south, we decided to return with them for a reprise visit. We could not have been more blessed... dark skies, no clouds, and the exact spot on the planet which caught the full intensity of the biggest sky show of the past 38 years.

We set up our sleeping bags in an open field with a bunch of the volunteers and observed up to two meteors per second for minutes at a time, and over 60 per minute for an extended period. After a while, you could almost feel the planet zipping through space, a la the Star Wars light-speed special effect. Most of the folks passed out a few hours past midnight, but there was no way I could sleep. I waited until the approach of sunrise completely drowned out the meteors.

still grateful to this day to have caught that show

and I can't believe that was already five years ago

[This year's Leonids peak this week, however, there is little to watch for as the big cyclical version of the shower will not return until around 2032. The August Perseids and the December Geminids are the best annual showers, often providing a healthy meteor or two per minute during their peaks]

E-HUNTING?!?

I think the term "WTF?" may have been invented with this very concept in mind.

Do you really need to kill the actual animals?? Just go buy yourself a Nintendo (with the gun) and get yourself the Duck Hunt cartridge. Or Hogan's Alley if you're into shooting people.

AWESOME!


The aurora I watched from the right side of a November 7th
Dulles to Pittsburgh flight

This is an Air Force nighttime satellite image of the northeast. The Air Force satellites have low-light sensors capable of picking up nighttime phenomena such as aurora, city lights, and moonlight reflecting off clouds.

Based on how far into the flight we were that night, I estimated we were over Somerset County, PA when I spent a few minutes watching from a dark spot in the plane. There were wide green swaths all along the northern horizon up to about 30 or 40 degrees, a couple smaller distinct curtain-like formations with pulsation visible in center, and– also some diffuse red glow visible to north east.

The whole thing was pretty damn cool. I'm glad Independence Air began serving Pittsburgh this summer... this in-flight aurora viewing they've got on their flights is a pretty sweet perk. Those cheap bastards at USAir never offered Northern Lights shows to passengers in all the years that Pittsburgh was their hub.

The next time you have a tough day at work, think about this guy's bad day at the office

I recently stumbled upon this interview while searching for something completely different. Its a rare survivor's tale of one of the lowest moments in modern human history - the 1986 meltdown of Chernobyl No. 4 and the resulting release of as much as 400 times the radioactive contamination of the Hiroshima attack - told by a nuclear engineer on duty the night of the disaster.

Some of the details are surreal. For example, imagine walking outside your workplace at the end of the day and seeing a blue laser-like beam of light shooting out of the roof into the heavens... and knowing that watching it would kill you within in minutes thanks to the escape of deadly gamma rays.

And then later, the guy recounts how a few men were ordered to go back to the mangled reactor to manually insert the control rods. That they even tried seems like quite a show of courage and selflessness. My best guess is that doing this would be like pulling a Spock (from the end of Star Trek II).

Anyway, it's quite a story.

Screw renting DVDs, I need to rent an entire Blockbuster

I recently flipped through an issue of Rolling Stone and came upon an article about the year's best 25 DVDs. I then realized that I have only seen a handful of new movies since starting law school in 2002. And three of those were the Matrix 2 (eh), the Matrix 3 (terrible), and Alien vs. Predator (terrible). This sucks. I really miss being a film guy.

My personal must-see list has now mushroomed to an unmanageable size. I plan on knocking off as many as possible during this coming winter break, but as stated above, I almost need to rent the whole damn video store to accomplish anything at this point.

Just from the Rolling Stone 2004 list:
   Lord of the Rings I/II/III widescreen director's cuts
   Star Wars IV/V/VI widescreen director's cuts
   Spider Man 2
   Fahrenheit 9/11
   Garden State
   Dodgeball
   Kill Bill I/II

More from the past couple years:
   Mystic River
   Memento
   Bowling for Columbine
   Saved!
   A Mighty Wind
   Big Fish
   Star Trek Nemesis, just to maintain my full Trekkie standing

And some that have inexcusably been on my list for a long long time:
   A Clockwork Orange
   This is Spinal Tap
   Schindler's List
   Blazing Saddles
   The Paper Chase
   Citizen Kane
   Slacker

So that's 26 movies at an average of 2 hours a piece for a total of two full days. Something tells me I won't get beyond a fraction of that.

[revised 11-22-04]

THIS EAGLE HAS SOARED!


Our esteemed attorney general, rocking out on stage

Attorney General John Ashcroft, loved by all inside the beltway, announced his retirement today. When pressed for comment on the retirement, Ashcroft said "because I already single-handedly won the war on terror, it seems like the right time for me to step aside and concentrate on my music career."

We will truly miss ya Johnny boy!

One Year of Blogging

One year of Ironcity as of Saturday. I'm not sure what that means, but to quote Jerry Seinfeld, "that's something."

Mary and I are off to Maine this weekend to visit my grandparents and check out potential wedding sites. And the Eagles are off to Pittsburgh this weekend to visit the Steelers and get their butts kicked straight back to Philly.

Thoughts and Reflections on "Election Protection"

I wound up walking away from yesterday thinking the whole thing was very helpful despite early misgivings about the parties' willingness to lawyer-up in advance. At first, I assumed placing lawyers on the ground everywhere would result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, lawyers looking for a reason to get into court. I had volunteered only out of sense of loyalty to my party, no matter the strategy they wished to pursue.

However, with one glaring exception which I will address later, I saw a completely different picture during our election-eve training and on election day. A much more positive picture of Election Protection. I worked in Lawrence County, PA yesterday. The lightly populated but deeply divided county went for Bush by only 400 votes out of 43,000 cast. There were four of us that spent the day being dispatched to precincts all over the county from the local party HQ.

There was one major screw-up which we encountered right up front. Despite a ruling from the state Supreme Court a couple weeks ago affirming a lower court decision to remove Nader from the state ballot, Lawrence County's election officials distributed their paper ballots with Nader/Camejo still available. We first heard about this around 7:15am as Democratic voters began calling. I called the state DNC legal coordinating team who agreed with me that there was really nothing we could do at this point other than make sure someone is held accountable and does not have any part of future election administration in the state. Over the next 13 hours, I think we spent about 20% of our time just trying to calm down angry Democratic voters who were complaining about this issue.

In general, beyond just the Nader issue, calming both Kerry volunteers and voters was a major role for us rather than dealing with intentional fraud or intimidation. The media had whipped everyone into such a frenzy that it seemed like the general public was actually more blood-thirsty for action than the lawyers. Yes, there were some minor snafus at various sites, but these were mostly non-malicious technical violations which, at worst, were offending only the most sensitive of our voters or were creating longer lines which we wanted to alleviate.

Now back to the glaring exception I mentioned before. One of us four lawyers did have an itchy trigger finger. He was out in the field around 7:30am as we first caught wind of the Nader issue. Though I had been told by the DNC's state legal coordinating team over the phone that we should "stand down," this guy went straight to the courthouse and (futilely) sought some sort of injunction. Though I believe he was acting on the assumption that it was only one precinct rather than an unfixable county-wide problem, this does not excuse him for going off the deep end. Later on, when we heard a report that someone was improperly using a videocamera inside a polling place, he called the police to report a disturbance of the peace rather than taking a non-ridiculous route.

Ultimately, though, the process was a good one. County election officials and poll workers knowing of and fearing the presence of lawyers is a good thing. Everyone had their acts together. Assuming the parties can do a little better job of filtering out or discouraging lawyers with the go-in-with-all-guns-blazing attitude, I think everyone will come to regard the election protection efforts as integral to a healthy electoral process.

THE END IS NIGH

house and senate majorities increased for GOP...
Dems' Senate leader defeated within own state...
gay hate soars to new heights...
state governorships remain thoroughly republican...
Bush increases popular vote from 2000 by a significant 2 or 3%...
at least two swift boat veterans to be appointed to supreme court this term...

All I can say is to console myself is that at least Bush/Cheney went 0 for 6 in my three states during these past two elections.

BTW- Amazingly lost in all this Ohio nonsense is the fact that in the end (and not reported anywhere as far as I know), Kerry won PA by only 120,000 out of nearly 6 million votes cast, with plenty of provisionals/military ballots out there as well... actually closer than Bush's win in Ohio. The late-reporting conservative "T" zone of the state turned into an even larger than expected rally for Bush which almost made things really interesting here.

And BTW-2- What the fuck is up with PA going for four straight Democratic presidential candidates and five straight Republican senate candidates???