"See How We Are" - X
- Here's a scary story about the "due process" required to execute someone in Alabama -- a place where appointed counsel got $1,000 to represent Corey Maples in a capital murder case. That's about what I would charge to research and write a memo that would require four or five hours time -- and my rates are about 30% of what the DC federal court will award as attorneys' fees in cases. Even worse, this poor bastard thought he he had gotten a lucky break when a couple of associates from big ass NYC firm Sullivan & Cromwell took his appeal. Those two attorneys subsequently left the firm and failed to keep track of what went on with the case, Alabama counsel inexplicably ignored deadlines, and no one at S&C bothered to notice the communications sent to the firm addressed to the former associates. As a result of this extraordinary neglect, Maples is possibly going to be executed without having a single federal court review his case. [This kind of thing really pisses me off -- my own firm, which has never numbered more than 31 lawyers, took a death penalty habeas case and ran with it for ten years -- racking up over $1 million in attorney time (at our very low rates) and going out of pocket over $100,000 for depositions, experts, etc., before finally prevailing in front of the Supreme Court. Sullivan & Cromwell should have their asses sued off over this and the bright young things who took the case should be disciplined by the bar.]
I'm sure Ross Douthat would tell me not to sweat it.
- One of the things that I find continually amazing about right wing academics who blog -- see e.g. Victor Davis Hanson, Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, is the sloppy writing and thinking that characterizes their work, their comfort with racist and sexist tropes, and the degree to which their politics are informed -- if one can use that term -- largely by visceral, culture war resentments, rather than serious discussions of policy. Read Roy's latest take down of the insufferably pompous Hanson -- and the comments of course. I particularly enjoyed Hanson's put down of his students from 1985 who he claims had no aspirations higher than to work for the state -- an evidently disgraceful lack of ambition. Leveled, of course, by a guy who taught for many years at Cal State Fresno. Reynolds and Althouse, too, are tenured professors at law schools at state universities. An appreciation for irony has never been the strong suit of the right wing sensibility. (No one seems to have informed Hanson that welfare reform was passed more than 15 years ago in this country -- those "welfare queens" of yesteryear get a maximum of 60 months of exceedingly modest benefits. As of 2010, there were barely more than 4 million Americans receiving TANF. The notion that our taxes are supporting a vast army of welfare recipients living the good life is a cruel and laughable fantasy -- and racist to the hilt.)
- Speaking of which, Douthat is dismayed at the failure of any of the exemplars of "right wing populism" to make a compelling case to the Republican electorate thus far. Douthat seems to miss the fact that there really is no such thing as right wing populism in policy terms -- well, at least among this crowd. There is not a leading Republican out there who is interested in curbing the corporate power for the benefit of ordinary people. As has long been the case, right wing populism consists of appealing to people's resentments and prejudices, not offering economic policies that would help the average person. Token demagoguery about "crony capitalism" -- with no plan but to continue embracing it -- does not populism make.
- I don't think he realizes it, but Thomas Friedman offers us a description of a dystopia for most Americans looming out there.
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