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The Representative elected from the district I live in said yesterday that some (unspecified, in the way of many slurs) Democrats are traitors and secretly hope that our soldiers are killed in battle. Yes, although not her exact words, that is the exact meaning of what she said.
Bid for Prewar Iraq Files Raises Political Heat – New York Times: Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, declared that some Democrats “do not want us to win in Iraq” for fear that it would give the administration a political victory.
Will no one serious come forward to rid us of this embarrassing incumbent? It would be an uphill race, but she is much more vulnerable and unpopular around here than she seems.
Previous relevant post: Who Will Run Against Ros-Lehtinen? (All Politics Is Local).
Thanks to Opinio Juris for providing a pointer to a new International Committee of the Red Cross statement. It announces the adoption of a Third Optional Protocol making a “Red Crystal” a symbol on par with the long-standing “Red Cross” and “Red Crescent”. In so doing it finally — after decades — makes it possible for an Israeli relief organizaiton to join.
About time.
Big news at White House Talk, in which my brother writes:
I’ve been wrestling with how to break this to my regular readers, but … my wife and I are expecting our first child within the next several weeks, and I will be taking a few weeks off when that happens.
(And yes, I had heard of this before I read it online.)
Lynn Nofsziger: “Conservatives are pleased with the president’s selectiion of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. For them Alito bit goes a long way.”
Several years ago, concerned about what was then a low bar pass rate (it has since improved quite a lot) the UM law school did a pretty comprehensive study in an attempt to identify which factors in our students’ legal education might be correlated with bar passage or failure.
As I recall, the data collected for the study failed to confirm almost every hypothesis to a statistically significant confidence interval except the fact that being right at the bottom of the class — having been on academic probation, and maybe graduating in the bottom 10% if I recall — was a very significant marker for likelihood of failing the bar. Everything else we could measure from transcripts (if I recall, and it was quite a while ago, we didn’t do a formal survey of bar study habits) failed to show a statistically significant effect on bar passage odds — not being in the top 10%, not taking particular courses, not taking particular professors or particular sections of ‘bar courses’.
We were left with anecdotal evidence, but I believed it: the people who showed up to bar review and who worked hard passed; the people who skipped bar review classes and/or didn’t study like fiends, were far more likely to fail. This was one of the reasons why, when the Deans asked us to, I agreed to toughen my class attendance policies: I decided it made sense to send the institutional message that an important part of life is just showing up.
Comes now this unfortunate reminder that without enough cramming anyone can fail the bar exam, even very very accomplished lawyers….even law Deans: WSJ.com – Raising the Bar: Even Top Lawyers Fail California Exam.
Jotwell Blenderlaw