Ariel Gore on how killing your television will make you happier

Ariel Gore is a feminist journalist and author whose books I've enjoyed for years. The daughter of hippies, she was once warned by her mother, "Commercialism is a vacuum. It will suck you in." Now three sociological and psychological research studies in the past five years are showing just what her mom knew way back in the 1970s: there's causation, not just coincidence, when a person says that they're happy, and that they also tend not to watch much TV. Ariel's advice:

And so, may I suggest, just as an experiment, just as a quick study in living: Kill your television.

You don't have to go smash it in the street. This is just an experiment, after all. Do what my mother used to do--just hide it in the garage.

Leave it out there for two weeks.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: It's the last Center City Drinking Liberally of 2009. The frightfully cold, windy weather has driven one of the co-hosts away for a week's vacation in the tropics. It's driven one of the regulars to Kazakhstan, where it's probably warmer. Though we won't be making anybody sing "Auld Lang Syne" tonight, let's get together to kick 2009 out the door and welcome in 2010. What do you say?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Christmas extended until late afternoon on the 27th

My holidays are being protracted under family obligation circumstances beyond my control.

Luckily, I laid in a store of Scotch on the 24th.

Happy merry

"There are amazing things claimed about Mithras . . ."



Happy birthday, Mithras!

Friday jukebox: Bruce Springsteen

I'm a sucker for this song:



I love the "olden days" views of Philadelphia, where you could touch the Liberty Bell (without risking being shot) and run back and forth across Chestnut Street between 5th and 6th to see Independence Hall (without risking being shot).

Meet Me in St. Louis is the only Christmas movie you ever need to see

And you only ever need to see the following 2:29 of it:

Quote of the season

"Saying that there's a war on Christmas because some people don't spontaneously wish you a merry one is like saying there's a war on your dick because some people won't suck it." -- Arthur Hlavaty

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Are the holidays over yet?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

NPR poster child Garrison Keillor hates gays with kids, Jews who write Christmas songs

Garrison Keillor, thrice-married and with two children by two different wives, back in 2007 on why gays shouldn't be parents:

Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents -- Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck -- and need a program to keep track of the actors.

Garrison Keillor in 2009 on why Jews shouldn't write Christmas songs, like "White Christmas," "Winter Wonderland," "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "Silver Bells," etc.:

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t. Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

I'm not sure where Jesus said that. Is that sentiment part of the whole "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" thing (Matt. 10:34)?

Why does anyone listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" any more? I never did understand why Robert Altman made a movie about it -- what a waste and a tarnish to a brilliant body of work.

Amanda Palmer on why Lady Gaga is great

Attention, Brendan! Amanda Palmer explains it all for you: Lady Gaga is one of the canniest and best pop music entertainers out there, in a tradition that Madonna trailblazed in the early 1980s.

Note from the bunker during an early season snowstorm

Snow continues to fall and is predicted to let up only sometime after midnight.

I have bourbon.

I have brownies baking in the oven.

The cat is staring at me a little too intently and is purring a little aggressively.

Did I mention I have bourbon? And a bottle of wine that was supposed to be a Christmas gift for someone. There are a few more shopping days left if I find I need to replace it.

A blow to patent troll forum shoppers everywhere

The Eastern District of Texas is famously -- er, at least in patent litigation circles -- a "rocket docket" with a judge experienced in dealing with patent cases. This is good for patent plaintiff litigators, because the discovery process is expedited: "Gimme all yer documents now! The Markham hearing is next week, and trial starts next month." Further, the parties don't have to educate the judge on patent caselaw, where there are very specific issues that come up, over and over again, and which the Federal Circuit exclusively addresses. It's a plaintiff-friendly courtroom environment with a jury pool that has a reputation for being sympathetic to patent infringement "victims" whose ideas and hard work have been "stolen."

So you get infringement cases with plaintiffs, especially patent troll plaintiffs, that have pretty much no connection with the Eastern District of Texas trying to find some way, any way to get the case tried there. Until this month, when Nintendo won a mandamus order (PDF) for its lawsuit to be transfered to where it belongs, namely its home venue of the Western District of Washington:

Nintendo [. . .] asked the [Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit] to transfer the case from the Eastern District of Texas to the Western District of Washington, arguing that the dispute had no meaningful connection to Texas. Nintendo is a Japanese company with a Redmond, Wash.-based affilate; [plaintiff] Motiva is an Ohio company; none of the primary witnesses had any connection to Texas, and no evidence was located there, Nintendo maintained. Motiva countered that Nintenda [sic] had not met its burden of proving that another venue would clearly be more convenient. The sale of Wii prodcuts [sic] in Texas was sufficient to give the court jurisdiction over the case, Motiva argued. In June, federal district court judge Leonard Davis sided with Motiva and denied Nintendo's request.

This is the standard argument for forum-shopping in a patent infringement case. "But, judge! They sell their product here! Thus, they should reasonably expect to be haled into court here!" This gets you a couple of points on your patent litigation exam; it's apparently enough for Judge Davis; but the Federal Circuit is tired of it:

In its mandamus order, the Federal Circuit panel found that Judge Davis "clearly abused his discretion" for refusing to transfer the Nintendo case, explaining that "this case features a stark contrast in relevance, convenience, and fairness between the two venues [as n]o parties, witnesses, or evidence have any material connection to the venue chosen by the plaintiff." The court pointedly noted that for similar reasons it had also ordered the transfer of cases brought against TS Tech, Genentech, and Hoffmann-La Roche out of the Eastern District of Texas.

The question now is whether Motiva will file a petition for rehearing before a full panel of the Federal Circuit, and then, if they get the same result, whether they'll pursue taking it to the Supreme Court. If it does go all the way, will SCOTUS slap down the Federal Circuit yet again, as it's done so many times in the past few years?

And when are we gonna get an answer on Bilski, anyway?

On the ABA's "Legal Rebels" thing

Will someone please explain to me the theory behind how the legal profession will be improved by lawyers buying merchandise that has "LEGAL REBEL" printed on it?

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: The Flyers, the Sixers, and the Phils (for trading Cliff Lee after his Game 1 of the 2009 World Series): three reasons why the stadium area at Broad and Pattison is called Philadelphia's sports complex.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Monday art house: "MacBeth - a comedie, Act I"

Ish Klein and Erik Ransom in an EvilolivE 3000 production:

South Philly High's principal: not good enough for New Jersey schools

LaGreta Brown, principal of South Philadelphia High School, was recruited for the Philadelphia School District even though her faculty at Atlantic City High School gave her a no-confidence vote when she was principal there. Furthermore:

The New Jersey State attorney general’s office also once tried to strip her of her administrative license after allegations that she had endangered children by ordering the fire alarm system of Atlantic City High School to be dismantled during a trash-can fire. The charges, however, were dismissed by the NJ Department of Education in 2007 after an investigation [PDF].

After the “no-confidence” vote, Brown was later transferred to lead an alternative high school. She was then sent to an elementary school in the district.

An article in the Press of Atlantic City on Nov. 4, 2006 said that the “no confidence” vote came after allegations that she "mistreated students and staff."

The Philadelphia Public School Notebook blog continues with an explanation of why Brown was considered unfit to lead a high school:

In 2000, shortly after she became the first female principal of Atlantic City High, a warrant was issued when she failed to appear in court for a harassment suit from a former cafeteria worker. In 2002 [ ... ] the city fire department found 63 fire violations in the building, with two counts of falsifying fire reports "that lead directly back to Brown," according to the Press. And a teacher who accused her of harassment after she denied him a day off to observe Passover resigned after he realized she would not be reprimanded.

Brown was suspended with pay in 2007 from her position at the New York Avenue school for unspecified charges of "insubordination."

The article paints a portrait of an autocrat with demonstrated insensitivity to cultural diversity and little respect for the courts. And yet the Philly public schools actively sought her out to lead South Philadelphia High School. Since giving lip service to Asian immigrant students before the school year began, she has "failed to meet with the Asian community groups" that she promised she would work with and has not had the courtesy or basic professionalism to return their phone calls.

Why the Philadelphia schools thought that someone who was barely fit to run an elementary school in Jersey should lead a troubled urban high school of over 1400 teenagers is beyond me.

The complaints from South Philly High's Asian students

Via Helen Gym at Young Philly Politics:

South Philadelphia High School is not a safe place for us.

We are targeted because we are Asian immigrants. Every day we face taunts and violence. It hurts when we are attacked by other students. It hurts more when school staff ignore, deny, or cover up the racial attacks against us.

For the last three days we have chosen to boycott our school in order to get a real education about how to ensure our safety. This is what we have found.

On Thursday, attacks against us happened throughout the day both inside and outside of school. Adults in the school are supposed to care for us and to make us safe. Instead this is what happened. School staff:

Allowed large groups of 15-20 students to wander through the building for over four hours. These students were reported to be looking into classrooms for targets of their attacks;

Overrode one security guard’s efforts to keep a large group of students from the second floor where they did not have classes and purposefully allowed them to go running through the halls;

Ignored Asian students’ fears about going to the lunchroom following these clear signs of trouble in the building;

Forced Asian students to follow a security guard to the lunchroom where they were attacked and beaten by a crowd of students in front of several adult staff;

Failed to call all the parents of injured students for several hours after the attacks;

Refused to allow some Asian students who were seeking shelter and safety in the school at the end of the school day to stay at the school, until community advocates called 911 and arrived on the scene;

Forced Asian students who had been assaulted to leave the school building even though they were hurt and frightened;

Discounted Asian students’ fears of walking home and to their transit stops;

Directed Asian students into the streets where crowds of students had gathered and where immediately afterward they were assaulted;

Neglected to call the students and families who were victimized by the attacks to either check on their well-being or to get a full report of what happened to them;

Failed to conduct a full investigation of what happened;

Downplayed the seriousness of the attacks until they were reported in the media;

Disregarded students’ and families’ fears and recklessly called on students to return to school before even investigating what happened on Thursday; and

Refused to accept responsibility for the mistakes of school staff and administration on that day and placed all the blame on the student attackers.

Most of the students at South Philadelphia High School – Asian, African American, Latino and white – are just like us. They are trying to get an education in a school where they do not feel safe or respected. We are calling on the adults in the school and in the School District to take responsibility for the unsafe environment of South Philadelphia High School that makes it hard for all of us to learn there.

I see knee-jerk black-against-Asian racism around town on a nearly daily basis. It's a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to Philadelphia race relations, I think. Arlene Ackerman, Ed.D., the CEO of the Philadelphia public schools, is quoted in the article there as saying, "In our rush to sensationalize this latest incident, let us not as adults criminalize or victimize any racial group of students with a stroke of the pen or careless words of blame and fingerpointing." With this comment, at best she's deliberately ignoring the racial foundation of the problem. (As a community member testified: "It is a racial issue not because of the race of the attackers. It is a racial issue because students were targeted for attack because they are Asian. Throughout an entire school day, Asian students were randomly attacked, and school staff failed to protect them.") Or, worse, Ackerman is denying the reality of the experiences that the Asian immigrant students at South Philadelphia High School have had, with the excuse that the incidents haven't been reported. But she can hardly claim plausible deniability when the victimized kids point out that the school's safety manager has systematically refused to file incident reports for the express purpose of minimizing the number of incidents recorded.

Where does the buck stop? Ackerman wants it made clear that it's not her fault, because she never heard about the problems. The school is saying that it's not their fault, because the "attacks" are mere roughhousing and the Asian kids are making a mountain out of a molehill, and anyway the Asian kids started it.

Got that? All the adults are blaming the children. The school and district leadership are refusing to own their failures, and instead they're alternatively blaming the victims and denying the truth of their experiences. When a parent does that to a kid, you end up with an adult who had a lousy model for parenting and will have some issues to overcome when they have their own kids. When a school does that to a community, you end up with a whole city of adults who perpetuate the violence, racism, and dysfunctional inter-racial relations that it taught them as children.

Men I've dated, part n in a series

One evening after I'd put my daughter to bed, I was dumped by phone. When the call came in, I recognized the name on the phone's display, and after I'd answered with my usual cheery greeting, I heard:

"Well, I'm calling because I'm breaking up with you."

It was an interesting phrase from someone who'd never called me his girlfriend to begin with.

I'd been warned that he was a serial dater and a commitment-phobe. He's lived in the same bachelor pad for over a decade and, though he's had steady, highly remunerative employment since he finished university, he has procrastinated buying a home. He talks often about buying a condo near his workplace. Now, condos are great. I've lived in three of them, and I like not having to be personally responsible for, e.g., roof repairs. But a condo is admittedly often a stepping-stone to "real" home ownership of an actual house, with a lawn and a tree or two and a driveway -- in other words, a way to avoid commitment to "real" home ownership. And he was putting off making a decision to even buy a condo, in the face of the first-time homebuyer stimulus incentive, too. Though far be it from me to try to force upon others my own boring bourgeois values. In any event, between the home-buying delay, his reluctance to have sex with me in the previous week, and the content of a few "how's our relationship going" conversations, I had already been expecting the phone call for a couple of days before the phone finally rang.

Several months ago, he decided to get rid of his things. He wanted to live more lightly and not be encumbered by so much stuff, he told me. So he got rid of books, clothes, CDs, videos and DVDs, kitchenware, boardgames, linens, and so on. Because he'd rid himself of his kitchenware, he used plastic plates and Solo cups. He had a few coffee mugs and a brandy snifter upended in the kitchen sink. The fridge held an assortment of 2-liter bottles of soda. The cabinets held some packages of disposable plates. The dining table served as a liquor cabinet.

When a practicing Zen Buddhist friend of mine simplified her life a dozen years ago, she also got rid of a lot of her kitchenware. She kept a single bowl, a plate, a set of flatware, a coffee mug (and her moka pot), and a stripped-down assortment of cooking essentials. Far be it from me to question a person's motivation, but dare I say that my Buddhist friend went about her lifestyle simplification process with a little more meaning and purpose than this guy did?

Unfortunately for a commitment-phobe, we started dating just before the end-of-year holidays. My family Thanksgiving was slated to be a brunch affair, because my sibling had numerous commitments with her spouse's relations; and since my nuclear family is small I invited him along. He reciprocated by taking me to his family Thanksgiving later in the day. What I thought was a fun and highly entertaining way to meet new people, he interpreted as "moving too fast."

Toward what? I don't really know. I have no intention to leave my home and share my living space with another adult any time soon. I haven't been drafting a pre-nup for myself nor adoption papers for my daughter. I wasn't putting together a trousseau in a hope chest. It is true that I usually go from 0 to 60 very quickly in a relationship. But generally I don't have a destination in mind, and I'd told him so a few days before the phone call.

He could only repeat that we were moving too fast. He asked me if I had anything to say, and I said no. Clearly, I told him, he had some impression of what I was doing in the relationship that didn't jibe with what he wanted in the relationship, but I wasn't going to be able to change his mind.

The last morning that we were together, I went to his (nearly empty) clothes closet and hid the blouse I'd worn the previous night to a party, in among his work shirts. Maybe what I'd intended as a joke came across to him as some kind of hint that we should buy a house together. Perhaps it was the last straw for him. Or perhaps it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

The question I'm left with though is, "Why now?" And I don't mean in the sense of sentimentality about the holidays; I mean in a very practical sense. I'll have a ton of free time between Christmas and New Year's, and he's got a ton of vacation time set aside for the second half of the month. Why kick your girlfriend to the curb now, rather than enjoying all that free time together? Would he really, truly rather sit at home and twiddle his thumbs, or go see a bunch of movies on his own, or hang out only with his guy friends? Put frankly, the sex was very good. The conversation was intelligent on both sides. We're both morning people. I liked his jokes, his stories, and his family. And the sex was very good.

Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted. And I didn't want to go to his New Year's Eve party anyway.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery -- this week at the platform bar downstairs -- where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Asian-American students are boycotting South Philadelphia High School this week because school officials have failed to address black-on-Asian violence there for literally years. "Officials" includes staff and administration at the school as well as police, the regional superintendent of Philly public schools, and the district's chief safety executive, leading the attacked kids to seriously consider pursuing self-help. Because, clearly, what the Philadelphia public schools need right now is an all-out race war. But far be it from me to suggest that superintendent Dr. Arlene Ackerman is insensitive to the problems of students of color: regarding Philadelphia's "persistently dangerous" schools, she's aware of and concerned by the “'gray areas' relating to incident reporting." Really? When 26 Asian-American kids are attacked in a single day at a single high school and all the newspapers cover it, that's a "gray area"?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Unintentionally obscene evangelist quote of the day

A high-school friend of mine posted this quote, which he attributes to Nancy Ortberg, on his Facebook page today:

Jesus is like a Warhead candy. For those of you not familiar with Warheads, think of them as SweeTarts on steroids. The moment you place a Warhead in your mouth, your whole body responds, forcing you to decide if you can take the intensity or spit it out.

Just, wow.

CDC's abortion surveillance 2006 report released

A couple of weeks ago, the CDC released its report on U.S. abortion statistics for 2006.

In that year, as reported to the CDC, about as many women as the entire population of the state of Delaware (i.e., about 850,000) voluntarily terminated a pregnancy in the United States. (That's a lot of murder prosecutions!) Assuming all U.S. residents -- and the figure is reported abortions performed in the U.S., not reported American women obtaining abortions -- that comes to about 16 women age 15 to 44 per 1,000, or about 2 women in every 300. Women under 20 and minor women accounted for about 1/8 of all abortions. The vast majority of abortions (over 60%) were performed at or before 8 weeks' gestation.

The summary page includes a discussion of methodology and links to over 20 tables of organized data. My friend Amie Newman has drawn out and explained some of the more interesting facts and figures. And she concludes her post at RH Reality Check with a reminder about the real goal of Crisis Pregnancy Centers and other anti-choice organizations:

Crisis Pregnancy Centers, most often created and run as an outreach arm of a faith-based, anti-choice organization, do not provide medical care and so do not provide family planning or contraception services to pregnant clients. Instead, they repeat falsities and lies claiming that birth control methods like the pill or emergency contraception (Plan B) cause abortions.

If there is anything we can take from reports like these it is that an increased focus on ensuring that all women in this country have access to the education and tools necessary to prevent unintended pregnancy should be accessible health care for all women of reproductive health age.

Is David Sirota freaking kidding me?

David Sirota asks a series of less-than-thoughtful "simple" questions about President Obama's plan for dealing with Afghanistan. I don't agree with Sirota's characterization of Obama's plan as a "massive escalation," so I have a few questions for Sirota myself.

One, the President has set an 18-month deadline for re-evaluating what's going on, though granted it's not a timeline for complete withdrawal. How is this a "massive escalation"?

Two, what would Sirota have the administration do? Withdraw our forces completely right away without doing something to stabilize the land mass between Iran and Pakistan? Why does Sirota like acid thrown in schoolgirls' faces so much?

And three, regarding his "Where's the antiwar movement" complaint, there was a protest at Philadelphia City Hall yesterday afternoon, which some friends of mine attended. Sirota lives in Denver, I think, so of course he wouldn't have known about it. But there are protests planned for Denver and Colorado Springs. They're small, to be sure, but it's pretty lame of Sirota to try to make his point by denying their existence -- he'd get better mileage out of the situation by decrying how few people are protesting despite the toll of the Afghanistan war on the soldiers at Fort Carson. Or if he's genuinely disappointed at the lack of a sizeable antiwar protest, then why isn't he organizing and attending one?

I don't envy the President's position. I don't know what I'd do if Afghanistan were thrown in my lap, but I don't think Sirota's questions are particularly thoughtful. I think it's staggeringly naïve to imply that it's in our nation's best interests to quit Afghanistan and leave the country in the hands of militants, terrorists, grifters, grafters, and acid-throwing, eschatological Dark Ages religionists -- with a nuclearizing state to the west and a fully nuclear state to the east. Is Sirota freaking kidding me?

And I'm a pacifist! It's all nice and liberal and sweet to complain about how we can't bring peace to Afghanistan, but that's begging the question that bringing peace to Afghanistan is President Obama's goal. At this point, he should probably settle for helping establish a stable government that, if it does get its hands on nuclear weapons, won't use them to blow away the infidels across the way in Europe, invade Pakistan on the one side, go after Iran's oil fields on the other (does Iran need to be given a legitimate reason to expand its nuclear capabilities?), and exact some long-festering revenge on the ex-Soviets to boot. In the face of these real geopolitical questions, Sirota's "simple" questions are just that: simple and naïve.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Don't forget your SEPTA November pass refund! You can trade in your weekly pass from the week of the strike for a full refund, or you can get $20 off your December monthly pass. Discounts are not available if your card was punched for a regional rail trip.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Day late, dollar short on "Men I've dated"

I'm overdue for another "Men I've dated" post, I know. I've got one cooking about a performance artist who pays the bills by working for a moving company, but it'll be a few more days.

Paying work has come up. As well as laundry and housework. I need a wife!

Systematic cover-up of clergy child sex abuse acknowledged in Ireland

On the first day of the American Christmas season, a news item out of Ireland, where a commission was commissioned in 2006 to investigate how and when the Catholic Church and the Irish government ignored, covered up, and thus facilitated child sex abuse by the clergy from 1975 to 2004. The commission has published its findings:

The Commission of Investigation into Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese has concluded that there is “no doubt” that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the archdiocese and other Church authorities.

[ ... ]

In its report, published this afternoon, it has also found that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.”

It also found that “the State authorities facilitated the cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.”

Over the period within its remit “the welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered in the early stages,” it said.

“Instead the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important members – the priests,” it said.

The report concludes that the Irish national police force systematically allowed the abuse to continue for decades, in a sort of public-private partnership for the protection of pedophiles:

“The relationship between some senior gardaí and some priests and bishops was also inappropriate,” [the report] said. “A number of very senior members of the gardaí, including the Commissioner in 1960, clearly regarded priests as outside their remit. There are some examples of gardaí actually reporting complaints to the Archdiocese instead of investigating them.”

Dig that. That's theocracy in action: the police reporting to the church rather than putting suspected criminals into the justice system. (The Garda has apologized for its complete abdication of responsibility in the matter.)

The government's statement (full text) is a good start and a profound victory for generations of victims of clergy sex abuse. But sadly, it's only in my dreams and in better blogs where the church is called out as an international pedophile ring.

We're gonna need some bigger prisons

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and Chris Matthews said it for me yesterday: if you seek to outlaw abortion because you consider abortion murder, then you gotta be willing to put a lot of people in prison. If abortion is murder, then you have a whole new class of murderers and accomplices to murder -- the women, their doctors, the healthcare support staff, the people who help women get to and from the abortion facility, and the people who help women pay for their abortions:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

About 1/3 of American women get abortions during their childbearing years. If abortions are outlawed, then that's a lot of women to put in jail. If abortion is murder, and if the appropriate punishment for murder is life imprisonment (or execution), then what is the appropriate punishment for a woman who has an abortion?

Another implication: some 3/4 of all women who are trying to conceive will spontaneously miscarry a pregnancy. If abortions are outlawed, then every miscarriage will have to be criminally investigated to eliminate the possibility that the pregnancy was intentionally terminated.

Any intellectually honest discussion of outlawing or restricting abortion must address these questions.

"Sarah Palin Parking Lot"

A camera operator and a man with a microphone interview people in a Border's bookstore parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, and asks questions from Sarah Palin supporters:



From New Left Media.

(What the title of this post refers to.)

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: A Canadian real estate company recently bought the Pontiac Silverdome for USD 583,000 in a no-minimum-bid auction. How much value has your home lost in the past few years?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Monday art house: Joe Boruchow

Joe Boruchow is a Philadelphia artist and musician (auto music) whose show "Public Service" is on display at the Bean Café, 615 South Street:


Boruchow's work is paper cut-outs. It's like Pennsylvania Dutch "Scherenschnitte," only seriously urban, modern, and worldly, often erotic or radically political. Over the years he's gotten more skilled and the pieces have become so much more intricate and detailed that it's hard to believe they're made from a single piece of paper.

He frequently makes photocopies of his work and posts it on poles and walls around town, especially around South Street, Old City, and Northern Liberties, carrying the copies in a R.E.Load bag embroidered with one of his own images. Maybe you've seen him.

On trying to find people without paying for a real search

There's a special circle in hell reserved for high-school friends of mine who keep themselves under the Google radar.

Damn you, old friends with un-Google-ably common names! And apparently uninterested in Facebook! And professionally successful enough to eschew LinkedIn! How can I possibly plan a trip to Florida between Christmas and New Years if I can't look you up properly?!

Not to mention the women who intolerably changed their names after getting married to men they started dating after we lost touch.

Hockey changes without me, even though I don't watch TV any more

In 2008, CTV bought the rights "in perpetuity" to Canada's other national anthem, the old Hockey Night in Canada theme. Which makes it no longer the theme to HNIC, which is a CBC program[me]. Instead, CTV has been using it during its NHL broadcasts for the past year.

I would have blogged about this change earlier if I were still living in a media market where the cable TV provider carried a CBC station. (I got so, so spoiled when we lived in Seattle; they carried CBUT-TV out of Vancouver as if it were a local station. Oh, man. Six hours of hockey makes a rainy winter afternoon and evening in the Pacific Northwest almost bearable.) As it is, it went completely under my radar that HNIC's theme had changed, and I didn't even know it until I saw today that Neil Peart of Rush will be recording a new version of the theme for CTV.

But as for HNIC, it must feel weird to have new music precede Don Cherry's antics outfits on Saturday nights. Will school bands play (skip to 1:15) the new theme in their symphonic concerts? Can people use it to teach themselves guitar (equal time: Canadiens version) and Mario Paint?

At least HNIC's opening titles still include Foster Hewitt's "Hello, Canada, and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland."

Official video of the Drexel Shaft implosion

Multiple "look what we didn't take down" views of the Drexel Shaft implosion on Sunday:



CDI had to avoid a parking lot, a rail bridge, and several converging rail lines when they brought down the Penn Coach Yard chimney. In the end, to bring down a building and make it land in a precise way, it's all about doing the math -- but what math.

"New Yorkers are generally unafraid of putting swarthy-looking terrorists on trial in their courts"

BooMan takes on "conservative cowards" and explains why why KSM and the other Gitmo detainees should be tried in S.D.N.Y.:

[Conservatives] want to fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here. Why be afraid to fight terrorists wherever they might arise? After putting New Yorkers at increased risk of retribution by attacking and occupying a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the conservatives feign concern for the safety of New Yorkers when they try to put the real culprits on trial. It is beyond insulting.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Did you send a coathanger to the anti-choice Democrats in Congress yet?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Monday art house: "Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No"

For years after pitching a no-hitter in 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis swore up and down that he'd been "high as a Georgia pine" on LSD and bennies during the game. Filmmaker James Blagden has put together 4:30 of animated video and sound effects to accompany an interview recorded for American Public Media:



"One time I covered first base, and I caught the ball and I tagged the base, all in one motion. I said, 'Ooh, I just made a touchdown!'"

But seriously, folks:

It was easier to pitch with the LSD, because I was so used to medicating myself. That's the way I was dealing with the fear of failure: the fear of losing, the fear of winning. It's just that it was part of the game, you know? You get to the major leagues, and you say, 'I got to stay here, what do I need?'"

A substance abuse counselor after leaving baseball ("I hope to make these young players aware of the stress involved in being a professional baseball player and drive home the point that drug and alcohol abuse is not the way to relieve that stress"), Ellis died in 2008 of irreversible liver disease.

An early fact-checking of the Palin book

The AP purchases and fact-checks "Sarah Palin's" memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, so you don't have to. One check:

PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and "showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all."

THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.

And another:

PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

I simply must figure out how to lead a life where I can continually speak in bald-faced lies -- get them printed, even, in actual books from otherwise respectable publishers -- and not face any real consequences.

Judge Andre Davis confirmed for 4th Circuit Court of Appeals

Back in July '08, I blogged about a case before Judge Davis, then at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Re-nominated back in April for elevation to the 4th Circuit, he was confirmed by the Senate, 72-16, on the 9th.

There are 15 positions on the 4th Circuit, which comprises the federal district courts of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina; but only 11 positions are filled. While the Senate has notoriously stalled on 4th Circuit nominees for the past dozen years -- both Clinton's and G.W. Bush's nominees -- defendants have been waiting and waiting for their appeals to be decided, and victims have been waiting and waiting to see justice done in their cases. Judge Davis, for example, was originally nominated by Clinton 9 years ago, but the nomination expired with no action by the Senate. One editorial I found blamed G.W. Bush's "ineffective" politics for his numerous unsuccessful attempts at appointments.

Likely recognizing both the problem of long-delayed decisions in the 4th Circuit and seeing an opportunity to nudge the court a little toward the left, President Obama has quickly nominated some candidates for 3 of those last 4 seats: Albert Diaz of North Carolina, Barbara Milano Keenan of Virginia, and James Wynn of North Carolina. Here's to hoping that they're all seated and working soon.

An early summary of the Palin book

The AP purchases and reads "Sarah Palin's" memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, so you don't have to. Here's one he-said, she-said issue from the book:

Palin comes across as particularly upset about being stuck with $50,000 in legal bills that she says were directly related to the legal vetting process for the VP slot. She says she was never informed that she would have to personally take care of expenses related to the selection process, and jokes that if she'd known she was going to get stuck with the bill, she would have given shorter responses.

According to the book, Palin asked officials at the Republican National Committee and what was left of the McCain campaign if they would help her financially. She says she was told that if McCain had won, the bills would have been paid, but since he lost, the bills were her responsibility.

Trevor Potter, the McCain campaign's general counsel, told the AP the campaign never asked Palin to pay a legal bill.

"To my knowledge, the campaign never billed Gov. Palin for any legal expenses related to her vetting and I am not aware of her ever asking the campaign to pay legal expenses that her own lawyers incurred for the vetting process," Potter said.

If Palin's lawyer billed her for work related to her vetting, the McCain campaign never knew about it, Potter said.

What a clusterfuck it must be to try to work with her.

ABA wants to know your views on document review offshoring

Take a minute or two to fill out a brief survey and tell the American Bar Association exactly how you feel about offshoring American legal work to lower-paid workers in other countries. I covered the topic here at the end of September:

On the one hand it's accrediting new law schools left and right, generating literally thousands of new law grads every year that weren't flooding the marketplace just 5 and 10 years ago. Yay! More lawyers, more lawyering work, more big fees, and more big profits! Right? Well, wrong -- when the work that new law grads tend to do, namely, low-level document review, is now being outsourced, with the shiny stamp of ABA approval.

The Spectrum's top 10 sports moments, per ESPN

ESPN's list of top 10 moments at the soon-to-be-dearly-departed Spectrum includes Ron Hextall's goal, so I approve of the list:



Needless to say I didn't see any of those events live. But my fondest memories of the Spectrum are indeed sports moments, not concerts. I got to see a couple of Sixers games in the early 1980s, where Dr. J would go flying across the court and the late Dave Zinkoff would announce the basket with a call of "Julius ERRRRRRRR-ving!" Go ahead and skip to 1:37 and note that it's pretty darn late in his career (it's the "rock the baby" move during the 1983 NBA finals where the Sixers swept the Lakers):



Michael Jordan had to learn from somebody, after all.

SEPTA will give you a reimbursement or discount because of the strike

Reimbursements for SEPTA pass users who effectively lost money during the 6-day November strike:

Holders of eligible [i.e., unpunched] weekly TransPasses -- usually honored on buses, subways, and trolleys -- have until Dec. 31 to turn them in for new ones, SEPTA said. Those with monthly passes should finish using this month's pass, then surrender it to get a $20 discount for a December, January, or February pass.

[ ... ]

Eligible customers may use any sales location, SEPTA said. People with passes obtained through an employer program or a pre-tax program, however, must mail in their requests along with their passes.

Punched passes will not be honored. The punch indicates the pass was used to ride the Regional Rail system, which remained in operation during the strike[.]

[ ... ]

Those using employer or pre-tax programs to obtain passes should submit the pass by mail to: SEPTA SIP Refunds, Box 58609, Philadelphia 19102-8849. Be sure to enclose a note with contact information, including an address.

I'll probably re-post this message or at least put up a reminder -- mostly for myself -- at the end of the month.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Now that SEPTA's city division is back to work, you can actually use the public transit directions this week.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Dissecting the Stupak Amendment

Selected text of the Stupak Amendment:

No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act . . . may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.

As Booman points out, I don't see coverage for a D&C after a spontaneous but incomplete miscarriage, or for a D&C after an unsuccessful therapeutic abortion, unless the woman's life (not merely her health) is endangered.

How do you police and enforce this rule?

When I was pregnant, I passed a quantity of material that, considering what it looked like and how far along I was in the pregnancy, could have been nothing but a fetus. That is, I'm almost certain that I had been pregnant with twins, and that only one of the twins survived. Under the Affordable Health Care for America Act that the House of Representatives has passed, if I'd progressed to a full complete miscarriage and needed a D&C, my doctor and I would have had to be able and willing to certify to the U.S. government that my life was endangered in order for the procedure to be covered.

Here's another question: If a woman has a D&C to treat fibroids, or treat any of the other conditions that indicate a D&C, will the doctor have to certify to the government that she wasn't pregnant when the procedure was performed? What if the lab's urine or blood test for pregnancy returned a false negative and the doctor unintentionally aborts a fetus? I don't see a state-of-mind requirement in the language of the Stupak Amendment; but maybe it's elsewhere in the bill. As the language stands solely in the amendment, though, it looks like strict liability to me.

This is smaller government? If a woman you know needs a D&C -- your mom, your partner, your daughter, your sister -- do you want her to have to justify her healthcare to the government? The government is going to keep files of American women's pregnancy test results? (I guess I'd better forgo using my credit card and instead use small, unmarked bills next time I buy an E.P.T.) What else about your private medical information are you OK with giving the government?

If this language remains in the final version of the law that President Obama signs, we'll see the following developments from the new restriction:

one million American women every year will still get abortions

doctors will massage the paperwork, and mysteriously the rate of "life-endangering pregnancies" in the U.S. will go up

for larfs, maybe that'll turn into a public health crisis

but seriously: poor women, who can't get their abortions paid for through Medicare anyway, will find it that much harder to raise the funds for their abortions; the ensuing delay will result in riskier abortions, increased healthcare costs, and very likely deaths

government functionaries will decide which pregnancies are life-endangering enough that the abortions ending them should be paid for

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to reconcile that last item with ideals of small government and the protections of the 4th Amendment. But then, abortion restrictions are like that: Government out of my patient files and out of my doctor's office! . . . Unless the patient is a woman and the doctor is providing her with reproductive health care.

Monday art house: addiction

In the past year I have become completely enthralled by themes of addiction and substance abuse in modern literature. Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Leaving Las Vegas; of course On the Road. "I-80 Nebraska, M.490 - M.205," a mid-1970s short story by John Sayles (better known for his films) concludes with an amphetamine epiphany:

"And it's beautiful. Beautiful. The things a sleeper never sees open up to you. The most beautiful dream is the waking one, the one that never ends. From a straight line you see all the cycles going on without you, night fading in and out, the sun's arch, stars forming and shifting in their signs. The night especially, the blacker the better, your headlights making a ghost of color on the roadside, focusing to climb the white line. You feel like you can ride deeper and deeper into it, that night is a state you never cross, but only get closer and closer to its center. And in the daytime there's the static of cornfields, cornfields, cornfields, flat monotony like a hum in your eye, like you're going so fast it seems you're standing still, that the country is a still life on your windshield."

[ ... ]

"Do you know what metaphor is, truckin mamas and poppas? Have you ever met with it in your waking hours? Benzedrine, there's a metaphor for you, and a good one. For sleep. It serves the same purpose but makes you understand better, makes everything clear, opens the way to more metaphor. Friends and neighbors, have you ever seen dinosaurs lumbering past you, the road sizzle like a fuse, night drip down like old blood? I have, people, I've seen things only gods and the grandfather stars have seen, I've seen dead men sit in my cab beside me and living ones melt like wax. When you break through the cycle you're beyond the laws of man, beyond CB manners or Smokies' sirens or statutes of limitations. You're beyond the laws of nature, time, gravity, ,friction, forget them. The only way to win is never to stop. Never to stop. Never to stop."

Just finished reading Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting last week:

Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Lauder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road . . .

It's the invisible hand of Henry Hyde!

In the U.S., about one in three women will have an abortion during their childbearing years.

Next time you're in line at the supermarket, coffeeshop, DMV, TSA security at an airport, look around you. Or you're in a crowd: a ball game, a theater, a bar. Or with your friends and family, look around you. About one third of the women you see have had or will have an abortion before they reach menopause.

And right now, government health insurance won't pay for it. It's the Hyde Amendment writ large: no longer just a part of Medicaid, but now a part of the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

Most American women fall pregnant, intentionally or not, during their fertile years; and about one million American women get abortions every year. One million women every year will be excluded from the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

You know someone who's had an abortion. Every day you see women who have had an abortion. Which one of these women would you say shouldn't have insurance for her reproductive healthcare?

Friday jukebox: Chicago

Low-quality video, insane-quality guitar:



They just don't make prog-jazz-Latin-experimental-fusion the way they used to.

Men I've dated, part n in a series

"I'm on a first-name basis," he said, "with vodka."

On a recent cross-country flight I was reading a paperback collection of short stories that I'd put away, half-read, some years ago. Stuck to the inside back cover was a Post-It note with a name, a phone number, and an Art Museum area address on it.

"Vodka, she speaks to me, and I speak to her. We get along well, except when we don't."

"When is that?" I asked.

"When I don't respect her," he said, and he refilled my glass.

When we met, he was updating one of those beat-the-test books for getting into professional school. He was facing a deadline for shipping his portion of the work on a new edition to his co-authors and editor. Although he worked at home in his apartment, the place was clean, if a little cluttered, in the way you'd expect an author's pad to be cluttered. I remember hardwood floors; an open-tiered desk with papers and books surrounding a Mac, which had been left on; table lamps that were placed so well in the rooms that the layout seemed scientific; and the square, black, reflective shapes of a few uncovered windows along one wall. There was a wooden mission-style bed with a rumpled plaid-patterned comforter. We spent most of my visit on the bed, just talking and drinking.

He was from Buffalo, where the lake moderates the summers but smothers the city in snow every winter. His family had been in Buffalo for a few generations. He said he wasn't the only alcoholic in the family, and not the first, either. He'd lost an uncle to vodka, an uneven sidewalk, and a snowbank a couple of decades ago.

"That's very Russian," I said.

"My uncle didn't respect vodka the way I've learned to respect her."

(Does the Art Museum area select for alcoholics? My friend from Buffalo lived literally one block away from the alcoholic pathological liar I had a later, three-year relationship with. They lived on opposite sides of the 33 bus.)

"Dozens of people freeze to death," I continued. "They pass out drunk on the streets of Moscow and never wake up, every winter, dozens of them." I moved a little further under the comforter. I get cold easily, and the apartment was one of several drafty flats in an old subdivided townhouse. An unintentional yet successful come-on: he put out his cigarette and we started necking.

We would have accomplished more, but as I say he was an alcoholic. I went home a little frustrated, and then disappointed that we didn't get together another time to try again.

Nowadays he's in New York City, and he's still co-authoring the same beat-the-test book. He's gotten married, which is great. I found a few photos of him online, looking older than it seems to me he should be looking. Or maybe he was already over 40 when I met him.

This is what happens when the Democrats fail to GOTV

What happens when the Democrats fail to get out the vote for Pennsylvania judicial elections? Republicans swoop into the appellate-level courts:

Joan Orie Melvin secures a Republican majority on the Supreme Court; Jack Panella would have brought an eastern, urban Pennsylvania perspective as well as tipped the court in the Democrats' favor

Superior Court: 3 of 4 open seats to Republicans

both open seats on Commonwealth Court gone to the Republican candidates

Turnout was low statewide, but particularly in Philadelphia.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Don't forget to vote before you head out for socializing! Polls are open 7:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. Since I'm working for the county board of elections at a polling place today, I imagine I'll be showing up pretty late. I know it'll be hard, but please try to enjoy yourselves without me until about 8:45.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

3d Circuit tosses combined buffer zone law

A federal appeals court has struck down an ordinance that created two types of buffer zones around medical facilities after a Christian legal group challenged the law on behalf of a nurse who protests abortions.

[ ... ] The Pittsburgh law bans protesters from standing within 15 feet of entrances but also makes them stand 8 feet from clients in a 100-foot buffer around entrances.

The court found that either zone by itself could be legal.

In other words, the court ruled that, under current Supreme Court precedent, Pittsburgh can have an ordinance that keeps protesters 15 feet away from clinic entrances (a "buffer zone"), or it can have an ordinance that keeps protesters, who are within 100 feet of a clinic, 8 feet away from clients as they approach the facility (a "bubble zone") -- but it can't have both (83-page PDF).

The news article does not indicate whether the city will seek a re-hearing en banc. I hope against hope that the city does not press its luck on this one. Please-please-please. I really don't want it to reach the Supreme Court any time soon.

Tonight at the Tractor Tavern, Seattle: Hoots and Hellmouth

"Home for Supper":



Sound ranges from hard-rocking blues to bluesy ballads to Kansas-City-blues informed jamming. They're a delight to see in person, school night or not, and the show should be cheep.

The Philadelphia Bar Association is not serious about helping underemployed attorneys

From today's e-mail:

Training Program for Attorneys
Who Need to Develop New Business

Presented by the Training Resource Group and the Philadelphia Bar Association

[ ... ]

Fee: The cost is $795 per participant which includes four training sessions, one individual coaching session and materials.

Holy mother of christ, 800 clams to teach newly laid-off attorneys and new graduates how to hand out business cards, network, and hustle for new clients and gigs?

If the Philadelphia Bar Association were truly interested in reducing un- and underemployment among area lawyers, they would organize job fairs to get firms and attorneys to meet and hire one another. Or put up some kind of online legal services delivery clearinghouse where potential clients could find lawyers and hire them. Or sponsor events where solo practitioners with few or even no clients in their books could meet and explore putting together their own firms or legal services organizations so that underserved constituencies could hire them. Instead, the PBA offers this course, which seeks to

[d]evelop and implement a cost effective training program targeted at introducing business development skills to attorneys. After completing the program, participants will have the mindset, skills, and confidence to create an individual business development plan, successfully network and create strategic partnerships, better cross-sell current clients and build account relationships at a higher level. The program will focus on teaching tactics and techniques that will help participants to develop new opportunities and turn those opportunities into new clients.

Sounds like "how to bill your dwindling client base more and more money, even as you're losing them because they can't afford you any more" and "how to get those clients to refer you, at your increased rates, to more clients" and "how to make other attorneys think these tactics are actually finding you work" to me.

Friday, Dec. 4
Building a Stronger Network
Learn the secrets to participating in, or founding, a successful peer group, accountability group or referral group.

Secrets? It's a $200 secret (one quarter of the course) to toss your pals some e-mail suggesting that you pool your resources and share an office or put a firm together?

Friday, Nov. 20
The Basics of Networking and Building a Memorable 30-Second Commercial
Learn the basics of networking. Develop a plan that will help you choose appropriate events to attend how to approach each event, and tips for turning the events into business contacts.

What's an event where it's appropriate to hand someone a business card? Here, I'll save you another $200. YES: A cocktail party or gallery opening; a summer barbecue; an alumni event for any school you've attended; the holiday party at your partner's work. NO: A funeral; a transaction involving controlled substances; an evening at the Pleasure Garden (NSFW).

It's every lawyer for herself, I think. Best to go out on your own (or find a small group of pals with skills in complementary areas of practice), underbid the firms, and use that Jenkins membership of yours for all the LexisNexis access it can get you.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Convince me that my local baseball franchise isn't doomed.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

UPDATE: Father in latest DHS travesty case suicides in jail

The father of Charlenny Ferreira has suicided in county jail rather than face his fate in prison as the father of a girl who was sexually abused, beaten until she had a broken hip, and finally killed by blows to the torso that broke her ribs, which, left untreated, led to a collapsed lung and death by pneumonia.

The girl's stepmother, who has stated that Charleeni limped because she "had recently gained weight," is still in jail.

The newspapers don't seem to agree how to spell her name. The Inky reports "Charleeni"; the Metro reports "Charlenny"; the Daily News reports "Charlenni." (The criminal docket summaries I found don't include her name at all.) That the media can't get her name right makes the story even more pathetic.

How does Anne Marie Ambrose sleep at night? Why hasn't she discontinued DHS's deadly scheme of outsourcing its family supervision work to outside contractors? How many more Philadelphia children are going to die these miserable deaths?

DHS fails another girl, who dies after years of horrific abuse

Philadelphia's Department of Human Services has failed, again, to help a girl who had been reported to them. This time, it was Charlenni Ferreira, a 10-year-old dead of an untreated lung infection, whose body showed signs of years of physical and sexual abuse, including "a gash on her head that had been covered with a hair weave" and other "severe head trauma, bruising of her back, leg and torso, a recent fractured hip bone and injuries."

Her neighbors said she walked funny -- that is, the few times they saw her outside her house. Police are calling her injuries evidence of "years of horrific, tortuous abuse," including sexual assaults and clear indications of severe beatings.

Where was DHS? A school nurse reported Charlenni multiple times to DHS, but the DHS pediatrician didn't think that Charlenni's funny walk, multiple bruises, and swollen face indicated abuse. DHS sent one of its private contractors to check up, but they closed her case.

Sound familiar? DHS's trained-monkey outside contractor failed Charlenni during 2006, the same year Danieal Kelly was found starved to death and covered in bedsores after DHS outside contractor MultiEthnic Behavioral Health falsified documents saying that they had, in fact, checked up on her and that she was, in fact, thriving. This time, a group of trained monkeys called Family Preservation, a family support services program by Congreso, are the ones who closed Charlenni's case after a mere 3 months of investigation.

We're 3 years past Danieal Kelly's death. Why hasn't DHS gotten their act together yet? How much money are they pouring into these outside contractors, who clearly do no work at all? Who the hell is the pediatrician who decided that Charlenni wasn't being abused, and where is he or she practicing? How many more children are going to die on DHS's and that pediatrician's watch?

Now men can get Gardasil, too

The FDA has just "approved use of the vaccine Gardasil for the prevention of genital warts (condyloma acuminata) due to human papillomavirus (HPV) types 6 and 11 in boys and men, ages 9 through 26."

Since Gardasil is administered as a series of 3 injections, I've joked that my daughter will be getting the vaccine "early and often." Of course, the truth behind that joke is that I'm so happy I can do something so concrete to reduce her lifetime risk of cervical cancer. I hope the parents of her future partners feel the same way about their kids!

Drexel Shaft to be demolished next month

Word on the street is that the Drexel Shaft (turn your sound off first) will be brought down by Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI), on Sunday 8 November, at 7:30 a.m. The Shaft is not actually a Drexel University structure, but is a chimney for an old Pennsylvania Railroad steam plant. The property belongs to Amtrak; the demolition may be related to the $25 million in stimulus money that Amtrak just got for upgrades along the northeast corridor.

As for CDI, they're known for bringing down various old casinos in Vegas, Seattle's Kingdome in 2000 (video), and some buildings in New York, depending on whom you believe.

Men I've dated, part n in a series

Really, I'm not in the habit of bringing home men from bars. I'll recount two of them here. Keep in mind that the tales may not be too accurate, since they originated in bars. And furthermore, who knows how true are the tales men spin to me in bars? How true are the tales I spin in bars to men about myself?

One of my bar dates told me he was a world-class soccer player. He had been selected to play for the U.S. in the World Cup, but suffered some horrible back injury and could no longer play competitively. He accompanied the team for the trip and enjoyed the trip immensely -- France 1998? Italy 1990? -- but gave up soccer and went to engineering school instead. How true was his story? He was built like an ex-athlete: heavily muscled as if from years of training, broad shoulders as if from physical therapy to heal a back injury, a belly as if from working behind a computer during the day and hanging around bars at night. He name-dropped the owner of the gastropub several times and had come downstairs after celebrating some kind of dinner or get-together with a crowd of friends. He wrote his phone number on a coaster, but I never called him afterward because his friends had taken his keys from him. I don't want to get involved with a man-child alcoholic again, even if he does have a soccer player's stamina.

Several months earlier, I was studying in my "local," a dive bar with very cheap basket food specials and continually discounted PBR but a few good offerings on tap. I did a lot of law school studying in this bar. Sometimes I would set up my laptop computer at a table in the early afternoon and prepare notes for the next couple of days' classes. Sometimes I would simply take a casebook and a highlighter to the corner stool at the bar. Most of the time I'd last three pints, at which point I would join in on some nearby conversation, or another regular would stop by and I'd decide to be social, or I'd have had too many pints to study efficiently -- after enough time had passed for me to finish three pints, I would do best to take a study break anyway.

Some younger guy from the neighborhood was sitting a few stools down from me and was intrigued that I was drinking one of the local microbrews rather than a PBR or lager or Budweiser bottle. We talked about local microbrews, the lack of a wide range of choices at my local, and the wider range of options at the Belgian gastropubs here in Philly. We ended up at my place in short order. He was tall and skinny, not athletic or post-athletic, but the tall, skinny type that I'd been attracted to when I was a teen. It was a highly enjoyable encounter. A week or so later we met at one of the city's Belgian gastropubs for further beer appreciation. It was very humid, and rain came and went sporadically. On the way home we sort of shared an umbrella, but he walked very fast, and I'm a short person. The rain came down harder. I hadn't brought my own umbrella. We separated at a corner between his apartment and my home; he didn't walk me to my door, though it's about three blocks from his. I quit texting him for another beer-appreciation date after he declined twice, explaining both times that he had a prior commitment with friends from high school.

He sent me e-mail about a month ago wanting to know if I was free. I didn't answer, even though I was, and since then I still haven't found someone to go out and appreciate craft brews with.

PFA orders don't help, but here's how to get one in Philadelphia

This situation is not unusual:

About fifteen minutes later, a man in his early 40s riddled his estranged wife with bullets and then fatally shot himself inside their home on Maple Avenue near Trevose in Somerton, [Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott] Small said. Neither victim was identified by police.

"The wife had recently gotten a protection from abuse order, but that didn't stop him from calling her or showing up," Small said.

The man and his estranged wife were both pronounced dead inside at the scene, he added.

A Protection from Abuse (PFA) order is a piece of paper. It stops bullets, knives, baseball bats, and vehicles about as well as any other piece of paper can. It does not go onto the abuser's criminal record, because it's a civil action. It helps you in only 2 ways: the cops may come faster if you tell them you have taken out a PFA against the guy who's stalking you, again, or has broken into your house and started hitting you, again; and the Commonwealth can add a few more criminal charges against your abuser if he's arrested for abusing you again after you get it.

And that's if you get one in the first place. I volunteered at 34 South 11th Street while I was in law school, helping victims of domestic violence understand the hoops they had to jump through to get their PFAs. And there are a lot of hoops.

First, if you go to the wrong office, you can't get a PFA. Temporary Restraining Orders (TROs) are for neighbors, co-workers, and other non-relatives, non-intimates, and non-members of your household. You get a TRO by entering 34 S. 11th St. by a door directly east of the door for PFAs -- it's not just a different office, it's basically a different building. Oh, and outside of ordinary weekday business hours, you have to go to the Criminal Justice Center at 13th and Filbert Streets instead. I'm not sure how many other counties and major American cities make you go to 2 different buildings depending on what hour of the day or day of the week you got beaten up, but there you are.

Second, I hope you don't need much food and that you have childcare arranged for the day. You aren't allowed to bring food or drink into the waiting room, and there are no amenities for kids. But if you leave, you may lose your place on the list, and you'll have to start from scratch.

The ladies' room down the hall is filthy and is mostly used as a smoking room. It hasn't been renovated in at least 25 years.

The system is not computerized. You go into a back room or cubicle and talk to a court functionary -- the back area smells of cigarettes because at least one of the functionaries prefers the office to the ladies' room -- where you start your paperwork. All the papers from that morning's petitioners are physically walked over to the courtrooms. After a while, perhaps even hours or after the office's lunch break, you'll be called to speak before the judge. If you've used the right keywords in your petition (and the functionaries are not terribly helpful in wording the paperwork, and are sometimes actively unhelpful), then you'll get your temporary PFA and some more paperwork. If you haven't used the right keywords, then you have to go home and come back later with bigger bruises. Here's a list of good keywords and phrases:

He placed me in fear of bodily injury

He caused me bodily injury

He touched me sexually without my consent

He stalked me

He controlled my money

Sometimes there are some law students in the lobby area outside the waiting room. They have a lot of brochures to share with you, but the court allows the law students only to hand out brochures. The court has notified the agencies and schools that bring the law students in that they are specifically not permitted to help petitioners with their paperwork, even if it would expedite the process, shorten waiting times, and improve the overall quality of services at 34 South 11th Street. For instance, a big thing that petitioners often miss is including the names of non-resident children or resident close relatives on the petition. Omitted names won't be included in the final order. But the court would rather allow petitioners to accidentally omit a name or two on the paperwork than to have law students help the petitioners.

Another thing petitioners tend to miss is to fail to "shoot the moon." That is, it doesn't hurt to ask for full custody, full child support, payment for personal injury, compensation for loss of property or wages, and counsel fees. Worst you can hear is "no," but you won't even hear that if you don't ask. The court employees zip through the petition paperwork so quickly that they often won't bother to suggest asking.

So now you have your temporary PFA and some more paperwork. The "more paperwork" is court papers you have to serve on your abuser, just like in any other lawsuit. But unlike any other lawsuit in Pennsylvania, you can't serve your abuser by mail. You must personally hand the papers to your abuser (or you can maybe get a cop to do it for you). Philadelphia County is the only county in the Commonwealth where you have to personally serve your abuser. That makes Philly one awesome place to live.

After you've served your abuser, you have to come back to court to get the real PFA. Your abuser has the right to be there and call you a liar, and he can probably get away with some nasty language and intimidating behavior before he's finally kicked out of the courtroom. Try to dress nice so that the judge takes you seriously. Make sure you ask for the full 36-month PFA.

The Philadelphia courts have published a useful guide to obtaining a PFA (PDF); note that the guide is "sponsored" by the Philadelphia Bar Association, which suggests to me that Family Court wouldn't have produced it on its own initiative. If you need a PFA, your best bet is to read that document carefully and call Women Against Abuse (215-686-7082) or Community Legal Services (215-981-3700). Good luck, and certainly don't take this post as some kind of suggestion for self-help.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Silent Running. That's the name I was trying to remember last week, of the 1970s film where there are no plants left on Earth, and the last ones are on greenhouse spaceships, and Bruce Dern has to save the last ship. His ship's name is the Valley Forge, which I think was confusing some people last week as to the name of the film. As to how it compares to Rollerball, I think we'll have to have a movie night, particularly including The Omega Man, to come to a true appreciation of that particular sub-genre of film.

Oh, and the local law school chapters of the American Constitution Society are having a networking happy hour tonight. It is likely that not one of the law students who attend were yet born when Mad Max was theatrically released.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

10 pages in the San Fernando Valley

What do women performers get out of their jobs in porn?

[Highly successful porn film director] Jim [Powers] isn't the bad guy. He's the good guy. "I sleep at night," he informs me, his voice rising, "because I know, in my heart of hearts, I'm giving people money, that could not hold a job at fucking McDonald's, for the most part. I'm paying people's rent." He waves his hands spastically. "It's a lot more than I can say for a lot of the companies in America, pieces of shit, like Madoff, and Enron, all of these son of a bitches the Bush administration funded that do nothing but take, take, take! Here, I just give, give, give! And this is a fact!" he shouts, wild-eyed. "We are helping these girls! Anybody that comes into this business, for the most part, is a broken toy." He leans towards me, earnestly attempting to make himself understood. "We're giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they're not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!" He bangs the desk.

How about the men?

The men were there for many different reasons. They were lonely. They were horny. This was their fantasy. They wanted to be porn stars. They were fresh out of jail. They were social outcasts. They longed to be somebody, if only for a few minutes.

Afterwards, one polite young man in his twenties explained to me why he had taken Powers up on this opportunity to jerk off onto the face of a young woman whom he had never met before: "I'm not involved with anyone right now."

They were desperate men who had congregated on a barren soundstage in North Hollywood, stripped to their underpants with their faces hidden behind bandanas, all in the hopes of a fleeting chance at intimacy with a young, attractive, naked woman who would in the real world -- they knew in all likelihood -- never speak to them, much less allow any of them to come on her face, were she not being paid to be there.

Exceedingly interesting and NSFW 10-page article by Susannah Breslin, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?"