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: Almost a full week later, I'm still trying to understand why Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that it's perfectly acceptable for a male vice-principal to strip-search a 13-year-old girl at school on an unverifiable, anonymous tip that she's carrying ibuprofen (PDF).

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Speaking softly and carrying a big stick

The U.S. Air Force has had a successful ICBM test from Vandenberg AFB to an atoll off the Marshall Islands -- which is conveniently about the same distance between Vandenberg AFB and North Korea.

On clothes and dates

It has been not-so-gently suggested to me that I might have more luck getting laid if I would only dress better.

In my defense, it's a lot easier to dress well when one has an income. I haven't had an income for a while, but if I remember correctly income is a situation where you "trade" your "time" and "work" for "currency," which you can then "exchange" for "goods and services" provided by other people. And, in the process, the numbers on your bank statement do not continue to dwindle and go to zero, so long as you "save" more of this "income" than you "exchange" away.

But until I have an income, I'll be making do with ill-fitting jeans, hand-me-down shirts, and D.I.Y. haircuts.

And maybe that's a vicious circle, too -- I'd be more appealing to a potential employer if I had more than 2 suits that fit me, and if the suits I have were better styled and tailored. Let's just say that I'm on a "banana republic" budget right now.

Anyway, I have a long history of dressing badly, and if you think my hair looks crazy now, you didn't know me in the 1980s. Childhood snapshots of my family generally show me wearing pants that are too large, a shirt that is too small, and a hairstyle that looks like a dead muskrat stapled to my scalp. When I was an undergrad, my uniform was jeans, a t-shirt with a tea stain toward the front hem, and a rolled-up bandanna holding my hair back. At least nowadays I know how to use black clothing, spandex, and hair product, and I can blame the pot belly on pregnancy.

Speaking of which, have you actually been shopping for women's clothes lately? What the hell is up with these maternity-looking shirts? Hanger after hanger of them, and hung up all over display windows. Blouses, frilly sleeveless tops, even professional shirts all have extra pleats in the front, I guess to cover up how fat American women are becoming. Folks, I didn't look good in maternity wear when I was pregnant, let alone now. Ugh. It makes me want to go back to wearing jeans, tea-stained t-shirts, and bandannas.

And I think the lack of dates is more due to my abrasive personality, and the fact that I have a kid at home, than my wardrobe, really. But on the off-chance it helps, a few days ago I went out and got some new-to-me summer clothes for myself from the upscale consignment shop down the street. Then I came home and put a slightly greater quantity of clothes in bags to donate to a charity thrift shop.

Classes I'm glad I took in law school

Classes I'm glad I took in law school, so that I'm not looking at the material now for the very first time:

• 1st Amendment
• Employment Discrimination
• an upper-level contracts course
• 1st Amendment
• Corporations, Partnerships, Agency Law
• Trusts and Estates
• 1st Amendment
• Entertainment Law (invasion of privacy torts)
• did I mention 1st Amendment?

I wouldn't say that Administrative Law was a complete waste of time. I don't think Chevron is going to show up on the bar exam, but being able to explain why and how the FDA can suddenly regulate cigarettes can be handy at parties. The kinds of parties I usually end up at, anyway.

Because, really, that's the only reason anyone goes to law school: to be able to tell people what to do when they get pulled over for speeding but there's a nickel bag in their pocket, or whether they should go ahead and declare bankruptcy, or explain the finer distinctions between warrantless wiretapping, legal eavesdropping, pinhole video surveillance, and closed-circuit security cameras.

Does anyone even say nickel bag any more?

Tonight at Fergie's: the Dill Pickles

For the best in old-timey fiddle tunes and jug band stomps, head to Fergie's tonight, Friday 26 June 2009, 6:00 to 8:00, to see The Dill Pickles! Fergie's is at 1214 Sansom Street in Philadelphia.

Free! No cover! Buy [me lots of] beer and tip the bartenders!

Profoundness: on practice bar exam questions

Snakes on a Plane: actionably negligent aircraft design or unforeseeable intervening force? (For those of you playing along with Pennsylvania Bar/Bri, it's question #14 in Torts Set 2 in the MPQ1 book.)

This must mean that law school has come full circle for me now. I went and saw Snakes on a Plane at the Bridge with friends for my birthday a week or so before orientation in 2006.

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 canceled then uncanceled then canceled meeting with the neighbors has been uncanceled again. If I make it tonight, I'll be really late. See you next week!

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Bar exam study notes to self

A preliminary list of things I've learned while studying for the bar exam:

- Don't sign over the deed to your house to someone and then toss the document in a desk drawer. Unless you don't like your heirs and you're trying to cause them problems.

- When you buy some real estate, get insurance on the property that takes effect upon signing the contract of sale -- don't wait until closing. You're just inviting a month's worth of arsonists, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

- When 2 neighbors are talking by the fence, the one who thinks he should win loses.

- Get it in writing and "record," whatever that means.

RSS mechanism appears broken

Stuff is not getting propagated via the RSS feed mechanism. Dunno why -- maybe you should just affirmatively check in here once a day or so rather than rely on your feed aggregator.

I'll see if I can force it somehow, but I'm kinda busy doing other things lately.

Friday jukebox: G-Love and Special Sauce

I'm pretty sure these guys are too young to know "East River Drive," but this tune cracks me up anyway.

Laurence Tribe: "Calm the fuck down, anti-DOMA people"

So DoJ filed a brief in the 9th Circuit urging that Smelt v. United States be dismissed, and anti-DOMA activists are upset at this perceived betrayal by the Obama Administration. But Laurence Tribe figures that it's not that President Obama wants DOMA to stand. Rather, he sees DoJ's move as strategic: Obama doesn't want DOMA to go to the Supreme Court on this case, because the plaintiffs aren't nearly as well situated legally as the ones in Massachusetts:

A strategic Justice Department interested in a litigation strategy that has some realistic chance of success certainly would not have taken [the Smelt] case as the one in which the constitutional vulnerabilities of DOMA should be explored.

Bad cases make bad law, people. No matter how strongly you oppose DOMA, you really, really don't want the Supreme Court to get their hands on Smelt.

Comments making puns about fish are not only welcomed, but encouraged.

Anyway, here's an interesting paragraph from the brief:

When States began to consider adopting historically novel forms of marriage, Congress took a wait-and-see approach. It codified, for purposes of federal benefits, a definition of marriage that all fifty states had adopted (i.e., that between a man and a woman) and continued to accord financial and other benefits on the basis of that historical definition. At the same time, it cautiously declined to extend federal benefits on the basis of a newer definition of marriage that no States had adopted at the time of DOMA's passage (and only a very small minority of States have since). Thus, by defining "marriage" and "spouse" as the legal union of a man and a woman and affording federal benefits on that basis, Section 3 of DOMA simply maintained the status quo: it continues the longstanding federal policy of affording federal benefits and privileges on the basis of a centuries-old form of marriage, without committing the federal government to devote scarce resources to newer versions of the institution that any State may choose to recognize.

Does that sound to you as if the Obama Administration is saying, "Dear Congress, please repeal or amend DOMA, and I'll be more than happy to sign a new federal definition of marriage into law"? 'Cause that's the vibe I'm getting from that paragraph, myself.

Here's some bad news for the plaintiffs, if it's true (I haven't read the complaint, though):

Plaintiffs fail to allege that they have ever applied for any federal benefits that are available on the basis of married status -- let alone that they have been denied any as a result of DOMA.

D'oh! No harm, no standing! No standing, no jurisdiction! So kick it out of court without even addressing the merits, which would be great for the President.

You should feel free to download the brief and read all 54 pages for yourself, because I'm going to do only a short wrap-up of it right now.

The plaintiffs are arguing equal protection. When you make an equal protection argument, you're saying that Congress has passed a law that identifies a certain class of people and treats those people differently from other people, and that the way the law does it is not allowed under the Constitution. Congress has to articulate a really, really good reason for the discrimination, and the law has to be very closely drawn to address Congress's articulated reason. And if the law involves a fundamental right (e.g., privacy, raising and educating your children, free speech), then the law is almost certainly unconstitutional. In the context of this case, for plaintiffs to have DOMA declared unconstitutional, they need to get the Supreme Court to agree with their view that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right.

Now, I agree with that view, and you agree with that view. But right now, the Supreme Court doesn't agree with that view. So if Smelt gets there, even with Judge Sotomayor on the bench, the risk is that the Supreme Court will affirmatively declare no fundamental right for same-sex people to marry. Then DOMA will go away only through Congressional action; states with constitutions that will allow it will be able, under the U.S. Constitution, to enact restrictions on same-sex marriage, and feel welcome to do it; and progress toward recognition of same-sex marriages and full equality for gay people throughout the country will be set back for years, if not decades. I think it would even open the door to reviving the Federal Marriage Amendment. Jesus christ on a pogo stick, people.

So I agree with Professor Tribe's view. Let Smelt get dismissed with prejudice, and let's find a better case and wait for a better bench.

Now I'm picturing a POSITA of glass dildos. Actually, no, I'm not.

Patent law treats the word obvious with a meaning specific to that area of law. It means that, if you look at a particular device (patented or unpatented) and figure you could improve it, you can't get a patent on your invention if someone familiar with the original device's industry or science would have thought that your improvement was straightforward and predictable. The rationale here is that patent law rewards innovation. So if your improved device isn't new enough, you don't deserve the monopoly that patent law awards to truly innovative inventions.

A very good way to show that your invention was not obvious is to find relevant scientific literature that "teaches away" from the way you solved a particular problem. So, for instance, if you find a textbook that says "you can never make a battery with these chemicals," but you make a perfectly functional battery with those very chemicals, you can get a patent for your battery. But, on the other hand, if other people have used something to solve a problem, and you're just changing out some basic materials or components or techniques, your solution -- even if it's an improvement over the state of the art -- is likely not worthy of a patent. Science ever advances, you see, but not all of it is patentable.

Sex toys, including dildos, can be patented (NSFW, NSFW, and NSFW, just to name a few). And you can buy a dildo made out of glass (NSFW). And we all know that, if your improvement to a device is innovative enough, you can patent your new invention. So the question presented in Ritchie v. Vast Resources, Inc. was, can a new glass dildo be patented as new 'n' improved, if we make it out of Pyrex?

Judge Richard Posner, sitting specially on the Federal Circuit, says no: making a dildo out of Pyrex rather than glass is too "obvious" to make the new dildo patentable (PDF, NSFW, especially if your workplace would ban the word lubricious). It's not enough of an innovative change; it was merely a novelty and a predictable variation in the, uh, market sector of glass sex toys.

It looks as though the patent holder argued that Pyrex isn't just smoother ("more lubricious") than ordinary glass, but it's also better than ordinary glass because it's resistant to electricity . . . presumably a desired quality for dildos in some people's bedrooms. I, uh, wouldn't know about that.

In closing, I'll paraphrase KSR v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007):

The proper question to have asked was whether a [dildo] designer of ordinary skill, facing the wide range of needs created by developments in the field of endeavor, would have seen a benefit to upgrading [glass dildos] with [Pyrex].

(I don't have the U.S. Reports pincite for that paragraph handy, but it's near the end.) It's difficult to get a patent declared invalid; there's a heavy presumption in favor of the Patent Office's decision to award one in the first place. Judge Posner did it in 6 pages.

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!

NOTE: This week we will meet at Triumph, but not at the upstairs bar. Please check in at the host stand to find out where we are meeting! Next week, we'll be back upstairs.

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: Death to all software patents (PDF)! But sadly it looks as though I won't be able to attend and bore you with my views on the unpatentability of computer software, because last week's meeting with the neighbors has been rescheduled for tonight.Uncanceled meeting is canceled again. (If that doesn't sound like a LOLcat, I don't know what does.) This means you get to hear me expound about software patents . . . a sad state of affairs that you can prevent by buying me drinks.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

I got nothin'

I got nothin'. Just spending my days in bar prep, my evenings in housework, and the occasional nights out with friends.

I'll be more interesting -- or at least less uninteresting -- after the end of July.

Carry on.

Friday jukebox: Warren Zevon

Marking the imminent end of hockey season tonight . . . there's always room on our team for a goon:

The notes on YouTube indicate that this recording was done at the TLA in Philly. I love how the audience starts yelling "Hit somebody!" early and often.

Will copy-edit for food

"[L]iterally hoards" of people tried to get a good photo of the full moon behind Seattle's famous Space Needle a few nights ago.

Hoards!

. . . And I still can't get a job.

Secret evidence no good in English terror trial

Three terror suspects on control orders have unanimously won a major ruling over the use of secret evidence.

Nine Law Lords allowed the men's appeals after they had argued they did not know what they were accused of.

A control order seems to be a kind of house arrest scheme: curfew, ankle bracelets with electronic surveillance transponders, and restrictions on association and travel. In the U.S., equivalent house arrest restrictions would pose major First Amendment problems, I would guess, so the government would have to prove to a very high standard that the restrictions were required. (On the one hand, the government would probably say, "They're prisoners so the government has more discretion." And the counterargument would be that they're only suspects, not convicts, so the reason for allowing all those First Amendment violations in prisons shouldn't apply.) But in the U.K., until this ruling, a terror suspect under a control order would not be allowed to know "any of the secret intelligence assessments that form the basis of the restrictions." Yikes: the government calls you a terror suspect, won't let you see the evidence they have for the charge, and puts you under house arrest anyway.

Control orders haven't been abolished, however. Some 2 dozen men are still under control orders in the U.K., and the prosecutors appear to be waiting for them to take the initiative themselves to try to get released.

Profoundness: on cell phone auto-complete

For some reason my cell phone's auto-complete functionality doesn't recognize "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

I wonder if I can teach 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: You'll have to come up with one on your own, because I can't attend tonight, though I suggest you put your money where your mouth is and start donating to NARAL or to some fund that supports med students who are training to become abortion practitioners -- since, as you've probably heard, there are now only 2 abortion providers in the U.S. who will help women obtain late-term abortions. Myself, I have a previous commitment with neighbors. Since it will probably also involve drinking, I don't expect I'll be stumbling in late anywhere, except into my own bed. EDIT: O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Meeting with neighbors canceled. See y'all.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Today could have been worse

Today could have been worse.

After all, I could have woken up with a hangover.

Friday's a long ways away.

Weekend light reading: Judge Sotomayor's questionnaire

The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted Judge Sonia Sotomayor's answers to the questions all SCOTUS nominees are asked to answer (PDF).

12. Published Writings and Public Statements:

a. List the titles, publishers, and dates of books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited, including material published only on the Internet. Supply four (4) copies of all published material to the Committee.

That'll be interesting to see when people who have kept blogs for years start getting nominated for this kind of thing. Didn't LiveJournal just mark their 10th anniversary? Judge Sotomayor's answer goes back to letters to the editor in 1974 and 1976. Not that I'd ever be nominated for the Supreme Court -- or, let's be clear, anything at all -- but it makes me wonder if even a really good LEXIS newspaper search would find a couple of letters to the editor I wrote when I was a teenager. What a drag. Sotomayor wrote to her undergrad university paper about racism; I wrote to my undergrad university paper about the copy editor letting in the word suffrage when the author meant suffering.

13. Judicial Office:

[... ]

e. For each of the 10 most significant cases over which you presided, provide: (1) a capsule summary of the nature the case; (2) the outcome of the case; (3) the name and contact information for counsel who had a significant role in the trial of the case; and (4) the citation of the case (if reported) or the docket number (if not reported).

She lists the case where she saved Major League Baseball first. Whee!

Provide a brief summary of and citations for all of your opinions where your decisions were reversed by a reviewing court or where your judgment was affirmed with significant criticism of your substantive or procedural rulings. If any of the opinions listed were not officially reported, provide copies of the opinions.

A brief scan of the cases shows that a good number of them were not reversed for faulty reasoning but were reversed "in light of" SCOTUS opinions handed down while the cases were still pending -- cases like Booker and Crawford. In other words, to all the people who have been crowing about her "high" reversal rate: she or the panel she was on decided the case correctly and following precedent when it was before them, but the law changed afterward in a way that procedurally allowed those particular questions, but not necessarily the convictions, to go the other way.

For example, "The Supreme Court vacated and remanded the case for further consideration in light of its intervening decision in Booker rendering the United States Sentencing Guidelines advisory in nature" (U.S. v. Sanchez-Villar, 544 U.S. 1029 (2005)). Or, even better, "The Court then vacated the Second Circuit’s decision in LaFontaine, as it did with many other cases, and remanded for further proceedings in light of Crawford. On remand, the Second Circuit held that the introduction of LaFontaine's plea allocution was error, in light of Crawford, but that the error was harmless" (LaFontaine v. U.S., 543 U.S. 801 (2004)). (In non-legalese: defendant lost, no matter which rule Sotomayor's court used, because the first decision, which was wrong when tested under the new rule, was not wrong enough to have affected the criminal trial. Therefore, Judge Sotomayor is tough on crime.)

But uh-oh! Judge Sotomayor hates authors! Look at this decision of hers when she was a district judge in 1997 (New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001)):

The district court held that publishers did not violate freelance authors' copyrights by placing the contents of the publishers' periodicals into electronic databases (e.g., Lexis/Nexis) and onto CD-ROMs without first securing the writers' permission, because section 201(c) of the Copyright Act granted publishers the privilege of reissuing or revising collective works, and did not limit such republications to the original medium.

Huh? Maybe she came down this way because, in 1997 (or presumably even earlier in the 1990s, when the conduct the case was based on actually occurred), CD-ROMs were new and mysterious and scary and too technological for anyone to understand, and maybe a little threatening, too, because you used to get them unsolicited in the mail all the time from AOL. Back in those olden days, a lot of new technology cases were decided stupidly. But anyway:

The Second Circuit reversed, holding that section 201(c) does not permit publishers of collective works to license individually copyrighted works for inclusion in electronic databases, and that the publishers therefore were required to negotiate such licenses in their contracts. The Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit's decision.

Phew!

This case is a big deal for intellectual property nerds. It means that you have to include all kinds of ridiculous language in licensing contracts with book publishers, movie producers, and videogame publishers, talking about media now in existence or yet to be invented, because if you don't include it, the publisher doesn't get it. Which is nice for authors, if publishers get greedy after the ink is dry. And it's nice for the lawyers whose publisher-employers pay them by the hour to try to think up language about new media yet to be invented. For example, last time I drafted a content licensing contract, I even included Laserdiscs, in anticipation of the global Laserdisc resurgence, when everybody in the world will magically come to their senses and finally recognize the superiority of Laserdiscs over lossy, lossy DVDs. Anyway, we IP nerds need to entertain ourselves somehow.

"a no-strings, go-nowhere, sex-romp 'relationship'"

Far be it from me to say that men are pigs, but I ran across a funny dating anecdote the other day while following the bouncing links:

I don't particularly need a sugar daddy and if I'm going to have a no-strings, go-nowhere, sex-romp "relationship" with a guy, well, that’s what 25-year-old bartenders, aspiring actor-writer-musicians and the occasional summer associate -- not puffy, middle-aged, overworked lawyers -- are for.

The Legal Tease at Sweet Hot Justice discusses a "niche fetish" she's observed in BigLaw.

"Early modern England did not belong to the same world we now inhabit"

An intact "witch bottle" has been excavated from a site in Greenwich, England. It was buried sometime in the 1600s to ward off witchcraft, and contained iron nails, sulfur, brass pins, "a piece of heart-shaped leather pierced by a bent nail," and human urine, hair, nail clippings, and possibly bellybutton lint. It was sealed with a cork and buried upside-down. Unlike previous witch bottles that have been found, though, the seal on this one held, providing a rare insight to the mindset of Anglo-Saxons about the time of the Salem witch trials:

Archaeologist Mike Pitts, the editor of British Archaeology, told Discovery News, "The discovery of something so apparently bizarre, indicating a clear belief in witchcraft and forces that have nothing at all to do with conventional, approved religion, remind us that early modern England did not belong to the same world we now inhabit."

And yet this is a huge source of modern American common law. It makes one shudder.

Gay marriage now legal in New Hampshire

Apparently the governor of the state "personally opposes gay marriage," but (like most thoughtful religionists [1]) he figured that nobody was trying to force his church to recognize marriages that his church doesn't like. So he signed the bill into law once the legislature made that clear in the bill:

Cheers from the gallery greeted the key vote in the House, which passed it 198-176. Surrounded by gay marriage supporters, Lynch signed the bill about an hour later.

Whoa-whoa-whoa, wait a minute: 198 to 176? Exactly how many people in New Hampshire aren't in that state's House of Representatives?! Wikipedia tells me 400 representatives, serving a state of about 1.3 million people. The U.S. House of Representatives has 435 voting members representing 306.5 million people. So if the U.S. House had as many members, proportionally, as New Hampshire's does, it would number about 100,000. There must be a happy medium. Oh, wait. Here's a mention of the state Senate:

[T]he Senate . . . approved it 14-10 Wednesday afternoon.

Uh, I guess that balances it, having 24 Senators for all 1.3 million people? State governments are weird.

News via Mithras.

---

[1] Cue LBBastard telling me that thoughtful religionist is an oxymoron in 3, 2, . . .

Why is Newt Gingrich getting all this airtime?

Why are the news channels always talking to Newt Gingrich lately? Look, even when they identify him they have to state that he hasn't been in national government for 10 years. What's more, even when he was in office, it was for only 4 years.

I like how Duncan has taken to calling him "President Gingrich."

Profoundness: on the avalanche of work

It is devilishly hard for me to keep up with lectures, readings, and practice tests for the bar exam when you people insist on continuing to update your blogs.

Also, I haven't worked this hard since the first few months of my 1L year. I am out of practice.

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 decline and fall of Wolf Block.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Profoundness: on post-graduate education

It's days like this when I wish I'd gone to med school, rather than law school. What better way to put my money where my mouth is than to become an abortion practitioner? It's not like I'll ever be actually litigating abortion questions -- that kind of stuff is left to the top grads of the top schools, not to chumps like me.

No woman chooses a late-term abortion for kicks

To better help people discuss the situations in which a woman and her healthcare provider may opt for a late-term abortion, Booman provides a list of fetal conditions you should never, ever do a Google image search for.

Glomarization's heart goes out to Dr. George Tiller's family and patients.

Also: dig this video, presciently screened at an abortion-rights fundraiser on 21 May 2009: