Today I spent the morning at Downtown Disney. I went in as a small-l libertarian capitalist. Now I think I'm a Marxist. I'm pretty sure I need a new wardrobe; this button-down stuff won't work at all. Downtown Disney is a hub of ravenous naked commerce that would make Adam Smith shit himself.

Today was Abby's sixth birthday, so much of the morning was taken up with her visiting the Bippity Boppity Boutique at the Disney store for a princess makeover. Now, though I support full formal and legal equality for women, I am not generally seen as a feminist, nor have I ever been, with the exception of a period in college where I pretended to be one for distinctly un-feminist reasons. But the whole Disney Princess thing rubs me the wrong way. First, it's a way to re-brand and re-sell Disney's old properties to kids. Second, I'm not sure I like the message it sends to my daughters. Even if Disney movies — at least the modern ones — have fairly brave female leads showing initiative and purpose, the Disney Princess branding is mostly about being decorative and well-behaved. Screw that. I want my daughters to kick ass and take names on whatever playing field in life they choose, and only be decorative and decorous to the extent it amuses them.

Abby emerged from the Boutique made up like Princess Jasmine, with poufed-up hair, makeup, and lots of glitter. She looked extremely cute and was very happy. I told her she was beautiful and didn't act like a grump. But inside, I was thinking that no one with glitter in her hair ever made a crucial cross-examination or convinced the Board of Directors to move forward with the IPO or transplanted the kidney successfully. Honestly, I didn't used to dwell on that sort of thing much. That's what having daughters will do to you.

Jason Statham's Crank pulled in over $27 million, so it is no surprise that it landed a sequel, Crank: High Voltage, which comes out on Friday.

I liked Statham in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, so I didn't turn away when I was stuck watching the movie last year while waiting for someone for a very, very long time in a diner with a TV on. Here's a short synopsis of the plot: Statham gets dosed with something that is, effectively, an overdose of adrenaline. He has to run around the city burning off energy in search of the antidote, which I assume is a chamomile concentrate, or else he will die. It is basically Speed without the bus or Keanu Reeves' charisma.

This movie had what I consider the most offensive scene in any movie, ever, but I never thought it would be timely to bring it up, even with the sequel coming out. And then Jason Statham went out and won today's Obtuse Quote of the Day award, providing me the opportunity. Discussing filming a sex scene in a mall for Crank 2, Statham said:

"Trying to do an aggressive sex scene is quite difficult. Especially in a public place with a crowd of screaming extras with their little camera phones going click-click, talking pictures of your pasty white ass. I've had my fair share of bedroom antics in films, but they were a little more private."

Really, Jason? Let me remind you of a scene from Crank. After one suspense-filled encounter after another, you were winding down when you ran into your girlfriend, Amy Smart, in Chinatown. Without anything to keep your heart racing, you might die and there was nobody chasing you anymore. Of course, you did just notice your huge erection.

So you raped your girlfriend. On a crowded Chinatown street.

Then, just when she decided that she didn't mind being raped (!?), you took a phone call and left her lying on the street, frustrated. And the assembled Chinese throng applauded.

You might remember the scene because Amy Smart is also your girlfriend in Crank 2. I hope that Paul Blart was around if you raped her in the mall, too.

If you can't stand losing reasonably often, you will hate being a criminal defense attorney — particularly in federal court, where the feds cherry-pick winning cases and devote comparatively massive resources to them. It doesn't matter whether you are a great lawyer or not — you're not always going to win, unless you are cherry-picking cases yourself. So the occasional victory keeps your chin up and allows you to tell clients with a straight face that there is always hope.

I have a client I've written about before. He was horrifically badly used by his trial attorney, a now-disbarred mentally ill man who used a "jailhouse lawyer" to refer cases to him. I have compassion for that lawyer — there but for the grace of God go I — but as a result of his condition, my client, a man then in his early thirties, faced life in federal prison for his third drug beef. We came in after the conviction and did everything we could on direct appeal, but trial counsel had left such an awful record that there was little chance. Judge Kozinski chewed on me and on the AUSA for about forty minutes, but ultimately the panel affirmed. The family asked us to make a last-ditch effort — a Section 2255 motion (the habeas corpus vehicle to attack a federal conviction and sentence) and we filed one based on an ineffective assistance theory. For a year we litigated over things like getting trial counsel's state bar record, which revealed his admissions about his mental and physical condition during the client's trial. The government fought tooth and nail, arguing very credibly that the evidence was so overwhelming that the ineffective assistance made no difference to the result.

Today the judge granted our motion and vacated the conviction and life sentence. The government has to decide whether to re-try our guy — it won't be terribly easy, as we demonstrated that the informant lied on the stand and trial counsel failed to catch it.

If the government decides to re-try, it will be a rough fight. But today, it tastes sweet.

If Justice Anthony Kennedy only had the wisdom to foresee ICanHazGunPermit.com, perhaps he'd have decided that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is a collective one, after all.

Reality shows. I hate them. And yet, I watch every episode of the Amazing Race (although, I would argue that it is not quite as loathsome as most..) They have created a cottage industry for stars whose careers have faded to once again be seen. This leads to some contestants that stretch the term celebrity to ridiculous bounds.

Now, we have an NBC show (based on a huge British hit) "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here" where 10 celebrities will live in faux deprivation in the Costa Rican jungle. One of those celebrities, potentially, will be disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Now, assuming that NBC can get past the fact that Rod is not allowed to leave the State while on bond, is he really a celebrity? Would Richard Nixon have competed in Battle of the Network Stars if allowed? No. Would Bill Clinton? In a second. Was Clinton the tipping point where politicians became celebrities? Maybe it started with JFK?

In any case, Governor Blagojevich seems like an uncreative choice. I mean, throw Gary Condit or any Kennedy in there, and watch the disaster. The only real suspense here is what his hair will look like after a few days in the jungle.

The AP is running a story provacatively titled "Student killed in love triangle involving teacher" I link to the story despite including it in full below, to give you the full brunt of the assault on the English language. I defy anyone to read the first paragraph and figure out which person is the teacher, which the student and which the jealous boyfriend. In fact, in the first sentence, the gender of the pronoun changes.

Student killed in love triangle involving teacher

By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

(04-14) 14:10 PDT Chandler, Ariz. (AP) –

An 18-year-old high school student caught with his 48-year-old math teacher in her bedroom was stabbed to death by her boyfriend, who was himself a former student of hers, police said Tuesday.

Chandler police said 20-year-old Sixto Balbuena told them he never meant to kill Samuel Valdivia. He allegedly told police "the blade went in like going into butter" and that he just wanted to show Valdivia how much he hurt him by sleeping with Tamara Hofmann.

Balbuena, a Navy sailor on leave from California, was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder after police found him covered in blood and told them about the killing. He was in jail Tuesday and did not have a lawyer.

Balbuena found his girlfriend naked and Valdivia in his boxer shorts in the woman's bedroom around 2:40 a.m. Friday, according to police reports and court documents.

Balbuena told police that Valdivia apologized to him before Balbuena began kicking, punching and throwing things at him, according to a police probable cause statement.

Police said Balbuena told them he "wanted to teach the victim a lesson," and stabbed him in the lower side with a kitchen knife, according to the court document. Valdivia later died at a hospital.

He also threw Hofmann to the floor jumped on top of her and demanded to know how long she had been cheating on him, according to the document.

Police said Hofmann taught Valdivia math at El Dorado High School in Chandler and was also Balbuena's teacher when he attended Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe.

A call to both schools was not immediately returned Tuesday. Hofmann's phone number is unlisted.

Balbuena is the one who called 911. He told officers he felt remorse for stabbing Valdivia after seeing him lying on the floor struggling to breathe, police said.

There are times when a unionized employee has been aggrieved and it is appropriate to exercise one's contractual rights. Then there is James Kauchis, an accounting clerk at Broome County, New York's Department of Social Services. Kauchis recently filed for compensation for his missed lunch hour on April 3. Far be it from me to deny a man his contractually required lunch hour but he was stuck in his office because the building was on lockdown by the police following the Binghamton citizenship exam massacre. The DSS even got permission to have pizza delivered to the staff. It is hard to contemplate the sheer size and density of the balls this man must have.

I am the son of two former public employees so I chafe a little when I hear people complain about the lack of initiative of government employees. Partly because I know how many uncompensated hours my parents spent at their jobs but mostly because I've seen just how lazy private sector employees are.

On the other hand, I worked for a short while at the Port Authority and saw people who knew how to minimize the amount of time they spent at the office while still receiving their full pay with amazing precision. Whether it was by going to the bathroom five minutes before punching out every day (so that it was on company time) or turning every cold into a week-long hiatus (because a continued absence was only one absence), I knew that my run of the mill lack of interest in productivity was strictly minor league.

None of these city slickers, however, have the sheer chutzpah of Binghamton's Mr. Kauchis. I know that I could never withstand this sort of scrutiny (see, for example, the time of this posting) but I'd love to see an audit of Kauchis' computer during the time he had to 'work' through lunch.

Meaning, do we really want to know how they're made?

The Long Island head of one of the largest process-serving firms in [New York] state was arrested this morning on charges of running a massive fraud scheme by failing to properly serve court papers on thousands, authorities said Tuesday.

As a result of the actions by William Singler, the head of American Legal Process in Lynbrook, the victims from Long Island and around the state had their finances frozen or wages garnished without a chance to contest legal actions against them by creditors, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said.

In any civil lawsuit, it is required in order for the court to obtain jurisdiction that the defendant be served with a summons and complaint.  This ensures that the defendant has notice of the proceeding and allows him to respond to the suit.  This is true of litigation from the most complex, such as patent or antitrust suits that can keep a stable of lawyers working on one case for years, to the simplest, such as assembly line consumer debt collection, where one attorney may have hundreds or thousands of "cases".  In some states, private process servers are used to see to it that defendants are served, at which point the litigation goes on its merry way.

Now it's a dirty little not-so-secret that most (though by no means all) defendants in consumer debt collection cases are absolutely responsible and have no good defense.  Many (though by no means all) ignore such lawsuits entirely, leading to default judgments, garnishment, and bankruptcy.  That's the sort of case in which American Legal Process seemed to be most in demand.

Evidently, if the New York Attorney General's allegations are correct, someone at American Legal Process decided that since many defendants throw away important papers such as lawsuits, the company could save them the trouble.  Why not throw away the papers before they ever get served?

Cuomo charged that the overall scheme involved thousands of instances of so-called "sewer service" in which the notice required to be given to the defendants in a lawsuit is not properly served – but might as well have been dropped down a sewer. …

In one case, the attorney general said, one of ALP's process servers claimed "to have been at four different addresses at the same moment."

In another case, he said, one process server claimed to have driven around the state 10,000 miles in a single day to serve various people.

Concurrently with the criminal charges against Singler, Cuomo has announced a civil suit against Singler's largest client, Farmingdale-based consumer collections law firm Forster and Garbus, for failure to supervise Singler.  Of course, Singler and Forster and Garbus deny all charges, and will defend themselves vigorously in court.  They will be able to do so because they will be properly served with all process and complaints.

You can be sure of that.

Now the interesting question is, if Cuomo is correct and thousands or tens of thousands of suits weren't actually served, what are the Attorney General and courts of New York going to do for those defendants?  Will the courts reopen or reexamine a substantial portion of the 98,000 lawsuits in which ALP alleged proper service?

Don't hold your breath.  Everyone knows that most of those defendants were liable anyway.

The scene: Africa. Not the real Africa, but the thoroughly Disnified Africa of Disney Animal Kingdom, with people selling squirt-bottle fans instead of hacking each other to death with machetes. Right now the fans aren't selling. We're crammed under the leaky thatched roof of a restaurant watching the sheets of rain, a welcome change from the hail. Hordes of people are clad in lengths of eight-dollar Mickey-themed clear plastic, ponchos with indifferently placed head-holes that stink of free polymers and disappointment. The Florida sky is the color of an angry bruise and the palm trees are bending improbably far in the sudden wind. Children dance from foot to foot, and parents stare grimly into the rain, weighing a day out and about in a lightening storm against the prospect of being cooped up in a slightly musty hotel room with the kids.

It's the happiest place on Earth!

I was lucky enough to attend a house party put on by the SF Browncoats (Firefly fans, not fascists) that featured a very intimate concert by Marian Call. To sum up Marian in one sentence, I might go with: Definitely the best singer/songwriter playing the typewriter and the ashes of her dead cat going today!

Marian is incredibly talented, very funny and a geek through and through. She has songs dedicated to/ inspired by Firefly, BSG and other assorted things loved by the geeknescentia. And yes, as I mentioned above she does use the typewriter as a percussion instrument (and it works great!) and Zippy her departed cat as a shaker (as she says, "It's much less awkward once you meet him.")

I liked the show so much I bought her debut CD Vanilla there and then ordered her other album (which is all geek music) online. I think she's something folks would like, and I highly recommend her work. She's heading down to Southern California now, for those of you in the area. Check her out!

Last night, the Dodgers were given four outs in the second inning and got a bonus run that the Diamondbacks are probably still steamed about.

With runners on second and third and two outs one out, Randy Wolf hit a line drive right up the middle. Dan Haren caught the ball, wheeled and threw to the second baseman to double up Juan Pierre, the runner on second. Meanwhile, Andre Ethier broke for home on contact.

After the play ended, the Dodgers protested that the run should count and, after a conference, the umps agreed. The second baseman tagged Pierre instead of stepping on the bag, it was not a force out; because Ethier crossed the plate before the tag, the run counts. The danger of a run-down is always that other baserunners can advance while you are playing monkey-in-the-middle with one guy and that's what happened here.

But Ethier never tagged up. What about that? All of the lawyers on this board are probably only familiar with what happened from their law books: "procedural default." Since Arizona didn't throw over to third for what would have been, in their minds, a fourth out, they conceded the run. And because the time to appeal had passed, it was too late to complain that the runner hadn't tagged up – even though everyone in the park knew he had not.

It's just baseball – but it reminded me of the high bar that the Supreme Court has set for courts to evaluate new evidence of actual innocence after the regular run of appeals and habeas corpus petitions have been completed. I understand that the judicial system can't bear the weight of every claim of innocence but as we can see with the debacle currently ongoing in Mississippi, there are probably a lot of cases that the courts should take a look at again, procedural bars be damned.

That said, I probably wouldn't be so exercised about this if Haren's run weren't also charged to my fantasy team.

Let's be clear from the start. I am not beautiful, popular, rich or any of those other things that would give me entre into society. So, when I get small glimpses of the culture, I have to fight my inner Margaret Mead, and not become detached. That sort of happened on Saturday, as I attended the annual Cherry Blossom Festival Queen's Program in Japantown.

Continue Reading »

Sweet merciful God, help me.

I used to think that I was fat, until I went to the hotel pool near Disney World.

The Mystery of Time, presented by the Moody Science Institute, a division of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, Illinois.