For the past few days I’ve been trying to e-mail a copy of my resume to a family friend, but it kept getting stuck in his company’s spam filter. We kept thinking that my last name triggered the filter. (Ah, the perils of having a last name that contains the string of letters “s-l-u-t”.)
Turns out we were wrong.
The problem was that my resume says I graduated cum laude.
Think about that… it took me a moment to figure out why that was a problem.
There’s a great piece in this week’s New Yorker about a man everyone should know about: David Addington, Dick Cheney’s right-hand man. (The piece isn’t online, unfortunately, but there’s this Q&A with the author that effectively summarizes it.) Addington is an extremist bully who thinks the President can do anything he wants in a time of war and that the two other branches of the federal government can do nothing to stop it. Worse, he essentially controls the legal aspects of the so-called “war on terror.” He was responsible for creating the so-called military commissions (which even many high-ranking military officials disagre with, and the constitutionality of which the Supreme Court will decide this week), and he has taken presidential signing statements, a dicey concept to begin with, to an unconstitutional extreme. In the 1980s, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, he argued that rather than the Reagan Administration overstepping executive authority in the Iran-Contral scandal, Congress overstepped its authority in prosecuting people in the scandal.
Adding to his mystique, David Addington refuses to be interviewed or photographed. But one of the many people that Jane Mayer interviewed for her article did indeed refer to him as “a bully,” and another said that in meetings discussing what to do about presidential power after 9/11, he was “very insistent and very loud” and got his way.
This man is scary.
One hopes that if the next President is a Republican, he or she will be less foolish than George W. Bush and won’t allow things like this to happen, or people like this to work in the White House. I’m (rightly or wrongly) optimistic that this will be the case, that George W. Bush is just a horrific aberration in American history instead of the harbinger of a new era.
Some people have voiced expectations that the New York Court of Appeals will issue its same-sex marriage decision in Hernandez v. Robles soon – “as early as this week” (see here and here).
This is how rumors get started. As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no basis for these conjectures. I don’t know if New York law has a deadline by which an appellate court must rule on a case that’s been argued before it, but even if New York has such a law, the case was argued less than a month ago and I doubt any deadline would be approaching. I think some people are really eager for a court decision and are engaging in some wishful thinking. (The Empire State Pride Agenda might just be trying to be well-prepared, though.)
It’s not even guaranteed that the decision will be in favor of same-sex marriage. But if it is, I hope they wait until after the November elections. The last thing we need right now is another pro-gay-marriage court decision to rile up social conservatives.
Also pending: New Jersey and Washington decisions, the latter of which has been pending for a year and a half. That seems a bit extreme to me.