Saturday, October 08, 2005

Correct, Zack, Rehnquist was promoted to the Supreme Court by Nixon straight from the Attorney General's office. He is somewhat similar to Meirs in that he was a political hatchet man for the President who appointed him, but Rehnquist proved to be the exception to the independent rule I have laid down. I am not compeltely opposed to the Meirs appointment, but I wish G.W. would have picked someone with a little bit more experience in the mainstream of law as opposed to the mainstream of politics. Anyway, it should be an interesting show when Meirs goes up against the boys and girls on the Hill. Meirs better hope that any skeletons she has in her closet are buried 60 feet deep with two mac trucks parked on top of them. I still expect great things from our new Chief Justice. Roberts seems like the consensus builder we need on the Court. Here's hoping, anyway. Take care you guys and have a great day.

posted by Drew @ 12:00 PM 

Friday, October 07, 2005

Pete, if only you'd develop an imaginary relationship with say, a cartoon lioness, you might see that dropping a course is not worth getting in a fret about. And it turns out, I've read studies man, that sleep is important...so get some. Emily, I'm sorry I couldn't make it out to New York. I know it would have been a great time, especially working with six lovely young ladies. I wish you the very best and know you will find a good fit for yourself eventually. You're ten maybe eleven times smarter than me and you have so many passions. Christina, I suggest whipping every child who expresses a fear of Chemistry with that rubber Bunsen burner piping, or hmm, that seems kind of harsh, maybe you could force each kid to balance a graduated cylinder on his nose for the entirety of the class period. They'd focus so hard that it wouldn't occur to them to be mean to the sweet substitute teacher. Ok, I'm being silly and not helping. Let me just say, I could never be an ass to you if you were my substitute Chem teacher in high school. You're too cute and wonderful and interesting. Just think, you have chemistry with each one of those brats, I mean you do, even if just for one day. Build off of that, and keep that bunny under wraps.

posted by Ben @ 6:27 PM 

I heard that our recently departed Chief Justice never served as a judge. Is that true Drew?

Anyway, I forgot how cool this whole blog thing is. Just being able to hear about what is happening in everyone's life makes me smile. I don't feel quite so far away.

Grad school is grad school. I work long hours, study long hours and run participants and research for long hours. However, I have met a number of amazing people and I have managed to maintain a sense of freedom and free time somehow. Also, I think I'm becoming a better teacher because my students seem to do better than the other classes and they pay attention to me instead of playing on the computers. However, I can't imagine teaching any form of secondary school. I'll leave that headache to you Christina.

I live in a beautiful place surrounding by mountains and life is good.

Sending pleasant thoughts out to all of you.

I'm also sending thoughts of communist propaganda to you Drew. Mostly because I smile when I imagine you screeming "The Reds are coming! the Reds are coming!"

posted by Zach @ 2:25 PM 

Anyway, Meir is a political hatchet woman, less likely to be influenced by precedent and more so by politics. I agree that the law is made through politics and I even acknowledge that not being a judge before you sit on the Supreme Court does not necessarily make you a bad justice. However, inexperienced justices have been proven easier to manipulate by the politic forces inside and outside the court. For example, Earl Warren never so much as sat on traffic court and he ended up being railroaded by LBJ in the abortive attempts to find out what really happened to Kennedy. Powell, the well respected and capable lawyer from Virginia, was taken in by the emotional pleas of the bleeding hearts of affirmative action and tried to divide racial bias in schools and jobs in the same way Solomon did. Now we can use race as a positive factor in admissions, but the Court has yet to approve of any school's admission system for enforcing this because they all lead to quotas anyway. My point is that someone who has more judicial experience has a tendency to really put the independent in independent judiciary whereas someone who has ziltch bench time is more likely to be the guy in prison who the big boys use as currency. I wish Bush had picked someone with more experience, but this one will probably be confirmed because, like Roberts, there will be no dirt on her that the Dems will be able to dig up.

posted by Drew @ 9:29 AM 

Don't worry, Christina, I am sorry that I sounded like I was talking down to you and Pete. I don't mean to sound that way, I really don't. What is my opinion on Meirs? I don't like the fact that Bush picked someone with zero judicial experience. Traditionally, that has been a bad move for Republicans. Nixon picked Lewis F. Powell Jr., a former ABA President, and he ended up writing the opinion that allowed affirmative action. Eisenhower picked Earl Warren as Chief Justice to eliminate him as a opponent for the Presidency, and Warren turned out to be the most liberal Chief Justice we ever had. I have to go to my class in Contracts now, but I will finish this report later. Bottom line: Roberts is a good pick, Meirs is bad.

posted by Drew @ 7:08 AM 

Thursday, October 06, 2005

it's been a long time since i've posted, and i don't feel i have much to say tonight, but i'm here to announce that i'm still alive.
news at the farm: we have two new interns, a guy and a young woman, who are both very nice. the new guy is the only guy, so of course the first thing everyone ever says to him (especially when it's a guy) is, "soooo--what's it like working with six women?" Annie lives with Lorri and i. she just graduated Sarah Lawrence and has enough energy to run at the end of the day, which is impressive. she likes listening to NPR and knows a lot about Africa and foreign relations and agriculture. she owns a 1950s typewriter and uses it to write to her friends. i like listening to it from the other room.

potatoes, squash, and garlic are all harvested. tomatoes are almost done (finally!). we're just starting to break up garlic cloves for autumn planting. my thumbs are sore already. the weather lately has been gorgeous as we all work in 75-degree weather and watch the trees turn flickering, sunshiny red against the blue sky. tomorrow it will rain and be miserable, but at least it's taken this long to happen. Lorri and i are planning to get her to Woodstock next weekend, the 16th. she's excited, but we need to figure something out to keep us amicable while we drive. the ride back from Rhode Island was pretty unpleasant when she pulled out her umteenth cigarette and proceeded to smoke it as i drove the same wrong turn the third time in a row in heavy rain. we kind of stopped speaking at that point. on the other hand, the ocean itself was absolutely splendid. so was camping. being tourists in the little tourist towns was absolutely splendid. just the end sucked. i guess that's kind of Lorri in a nutshell. love and hate.

i have a lot on my mind lately, but not much i want to do. lots of stuff i don't want to do (but should) that i don't feel i have time for. some worries that i can't do anything about. lots of decisions to make, but often just feel lost. there's content in farmwork, but boredom, too. Lorri was a darling and bought me Pride and Prejudice to read, and i did it in three days. now i'm craving more old fiction. it's been such a long time since i've read a book that quickly, and with so much enjoyment. i need to decide what to do over the course of the next year. it would be nice if i could narrow it down to a geographical region, but i find myself considering both Urbana, and India again. it would be nice if i could decide what to do with myself, but i'm considering writing and farming and substitute teaching. i just can't decide. nothing stands out as being a clear-cut decision, and that makes things hard for me.

you kinda got me on a weird night. but i should be researching more employment possibilities. like Americorps. they're on the list, too.

posted by Emily @ 6:36 PM 

After realizing that my deep depression was probably related to lack of sleep, i dropped a class. I feel like a big loser now. I would feel like a slacker too if i hadn't stayed up until 4 doing homework last night.

Drew, Harriet Meirs. Expound!

posted by pete @ 11:58 AM 

Drew, I didn't mean to criticize so harshly. I appreciate your fatherly advice. I should have thought more about what I was writing. Sometimes you just type and don't reread it.

Ben wow. I miss mountains. you are so lucky. Maybe I'll be able to visit sometime. maybe.

I made a cheesecake yesterday and it was damn good. is good. today I need to do homework so I am wasting my time on the internet. imagine that. things don't change too much do they?

posted by Christina @ 11:21 AM 

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

So, I'm here working my bum off in Idaho, all moved into my new apt. The new address is 70 E. Little, Driggs, ID 83422. Anyways yo, here, check out my first column:

SHOW ME A GEM
By Ben Gildehaus


A month ago, I was the head of the liquor department at a grocery store in St. Louis County, pondering when my recently attained college degree would liberate me from wasting away amidst bottles of whiskey and cases of cheap beer. Then, out of the blue in a Star Trek-ish moment, Scotty (aka the Teton Valley News) beamed me up to a place called Driggs. Escape was mine. But Idaho? What did I know of Idaho? Potatoes…?

Moving so quickly caused a flurry of last minute preparations, but relocating to Idaho at least alleviated one minor irritation. I will no longer have to worry about the pronunciation of my new state’s last syllable. Back home in the Show Me state, if you’re from St. Louis or Kansas City, you’re from Missour-ee. If you’re from anywhere else in the state, you hail from Missour-uh. There’s constant argument between the urbanites and the more rural factions about how to pronounce the state they all live in. Here in the state of Idaho, the pronunciation is relatively straightforward. It’s just ho. Ida-ho. Rhymes with potato. One way to say it, no controversy.

Unable to scrunch much furniture into my ’95 Plymouth Neon (I’ll be the one driving, or maybe stuck in, a little red matchbox car this winter.), my folks stuffed their minivan full of apartment décor and parental castoffs and followed one day behind me up and over the Teton Pass. Mom, historically a white-knuckle downhiller, never realized that Teton “Pass” literally meant that cars would be careening around them at breakneck speeds no matter what was approaching from the opposite direction. Somehow she survived.

First to arrive in Driggs, I discovered that the apartment over Peaked Sports I had picked out through the classifieds was not quite yet vacant. Seems the inhabitants wanted to finish out their lease by staying til the end of the month. Imagine that. When the folks arrived, we realized we now had two cars at our final destination, crammed to the gills with nowhere to unload. For the next few days if we wanted to go anywhere together—out to dinner, up to Targhee Resort, wherever—we had to follow each other like gypsies through the Valley because there was no space in either vehicle to stuff another human being. We were eventually rescued by my future landlord who graciously let me set up camp temporarily in a vacant studio.

To finish off furnishing the new pad, we’ve become more than passing acquaintances with Victor’s used furniture guru, John Fettig of Turning Over (whom I’m trying to get to give me a discount since I’ve now mentioned his name in two articles). We’ve also shopped area thrift stores, a general store, and occasional garage sales. With the aid of a lot of friendly Idahoans—and four, count them, trips to Rexburg in the space of just a few days—I am finally a self-sustaining apartment dweller.

My first week in Driggs has had its ups and downs—literally. The new inflatable bed purchased to sub for the mattress and box springs left at home out of spatial necessity has mysteriously been oozing air, and I’ve found myself pumping up from the bottom of a hole at four in the morning. But at the same time at that ungodly hour, I’ve been able to blearily look out my window to the sight of a star-filled sky the likes of which St. Louis has never seen.

And there have been other sightings this week: a deer bounding across the road up in Targhee, an owl that almost took out the van on one of those late-night return trips from Rexburg, and Grumpy’s Goat Shack. (My parents couldn’t believe they were eating dinner with unmentionables suspended overhead!) This really must be the “Wilder Side of the Tetons,” and that’s just fine with this Show Me State transplant.

So, Idaho, thanks for taking in another new resident. You’re so much more than just potatoes. In just one week, it’s obvious that you really are the gem of your state’s nickname.

Show me more, Idaho.

posted by Ben @ 9:33 PM 

Sorry, just trying to help.

posted by Drew @ 3:06 PM 

Ahhhhhh Drew went into COMFORT MODE!!!! Sometimes I wonder if you are preparing for our funerals. It seems somewhat dirge-like. anyhow I have to get away from the computer before my eyes fall out of my head. HA LA!

posted by Christina @ 11:48 AM