Outside Counsel

This is the sort of thing that makes Dick Cheney so adorable:

"As revelations about the NSA continue to trickle out from the haul of secrets leaked by Edward Snowden, including unsurprising confirmation that the U.S. spies on frenemy nations like China, so do elaborate condemnations of his actions. "I think it's one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States," said former vice-president Dick Cheney yesterday on Fox News Sunday, before floating a theory that Snowden is actually a Chinese spy."

Yeah, because Scooter Libby was a patriot. 

Buffalo is "a marvelous environment for coincidence."

This is great:

ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina's skirt.

This post, at Byzantium's Shores, gets it exactly right. Another way to think about it might be that legal systems resemble mathematical systems, at least to the extent that both can be said to be subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem. Arguments about social policy that rely exclusively on the text of the Constitution are a form of question-begging, and should not be tolerated except to the extent that they are arguments that are made within the context of the system itself. I could, for example, argue to a judge that people should not be allowed to protest political decisions made by the President because such protests create the risk of social disruption. Maybe they do, but the judge would reject that argument because its reasoning occurs outside of the legal context in which the courts operate. Even if the judge agreed with me, it would be error to hold in my favor, because the judge is bound to operate exclusively within the boundaries that the law-- in this example, the Constitution-- defines.

Fridays are Law Days (sometimes) at Outside Counsel, so I thought I'd bring this Gil Thorp storyline to your attention. Two of my principal academic interests are Discovery and the portrayal of lawyers in popular media, and here we have an unusual example of  the two intersecting.* Gil Thorp is a strip about a high school coach. Typically it follows the seasons: fall is football, winter is hoops, and spring is baseball. In the summer different things happen-- for a while Gil's assistant coach solved mysteries. This particular storyline is, believe it or not, baseball related. The sons of the plaintiff's lawyer and the defendant here play on the team together, and this lawsuit is a source of interpersonal conflict. The lawsuit here arises from a slip-and-fall in front of a convenience store. I have to admit, this is the weirdest thing I think I have ever seen in the funnies. I like depositions, and they are at the heart of  American legal process, but if you want to see three panels about why nobody under 50 reads newspapers here it is.

* Another example, for anyone else who finds this interesting-- Hello? Where'd everybody go?-- can be found in the movie about Facebook, The Social Network.

Keef.

The Superman problem is well-known: if he is as powerful as all that, where's the dramatic tension? Over the years Kal-El has become more and more powerful, and the problem becomes more and more pronounced. It can be dealt with by giving him friends who are vulnerable: the complicated solution to this is for Superman to have a secret identity, and then hilarious complications ensue. He can be given vunerabilities: Kryptonite was introduced in 1943, five years after the Man of Steel made his first appearance, and it has proved to be a pretty good McGuffin over the years. The Last Son of Krypton is also vulnerable to magic. That's Mr. Mxyzptlk's dodge, although I personally think that magic is made up. The only other thing left is stronger bad guys, and for my money the best of the lot has to be Brainiac. He's wicked evil, and way smart, and he has a unique look as well. I mean, a pink polo shirt, Speedo and boots! C'mon! Only an android could pull that off. Lex Luthor gets all the attention, but Brainiac rocks.

For no good reason--seriously, no reason at all, honest-- I have often mused over where I'd hole up if I were forced to flee the jurisdiction. Of course, my thoughts on the subject are necessarily dependent upon the reason for my hypothetical departure-- as Edward Snowden is discovering it is one thing when the United States is the bad guy looking for you, and another thing altogether if it is, say, a robot from the future. Since we now know that the NSA reads everything (including, I guess, Outside Counsel) you'll find no clues in these pages, although the must-to-avoids referenced here would be poor places to start. Like David Byrne I feel as though some portion of my life has been spent trying to find a city to live in-- but I suppose in a pinch I could lay low in some crofter's cottage as well.
UPDATE: Pro tips.

To The Hold Steady at Thursdays at Canalside, a venue that I like more every time I go. It had rained hard all day, and the skies did not look promising, but we cowboyed up and caught the show that the rest of this summer's concerts will have to live up to.

Of course, it helps that Craig Finn and the boys have been a band that I've loved for a while now. As I said to Captain X last night, even though their songs aren't really about my life, or what my life was ever like, much, they sound as though they might be. The imaginary philosopher-punk that sometimes appears in my mind as my fictional alter-ego would be the kind of guy that would hang out with the guy whose girlfriend had a gift for the horses, and I've often wished I represented the cat who didn't get his phone call in "Sequestered in Memphis." There is a sincerity to The Hold Steady's songs that surpasses that of Bruce Springsteen, Finn's obvious influence. Their characters-- for the most part-- sound like people that they actually know or knew. With the Boss you don't get that as much. He sings a lot about lovable losers and romantic hoodlums and otherwise doomed characters, but you always get the feeling that Springsteen's pimps, whores and gangsters were really just people he saw at the bars his band was playing in-- he wouldn't have hung with those guys, because he was a musician*. Finn is too, but his characters aren't larger than life folk figures: they are mostly sad people whose anger and disapointment more or less sustains them as they careen from one stupid, bad choice after another, mostly on a nightly basis. "She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn't that great of a girlfriend"-- how do you resist that kind of writing? And oh yeah, they rock. "Literature with power chords," Christgau says, and I'll buy that. Seeing The Hold Steady is like an affirmation: they seem to love what they do, and they seem kindly disposed to their hoodrat audience.

* And then he turned into John Steinbeck. I don't want to exalt Craig Finn at Springsteen's expense-- but around the time Springsteen wrote, "And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat," I pretty much gave up on the idea of believing he was doing anything other than trying to make stuff scan. Nothing wrong with that-- I'll still turn up Thunder Road when it comes on, but we should really stop pretending that he is writing real-life, gritty stuff because it isn't the case, and hasn't been for years.

Sometimes it seems like this movie is my whole life:

Spade: (pointing) Give them Cairo.
Gutman: (chuckling) Well, by gad, sir.
Cairo: (incensed) And suppose we give them you or Miss O'Shaughnessy? How about that, huh?
Spade: You want the falcon. I've got it. The fall guy's part of the price I'm asking. As for Miss O'Shaughnessy, if you think she can be rigged for the part, I'm perfectly willing to discuss it with you.