I loved this piece in the Times Magazine today. Summing up the end of her time in Los Angeles, the author writes:
[S]urrounded by real friends and one lax psychic, that I saw the cruel joke behind the preceding nine years of my life: amnesia had been unavailable at every moment when it might actually have come in handy. So I moved.
Yeah, that’s it.
A lot of ink has been spilled the past several days over Lara Logan’s comments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about how she doesn’t watch the U.S. television news– even though she’s CBS’s Chief Foreign Correspondent– and if she did, she would “blow [her] brains out” because it would “drive her nuts.”
I share the sentiment. Television news here is terrible. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the networks, they’re all terrible. They are all utterly unwatchable. The BBC World News hasn’t been that great since before I went to college. The venerable News Hour, which I still think is the best U.S.-based television news, just doesn’t have the news-gathering capability to put out the product that it should Having Margaret Warner in Pakistan from time to time is nice, but they rely on short, voiced-over clips from Independent Television News for most of their international reporting. That just won’t do.
So, most of my news comes from print. Recently, though, I’ve added a television news source. In fact, the source is so good that I can hardly keep up with what it produces. I have over ten videos waiting in my Miro queue: one about Thai street food, another about the “judicial system” in Iraq, an interview with the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, and a feature about problems with urban growth in Indonesia. These are mostly longer-form videos of at least eight or nine minutes, many times what most cable news features in this country are.
The channel is Al-jazeera English, and you can’t watch it in this country without buying a satellite dish or watching on the Internet.
Let’s dispose of a few things right off the bat. It’s not anti-semitic. Israel has more restrictions on speech and the press than we do and the network airs there. Not only that, but it’s quite popular there. Moreover, it’s not editorially “anti-American.”
It’s simply the best television news I’ve seen in quite some time. They hired all the professional journalists from the BBC, gave them plenty of money and time, and let them do their work. It’s a pleasure to watch.
I just watched a twenty-minute interview on Al-jazeera with Noam Chomsky, one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals. Problem is, he can’t get a lick of airtime on television. William F. Buckley got television’s version of state funeral (rivaled only by the unseemly, lugubrious mess that followed Tim Russert’s death) and Noam Chomsky, whose work (most prominently as a linguist) unquestionably (and regardless of viewpoint) is superior to Buckley’s, can’t get a segment on Anderson Cooper 360.
Chomsky’s viewpoint is not the only one systematically excluded from television. The other voices, and the reasons for their suppression, are a larger matter than I can tackle here (or anywhere).
But are you not horrified, whether you want to watch it or not, that a network is being systematically prevented from being shown in your home in totalitarian fashion?
Like any television network, it could go sour quickly. Remember when CNN was a decent source of news? Faintly, if at all, I bet. I can’t vouch for Al-jazeera in the future. But I can vouch for it now, and it’s the best source for television news out there, even if you can’t get it on your television.
BarBri is the bulk of the human speech I listen to everyday, and after listening to these law professors talk (and talk and talk) every day, I’ve started, ever so slightly, to talk like them.
The most eccentric speakers is the one that has rubbed off on me the most: Richard Freer from Emory Law School. His teaching style heavily employed the question-and-answer format; the questions were yes or no and the answers were often emphatically repeated.
“S Corp owns stock in C Corp. S is the record owner. After the record date, S dies. Can S’s executor vote the shares?” The answer is YES! The answer is YES!!!!!
In conversations, I’ve found myself resorting to a similar style of speaking. Am I going to get a bagel? The answer is YES! The answer is YES!!!!! It’s kinda hilarious, emphasis on “kinda.”
Other than that, no news. I work, I eat, I sleep. I’ve gotten some leisure reading in lately, though. I just read God Is Not Great. My newspaper subscription is on now for seven days a week. Many of the prophylactic measures I took against my desire to read anything but BarBri materials were unnecessary and positively harmful. I’ve done so well at avoiding becoming a savant so far, there’s no use in throwing away those gains this summer.
I’ve finally found the right time to make my long-desired trip to see oral argument at the United States Supreme Court: it will be this October 7, during the morning session.
This morning, the Court released the schedule for the first month of its next term. On the calendar is a case that I’ve been following, Herring v. U.S. In Herring, police in Georgia arrested Bennie Dean Herring (what a name!) after a neighboring police department reported that there was a warrant for his arrest. The police, relying up on that report, arrested Herring, searched him incident to arrest, and found that he possessed methamphetamine. Later, we learned that the neighboring police department had made an error and there was no warrant for Herring’s arrest when he was arrested. The meth found on Herring should have been suppressed the fruit of an unlawful arrest and the charges against him dropped.
Generally, when the police arrest someone without probable cause any evidence found incident to the arrest is suppressed based on what the court calls the “exclusionary rule.” Since the sixties, when the rule was introduced, the Court has steadily narrowed the application of the rule. One of the exceptions is that when the police rely upon an erroneous report from a court that a warrant exists, they may still use evidence obtained from the unlawful arrest. The idea is that the police relied in good faith on the information; in simpler terms, “it’s not their fault.”
Herring claimed that in this case, the report came from a law enforcement agency, not a court, and that law enforcement can’t rely in good faith on itself to get around the Fourth Amendment. The Eleventh Circuit, astonishingly, disagreed with this argument. And a cert grant later, here we are before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning quite effectively reveals that the current approach to the exclusionary rule does the right thing for the wrong reason. It suppresses evidence obtained unlawfully– that’s good– but does so only to deter police misconduct– that’s not so good, because it allows the police to act unlawfully, claim good faith, and still proceed as if they hadn’t done anything wrong. Since I spent about two years listening to claims of good faith by police officers after misconduct, I’m fairly skeptical of those claims. In candid moments, police officers have even boasted to me of the connivery they employed to employ good-faith rules to their advantage.
In my view, the proper reason for the exclusionary rule is that it is the only remedy that sufficiently restores the defendant to her position before the arrest. It’s irresistibly simple and fair, but not too popular with courts, apparently.
Whatever the rationale, I love the exclusionary rule. The government, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, frequently doesn’t do the Right Thing. (This unfortunate point has been eminently clear to me after only one day of Erwin Chemerinsky’s wonderful BarBri constitutional law lectures. Countless times this evening I muffled sighs and grunts of disbelief and we haven’t even covered equal protection yet. Perhaps I should take a mild sedative before tomorrow’s class, when we will.) But here, even if for the wrong reason, and even in woefully limited circumstances, the rule is my government doing the right thing, and for criminal defendants, no less! It’s my kind of rule.
My teacher and friend Charlie Whitebread, a fellow fan of the exclusionary rule, has expressed optimism to me that the Court will not affirm the decision. Charlie is more of an expert in this that I’ll ever be, but my pessimism here overcomes me.
So, if the Court decides to make Herring yet another board of dry plywood to fasten to the exclusionary rule’s pyre, I’ll be there to see to see it.
No Bar talk today. I’m treating myself.
My day didn’t really get started in Brooklyn, but at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan where I went to a service of the Church of Stop Shopping. Rev. Billy gave a wonderful sermon about pushing back against the forces that seek to commoditize our lives and devour our public space. Fight the monoculture. Changellujah. Freakallujah.
At the service, the church saint-ified Dick Zigun, the mayor of Coney Island, who talked about the perils of rezoning, how the weirdness of the place is in danger of falling into the hands of real estate developers. It was a beautiful, urgent gathering of people.
On the F train headed back to Brooklyn, I started thinking about the fragility of so many of the odd places in this city, like Coney Island, that I hold dear. At W4 Station, a D train was across the platform. I hesitated, then bolted across the platform to the Stillwell Ave-bound D train.
And so I spent the late afternoon hours wandering around the boardwalk, which was bustling with people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some had shirts, some didn’t. Some were on bikes, some on foot, some glided past without me seeing how they were moving. Shoot the Freak was there, of course, and while there was a large crowd to watch, apparently none of them wanted to actually pick up the gun and shoot.
Sirens blazed, bells rang, children screamed; the entire shore was cacophonic. The mighty ocean was hardly noticed amidst the commotion.
I’m a fan of simple answers to simple questions, which stand in stark contrast to the convoluted projections and predictions that are the lifeblood of treacherous real estate developers. My simple question here is: what’s wrong with Coney Island? My simple answer is “nothing.”
Soon I grew hungry, and went to board the Manhattan-bound D only a few stops to go to L&B Spumoni Garden for a delicious square slice and small cup of layered spumoni. As I sat on a plastic bench in a crowd of people all eating the same thing I was, an ice cream truck rolled by with hip-hop music blaring harshly out of crudely mounted speakers on the side of the truck. The truck lingered, then lurched off the block.
I sucked the last of my melting spumoni out of its crumpled paper cup, and proceeded through Bensonhurst, down Avenue U to the F train that would take me home. I marveled at what a wonderful city this is, and at my fortune for living here. The hip-hop ice cream truck then barreled down the avenue, weaving past double-parked cars and into oncoming traffic. The song was different, but the music was unmistakably the same.
As dusk approached, I walked up the stairs to the F train, boarded near the conductor’s position, and started my journey home.
Today I spent the day at the central Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza. The building has a post-war, faintly modern feel to it, even though it’s (barely) a pre-war building. It’s so quirky that it’s more like the Guggenheim Museum than the central New York Public Library. And though I prefer the latter’s style, the BPL is far more convenient.
The windows facing Prospect Park were open all day, and the breeze was so nice that I never left even to get a cup of coffee. Ask your doctor if opening a window is right for you.
Late in the afternoon, the wind began to gust and later it rained for a minute or so.
As the evening wound down, I looked around and noticed that everyone was studying for the medical boards. Maybe the Bar Exam isn’t so bad, but it’s sure starting to feel that way.
I learned an important lesson today: use the big outlines instead of the Conviser Mini Review as my main study outline. The BarBri materials say you can use either, and say that most students use the CMR as their main study book. That may be true, but “main” doesn’t mean “first.”
For those of you familiar, these are two huge books. Calling the Conviser review “Mini” is some kind of cruel joke. You pick it up and imagine that it must be enough to get you through this. But that’s not the case.
The Conviser just isn’t in-depth enough and doesn’t provide enough wacky examples to adequately prepare me for the totally absurd Multistate multiple choice questions. In fact, by providing you with a false sense of certainty in an oversimplified rule, I think the Conviser alone pretty well would sabotage me on the Multistate.
On the first day of class, someone had scratched on one of the writing boards “bite me Conviser.” Indeed.
Two more days off, then back to class on Thursday. For now, back to the Multistate outline.
