Irregular Updates
 
At least for the next two weeks as my soon to be ex-boss, in abscentia, is squeezing every last ounce of work out of me before I leave.  Right now he's got me drafting an ex parte application that feels like the intellectual equivalent of trying to put square pegs into round holes.      

Three More Weeks

Until my brief tour with the firm from Hell is finally over. On the bright side, my soon to be ex-boss will be gone on vacation for two of my final three weeks. Seeing as how I'm probably not going to have much to do, this might actually be one of those rare times in life where someone will be paying me to find another job. At the very least, I should be able to start writing more 'blog entries on a consistent daily basis.

Counting the Days

Well, I've made a decision. In roughly three, maybe four, weeks I will be giving notice of my resignation at the law firm I have been an associate at for the last couple of months. If this was a job that I sort of liked, I wouldn't mind that I'm struggling learning how to do it or that my boss tends to be incomprehensible and somewhat of a condescending a-hole. The fact of the matter, though, is that I'm not well suited for the advesarial nature of civil litigation and all the petty games that seem to go hand and foot with it. Of course, if the firm I am currently at only did litigation in matters related to religious liberty or defense of the unborn, things would probably be different. But, that's not what it does (not even close) and frankly I'm tired of physically being sick every morning because I don't want to go to the office. Fortunately, I'm not in a position where I absolutely need a paying job, and can actually afford to look for other opportunities. Such is the benefit of having a supportive family.

I Hate Civil Litigation

You know what? Maritime law firms are basically personal injury/civil litiation firms. The only substantive difference is that a lot of slip and fall cases that happen out on the water or on boats will often fall under the jurisdiction of federal law (i.e., the Jones Act). Anyway, I'm one month into my new job and I already want to quit. The attorney who hired me is ridiculous. He likes making what I think to be needless motions on cases, and he's making me do all these last minute document drafts with little or no guidance. (It'd be nice to have some details about the situation you want to make an objection or motion to. I'm not a freakin' mind reader). And then to top it off, the guy makes these irritatingly condescending remarks whenever I give him something that might have a slight mistake on it that he had a hand in putting there. (Boss: "Why'd you put the wrong case number on these pleadings? This isn't the case we want to dismiss? Why didn't you know it was the wrong case number?" Me in my head: Because the effin' drafts you wrote and gave me to clean up had it on there already!)

If it weren't for the fact that I'm looking for some practical litigation experience (it seems the bulk of civil litigation deals with discovery and motions) I tell ya I'd quit tomorrow. As it stands, I'm giving myself a two month window to see how much more I can stand, and also to teach myself how to write wills and trusts. I'm still looking to have my own practice, and although I'd like try to take on a some employment discrimination cases, I think estate planning may be better for my overall health and mental well being.

Requiescat In Pace

He has slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.

Hiatus

Given the demands of my new job, I'm going to be taking a little bit of a break from blogging; maybe two weeks, and I'll probably get going again well before Molly. (Chortle)

Employment Found

Well, after some miscommunications and playing a round of phone tag, I will be starting my new job as an associate attorney for a small downtown San Francisco maritime law firm on Monday. Although I'll only be starting out on a two-week try out basis, I have fairly high hopes that there will be a good match between myself and the firm, and that I will be employed there for a while. But if not, I just scheduled an interview with a firm out in Napa on the 21st of this month.

Lazy Reporting or Intentionally Misleading?

Here's an "interesting" sentence that appears in the middle of a news report about the ACLU threatening to sue a city council over the practice of legislative invocations:

The U.S. Supreme Court banned sectarian invocations prior to legislative meetings in 1989.

You'll notice when you read the report that no Supreme Court case is referenced to support the above assertion. Want to know why? Because there is none. Just one more example of why you should never trust what the lame stream media says.

Charitably Speaking, the Man is an Idiot

Lest he actually be given some credit for abstaining from Communion while remaining in support of abortion, New Joisey Gov. McGreevey preserves his public contemptuousness by utterging this asinine remark:

"I believe it's a false choice in America between one's faith and constitutional obligation."

First of all gub'ner, you are only required to enforce the law. There is no constitutional obligation for any publicly elected official to be in favor of abortion rights. Secondly, the Church is not telling you how to do your job. Rather, she is dictating what you must believe and uphold within the context of a self-identified Catholic. If you don't want to believe in or uphold the Church's teachings, then stop calling yourself Catholic, and become a member of a religious community that is more in tune with your own warped beliefs on the sanctity of human life.

Hedging Their Bets

With the pending implosion of the Democrat Party (see Blog from the Core's collection of "Democrats in Self Destruct Mode" stories) is it really any wonder that the trial lawyers are starting to give more campaign money to Republicans?

Trial lawyers have one of the best records on Capitol Hill when it comes to killing legislation their members find objectionable. The group has thrived by pouring money into Democratic campaigns at every level of government and opposing legislation that would limit the rights of plaintiffs to seek redress through the court system.

But behind the scenes, ATLA has been surprisingly generous toward GOP organizations, provoking a rebuke from a top Senate Democrat.

?Not based on merit ? that?s for sure,? said Minority Whip Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) when asked about the contributions.

ATLA gave $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and another $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) this cycle ? just as congressional Republicans are pushing the tort-reform measures through Congress. That is the maximum amount ($15,000 per year) that a political action committee can donate to a party organization.

So Wrong Yet So Funny

Here kitty kitty...Pow! (link via The Corner)

Stop Calling Yourself Catholic!

Mamas, don't let your kids grow up and go to a Jesuit college.

In February of 2004, the University of San Francisco formally ratified an amendment to employee contracts that provides benefits for "legally domiciled adults." An e-mail that was sent to faculty boasted that the University of San Francisco was "the first Jesuit university to do so" and invited staff to a celebration that included, among others, university president Father Stephen Privett, S.J. Father Privett was identified as one of the "administration members most responsible for the successful conclusion of this agreement."

Kirk and Conservatism

A new book by W. Wesley McDonald is coming out about Russell Kirk, the man who essentially established the word "conservative" as a political term. Although I don't believe Kirk ever wrote anything about Catholicism (of which he was a convert to) one gets the distinct feeling from reading a few of his works that he would have made a fine apologist for the faith.

What Kirk extracted from Burke's thought -- and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot -- was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom. Reformers and revolutionaries might appeal to disembodied, universal concepts to justify changing the world, or to draw up blueprints for a new society. But for Kirk, what must be cultivated was not reason but "the moral imagination" -- a resonant, if ambiguous notion that Mr. McDonald devotes much of his book to elucidating.

The "reason" that Kirk found so objectionable, writes Mr. McDonald, caused liberals to define themselves "as enemies of authority, prejudice, tradition, custom, and habit." For liberal rationality, the social order was a contract among individuals "bound together ... not by love or duty, but rational, enlightened self-interest."

By contrast, Kirk's "moral imagination" enabled people to see their lives as part of, in Burke's words, "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." The obligation to preserve old institutions and ways of life -- and to change them, if at all, only very slowly -- was not a matter of nostalgia. "The individual is foolish," wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, "but the species is wise." We have inherited from the past "the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites."

Federal Court Affirms Demjanjuk was a Nazi Camp Guard

Over at the Catholic singles site I've been hanging out at lately, there are some "hard" conservatives who have been trying to convince people to write in Pat Buchanan in the upcoming presidential election. Buchanan, of course, has been a long time and outspoken defender of John Demjanjuk. I can't imagine that this ruling will be helpful for the ad hoc Buchanan 2004 campaign.

The unanimous ruling from the three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said the government had provided ''clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence" of Demjanjuk's guard service.

Although it years ago abandoned an assertion that he was the notorious Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp in Poland, the Justice Department maintained that Demjanjuk had persecuted civilians during World War II at five Nazi concentration camps, including Trawniki, Sobibor, and Flossenburg.

''The court's decision sends a powerful message to every participant in the ghastly Nazi campaign of genocide who is still living in this country: The government will not waver in its determination to find you, prosecute you, and remove you from the United States," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

"Officially" Blown Off

The small firm I had an interview with on Monday has not returned my calls regarding its Wednesday offer to give me a two-week try out. I suppose I should regard the non-response as a blow off. I also wonder if I should have taken the offer immediately rather than ask for a day to think about accepting a job I could have possibly lost after only 10 days. Ah well. Live and learn.

Musings of a Lavender Mafioso

Proof positive that their agenda is to destroy marriage by seeking to "broaden" its meaning.

The head of a national homosexual organization is vowing to politically "punish," "terrify" and "torture" activists who oppose his organization's agenda on "gay" rights – which he says would give him "endless satisfaction."

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C., made the comments in yesterday's edition of Between the Lines, a Detroit area homosexual newsmagazine, the American Family Association of Michigan points out.

(...)

Foreman was asked: "Is getting the right to marriage for same-sex couples something the Task Force is interested in?"

He responded: "We want full equality under the law, which, right now, means the freedom to marry. But we're also hopeful that we create different ways in which people can form relationships and families that don't come with all the baggage and the downsides of marriage. One of the great things about where we're going is that we are creating new ways for people to relate, new ways for people to obtain rights and benefits."

Time to Write Archbishop Levada

Congresswoman Nanci Pelosi publicly distorts Catholic teachings and expresses her intent to receive Communion despite her pro-abortion record.

Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat who was raised in a devout Italian Catholic home, told reporters, "I believe that my position on choice is one that is consistent with my Catholic upbringing, which said that every person has a free will and has the responsibility to live their lives in a way that they would have to account for in the end."

"I'm certainly concerned when the church comes together and says it's going to sanction people in public office for speaking their conscience and what they believe," she said

Bork: Legal Justification for Same Sex "Marriages" is a Judicial Sin

For the umpteenth time, America really lost out by not having this guy on the Supreme Court. Now that Bork is Catholic, maybe he'll come around to seeing the Ninth Amendment as something more than an ink blot.

Job Wanted

Since the solo practice isn't going too well, I've decided to "hit the pavement" and look for a job with a small firm in San Francisco. I sent out over 600 (yes, 600+) resumes to various solo practitioners and small firms in the City last Thursday, and so far I've gotten a few "not hiring at this time" letters and one request for an interview yesterday with a firm that I didn't know mostly did maritime law until I arrived for the interview (I thought it was just a general civil litigation firm).

Overall, I don't think my interview went too well. It lasted for only about thirty minutes, which is never a good sign. Furthermore, while it was hard enough trying to put a positive spin on my general lack of litigation experience and exposure to maritime law, I had to deal with these issues while sitting in a hot office with no air conditioning (it hit a record 91 degrees in San Francisco yesterday). Needless to say, I wasn't very impressive, and I think it's probably safe to presume that I won't be tendered an offer to work with this firm. So while I anxiously and hopefully wait by my phone for other attorneys to call me in for a job interview, I would ask you to please keep me in your prayers during this somewhat personally difficult time.

Update: Got a call from the above law firm's owner today (Wednesday), and he said he'd like to hire me on a two-week (10 days) trial basis to "see if there's a good fit." Not wanting to seem desperate or that no other firms have been in contact with me about possible employment, I responded that I'd need the day to think about it, and that I would call him back Thursday morning. After some discussion with friends and colleagues, chances are pretty good that I'm going to accept the offer.

Sad

As most of you are probably aware by now, it was reported over the weekend that Pat Tilley, who gave up a lucrative career in the NFL to serve his country in the Army, died in combat in Afghanistan. This weekend also saw Eli Manning, son of legendary NFL quarterback Archie and brother to probable NFL legend Peyton, throw a subdued tantrum about being drafted by the San Diego Chargers. Fortunately, San Diego traded Eli to New York, where hopefully he will take the opportunity to go by the area where the World Trade Center buildings once stood and reflect upon the sacrifices that have been made for him by brave souls like the late Pat Tilley.

Errata: Pat's last name was Tillman. I must have been thinking about Meg Tilley or something.