so, does an establishment have a right to refuse entry to a service animal (for example, seeing eye dog), if an employee of said establishment is violently allergic to said service animal?
does the ADA apply? and to whom - the person in need of the service animal, or the person with the debilitating allergy?
we care about the mental health of our returning soldiers… unless we don’t.
astonishing institutionalized disconnect in the army strikes again; psychiatrists finally tell prosecuting attorneys they’re full of shit. who knows if it will make a difference.
Military psychiatrists at Walter Reed who examined Whiteside after she recovered from her self-inflicted gunshot wound diagnosed her with a severe mental disorder, possibly triggered by the stresses of a war zone. But Whiteside’s superiors considered her mental illness “an excuse” for criminal conduct, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
At the hearing, Wolfe, who had already warned Whiteside’s lawyer of the risk of using a “psychobabble” defense, pressed a senior psychiatrist at Walter Reed to justify his diagnosis.
“I’m not here to play legal games,” Col. George Brandt responded angrily, according to a recording of the hearing. “I am here out of the genuine concern for a human being that’s breaking and that is broken. She has a severe and significant illness. Let’s treat her as a human being, for Christ’s sake!”
it gets better. general schoomaker, now the surgeon general of the army, was of the medical opinion that
“This officer has a demonstrably severe depression which manifested itself . . . as a psychotic, self-destructive episode…
and yet, military bureaucrats in the warrior transition brigade (mission: “to facilitate warriors’ transition and healing process“) maintained that
“Although the sanity board determined that at the time of the misconduct she had a severe mental disease or defect, she knowingly assaulted and threatened others and injured herself.”
and
her “defense that she suffers from a mental disease excusing her actions is just that . . . an excuse; an excuse to distract from choices and decisions made by 1LT Whiteside.”
read the whole article. it’s pretty sick.
what with the pay-for-renovation megahours i’m working.
but here’s an interesting thing to note - and perhaps in the future ponder on its implications. it seems a disproportionate (when compared to the proportion of law school graduates they comprise) number of the contract attorneys at my site are black women.
well, having turned down a 40 hr/wk position with a small firm, i’m back at contract attorney work. this isn’t a bad thing, and in fact factored into my decision not to take a “real” attorney job. while the non-pay benefits aren’t great (i don’t get health benefits or paid vacations or even sick leave), there is the possibility of making scads of money in a short period of time on high-overtime projects.
like the one i started today: the firm wants a minimum of 9 hours a day (M-F), and would just love it if we were there 70 hrs/week (11 hours a day M-F, 7.5 hours on SaSu). when you figure that’s 40 hrs/wk at hourly and 30 at time-and-a-half, you can see the appeal.1
maintaining those hours over long periods of time will also turn you into a zombie.
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1 one thing you do have to watch out for is the point of diminishing returns - the mega OT also pushes you into a higher tax bracket.
yesterday, approximately 9:10 a.m., g, j, my father and i filed into the moultrie courthouse for the swearing-in ceremony that would admit me to the DC bar. (the oath went something like, “i, state your name, do solemnly swear…”) we (the postulants, mostly admitted on exam - rare for DC) were welcomed by 3 members of the DC court of appeals: two associate judges and a senior judge.
one of the associate judges addressed the newly admitted attorneys with brief remarks focusing on the situation in pakistan, where lawyers are rising up in against musharraf’s second coup. she was, i think, trying to impress us with the weighty responsibility of our chosen profession, but i kept hoping she was going to draw a parallel between the musharraf and bush regimes.
the headlines would’ve been great: DC COURT OF APPEALS ASSOCIATE JUSTICE INCITES NEWLY ADMITTED ATTORNEYS TO RIOT.
being guy fawkes day, though, it was likely to end in tears. or hangings.
(or at least partially)
update on the content scraping/copyright infringement issue: there were two offenders. one has been suspended; the other is still pending because the contact listed with the copyright office is not a recognized e-mail address. so off i’ll send a second letter to the contact listed on the whois database results.
(oh, and it surprises me not at all that the offending page that has been removed now defaults to a sited called “onlinecashcow.”)
i have passed the bar.
that is all. thank you. carry on.
to hear my dad tell it, back in the day (say, 25 years ago), a country would get a good family planning program going, only to have it derailed by a visit from pope jp2.
sounds like they’ve stopped buying what the vatican’s selling.
in other news, an ottawa appeals court decided that a five-year-old boy has three legal parents: the lesbian couple who made the decision to have a child, and the friend who agreed to father the child. it was the legal status of the biological mother’s partner that was in question.
on sunday while eating breakfast, i was watching the bird feeder on the deck. squirrels had been raiding it, and they had finally ripped its sides to shreds (i’ll include a smallish photo a bit later). it lay forlornly on its side, the remaining birdseed scattered.
a squirrel jumped up on the deck to investigate. as it circled the feeder sniffing for something more appetizing than millet (or perhaps it was sampling the millet - i really don’t know what goes on in the brains of squirrels), it wound up facing away from me, on all fours. that’s when i saw it.
it was a male squirrel. it had enormous balls.
now, i know rodents have big balls in relation to their body size (housemate james suggested it had to do with their quick sprint to sexual maturity), but i had never noticed a squirrel’s balls before. they were furry. they dragged on the deck.
and now i can’t unsee them.
every time i see a squirrel - and there is a sizeable population in these parts - i see squirrel balls.
is this evidence of some sort of gender selection among squirrel parents? have girl squirrels fallen out of favor? or am i becoming obsessed with their gonads (gonads and strife!) and seeing them even where they don’t exist? i don’t know!!!
on a completely unrelated note1, wapo reports that “Legal experts familiar with the 4th Circuit said yesterday that the court is likely — but not certain — to reverse its earlier ruling and allow Virginia’s ban [on ‘partial birth infanticide’] to take effect.” looks like more reading for me.
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1 i always have the urge to write “an” before i use the html tag to italicize text, even when the text being italicized begins with a consonant. food for thought.