The Hot Summer Days

It has been quite a summer. All of the bar prep classes have done more to create anxiety than to make me feel prepared.

Lance is not in the tour, which makes it a much less interesting race. Some good wrecks, though. Talk about broken colllar bones.

Hezbolah sure messed up the summer. I wish Isreal would simply UNLEASH on Lebonon and get it over with. Some real Shock and Awe. William Techumsa Sherman knew that if you fight a war, it has to be ugly. Real ugly, or it won't end. Soldiers fighting soldiers aren't enough to stop it, the war has to be like the Blitzkreig to get people's real attention.

Gotta stomp on Iran and Syria while we are at it.

The summer storms in Vegas are always nice. Thunder ... lots of good light storms. But the fires in California screw up the air.

116 in the afternoons lately. Makes me wish I was in the pool. But not to be yet.

One week from tomorrow the bar exam begins. This is my Mount Everest in my seven summit quest over the last seven years. I am anxious and have some trepidation going in. But that is what they want. It is an all out war to get a ticket to earn a living and the bar examiners are not your friend. I have been in boot camp for four years and officer's training all summer. This is the big dance and then the long silence until October when they deem to tell us our fate. What a system.

Big Bad Harry

So. It is his JOB to take free stuff from people who have a stake in the way he votes. He should take MORE stuff. Harry Reid is the embarrassment of Nevada that keeps on giving....er....taking. The little boy from Searchlight must be proud that he now has a job where perks are better than wages and ethics is a living, changing thing.....like the Constitution. Mold it bend it and make it fit the situation. I can only hope that people finally get the picture with Harry the Bad. He seems to feel a sense of comfort in the five years remaining in his term and I predict his behavior will only get worse.

Objection!!!!!!!

On any given day you can watch the news and hear someone upset that the jury was not allowed to see all of the evidence, but if they had, the defendant would certainly have been convicted/aquitted. Evidence at trial is tricky business. It involves a complex set of rules all of which have exceptions. One thing the court does not allow is a witness to get up and tell us all what she heard others saying. This is because our constitution requires that the defendant be allowed to confront and cross examine the persons who have something to say about his being locked up. However there are over 20 exceptions to the hearsay rule. I like evidence. It is part of what makes trial work exciting because you have to be on your toes in order to launch your objection. You can't yell out "I OBJECT!" prior to the question being completed, but then again neither can you wait until the witness has answered in some situations. You have to think all the time and be prepared to explain the theory on which you base your objection. Though Robert Duval in A Civil Action says that when you have fallen asleep in court and wake up, the first thing you do is fire off an objection, I would advise against it. It maight wake up the judge.

Essay Hell

So, this is Memorial Day weekend. I am doing a multitude of multiple choice questions and writing way too many essays. I am told this is the way to prepare for the Nevada bar...one of the most difficult in the country. I did the PMBR early bird six day lecture series. My iPod plays PMBR lectures all night as I sleep. I am a week in to Bar/Bri. I have to spend today writing several essays. The schedule given to us by Bar/Bri generously suggests taking tomorrow off. However, THAT cannot happen and get the work assigned done as well. I could skip it. But will that be just the thing that puts me under the line when the bar exam is graded. Can't take the risk. This is war. This is combat, this is ESSAY HELL!!!!!!!!!

Passing the Bar

ERWIN CHEMERINSKI - DUKE LAW

It is a time tested rite of passage to take and pass a bar exam to actually be able to practice law. No matter that you just plunged yourself into six figure debt and endured professors who had as their goal to single handedly suck every last vestige of conservative thought from your brain. The courts of the land, read: good ol' boys, have maintained that it is no violation to require this abuse.

Interestingly, now that law school is over and class is done, the tassel on my mortorboard is still wagging and I find myself back in the classroom. This time, it is to learn to actually PASS the bar exam. Now, being of Irish decent, passing a bar is counterintuitive. Wait. Can I say that, or is it too insensitive to suggest the Irish like their drink? Those damned liberal profs!

It is no secret that a person undergoing bar prep has a single minded, one note song playing from now until the end of July. Rightzilla is no different. Wait, that is Rightzilla, J.D. now.

Erwin Chemerinski was in the classroom the past two days. I do not like his politics. But I own his book Constitutional law: Principles and Policies and enjoyed him. I have admired his intelect for years. He is a smar-T-pants with a capital T. Does the entire outline without notes and is unflappable. I felt I got my money's worth from those lectures, let me tell ya.

Chemerinski is a law professor a Duke. He is a premier brainiac on constitutional law. I was surprised, then, that he revealed he had recently represented a plaintiff in a Texas case wherein they were suing to force the removal of a 6 foot high, 3 foot wide monument from the Texas state house property because it violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It contains the Ten Commandments. You see, there are 22 other such monuments on the property with a variety of inscriptions and therefore, no endorsement of religion. Seems so straight forward that would be the case. It is like the bullying often done by the ACLU in such cases. Thank God, (no pun intended....uh....yes there was) they lost the case. To me, the only reason to even think that that case had more than an ice cube's chance in hell (note additional pun here) of prevailing was to find an activist judge who would ignore the full application of establishment clause law and just throw the monument out. I was disappointed by this. But I cannot deny his incredible knowledge and grace in presenting information.

You will tire of Rightzilla's bar prep. But no more than will Rightzilla.

Graduation Time

Listen to a graduation address by Michelle M. at Hot Air!
http://hotair.com/archives/vent/2006/05/19/conservative-commencement/

I am back

Sorry to be gone so long. Much is going on in the world and I have had my head burried in law books. But Michelle Malkin has launched Hot Air and it is top shelf! It will be an important website as we continue to find ways to get conservative thought and news in front of people. Rightzilla loves it!

I am learning about such blog essentials as tagging etc. so that Rightzilla can emerge as a meaningful contributor to the conservative web culture. Be on the lookout for more as time goes on (and after the bar exam is done).



RIGHTZILLA Right Now!!

Giant Head of Ted Nearly Explodes!

It's a nice color on him. Purple. It contrasts well against the little half glasses he wears with the ear pieces straining not to break as they hug his corpulent head. He huffs and puffs and smoke emits from his ears. Those EARS. I've never seen ears like that. Those lobes are quite the flappers. And when Ted is in full flight, it is truly a beautiful thing. That is what we were privileged to see today at the Alito Hearings. It happened when Arlen grew some gonads and told Ted he was not in charge of the committee and was not going to be able to run it. I kept rubbing my eyes as I saw Ted morph into W.C. Fields and back again, over and over and over. His hands trembling because he had likely had to go more than an hour without a cocktail in them. Shaken, not stirred. Meanwhile, Alito sat calmly at his seat watching the whole process devolve into bickering amongst the elected elite.

Ted tried, but failed, to resurrect his issue regarding the Vanguard trial. He beat that dead horse until it was nothing but a puddle of Elmer's glue. Too bad that stuff was always non-toxic.

Ah yes. Then there was that CAP group that Ted and his ilk want to depict as some Neanderthal organization, one step away from hoods and crosses. But, once again they fall short. As each question regarding Alito's involvement is preceded by some lengthy description of human rights violations, Alito simply states he has not participated in any of the activities described by Ted. This gives Ted an opening at looking as though he may be on to something. But once those outside the hearings and with actual knowledge of the group begin to explain its purpose, this false advancement of the left vanishes as the big lie it is. These hearings are great recreation for those of us who are tired of the Ted's, the Harry's, the Dan Rathers and the Feinsteins of the world. More to come.

Alito too Smooth for the Dems

I spent time watching the Alito confirmation hearings today. I was not surprised by Kennedy's questions, which were more him making statements that were misleading with a question mark at the end. I also was not surprised by the stupified looks these guys had on their faces when Alito's answers left them no way to exclaim AH HA!!!!!!!! What surprised me was that the media decided that the reason the hearing went off without a fight today was that the Dem's just didn't have their game faces on. The truth of the matter is, Alito was too smart for their sophomoric antics. He gave good answers and therefore, the senators simply could not continue to try to get their answers where they did not exist. Alito has a brain. Kennedy has a pickled chunk of hardened grey matter floating in Gin. Shumer has an I-beam keeping his head from simply imploding in on itself. They had their game on, it is simply a substandard game. It is Podunk High v. The Yankees. I, for one, am not sure what about their own voices gives these guys such a charge, but Alito politely chewed them up and spit them out. He had the patience of a saint. I would have had to ask Teddy to pour another Beafeater's and pull his pants up. It will be interesting to see how things go in the coming days. In the end, we will have another member of the actual thinking public making the most critical legal decisions society comes up with. No married-to-the-ACLU Ginsburg. No Turncoat like Suter.