Obama has enough over Palin already. The trouble with over-reaching is that people call you on it and ignore everything else. It might arguably be true that Obama depended on food stamps at some point, but compared to graduating Magna from Harvard Law, no reasonable voter should care.
Anyway, Joe should definitely run for Congress if he wants to, since as I understand it, it’s the right of any American that meets the various Constitutional requirements.
In my opinion, America should stop electing lawyers into office. The reason is: lawyers do not create wealth-their activities redistribute wealth, but do not create it. Don’t forget, no law firm ever innovated a single therapeutic drug, or ever came up with a new car design-or any innovation in aircraft engineering.
We would be much better off, if we had representation from engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs-people who have actually DONE something, instead of writing worthless articles in the HARVARD LAW REVIEW.
The planet Krypton was run by a Science Council. Fat lotta good it did them.
Oh, I think he always had a big head. The way he asked Obama that question implied a certain–shall we say–confidence & sense of entitlement to things he didn’t have yet.
Speaking as someone whose head has its own weather system, I admit it’s not the worst thing in the world, so long as other people have the sense not to take him seriously.
But he appeals to lots of other self-important graspers just as arrogant & ignorant as he is.
The Science Council was politicized!
I have bad news, folks, but having met and worked with a number of our esteemed members of Congress, I have to say that Joe The Plumber would have a lot of competition for the title of “Biggest Dumbass in the U.S. Congress.” Believe me, being able to convince a majority of the unwashed in some BFE congressional district to vote for you does not mean you are even remotely intelligent, educated, cultured, etc. Remember, the only qualifications for Congress are age and citizenship. Those two are about the best that many members have to offer.
Rand rover, Do you really think Obama is unqualified to be president?
I thought Rand rover was gone. He twisted and contorted himself so much in defending Palin/McCain that as he walked ,he screwed himself into the ground.
Your pointless screed about law firms notwithstanding, that’s not a bad idea. There are plenty of non-lawyer Congresspeople, but the problem is they tend to be people who are famous for things that don’t translate well into political chops.
Quarterbacks, actors, and so on.
Yeah, why would we want lawyers to do stuff like writing and executing the country’s laws?
Perhaps the laws would not then be in language that only lawyers understand?
To be scrupulously fair (and legalese annoys me as much as it does the next guy), I look at writing laws as somewhat like writing software. You’re codifying instructions that are going to be fed into a machine (in this case a bureaucracy) that is, on the whole, very stupid. You need to cover every contingency unambiguously, handle errors and unexpected input gracefully, and provide clear debug information to support staff (the courts). Plain old standard English isn’t really very good for that, any more than it’s good for telling a computer what to do–it’s too vague in many cases. As a result, lawyers have established lots of “terms of art”, where particular words and phrases have a special legalistic meaning. When used honestly and by general consensus, this jargon can make the legal system work more smoothly. (Unfortunately, we’re all too often treated to the legislative equivalent of the Obfuscated C contest, or to laws written in INTERCAL or Rube.)
This makes legalese look like English when it really isn’t, any more than C++ or Java is. That adds an extra layer of complexity; not only is the casual reader trying to interpret, in essence, an unfamiliar language–they’re trying to do it without realizing that it’s an unfamiliar language. Of course, it blocks people who don’t know the language from reading the law themselves, just as non-coders have trouble reading the code that makes their computer applications work. That’s a bad thing in both cases, really, but much worse in the law. I understand how it came about, but I think it’s gone too far.
Balance, I agree with your analysis. The worst laws aren’t those written by lawyers, anyways. They’re laws and especially amendments written by staffers who may be paralegals, or even less well-trained. And then get rammed through without a proper review of what the law, as voted upon, is going to say, rather than what they mean it to say.
The Nebraska Safe Haven law seems to be one of these. And there are many others.
This isn’t a claim that the only good law is that written by lawyers. I’m at least as cynical as the next person, and likely far more so. Just a claim that removing lawyers from the process isn’t going to make things necessarily better.
Porn?
Personally, I’m disappointed.
I am sure that I read somewhere that Joe-the-not-Plumber was going to cut a Country Western album. Am I the only one who read that? Or was it just a (bad) dream?
:dubious: Well, we are approaching the end of the administration that was hailed as “our first MBA President”. How good an advertisement is he for having non-lawyers in public office?
Why can’t he do both?
Shep Smith of FOX schools Joe the Dumbass
You KNOW you’re stupid when FOX tells you to get bent in defense of the Dem. candidate.
All of the folks that went around wearing “I’m Joe the Plumber” t-shirts and the like should watch that. It probably won’t help them, but it if it makes one of them think “Why did I think that guy had anything important to say?” it might make them actually think about before they blindly swallow the mudslinging in another campaign in the future.
Well, maybe not. They’re probably in the small percentage that thinks GWB did a good job as prez.
You missed the second part of that.
What was written:
What they see: