Everyone’s A Lawyer

Friday, May 28th, 2010

I suppose by now I should realize that one reason everyone hates lawyers is that they think them largely unnecessary. Like doctors and pilots. I mean, anyone can remove their own appendix or fly themselves across the country, right?  And lots of people — at least 50 to 60% of U.S. adults — can read.  So who needs lawyers when they can read the law for themselves?

Thankfully, Ray McEdward of Madera provides a shining example that being able to read does not a lawyer make.

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How Police States Are Born

Friday, December 18th, 2009

It’s amazing how often history reports itself in things both small and large. 

I recently ran across one of the small things in this passage from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?”  (Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (2005 ed.) p. 17, originally published in 1935.)

Can I interest you in some “freedom fries”

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