Wednesday, July 20, 2005
TigerHawk is on jury duty
(Via Blackberry)
So I'm sitting in the jury waiting room on the second floor of the Mercer
County (New Jersey) Courthouse in Trenton. There is allegedly "limited
internet access," but no signal pops up on the wireless icon, so blogging
may be, er, light. Unless I get my paws on that there internet access.
The room is comfortable, with good air conditioning and decent chairs.
There is also a television in the front of the room, and it is quite
unexpectedly tuned to "Fox and Friends," the morning show of Fox News. This
implies that the Mercer County Democrats do not exert the iron control over
their staff that one might expect. Or, perhaps, this is just part of the
considerable effort necessary to induce Mercer County suburbanites into the
heart of Trenton.
So far, I've learned that Barbara Boxer has "some concerns" about the
Roberts nomination. As Power Line predicted last night (click through the
link in the post below), she is "concerned he upheld the arrest of a child."
If that is what they're going with, a lot of Democrats are going to
embarrass themselves.
UPDATE: Got to the wire. Laurence Tribe is also bringing up the "french fries" case, in which Roberts wrote an opinion for a unanimous D.C. Circuit panel upholding the arrest of a twelve-year old girl for eating a french fry on the Washington subway. While acknowledging that "No one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation," Roberts held that the court was not in a position to overturn the District's law or enforcement policy.
All of this reminds me of my own food-eating encounter on the Washington metro. It was the summer of 1985, and the salient feature of our capital city's subway in those days was that it essentially did not go anywhere that poor people lived. There was the planned green line, but it was the last line to be completed by some margin (as I recall -- bear in mind that I'm sitting in Mercer County Courthouse and can't conveniently verify my facts).
Anyway, my familiarity with subways was confined to New York, Paris and London, so I naturally assumed that eating was one of those things that you did on the train. There I was one morning in May, in my suit looking like the summer associate that I was, munching unobtrusively on my bagel. All of a sudden a very WASPy woman started yelling at me about eating in the subway. I asked her, "where are the signs that say you can't?" She hissed -- and it absolutely was a hiss -- that "they are in the stations!" with a very wild look on her face. Then she turned to a bunch of guys in suits who did not seem to give a rat's ass about my bagel, and declared loudly that "if people eat in the Metro it will end up just like New York!," as if that were the worst thing imaginable. I quietly pointed out that that was unlikely, since the Washington Metro "doesn't seem to go where poor live." That really pissed her off.
Fortunately, in 1985 the DC cops were too busy writing tickets to jay-walkers to bother with bagel-eaters on the Metro.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Jul 20, 08:51:00 AM:
"Fox and Friends" won't last. Before long, the box will be blaring "Regis" and similar daytime, brain-numbing crap.
In addition, if my experience is any indication, once one of the parties to a case learns, through voir dire, that you are a lawyer, it's back to the jury room for more "Regis".
By 
Sluggo, at
Wed Jul 20, 09:13:00 AM:
Love jury duty. Love it. I've been on three criminal juries and one grand jury and each one was fascinating. Jim is right, though. At our firm the lawyers always schedule a full day the day after they're called.
By , at
Wed Jul 20, 09:16:00 AM:
They're keening 'cause they didn't get someone "in the mold of" Sandra Day O'Connor -- a strange, flawed concept, but obviously one of the Democrats' talking points, perhaps "framed" by George Lakoff
Good news via Slate: The NYT's Adam's Nagourney describes the choice as "almost obvious in retrospect": Roberts "is at least good enough for conservatives ... yet genial and enigmatic enough to confound Democrats." "They've artfully threaded the needle," said one Democratic congressional aide.
They still don't get it.
sisu
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