THOUGHTS FROM MICHAEL HIGDON on legal writing.
Archive for 2012
March 13, 2012
IN THE MAIL: From Cliff Ball, Times of Trouble.
ERIC HOLDER’S SHAMELESS SPIN: “Attorney General Eric Holder kicked off Sunshine Week 2012 by rehashing widely discredited statistics released by the Department of Justice after it was awarded the Rosemary Award by the National Security Archive for the worst open government performance by a federal agency in 2011.” The Rosemary Award is named for Rose Mary Woods.
PUBLIC EDUCATION: Teacher Evaluation Fail in New York. “Teacher unions would like for virtually all teachers to have lifetime tenure and for evaluation to play little or no role in their lives. Principals don’t want parents nosing into administrative decisions or complaining that their kids are getting stuck with subpar math teachers. Pointing to the deep and real flaws in everything from standardized tests to score students to individual teacher assessments is, among other things, a way to stave off public pressure for more accountability in the schools.”
HERE’S A REVIEW of Elizabeth Price Foley’s new book, The Tea Party: Three Principles.
PHOTOS FROM Moscow’s Election Protests.
CAMERA UPDATE: So I noted a while back that I hadn’t bought a new camera in a while, and wanted to try out a new micro four-thirds camera. I wound up buying a Panasonic Lumix GX-1 with the Lumix 7-14mm ultra-wide angle lens.
After playing with it for a while I can report that it’s a great camera. It’s terrific in low light. Here’s a picture from Big Ed’s Pizza, and you can see how it froze the pizza-toss in available light. Pretty well.
The wide-angle lens takes in a very wide angle, and as you can see, the color-rendering in dim uneven light is still quite good.
Pics taken around stately Instapundit Manor suggest that the 7-14 lens is great for making houses look better than they do: If I were a real estate agent I’d order one immediately. The only downsides are (1) While it’s smaller than a full-sized DSLR, it’s still big enough that it won’t fit in a pocket; and (2) It’s kind of expensive. It’s a better and more versatile camera than the Lumix LX-5, but is it enough better to justify the price difference? If you need interchangeable lenses and high quality in a small package, yes.
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Black, who’s a fan of the LX-5 writes:
Hi Glenn,
I was a professional photographer and photo lab owner with my wife for about 25 years. We got out of the lab business just before the digital tsunami hit, and are now employed in geographic information systems. I picked up a Panasonic Lumix LX-5 last summer, and I honestly think it’s the best camera I’ve ever owned (I still have about a dozen film cameras, from Mamiya M645 to Canon A2E and F1’s, none of which will ever see another roll of film). The Leica F:2.0 wide angle zoom on this camera is amazing, and the low light performance you mentioned on your model is evident in this model as well. I’ve always been a bit puzzled by folks enamored of super zoom telephoto lenses. I find the wide angle lens to be far more useful in practical terms (so much so, I also bought the .75 wide angle converter for it, making it an 18mm wide angle). Most of the time, you can move closer to a subject to get the framing you want. But if your back is up against a wall, and you can’t get everything in the image you want, you’re SOL. Below is a link to some of the images I took on our 30th anniversary trip to Chicago last August.
A small sample of some of the 1,000+ images I shot while in Chicago…
Very nice. And I quite agree about the value of a wide angle lens vs. a telephoto, especially for the kinds of photography I tend to do.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Recovery 2020! We’re Barely on Pace to Close the Jobs Gap This Decade.
OVER AT SALON, they’re worried about Obama’s sudden polling crash. Maybe the politics of division and demonization doesn’t do much to burnish the image of a guy who ran as a postpartisan transformer?
UPDATE: The New York Times caught cocooning in public. “These are not close results. It’s hard to read this poll and not conclude that, contrary to some accounts, Obama wasn’t such a genius to pick a fight over mandated contraception coverage–because he appears to be losing the public debate on the question. That’s a conclusion the Times story effectively hides from readers. It’s also one possible explanation for Obama’s otherwise somewhat mystifying overall drop in approval during the period–March 7-11–when the poll was in the field. But not an approved explanation. Gas prices are the official MSM explanation. Got it? Gas prices.”
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The Case For Space: Why We Should Keep Reaching For The Stars.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Exercise & Fitness.
ANYBODY BUT OBAMA: Tea partiers will vote for ‘whoever’ GOP nominee ‘turns out to be’, says tea party scholar. “They aren’t rallying in the street anymore — I think they’ve been there, done that, so they appear to be quieter. But tea party chapters are still alive and vigorous, and they are just chomping at the bit to pull a lever in November.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, THE U.S. WOULD BE INTERNATIONALLY DESPISED FOR TORTURE AND INHUMANE TACTICS: And they were right! “The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.”
Something about the U.S. economy isn’t adding up.
At 8.3%, the unemployment rate has fallen 0.7 percentage point from a year earlier and is down 1.7 percentage points from a peak of 10% in October 2009. Many other measures of the job market are improving. Companies have expanded payrolls by more than 200,000 a month for the past three months, according to Labor Department data. And the number of people filing claims for government unemployment benefits has fallen.
Yet the economy is barely growing. Many economists in the past few weeks have again reduced their estimates of growth. The economy by many estimates is on track to grow at an annual rate of less than 2% in the first three months of 2012. The economy expanded just 1.7% last year. And since the final months of 2009, when unemployment peaked, the economy has expanded at a pretty paltry 2.5% annual rate.
How can an economy that is growing so slowly produce such big declines in unemployment?
How, indeed?
A CHALLENGE TO OBAMA: Get serious, says Sarah Palin.
HE’D RATHER TALK ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL: Gas Prices Trigger Obama Scramble. Or at least, that was the plan. Hasn’t worked out too well. And they’ve noticed:
The White House scrambled Monday to contain the political damage from rising gas prices, which have emerged as a primary threat to President Obama’s reelection.
Obama gave White House interviews touting his energy policies to TV stations in several regions, including the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar appeared in the White House briefing room to emphasize that “all options are on the table” to lower prices.
All options except, you know, drilling, building the Keystone pipeline, increasing refinery capacity, or stuff like that.
OUCH: “No longer is it good enough to disagree with conservatives. They must be fired from their jobs, separated from their advertisers, booted from the airwaves, buried under a prehistoric rock. The tactics attributed to Joe McCarthy tied to the polemical rigor associated with Jenny McCarthy.”
MISMANAGEMENT: Is U.S. Strategy In Afghanistan Disintegrating?
LAWYER JOKES: Laughing Near Lawyers.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Surprise! Obama has a secret plan to deal with a catastrophic U.S. debt crisis. Here’s what might be in it. Hope and change!