Black Friday

Today is the day. It is not an ordinary day; today both of our lives will change. We will either become unemployed lawyers or we will be unemployed adults.

I have never been so nervous about anything in my life.

Point being, we will no longer be students. We have both been students since kindergarten. In the last couple of months, we have been trying to string out being a student as much as possible, but that life has ended.

Passing the bar is a huge accomplishment and I do not want the accomplishment played down. Getting into law school and graduating does not really bring a huge feeling of pride, but passing the bar would be the biggest accomplishment.

Matt and I will both feel blessed to pass the bar and I approach today with much humility. And it is stressful praying that we both will pass. Matt and I worked hard to get through law school - having a relationship of over 200 miles apart and engaging with new people and activities which we had never done before. Tonight it could all pay off. A long distance relationship, in law school in winter, was not fun at all, but it made our relationship stronger.

I have dreamed about being a lawyer my entire life, even my mom will vouch for that. I used to layout in the pool and talk to my mom about becoming a lawyer. I have memories as young as in the fourth grade, even though I was not exactly sure what a lawyer did, I knew they had power to do great things and that is what I wanted – to help people. Even though my actions did not always reflect that I wanted to be in the path of wanting to become a lawyer, I worked hard to overcome those set backs and went to law school. If I became a lawyer today, my lifelong dream will come true today and that is a really big deal to me.

In the end, I know we are blessed with each other and great family and friends, but if we fail, we take it in November and have to wait until May to get results (May being our wedding month). That is a full year after law school graduation. I had hoped to have a legal job before our wedding.

And with the title, I do not mean to make light of the real “Black Tuesday” as well as the days leading up to that terrible day when the stock market crashed in 1929. The economic downturn in this country is incredible and not to be joked about. It is historic. It is affecting every single American.

Time and time we learn, deregulation of the economy is not the way to go. Complete regulation is not the way to go. Nothing in the extremes is advantageous; we need to balance regulations with deregulating certain parts of the economy, although I am, as Democrats are, for more overall regulations.

The individual business person becomes selfish and starts making individualistic decisions with the business, which is why it is so important to have the federal government oversee the economy, often with regulations. The federal government is the most competent organ to regulate the economy, not the individualistic business person. Selfishness prevails and business people get caught up with the "leaky jar syndrome." Once they give in to needs and wants, one just wants more and more; can never "fill" the jar with a leak.

We need to elect Senator Obama (a lawyer). :-)

Lady Justice holding the scales of justice.

So here is to hoping for a better economy and good results tonight. I will be praying for both.

- Jen

Still a Hillary Girl

I know this is yesterday news, but I am going to blog once about my disappointment with the primary race.

There are both gracious Senator Clinton supporters and Senator Obama supporters and there are also some not-so-gracious Senator Clinton supporters and Senator Obama supporters. Obama supporters need to stop telling Clinton supporters to get over it and Clinton supporters need to stop threatening to vote for Senator McCain.

And I am TIRED of hearing that Senator Obama has a "Hillary Problem." It is disturbing to called a problem and we're not going to go run to Senator McCain. I am sorry, but Senator McCain is not the champion of women's rights. His Supreme Court nominees would make progress harder, and I am NOT talking about abortion rights; there is more to modern day feminism than abortion noise.

Both candidates received over 18 million votes across the country; it was a close race. But if the Democratic Primary was like the Republican Primary, Senator Clinton would have won. Republicans use the “winner-take-all” strategy, that if an individual wins the popular vote of the state, he receives all the pledged votes. Alternatively, Democrats split up the pledged delegates by percentage of the popular vote.

My point is that Senator Clinton could have won and she came close. I understand that life is full of rules that must be followed. But that dimension of her momentous run made it much harder to move pass the loss.

I like Senator Obama and there are no great differences between the two candidates besides age, race, and gender. But I have been slow to “fall in love” with him like I did for Senator Clinton.

During the primary, Senator Clinton stood by her Iraq war vote and Senator Obama ran to the left. Now Senator Obama is running back to the center, like ALL politicians do during primary and general elections on their respective sides. But it makes me angry because Senator Clinton lost votes for her centrist position. She stood firm for various reasons, but an obvious reason was to stay closer to the middle, as to not alienate people during the general, not do what Senator Obama did. Besides, Senator Obama was lucky to have not been in the Senate when it authorized invasion; he even admitted to the great Tim Russert in 2004 that he did not know how he would have voted if he had to make that Senate vote. He did not have all the intelligence and reports that Senator Clinton did. I thought it was a cheap line during the primary election, but it worked for him, he is the nominee. From the LA Times:

Many women who support Obama say they were torn, but are unapologetic about their choice. For many, the decision turns on one vote cast by Clinton in 2002:
for the bill authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq.

Earlier this year, a group calling itself “New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama,” circulated an online petition that was a nuanced endorsement of the Illinois senator. It was so popular that the words “New York” were dropped from the name, and the effort went national.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/02/nation/na-feminists2

When a race is close, it is easy to look back and see where votes were lost and ask what if. But she lost. It is time to move one with Senators Obama and Biden.

-Jen

Defeating the Communists with Candy

Kind of.

Author Andrei Cherny wrote about the Berlin airlift in his new book The Candy Bombers. Mr. Cherny works in the Arizona Attorney General's Office, in the division I interned last summer. It is interesting how themes repeat throughout history and only if we could learn from them. After WWII, the United States was the moral authority and leader in the world with its impeccable performance with difficult situations. It is too bad the United States, in recent years, has given the world a reason to question its moral authority, with Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, water boarding (note that some Japanese soldiers during WWII were prosecuted for water boarding US troops, it is most definitely torture, thank you Senator McCain for voting for the torture bill), extraordinary rendition, the "CIA torture flights" and other things. The US did not do this kind of low-level stuff during WWII, which that War was perhaps the biggest threat to modern democracy. Remember the Nuremberg Trials to prosecute the Nazis? Seems like amuch better idea than locking "terrorists" up in some random prison.

Story about Mr. Cherny's book in The Washington Post today:

From Berlin to Baghdad

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; Page A15

The city is in dire straits -- its economy shattered, its citizens desperately hungry. Random violence is rising, electricity is sporadic. Three years after the invasion, hope for a brief occupation has faded. The mission is to build democracy from the ruins of dictatorship, but sober analysts question whether a flaw in the national character makes freedom unattainable.

This is not Baghdad 2008 but Berlin 1948, which makes the reunified German capital a particularly fitting venue for Barack Obama's speech tomorrow. The lush Tiergarten where Obama will speak was then a wasteland where Berliners struggled to grow vegetables in the shadow of the bombed-out Reichstag.

Sixty years ago this month, Berlin stood on the pivot point of history. The Soviet Union choked off food and fuel for the western sector of the divided city. The United States launched an improbable mission to supply it by air.

And a Utah farm boy named Hal Halvorsen, flying C-54 Skymasters in the relentless shuttle, made an impulsive promise to the scrawny children gathered behind the barbed wire fence at Berlin's Tempelhof airport: He would drop some candy for them. Operation "Little Vittles" eventually delivered tons of chocolate, attached to tiny parachutes fashioned from handkerchiefs.

The story of the Berlin Airlift and Halvorsen's mission is told in "The Candy Bombers," a new book by Democratic strategist Andrei Cherny. If the plural of anecdotes is not data, the stacking of historical analogies is not sound policy. Yet, as Cherny writes, "Their story has powerful resonance for our own time. In confronting the Berlin blockade, America went to battle against a destructive ideology that threatened free people around the world. In a country we invaded and occupied that had never had a stable democracy, we brought freedom and turned their people's hatred of America into love for this country, its people, and its ideals."

The lessons of the Berlin Airlift are anything but simple, which is what makes it such a useful historical moment. Cherny's book is something of a Rorschach test on Iraq: The message readers receive may depend on the mindset with which they arrived.

Thus, Obama can rightly point to the airlift as evidence that maintaining America's moral voice is an essential component of its foreign policy. The United States stands to gain as much from a modern-day Candy Bomber as it risks losing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Those who doubt the capacity of government, in the aftermath of Katrina, to mobilize quickly and implement deftly can take heart from the example of organizational whiz Bill Tunner, who turned a slapdash operation incapable of supplying Berlin into a precision drill that kept the beleaguered city going through a long winter.

The rest of the article can be read at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/22/AR2008072202113.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

-Jen

Support the Troops

Throughout history, patriotism ebbs and flows. In recent years, if one spoke out about the country, the individual was “not patriotic” and this angers me. This term is thrown around as an insult to undermine what an individual is advocating. The Founding Fathers (though those wives who stayed home on the farm should be given more credit too, but that is a blog for another day), would believe that dissent is the ultimate form of being patriotic. We should be thankful for their dissent, because, but for them standing up for what they thought was right, the United Kingdom would still be our “Mother Country.” (I am currently watching the HBO series on John Adams…)

This brings me to “support the troops.” This is an insult that is also thrown around. If you speak out against the war, then you don’t support the troops. If you don’t agree with the war, you do not support the troops. This is disrespectful and detracts from the troops. I believe there are different ways to “support the troops.” Putting a magnet on a car is not the only way to show support. Supporting the troops is not wearing a flag pin or putting your hand over your heart. Those simple actions are a great way to show support, but the actions can be superficial if that is it. Senator Obama should not have to give a speech about being patriotic; he has shown his love of our country through his public service as a politician and he has done nothing to permit such questions of his dedication.

Senator Clinton, a few years ago, helped sponsor a bill that would have given permanent health care to any individual who was served our country in this capacity, but it was laughed at. And there have been others. Additionally, the new GI Bill has been greeted with resistance from various republicans and Senator John McCain. Any soldier who serves our country should be welcomed home with the same opportunities our WWII troops were given.

What brings me to this topic, as being my first real blog topic, is an article on CNN, “Homeless veterans face new battle for survival.” It is noted that veterans make up almost a quarter of the homeless population and this number is expected to rise. Individuals dismiss the homeless population as being lazy and not deserving of any help. But the homeless population is made up of primarily veterans, former foster care children, individuals who are mentally ill, and others. It is embarrassing that the richest country in the world cannot take better care of its veterans, (the state of some VA hospitals is terrible, we can do better). The federal government is the most competent organ to address this issue; the individual donative person cannot fix these types of problems. They served their country, their country should serve them.

With that, Happy Fourth of July!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/02/homeless.veterans/index.html

-Jennifer