For those people that will be making the voyage to Louisville, KY this weekend for the 129th Ky Derby, here's a list of items that the track will not allow in this year. So, if you want anything while at Derby, be prepared to pay. And I do mean PAY for it. It won't be cheap as last year demonstrated with a similiar setup. Here's the key list:

Security procedures established for Kentucky Derby and Oaks 129 include:

• Magnetic wand searches of all patrons at all track entrance gates
• Limits on items on carry-in items for patrons and employees
• High visibility and numbers of security personnel in all areas of the track
• Placement of barriers outside the track's admission gates Security sweeps of all vehicles (buses, limousines and vendor vehicles) that enter the track
• Vehicles parked in all Churchill Downs lots will be subject to search. Items that patrons may carry-in to Churchill Downs on those days are:

• Food items in clear plastic bags (maximum size 18"× 18" - no trash bags) - LIMIT TWO (2) PER PERSON
• "Box" lunches if packaged in clear plastic bags or plastic containers (maximum size 18"× 18" - no trash bags) - LIMIT TWO (2) PER PERSON
• Cellular telephones, cameras, and camcorders (patrons required to turn electronic items on before entry is allowed)
• Small personal music systems, radios and televisions - no "boom boxes"
• Binoculars
• Purses and baby bags (all subject to search)
• Chairs (Gate 3 only)
• Blankets (Gates 1 & 3 for infield use only)
• Tarpaulins (Gates 1 & 3 for infield use only)
• Strollers (only if carrying a child - no other items allowed)

Items that are banned from the track on Derby and Oaks Days include:

• Weapons of any kind (includes all knives and scissors)
• Bottles and cans of any kind (includes all beverage and lotion containers - glass, plastic or metal)
• Thermoses
• Coolers
• Grills
• Backpacks, luggage and duffel bags
• Wagons
• Umbrellas

I understand most of the rules, but still I think they're being a bit paranoid.

With recent events adding a bit more stress to my life it's a good thing that I only have one more week as a 1L. In the past week I've completed Civ Pro II and Property II. Being the two "easier" tests, I'm looking forward to a week of tests, course reviews, and constantly fighting myself to stay on task.

What would the New York Times have printed after the victory at Yorktown in 1781. The Weekly Standard has an answer.

Our bulldog, Boss, passed away yesterday. I'm still in a bit of a shock from the phone call last night about it. He was always such a happy "little" dog, even when you could tell he wasn't feeling very well, he'd still come up to you and wag his stub of a tail. Boss was the only dog that we ever had that I remember as a puppy. I remember him playing in the snow the first winter that we had him and the snow was higher then he was. He had to jump in order to get through the snow. I also remember him dressed up in a Halloween costume that my mom bought for him as he stood outside while candy was handed out to the kids in the old neighborhood. It's going to be very strange to visit my parents now and not have him come and greet us. He's going to be missed.

Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via blogoSPERICS)

Today Christians celebrate the most important holiday of the faith, Easter. Without the Resurrection of Christ, the Christian faith would hold little meaning. C.S. Lewis wrote about the Resurrection in God in the Dock:

Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been opened.

By defeating death, Christ has opened the door to all who follow and believe in him to do the same. And due to this, Easter is our hope, our believe, and our faith. If Christ had not risen from the grave, the Apostle Paul tells us that our faith is useless (1 Corinthians 15:17) and that if we have hope in Christ only for this life, we are the most miserable people in the world. (1 Corinthians 15:19) But Christ did rise from the dead. And through the resurrection of Christ death no longer holds any sting.

For more on Easter try listening to the recent sermons at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY.

UPDATE - Southeast now has the Easter message online.

and she's going to attend Boston College. I've known it for a few days and I'm happy that she's decided on what school she'll be attending for law school next year. Of course, due to the fact that I'm attending UofL at present, my feelings overall are a bit mixed. (She's going to be nearly 1000 miles away!)

Looks like I'm going to be making regular trips up to Massachusetts.

The article is a bit old, but due to the fact that it's time for law school exams once again, I thought it was on point.

It turns out that law school exams are demonstrably arbitrary and discriminatory in their grades.

In "Law School Examinations," University of Kansas Law Prof. Philip Kissam explains that, "Most law schools have developed exam systems that generate highly disaggregated class rankings" to assist corporate law firms in choosing their prospective employees. This allows students to perceive meritocractic distribution in post-graduate options that in reality only reflects systemic discrimination.

Discrimination in higher education and professional programs? The horror, how could this have ever happened?

The overwhelming empirical evidence of discriminatory results in grading suggests the existence of serious flaws in exams, particularly issue-spotting exams. In their article on grade normalization, Downs & Levit observe: "A vast amount of research in educational testing theory suggests that the preferred method of testing in law schools is one least recommended by professional educators. A single examination followed by a course grade prevents professors from giving students repeated feedback, which many theorists say is essential to deep learning. A one-shot examination highlights inaccuracies in evaluation that may result from student illness or personal troubles, or imbalances between student coverage and selective testing."

I know that the administration at Louisville at least pays lip service (and some demonstration of) concern over student's personal troubles and how it effects them. But the testing and grading methods used just goes to validate that law school is not about learning the law.

The studies primarily focused on Harvard's own grading system, but many of the problems discussed overlap with other schools systems.

(via Lawschool.com)

This semester in Civil Procedure II we went over the laws, regluations and process of jury selection. In it we learned about voir dire. I found one of the more interesting definitions of this term today, not one that my professor would ever provide.

Voir dire - A fancy French term for interviewing prospective jurors and systematically eliminating anyone with an IQ over 20 from the jury.

Other gems include:

Common law - Kooky legal doctrine wherein judges are allowed to make up the law as they go along, citing precedents of other knuckle head judges as the basis for their home cooked decisions. Under the table payoffs and campaign contributions from lawyers pleading their cases are common components taken into consideration when common law is determined by judges.

Rule of law - Lawyers make the rules - and that’s the law.

For more unique definitions go look at Power of Attorneys.

Michelle Malkin writes how the left is now even brainwashing preschoolers to be peaceniks.

What are you doing to protect your 3-year-old from the radical anti-war agenda?

Aggressive efforts by blame-America educators to indoctrinate college-age students are well-known. But even toddlers are not safe from peacenik proselytizers.

Example: The nation's largest and most influential organization of early childhood educators sells a teacher's guide that depicts the famed Blue Angels, our U.S. Navy's flight demonstration squadron of F-18 Hornet fighter pilots, as heartless killers threatening to bomb innocent American children.
According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which oversees preschool teacher training, curriculum standards and day-care accreditation, "That's Not Fair! A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children" is "an exciting and informative" resource for "developing community-building, deep thinking and partnership ... to change the world for the better."

What is going on here? Malkin later goes on to describe how these "teachers" are happy about doing this type of thing behind parent's backs. I know not all educators are like this, but even one is one too many.

RTWT.

(via blogoSFERICS)

To take my mind off of law school work I've been using the computer as my primary diversion. So, over the past week or so I've put together The SD Portal. It's mainly for my own benefit, but just in case anyone else finds it remotely useful.

Freedom or Free-for-All?

The most profound political and philosophical trend of our time is a serious erosion of any consensus about what government is supposed to do and what it's not supposed to do. The “instruction books” on this matter are America’s founding documents, namely the Declaration of Independence and the original U.S. Constitution with its Bill of Rights. In the spirit of those great works, most Americans once shared a common view of the proper role of government — the protection of life and property.

Jefferson himself phrased it with typical eloquence: “... Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

RTWT.

(via Ipse Dixit)

Fox News and other news sources are reporting that the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Abbas is in U.S. custody in Baghdad.

Abbas is[was] the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front, which hijacked the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985. The hijacking ended with the death of one American.

What was it about Iraq not be connected with terrorists?

UPDATE: Fox News now has the story online. Also at MSNBC and BBC.

Another Update: The Boston Globe has more on the history of Abu Abbas.

Andrew Bolt writes in the Herald Sun about how wrong the protesters were about the Iraqi Campaign.

How is it that people priding themselves on morality in fact aided a genocidal killer, and not his victims? How is it they now watch Iraqis celebrate their liberation, and feel . . . sad?

A quarter of a century ago, such people rejoiced in making the allied soldiers in Vietnam look like Frankensteins, both silly and sinister. With Iraq, our soldiers have had their revenge. This is the Vietnam of the Left.

But when we say the Left got this war wrong, we must be clear that this was no innocent error of judgment. Too many wilfully let a self-indulgent loathing of capitalism, or the US or John Howard blind them to the real truths and the real evil.

NOR can we let the myth grow that the Left always knew the war would be won easily, and was worried more by the peace.

Not true. Below, I will recall just some of "peace" activists' predictions to show how they dreamed of a war in which millions died, and Iraqis greeted our soldiers not with kisses but bullets. Overseas, too, anti-war propagandists luridly dreamed of American honour drowning in Iraqi blood.

These are now many of the same people sneering that Iraq has plunged into anarchy, and will forever be a sleazy "puppet state" of the US. How lovingly they linger on news of looting.

Iraq may indeed go sour, although with effort, help and much time, it probably won't. But however Iraq turns out, we at least know it is no longer a threat. And whatever troubles it faces, they will not be greater than the horrors it has endured.

Iraq's future we cannot tell, but one thing we do know is that most of those now preaching doom were spectacularly wrong about the war itself. Why would they be so right now?

It is time we held them accountable. No more must they lightly skip from one disreputable cause to another -- preaching woe in the first Gulf War, disaster in Afghanistan, apocalypse in Iraq -- and always warning of the catastrophic consequences of resisting evil.

RTWT (Read the Whole Thing)

(via Instapundit)

It's getting really close to finals time and as expected, my stress levels have started to rise once again. A thousand different thoughts are going through my head right now. How will I do on my finals? What classes will I take next fall? What am I going to do over this summer? Where is Teresa going to go to law school? Only prayer has seemed to keep me in check to date and prevented me from losing it too much.

Teresa's in Boston, MA tonight with her mom visiting Boston College. If you take the time to read her site (which you should), you would know that she's been accepted to both the law and graduate schools at BC. She'll be back in town soon and I am looking forward to that a great deal. I'm not exactly sure how things are going to work out if she moves there for school, but I hope she chooses to go wherever she think she's going to be the happiest.

Well, I think I'm going to go take one of the last remaining chances I have for a good nights rest now. Tomorrow I have a full day of outlines, cleaning, and other joyful work to do.

Acidman posted this joke that was sent to him by a friend. He usually has some rather humerous entries, so you might want to check his site out if you think this joke is funny. ( WARNING: His site is not suitable for all readers. Strong language.)

A squad of American soldiers was patrolling along the Iraqi border. To their surprise, they found the badly mangled dead body of an Iraqi soldier in a ditch along side the road.

A short distance up the road, they found a badly mangled American soldier in a ditch on the other side of the road, who was still barely alive. They ran to him, cradled his blood-covered head and asked him what had happened.

"Well," he whispered, "I was walking down this road, armed to the teeth. I came across this heavily armed Iraqi border guard. I looked him right in the eye and shouted, "Saddam Hussein is an unprincipled, lying piece of shit!"

He looked me right in the eye and shouted back, "Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy and most of your Democrats are unprincipled, lying pieces of shit too!"

"We were standing there shaking hands in the road when the truck hit us."

(@ Acidman via blogoSFERICS)

If you have a good internet connection, click here to see we did the right thing. Slower connections, click here.

(via American Realpolitik)

(via American Realpolitik)

The Iraqi people are now tearing down a statute of Saddam in the center of the city with the help of the US Army.

It's amazing video to watch as the Iraqis climbed the statute and were helped by US troops. The fighting isn't over as they even came under sniper fire once while working on this so far, but this does signal the definitive beginning of the end of the Iraqi campaign in the War on Terror.

UPDATE: Some more photos from Fox News.

This US flag was in the Pentagon on 9/11.

There's a little more than two weeks until finals begin. I'm both looking forward to them (in the sense of getting them over with) and dreading them (in the sense of studying for and the stress of taking them).

They're having SBA elections on campus today, but I'm not going to vote. Yeah, me, Mr. Politics, will not be voting in an election. It's basically that I don't feel like choosing between friends. Normally, I don't have them running against each other, but I do this year. And if they're not running against each other, they're un-opposed for the most part. So, I'm just staying out and whoever wins will do just as good of a job as the person they ran against.

I'm going to apply for the law journals here soon, though I don't know if I'll be accepted as a candidate. But it sure doesn't hurt to apply on the off chance that I get selected. But now it's time for me to get back to work. More later...

Recently John McGinnis and Matthew Schartz had an article titled Conservatives Need Not Apply in the Wall Street Journal. FrontPage Magazine has since put it online. They argue that diversity is not the real motivation behind Michigan's use of it as a basis of affirmative action.

In its upcoming Supreme Court case, the University of Michigan Law School justifies its very substantial preferences for selected racial and ethnic minorities on the ground that a "critical mass" of African-American and Hispanic students is needed to assure that all students have the benefit of a variety of views and experiences. But professors even more than students set the intellectual tone in university life. Generating ideas is their job. These same law schools almost uniformly lack a "critical mass" of conservatives to offer an alternative to the reigning liberal orthodoxy.

We have conducted a study that provides evidence of the ideological imbalance at elite law schools -- of which we have heard no plans to rectify. We reviewed all federal campaign contributions over $200 by professors at the top 22 law schools from 1994 to 2000. During that time, close to a quarter of these law professors contributed to campaigns -- a proportion far greater than the average citizen. The proof is stark: as the Anglican church was once described as the Tory Party at prayer, the legal academy today is best seen as the Democratic Party at the lectern. America splits evenly between the GOP and Democrats, but 74% of the professors contribute primarily to Democrats. Only 16% do so to Republicans.

These overall percentages substantially understate the effect of the partisan imbalance at most schools. Republican-contributing law professors are very disproportionately concentrated at two schools -- the University of Virginia and Northwestern. In contrast, many other elite schools have few or no politically active Republicans. At Yale, where almost 50% of the faculty donate, almost 95% give predominantly to Democrats. At Michigan itself the ratio is eight to one. Sometimes the amounts donated can be instructive: in the last six years Georgetown law professors have donated approximately $180,000 to the Democratic Party, $2,000 to the GOP and $1,500 to the Green party. Conclusion? Mainstream conservative ideas are no better represented than those on the leftist fringe...

When law schools make no progress (and no discernible effort) in correcting the patent absence of diversity in viewpoints, it is fair to assume that their true goal is racial patterning, not educational diversity.

Read the whole thing for a good basis for one more good argument against affirmative action.

Found this Homeland Security Briefing that listed terrorists that they're looking for at this time. I think the parent's of these guys must have been in high school when they had them.

WARNING: Sophmoric humor and it's about 5.88MB Windows Media file.

This has to be one of the funniest error messages that I've ever seen.

(via American Realpolitik)

Every now and then our junior senator, Jim Bunning, pops up and says something to the press that you would never hear from our senior senator, McConnell. Senator Bunning has called for Peter Arnett to be tried for treason.

The Times of London is reporting that 3/4 of the French hope Iraq wins the current war.

The defilement of Commonwealth war graves in northern France coincided with a poll for The Times which found that 54 per cent of Britons no longer regarded France as a close ally because of its opposition to the war.

Relations will be further rent by a second poll, in Le Monde, showing that only a third of the French felt that they were on the same side as the Americans and British, and that another third desired outright Iraqi victory over “les anglo-saxons”.

After this, I no longer have any doubt that France is no longer an ally and indeed should possibly be consider an adversary at least, if not an enemy in the future.

(via Instapundit)

UPDATE: Evidently, people are already thinking ahead.