aka, Jessica’s Big Girl Blog
I made some Valentines to give out to my friends. I made the one with the heart middle, and found the rest online. They’re printed out on photo paper and have great, cheesy sayings on the back like:
- Will you be my constant? (Which is the cutest thing ever, really. So sweet!)
- I’d be LOST without you!
- Valentine, you set my heart aflame!
- Not even the Others could keep us apart this Valentine’s Day!
So anyway, here they are:
Really guys? Anyone could have seen this lawsuit coming from a parsec away. 
Lucasfilm sues to stop ‘Skywalker’ billboards
I’m still a little disappointed that Lucasfilm didn’t have any licensing internships for the summer… but maybe next year? Please?
As mentioned in the last post, last weekend was a con weekend. My first of the year, actually. I went to Chattacon in Chattanooga, TN, and even though I started getting sick on Friday, I had a lot of fun. I got to see some good friends—some of whom I hadn’t seen since Dragon*Con—played Apples to Apples for a few hours, hula-hooped with Gena, and finally got to see ArcAttack and their singing Tesla coils. (Yes, it’s as awesome as it sounds.)
My friend Derek took some pictures, which you can see at his blog here.
A con weekend plus being sick apparently equals me falling behind on my schoolwork and becoming completely apathetic.
It’s the third week of school, you guys! This is BAD. This weekend I had better get on the ball and do some serious HW and get some serious rest. My cold (or whatever plague my friend Daniel gave me) is still hanging on for dear life, and it needs to die. I’m planning on starting P90X this week (Sunday, hopefully, if i can get weights today) and I don’t want to be sick while I do it.
Could Obama’s criticism of the Citizens United decision have a reverse-effect of the switch in time that saved nine?
Watching the video at Althouse, none of the 6 justices who were there look happy or pleased by the criticism. I have to wonder with Althouse whether any of them would have attended if they had known that the President was going to call them out and encourage Congress to stand up and cheer against them. And I agree with others that this criticism really served no purpose other than to incite anger—the administration heartily criticized the opinion last week, so what’s the point of doing it again? To remind SCOTUS that Obama didn’t like their opinion—as though they actually care what he thinks? To make himself look good by making them look bad? I don’t really get it.
I don’t think that his comments during the SOTU are going to have as dramatic an effect on the court as FDR’s court-packing plan did, but I can’t help but wonder whether the court will be a little more willing to issue some beat-downs against Obama policy initiatives.
Politically speaking, those comments were downright idiotic. As President, you don’t want to insult the branch of government whose job is to interpret the constitution and review the laws that Congress cranks out based on your policy decisions. He may have gotten applause from Congress and some viewers at home, but President Obama’s comments may have stifled some of the justices’ support and created a quiet hostility toward his policies that might not easily be undone.
The Supreme Court is considered the most apolitical branch of government, and overtly political comments abotut the court will probably resonate in our political culture—at least for a while. They’ll resurface if Obama gets to appoint another justice, and they’ll resurface during every subsequent SOTU as the media looks to see whether any justices attend. Hell, the media might even resurrect them if SCOTUS beats down health care, cap and trade, or another Obama policy as unconstitutional. I have a feeling that at some point, Obama will regret the political misstep he made when he openly criticized the Supreme Court to their faces in the State of the Union Address.
Edit: Linda Greenhouse has a good post about what happened last night and about the Citizens United opinion in general.
Newsom: Obama Inexcusable on Gay Rights
So, I think the headline is pretty accurate, but a lot of the things that Mayor Newsom says are just silly at best, and delusional at worst.
There is some belief that [Obama] actually doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage.
Why would that be? Maybe it’s because he said that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman during the campaign? Newsom says he understands this position “tactically,” for campaign purposes, but that’s really not much better because it implies that (1) Obama didn’t care enough about gay marriage—an important issue to a lot of his supporters—to say so during the campaign, and (2) Obama will do anything, say anything, lie about anything to get elected. Not exactly the picture you want to paint of a politician, especially one from your own party.
But it’s fundamentally inexcusable for a member of the Democratic Party to stand on the principle that separate is now equal, but only on the basis of sexual orientation. We’ve always fought for the rights of minorities and against the whims of majorities.
Except for, you know, the 100 years from the time of the Civil War up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when they actively opposed equal rights for all. Maybe Mayor Newsom should meet with Senator Byrd to talk about how the former Exalted Cyclops felt about “separate but equal.” These statements reveal a total ignorance of the facts and an ill-founded belief in what the Democrat Party has “always stood for.” Every party is flawed, not every policy is good, and pretending that the Democrat Party is—and has always been—unblemished and ideologically pure is just crazy.
They also suggest that lying about your policy positions in order to get elected is a completely acceptable campaign tactic. And I’m not really okay with that. I’d rather lose because of my principles than win after I twisted myself in a pretzel lying to make everyone like me. (This is probably why I will never run for office. Also, because I probably pop up as a search result when you type in “Slave Leia pictures,” which would scandalize the Children or something.)
It’s pathetic that so many people fooled themselves into believing that Obama was lying about his position on gay marriage because he didn’t want to lose Independents, conservative Democrats, or cross-over Republicans. And it’s pathetic that they keep giving him a pass on all these issues that are supposedly important to them. (At least Newsom seems to have stuck to his guns. That’s admirable, and if it’s true, then Obama and the rest of the Democrat Party can learn a lot from him.) They’ve let him get away with dragging his feet on DADT, and even though they were initially pissed about the memo about DOMA, they seem to have given him a pass on that, too. The “it’s okay to lie to get elected” principle definitely backfired, but I don’t see how these people can really feel betrayed when Obama explicitly stated that marriage was between a man and a woman during the campaign. That’s a pretty unequivocal statement. It’s not like he waffled and said it was above his pay grade or something. 
My friend Hofmann posted a list of the costumes he wants to do this year, and it inspired me to post something similar. I originally posted this in my LJ, but why not post it here. It lightens up the place a little to get away from political issues sometimes.
Congratulations, Senator Brown! You have a chance to bring real, actual change to the Senate. You’ve already brought it to Massachusetts. I’m looking forward to watching your upcoming term.
And I’m amused at all of the desperate denial and hand-wringing going on in the Democrat camp. I don’t think this was an anomaly—especially when you take the VA and NJ gubernatorial races into consideration—and I don’t think the tide will change all that much between now and November. At least, I hope it doesn’t. Conservative candidates have a strong chance of election now, if for no other reason than that people are sick of Reid and Pelosi bossing them around instead of serving the people like they’re supposed to. People overwhelmingly want smaller government now, and it’s time for a party with that agenda to take charge. Set an example, Senator Brown, and lead the way.
This might be my favorite version of this video…
It’s the third day of classes, and I’m already feeling pretty apathetic. This concerns and horrifies me because it’s the third day of classes.
Legal Profession is rough. The assignments are long and tedious—read this 20 page chapter and the 10 hyperlinks I posted in the syllabus. This leads to too many open tabs in Firefox and PDFs in Preview, which leads to crankiness.
Patent Law is really intimidating.
Constitutional Law… well, we haven’t really started reading a lot of the law. Everything we’ve done so far has been introductory, Poli Sci 101-type stuff. I hope I’ll like it though… it would be nice to like more than half my classes this semester.
Haven’t had Trademark Law or Space Law yet. My hopes are high for both of those, so maybe after I have those classes I’ll be more enthusiastic about this semester. And less apathetic.
