Miami: Say NO to the Bush Bailout Rally
September 25, 2008
5:00 PM – 6:30 PMStand with your neighbors and say NO Bush Bailout!
Bring signs and friends so that we can all call on the government to invest in Main Street, not Wall Street.
Address
Busy Street Corner
SW 17th Avenue and US1
Miami, FL 33133
I wonder why so often progressive rallies pick this corner? Yes, it's on a main commuter route, but it's soulless and not that accessible.
Update: find a rally near you
I am very disappointed to read this in the NYT online.
At the same time, Congressional Democrats said they were prepared to drop one of their most contentious demands: new authority for bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of first mortgages. That provision, aimed at preventing foreclosures, was heavily opposed by Senate Republicans.
I hope it is not true. I have yet to read a convincing case for why banks should get all the windfalls for their evident stupidities. I do not like being asked to pay large sums of money for windfalls to the improvident, but given the choice between improvident families losing their homes and stock and bondholders in improvident banks, I know whose windfall I'd choose to hand my a share of my income to.
On a somewhat more cheerful note, it seems that the Dems might “only” hand over $150 billion, which might leave a little money for social programs in the Obama administration. Even though the $700 bn number was clearly made up, I suppose this will be about as small a number as they can get away with. Think what it could have done for health care.
If the Congress doesn't hold some sort of line on the amount, the GOP program of “starving the beast” — making the Treasury so broke that there's no danger Democrats could afford anything popular — would truly have reached its apotheosis.
via ACLU Blog: Because Freedom Can't Blog Itself: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union [link fixed]:
We learned late today that Army Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, the lead prosecutor in the military commissions case against Mohammed Jawad, has resigned in protest because the prosecution team was not providing the defense evidence that could indicate Jawad's innocence. Jawad was a teenager when he was captured in Afghanistan and he's one of the two youngest prisoners at Guantánamo.
I've said it before and will say it again: the JAGs are the heroes of the “war against terror”.
Congratulations to the UM Class of 2008, which recorded a stellar bar pass rate on the Florida bar exam. According to the official list, our grads achieved the highest pass rate of all Florida law schools, with a 92.4% pass rate among first-time test-takers. (More bragging at the official UM announcement.)
I've reproduced the full table below, sorted by percentage passing, based on the raw data (sorted by number passing) contained in a .pdf from the Bar Examiners.
But first, a few words of warning: Bar Pass Rates are Over-Rated As A Measure of Law School Quality.
| Number Taking | Number Passing | Percent Passing | |
| U. Miami | 236 | 218 | 92.4 |
| FIU | 64 | 58 | 90.6 |
| U. Florida | 235 | 210 | 89.4 |
| Nova Southeastern | 197 | 169 | 85.8 |
| FSU | 212 | 181 | 85.4 |
| Stetson | 173 | 147 | 85.0 |
| Florida Coastal | 192 | 158 | 82.3 |
| St. Thomas | 135 | 108 | 80.0 |
| non-Florida Schools | 722 | 558 | 77.3 |
| Barry | 123 | 93 | 75.6 |
| Florida A&M | 78 | 53 | 67.9 |
| ———- | ——— | ———- | ——— |
| Total | 2367 | 1953 | 82.5 |
It would be sort of interesting to extend this table with a column showing percent of class taking the exam, and also percent of class taking out of state exams.
The percent in-state vs. out-of-state tells you something about how national/regional/local the law school is. A large number taking no bar at all raises the question whether the law school is steering some students away from the summer bar exam in order to prop up its statistics, although there are also other very innocuous explanations. It may be that many students go on to LL.Ms and put off the bar, or that the school prepares them for other sorts of careers. The no-bar-anywhere number only raises a question, rather than answering it.
The first number is probably easy to get, but I don't know about the second. We graduated 442 JD's last year, making the 236 Florida test takers just 53.3% of the UM graduating class. My impression is that just about all of our JDs took a bar exam somewhere, and that the numbers reflect a reality that we run a school with both national and Florida ambitions, but I could be wrong about that. Indeed, if you'd asked me, I'd have guessed that the Florida-national ratio was more like 2:1 than 1:1, which suggests either that anecdotal evidence is not worth much, or that the school is becoming more national.
I hab a bad cold so instead of trying to say anything I will refer you to dday at Digby's place.
Fly a plane, catch a cold, it seems to be a law of nature.
This administration rushing a bill through congress, hogs at the trough, that seems to be a law of nature too.
But the Senate may be finding some spiny growths, so not all observed regularities in nature are reliable predictors.
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