Monday, March 30, 2009
Why I’m Awesome: Double Down Monday
I AM AWESOME. Here are two ways that this is true (No links, for reasons of personal convenience ((mine))):
Why I’m awesome, clever-dick version: When the stink went up about the AIG bonuses, lots of folk were demanding that the bonuses be rescinded or somehow recaptured. It was an emotionally-attractive position but I sensed legal problems and even went out on a limb in the comments of a political blog, saying that I thought recapture of those bonuses was tantamount to an ex post facto law or a bill of attainder - and therefore, naturally, unconstitutional. You can’t go passing laws to punish individuals for past behavior, neither by singling out the individuals nor their particular actions. Well, someone got a big-name law professor to opine on the question, one whose word I would personally take as dispositive on any question of constitutional law. And Professor Tribe said it wasn’t a bill of attainder, so it wasn’t unconstitutional. And, by extension, that I didn’t know my constitutional ass from my legislative elbow. You can imagine how his rebuke stung, with a sting of furious stank. Well, now Professor Tribe has taken a second look at the proposed legislation, and now he thinks it IS an unconstitutionally punitive personally-focused legislative agenda. In other words, it IS a bill of attainder, and he’s eating his hat in public - the hat that says “DAN IS RIGHT AND TOTALLY RULES.” I can’t say how far he’ll go with this public annuciation of my brilliance, but I think a tenured chair is in my future. That is to say, the crappy office chair I’ve been sitting on for six years is likely to be mine for another four. What this has to do with Lawrence Tribe, I leave it to you to discern. Constitutional genuises like me don’t have time to explain everything to regular folk like you.
Why I’m awesome, normal-person version: I’m not sure why I was looking up my high school last week, but a quick ‘net search revealed to me that there is actually an on-line repository of information about famous things, places, and uses associated with my HS. Yes, it’s been on plenty of TV shows, and it’s adjacent to the longest mural in the US, and I know of a few mid-alphabet-level list celebs who even attended there, myself excluded. But what I didn’t know is that Tom Selleck - yes, Tom Selleck from Magnum PI - went to my high school. Yes, he of the manly mustache and towering hunkitude, famous for aloha shirts and driving a red Ferrari as well as various other magnumism as to which I am currently drawing a blank… yes, he went to the same HS as I did. He probably didn’t do any acting on the stage on which I learned to do prat-faints and harmonic convergences, because apparently he didn’t do any acting till he was in college. But I bet we used the same bathroom, a mere two decades apart. And the star power lingered, I’m sure - I don’t think they’d been cleaned in the interim.
That reminds me of a story, but one which might tarnish my newly-established awesomeness. So forget it. Next up, probably something dumb about laundry or grammar. You’ve been warned. Awesomely.
