the daily snivel

  83.13% Professionally Responsible!

Well, I got my Professional Responsibility and Practice Management Examination score back today, and I'm happy to note that I passed with the above-noted score of 83%. All the exams are pass/fail, but the pass/fail point is relative to the performance of the group as a whole (that is, all the law students writing the exam for the Bar Admissions Course in Ottawa, London, Toronto, and Windsor), so if the group does better on average, the score required to pass is higher. If the group does worse on average, the score required to pass is lower. This time around, the passing score was a 50/83, or 60%.

I'm very pleased with my score -- it was a draining and time-consuming test. Thinking back to the exam, the only places I might have lost marks would be the tricky questions on trust accounts, and maybe some issues having to do with the Law Society by-laws. I'd hate to think I was, in fact, 17% Professionally Irresponsible on basic issues of the Rules of Professional Conduct. Then again, my condolences to those poor bastards who must have failed, too.

In any case, that's one professional licencing exam down, and (ugh) seven to go. The next one is (glurp) Real Estate on this coming Wednesday. 

  Freedom Fries are on the march!

Of course, as we all know, one of the pettiest in a string of lows in US foreign policy happened in 2003, when the cafeterias in the US House of Representatives three office buildings deleted "french fries" from their menus and replaced them with "freedom fries." This was done in blustery outrage over France's refusal to support the proposed war of aggression liberation of Iraq. They remain on the menu to this day, a tribute to the infantile obstinacy of that once-great nation. But now, even the congressman who demanded the name change has decided the invasion was wrong:

...
Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war "with no justification."
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But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.
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Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen"...

I admire those who have the courage and integrity to admit that they were wrong. But I have much more admiration for those with the courage and integrity to stand up for what was right in the first place, especially when faced with outraged bullies on the other side who demand they get their way. 

  From the great State of Texas

Truer words were never spoken:

Rarely are the words of one state legislator worth national attention, but when Senfronia Thompson, a black representative from Houston, stalks to the back mike with a certain "get-out-of-my-way" look in her eye, it's Katie, bar the door. Here is Thompson speaking against the Legislature's recent folly of putting a superfluous anti-gay marriage measure into the state constitution:

"I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

"Members, this is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.
...

Please do go and read every word. It does a lot to answer those who think banning gay marriage has anything to do with real Christian values.