Cynical Optimist

These are from a book called “Disorder in the Court,” by Charles M. Sevilla and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters.

ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
_______________________________
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can’t remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, ‘Where am I, Cathy?’
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep,
he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-one-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: Uh, he’s twenty-one.
________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Would you repeat the question?
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Uh….
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant
to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK?
What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why
I was doing an autopsy on him!
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Huh?
____________________________________________

And the best for last

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Tags: Random Thoughts by Cynical Optimist
No Comments »

They say Obama is really intelligent, and I believe that. That makes this statement of his all the more surprising.

A few fairly obvious observations:

1. You can’t ban the production of fissile material because the genie is already out of the bottle. This is like a handgun ban. If you ban it, only the bad guys will have it. It’s incredibly naive to think that an international ban (essentially just a piece of paper) would stop the bad guys from producing nuclear weapons if they can.

2. He says he would cut spending on “unproven missle defense systems.” Enough tests have already been conducted to qualify missle defense as “proven.” In fact, the systems are close to being deployed, with some parts of it already deployed.

3. He would end the war in Iraq. Very laudable, but at what price? How many Iraqi’s are going to die because Obama pulls out U.S. forces before Iraq is ready?

4. Our ICBM’s haven’t been on “hair trigger alert,” whatever that is, in years. “Hair trigger alert” isn’t even something that actually exists outside of the movies and the Senator’s imagination. In fact, the targeting data (the important part) was removed from them years ago.

Reading between the lines, it appears Barack Obama wants our defense capabilities to stagnate and die.

I’m not sure Barack Obama has a firm grasp of the fundamental issues he’s talking about, but he sure is good at making speeches.

Tags: Politics by Cynical Optimist
No Comments »

David Brooks has this to say:

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

 
See the article.

 I’m heartened by the knowledge that general elections expose this sort of opportunism, even though it doesn’t necessarily change the outcome.

Tags: Politics by Cynical Optimist
No Comments »

Finally!! The future is here. Well, almost.

On Monday, Honda Motor celebrated the start of production of its FCX Clarity, the world’s first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production.

This is HUGE!!

Fuel-cell vehicles have been a sort of holy grail of the auto industry, offering the promise of driving without emitting air-polluting exhaust. Fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen from ordinary air to make electricity, in a process whose only byproducts are water and heat.

I have two concerns though. Why was it Japan and not the U.S. that jumped out front on this technology? And, will Al Gore have a problem with the technology because it produces heat? The article.

While the vehicle costs “several hundred thousand dollars” to produce, Honda will lease them for about $600 a month. At the equivalent of 74 miles per gallon, that’s a real deal.

I call on the U.S. Government to subsidize the retrofitting of gas stations with the equipment for hydrogen cell refueling, and I also call on Detroit to get off their butts. They could have done this first.

The sooner we can get most Americans driving this technology the sooner those good folks in the Middle East can go back to being desert nomads.

Tags: Random Thoughts by Cynical Optimist
No Comments »