“Building a new stadium down the street does not work unless (Ron) Lancaster spilled some DNA in the lot where they’re going to build the new stadium,” he added. “You have to refurbish (Mosaic Stadium). You’ve got to can all new ideas you might have and use the sacred ground. Fenway did that and that is why Fenway is loved. The new Yankee Stadium isn’t the same as it used to be.”
The former Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos pitcher will not be running for the vacant mayor’s position in Regina later this year. With his opinion on the new stadium, he wasn’t sure he would garner many votes anyway. But that is nothing new to the former member of the Rhinoceros Party. Lee ran on the Rhino ticket in 1988 for president of the United States. Not surprisingly, he didn’t make the ballot in a single state. He said one of the high-ranking members within the party gave him a six-pack of Molson Canadian and asked him to run for president.
“I adhered to their funny philosophy,” Lee said. “My campaign slogan was ‘No guns, no butter. They’ll both kill you.’ And I only campaigned in federal prisons where I knew they couldn’t vote, and I only accepted a quarter in campaign contributions.”
With it being an election year in the U.S., Lee said he is all in for the re-election of Barack Obama.
“The only time (Mitt) Romney opens his mouth is when he needs to change feet,” Lee said of the Republican nominee. “If Obama does lose this, which I can’t see happening, then it’s because of a lady in Florida who works for Jeb Bush and Diebold, the voting-machine company. If Obama even comes close to losing this election, it’ll be fraud.”
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For the record -
Who was the last Presidential candidate TO release his grades?
note: i'm not saying that all of the above players used steroids, but i am saying that it's more likely that they did than they didn't, and even if any of them did not use steroids individually, the team still benefitted greatly from their use.
Is this supposed to be a rebuttal? Almost that entire list shows that incumbents who are under 50 percent face tough reelection battles. GWB barely scraped by in 2004; his father lost in '92; and Carter was crushed in '80. (Your claim about Reagan in '84 is dubious. He was never less than +10 in approval, with a high of +25, and he was a clear favorite throughout the campaign.)
In January 1984, Reagan was tied with both Walter Mondale and John Glenn at 45%-45%. In March, Gallup had Reagan losing to Gary Hart, 52% to 43%. In July, Gallup had Reagan losing to Mondale 48% to 46% (that was Mondale's convention bump). Sorry to ruin your dubiousness.
Nobody disputes that an incumbent (or for that matter, a challenger) under 50% has a fight on his hands. That's the concept of an election.
Your extrapolation from that -- Obama will lose because he hasn't done a particular thing that no candidate has done since at least 1968, including the biggest winners -- was incorrect. Your original extrapolation -- not only is Obama under 50% in the national polls, but he's also under 50% in the battleground states -- was the opposite of an insight.
He must have really turned on the jets when he got to law school then. Law Review isn't a popularity contest.
Being a minority presents many obstacles and many opportunites. Obama successfuly surmonted the obstacles and took advantage of the opportunities. I dislike his presidency, but I must confess that if I had been given his start I probably wouldn't have ended up as POTUS.
Paris Hilton has earned millions of dollars by trading on her popularity and charisma. If it's impressive when Obama does it, it should be even more impressive when somebody does it without the benefit of using their platform as a public servant.
Ray, when you say things like this you are acting like a complete idiot. We all know you aren't. Please stop.
I never read Obama's books, but I probably would have if he had released a sex tape first.
Yeah, especially since sobriety isn't required to fly commercial planes.
Snark aside, Bush is like anyone who made president since the days of Warren Harding: He's almost certainly a whole lot smarter than his opponents give him credit for.
Who cares? The topic under discussion is the assumption that Obama is a genius based only on a media narrative that he's a genius, with no college transcripts and no private-sector successes to bolster such a claim.
I don't know re: the former, but absolutely re: the latter. No one ever claimed otherwise.
I think there's a difference between being a public servant - regardless what comes out of that on the personal wallet side, I do believe public service is an important and honorable career - and becoming popular because you're an heiress that can afford to get famous for drinking a lot, partaking of drugs, and making sex tapes... I mean, not that I'm against any of those things, but in the grand scale of the universe -- yes, I put a lot more stock and honor in serving in elected office than I do the former.
The University of Chicago offering him tenure as a professor basically torpedos this claim.
EDIT: Sorry, a tenure-track position, not a position with tenure immediately after acceptance.
And the media narrative of George W Bush was that he was a regular guy people were comfortable having a beer with...
And the media narrative of Bill Clinton was that he felt your pain...
And the media narrative of Ronald Reagan was that he was the great communicator...
And the media narrative of...
Yet - Reagan had no debate team trophies that I'm aware of, Bill Clinton didn't have any humanitarian awards, I suppose W actually DID have stacks of cleared brush, so maybe he does win after all.
So, part of the problem here is that Joe clearly has a special set of "topics under discussion" that he keeps in his head and doesn't tell anyone else about.
While your point stands, just to be clear they offered him the opportunity to (in their words) "join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position."
I'm not good with education, but this means a tenure track, not tenure, yes? Or is it the case - I'm asking - that everyone on a "tenure track" eventually is granted tenure?
Joe has been told by reliable sources on the talk radio right that Barack Obama is nothing but an empty suit and that he flunked out of school but was propped up by Affirmative Action.
Let's just cut to the chase and deal with what is in front of us, right?
Tenure track means that he's on a career path to become tenured. This is distinct from an associate professor who simply gets rehired on a contract by contract basis and has no real shot at becoming a tenured entity at the university.
I edited the post already. But I believe that while he is on a path to be tenured he still has to earn it while someone on a non-tenure-track path basically has to do something extraordinary to jump career paths.
It's the difference between partnership track and contract attorney, basically. Not everyone who is on tenure track gets tenure, but the overwhelming majority do. In fact, probably too many.
EDIT: Cokes all around.
Maybe things are different now, but that sure wasn't the case when I was in grad school and aiming for an academic career.
I had a crummy 2.331 GPA at Duke, but back in the pre-grade inflation days that was still in the upper half of the class. There were some seriously slacker students in Bubasville back then, me definitely included.
Extensive googling regarding my #2602 -- no Presidential candidate that I can find has ever released his college transcripts... W's were leaked to the New Yorker (a dirty bit of pool, to be sure -- and also illegal) - but no President I can find has released them.
I was genuinely curious... and actually, a bit surprised -- Bill Clinton was a Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes Scholar, so you'd have thought he'd have released his, at least. However, I suspect doing so wins no one any votes because people tend not to like the smart kid in class anyway... much better to have the 'media' call you a genius than to flash the paper yourself proclaiming it so, I guess.
Heh... if your 2.331 was crummy, then I hope we never have to run against each other for office ;-)
For the record, if I ever ran for office, I'd NEVER release my transcripts... I had a bit of a lost year that still gives me nightmares explaining to the dean, and the last thing I'd ever want to do is re-discuss that publicly. Of course - as soon as I hit 'submit', I guess it's inevitable that some future reporter is able to track me to all known internet aliases so I'm screwed anyway.
What's the age rule for using the "when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish" gambit?
And better than all of the above is being Al Gore and having the media call you a genius even though you were a C-minus student.
On your best day.
I don't think the candidates released them, but the Washington Post had the college grades for Bush & Gore in 2000. Somewhat surprisingly, Bush had the better grades if you consider graduate school, where Gore did rather poorly in both divinity and law school.
Torpedoes what claim? How does being offered a job at the University of Chicago prove Obama is a genius?
Uh, sure. I have them right in my back pocket.
You answer your own question. There isn't a voting bloc in America that is going to come over to the Dems (that wasn't already there) because the candidate was a super-stud nerd. Releasing his transcripts would have undermined his campaign's "man of the people" rhetoric - "the man from Hope," et al - while opening up opportunities for his opponents at any stage to unleash the real hammer of American politics; anti-intellectualism.
What sort of person do you think is offered a tenure-track position at a top 5 law school?
Serious question: Who says this?
I recall some gushing over Obama's academic resume in '08, but that seems like ancient history today. I don't see many "Obama the Genius" stories these days. He's a smart guy; I have respect for anyone who makes Law Review at a top school because I missed the cut. He lectured at a top school. He sounds smart. This genius thing though...not really hearing it.
In what special needs world was there a raging media narrative calling Al Gore a genius? Do you guys just make #### up to keep from having to deal with anything resembling reality?
Yeah - my understanding is that both were leaked rather than 'released'... so far as I can tell, no candidate as ever willingly released them. Like I said - I'm kind of surprised.
No, but "Editor" kind of is.
And I know it's a high-status Law School Thing, but... why? Law reviews, even Harvard's, are mainly published to be written, when it should be the other way around. It's great prep for working at a big firm, or clerking for a judge. But it's nothing like, say, learning to research and write a persuasive motion. If I had to pick between two lawyers for my case, and all I knew about them was Lawyer A was on law review and not clinic, and Lawyer B was in clinic but not law review, I'd pick Lawyer B without hesitation, every time.
We're not talking about drinking and partying though, we're talking about monetizing one's charisma and popularity. Paris Hilton did a great job of doing so, and she didn't need political power to pull it off.
This depends on the institution and the discipline, but as a general rule, getting tenure requires scholarship and publications. The amount and the type vary, some schools require publishing a book plus X published articles, some don't require a book but have other demands, etc. I'd say overwhelming majority is an overstatement, at least in academia today.
Remind me again how many works of published legal scholarship Obama has?
Well, if law schools offer jobs the same way 'ASmitty' describes the partnership prospects for a "handsome, well-spoken minority man" ...
Not really, by the time you're in graduate school, from my personal experience and people I talked to, Professors just stop caring about differentiation and start assigning people A's. I think the assumption is if you're good enough to be in the program, you're good enough where I don't have to actually check your work.
But the people who go to grad school are usually the same people who gave a damn in school in the first place, so it all works out.
No disagreements here. But then again 90% of law school is a waste of time; any firm could teach you much, much more and save you $200k with an unpaid, three year internship.
But you can't get LR without grades. Joe seemed to be suggesting that Obama's failure to release his transcripts from undergrad meant he might have poor grades. Making LR at Harvard undermines that idea.
One of my best friends in high school was naturally as skinny as a beanpole, and he gorged on everything he could in order to get up his weight in order to be drafted. Talk about how times have changed: He had hopes of running for congress one day, and he didn't want to be accused of being a draft dodger. I sometimes wonder what he makes of the careers of Clinton and G.W. Bush.
He wasn't the brightest penny in the roll, but I don't think he would've cared about releasing his grade transcripts at the Universities of Oklahoma and Hawaii. OTOH he was deathly afraid that his high school nickname of "Flyface" could sink his future career in politics if it ever came out, and that paranoia caused him to become a bureaucrat instead. He now looks like the spitting image of a 68 year old Richard Nixon, but at least nobody is around to remind him of his old nickname, and so he's made his peace with his absence from the White House.
Yeah -
I guess I should also extend the caveat that I've known people who got really good grades and people who got relatively poor grades, and of the people I would consider 'geniuses' (or at least, really, really smart) -- more of them slotted into the latter class than the former... at least, that's what I tell myself!
Neither did Obama. Obama didn't "need political power" to be successful. He has political power *because he was successful.* Then he monetized his success story. Good ####### lord. This isn't very hard.
Different as far as tenure track at a top school. If you're on that track, you're not just teaching, you have to be publishing scholarly works as well. A top tier school can't have a prof embarrassing the institution by being a crappy scholar; the "academic reputation" of faculty is a metric on the law school rankings. Would Obama have been a crappy scholar? He didn't accept the offer, so it's impossible to tell.
EDIT: When I left private practice I considered teaching, but since I would never, ever want to write scholarly legal works, tenure track was never an option for me. It's a big part of the job, and you have to go the adjunct route to avoid it.
Well let's see, there's this 2007 Vanity Fair recap of the 2000 race which quotes Howie Kurtz, the most prominent insider-y media watcher and critic in the country saying:
"To this day, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who spent time traveling with both candidates, wonders why Gore remained "secluded in the front cabin [of the plane]" and didn't engage in chitchat. "Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign," says Kurtz, "and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it's the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention."
Translation: The Washington press corps thought Al Gore was "super-smart" and said so repeatedly.
I'm sure you can easily find other examples if you're interested.
Successful at what? Community organizing and getting political opponents tossed off the ballot?
What was Obama's greatest private-sector achievement? What was Obama's greatest legislative achievement in the Illinois legislature? What was Obama's biggest win as an attorney?
Don't be stupid on purpose son. Nobody said anything about success getting elected. He needed political power to monetize his charisma; Obama was pretty broke until he started getting elected to public office. Don't hate because Paris Hilton's better at something than your boy.
Assuming of course that he made all that money from his books in the first place.
Of course, different schools are different and I don't know how it works at Harvard Law, but I'd be surprised - shocked, even - if Obama was sitting on law review undeservedly, or in large part because he is black, or anything like that.
You will simply have trouble arguing that Obama isn't a bright guy while also having to deal with the fact that he was on law review at Harvard. (EDIT: As well as being an adjunct or whatever they wanted to call him - lecturer or senior lecture - at a law school. These people are not idiots.)
That's almost like a challenge.
There have always been two distinct and parallel thoughts about Gore in the Washington press corps. The first is, as you say, that he has an exceptionally high IQ level and a high degree of policy wonkishness. Whether the former thought is true or not, I can't say.
But the second bit of CW about Gore is that he's the clumsiest and most clueless major political figure this side of Thomas E. Dewey, at least until Mitt Romney came along. That's every bit as much of the Washington narrative about Gore as his alleged policy smarts, and if you're going to mention one you shouldn't forget the other.
--------------------------------------
This thread segment is a new low in BTF political discussions, and that's saying something.
Given the recent presence of two of BTF's two biggest right wing trolls, that's not too surprising.
P.S. I am not referring to Ray.
I don't doubt that Obama is a bright guy, but we're also talking about a guy who started law school at age 27. Like a 25-year-old in the New York–Penn League, a 27-year-old should do well in law school relative to his 22-year-old classmates, both academically and politically.
***
Weren't we talking about Obama getting rich off public service? I guess I missed the part where Paul Ryan made millions on book sales after he was elected to Congress at age 28. I guess he's not as good of a writer as Barack Obama. That must explain it.
This is a silly thing to argue about, but Paris Hilton needed her name, financial advantages and family connections to "monetize her charisma." Take those away and have her born to a middle-class family in Chatsworth, and she is just another blonde, and neither as hot nor as talented as many who make no dent in nor money from the celeb world. One of her big successes was The Simple Life, which I was aware of since I know a woman who at the time worked for Lionel Ritchie, and that came her way/was a go just because of her name.
Looking at her Wiki page, she has been involved in a lot of stuff in the lucrative but less prestigious parts of the entertainment biz (voiceovers, reality shows, straight-to-DVD movies, and she is now trying to sing) and has made a lot of money selling perfume and shoes with her name on them, some of which she supposedly designed. No way to know how much credit she deserves for that stuff, but the page does say that she was kicked out of her private high school for rules infractions and wound up getting her GED and has not been to college. Given the heavy emphasis most of the BTF demographic places on academic success, I thought that was worth noting. She also, of course, has done a short home confinement stint and has been in probation for a DUI/driving with a suspended license. In addition, on the good side, she has done some philanthropic work.
As to Obama, he is a smart, charismatic guy who, had he not become involved in politics,almost certainly would have been successful in law and/or academia. He was not doing the kind of stuff that makes you Romneyrich, but that is not the only way to measure success.
This seems like a fun game! Let's all reveal our university records.
I actually would if I remembered them. I believe I was in the mid-to-low 80s. I don't know how that equates with this whole GPA thing (which frankly sounds made up to me).
(Wrote book, had small success)
Then
(Became politician, had reasonable success)
Then
(Won a big primary)
Then
(Got his big break in a convention speech, speech kills)
Then
(Becomes major celebrity)
Then
(Book is re-released, well re-reviewed, becomes best-seller)
So we're arguing over how to precisely characterize this, and over whether it's a "distasteful" way to have made money or a more "distasteful" career path than other ways of becoming wealthy? Yeah, this is stupid.
I went straight to law school at Emory and there was about 1/3 of the class who did it straight like myself. Joe is speaking about something that he knows nothing about (probably not the first time).
Joe, I can't recall having a dumb professor, or adjunct, or instructor, or "lecturer" (I put that in quotes not to demean the term but simply because we didn't call them that) in law school. I seriously doubt the University of Chicago Law School would want to deal with someone as a lecturer who they didn't think was qualified for the job or good at the job - let alone keep him there for several years. These positions reflect seriously on the law school, I don't believe there is any shortage of people wanting to fill them, and students who think the adjunct sucks _will_ complain.
I've kind of lost what your argument is. Is it that Obama is not intelligent? Because I've seen no evidence for that claim. Is it that he's not a good lawyer? (*) Because I've seen no evidence for that claim either. But I've seen plenty of evidence to counter both claims.
There's a reason firms and companies who hire don't focus a great deal on transcripts, so his transcripts in college, even if bad -- and you've presented no evidence for that -- while they would be interesting and a factor in the inquiry, would not be solely determinative of intelligence. His post on law review certainly suggests -- more than that, even -- that his law school grades were good.
I've called him a "nondescript" politician, but that doesn't mean I think he wasn't bright; it means he wasn't doing anything that scores of other politicians were doing, but somehow his boat got floated to the top anyway.
I think he's an intelligent guy. I've heard him speak and debate, and while he has a talent for speaking articulately in debates without actually saying much, that doesn't mean he's not intelligent -- quite the opposite, actually.
(*) I note with regard to whether he's a good lawyer, I don't know enough about his work to say. It wouldn't shock me if he is a good academic but not a good "lawyer" per se -- by which I mean he understands the case law and concepts and is excellent at teaching and doing legal research but isn't very good at the day to day skills of being a lawyer, which are a much broader set of skills (e.g., speaking to clients, managing dozens of tasks and cases at the same time, able to work on deadline, dealing with multiple deadlines each day or week, doing the work efficiently and well so that the client doesn't complain about the bill or your firm doesn't have to eat your time, etc.). I've met some academics -- law professors -- who I don't think would be good lawyers but who are clearly smart people. I'm not saying Obama wouldn't be able to be a good "lawyer" in a practical sense, just that, again, it doesn't surprise me when I run into academics who fit this mold.
You can talk about Paul Ryan all you want; doing so actually bolsters the original point about Obama getting rich off public service.
Ryan's political career from ages 28 to 42 has been far better than Obama's career was at those same ages, yet somehow, Ryan hasn't made millions off book sales. If only Paul Ryan was a better writer ...
Mind-bogglingly.
I'm bucking trends all over the place!
My observation of grad school is that grades don't matter at all. It's either pass or fail, and you're judged on your proposals, publications, interviews etc. I have no idea what grade I got for my masters, I don't know for sure but I'm 90% sure those grades had nothing to do with me getting into my PhD program, and I don't really expect to hear what I get on my thesis beyond a yes or no.
If there's anything I've learned from my 10 years in university (and there probably isn't) it's what Mark-Paul Gosselaar says in Dead Man on Campus.
"Josh, is this about bad grades? Bad grades are meaningless. You know, they're like parking tickets. I mean, they mean nothing. Just laugh, because they're silly. You know, they're silly little nothings."
Joe: I don't know what you think the average age of a law student is, but it is simply not the case that nearly everyone goes to law school straight from college - quite the opposite, actually. If I had to guess, 1/3 or 1/2 of the students come straight from college. Maybe it's half. But a large swathe of the students are in their mid-to-late 20s, and probably 1/3 or 1/4 in their 30s, and then a small smattering 40 or above. It wouldn't shock me if the median age was 27, actually. But it's definitely higher than 21; it has to be.
EDIT: cokes.
Not really, by the time you're in graduate school, from my personal experience and people I talked to, Professors just stop caring about differentiation and start assigning people A's. I think the assumption is if you're good enough to be in the program, you're good enough where I don't have to actually check your work.
But the people who go to grad school are usually the same people who gave a damn in school in the first place, so it all works out.
Don't think that's true for law school, at least during my time, but if that's the case for grad school, it doesn't seem to say much for Gore, who reportedly received F's in 5 of the 8 classes he took at Vanderbilt University Divinity School before moving over to the law school for a brief stint as a C student before dropping out. Bush did earn a Harvard MBA.
He's not making any cogent arguments, Ray. He's just spinning, however he thinks best benefits his preferred team. He's not actually thinking, much less taking his thinking and putting it into critical arguments of merit.
You and I were talking about why people would be put off by Mitt Romney's wealth. Joe didn't like that Mitt Romney's downside was being discussed, so he brought up some crazy ass red herring about Barack Obama being equally rich (untrue) and that being the case only because of some sort of evil, nefarious "public service" aspect of his life (equally untrue, although more truthfully simply so incoherent as to deny one the ability to make any sort of truth judgement about it at all.)
The last three pages are Joe spinning and spinning and spinning, while swearing up and down that he's the only one standing still.
I've never said anything about Obama not being intelligent. I simply find MCoA's claim that Obama's celebrity and wealth are only "mildly" due to his political career to be absurd, as is the claim that Obama was likely to become rich and famous even if he had avoided politics. Until age 43 in 2004, Obama had shown no ability whatsoever to make money in a way that was divorced from politics. (And his political career started at age 36, not 22 like Paul Ryan.)
Stupid or lazy or uncommitted kids don't last long there.
The next honest thing he says will be the first honest thing he has ever said.
Don't stop him, he's on a roll.
further, i'm also fairly confident in saying that he's made money by trading off of insider knowledge that he's privy to as a congressman. that's actually legal, but i'd argue it's a much more distasteful way to earn money than by writing a book that happens to sell well because the author is well-known and personally likable.
oh, and if you'd like me to back up that claim with evidence, well, has paul ryan released his tax returns yet? :)
Or maybe crazy Joe Biden was right when he said:
***
Per some quick Googling, the median age of a 1L at a top-14 law school is 24.
***
Liar.
Frankly, I find myself preferring ineffective Democratic presidents over all-too-effective Republican ones these days.
Harvard Law Review is (or was, I haven't seen what the application contest looks like since the mid 90's) a research/writing contest. It's all about how well you can write, and to a lesser extent, Bluebook. Obviously, those are the relevant skills for editing a law review, so I cannot imagine anything has changed. I'm not sure it's a good preparation for anything but clerking, but a good chunk of Harvard law students clerk for a year.
Poopyhead.
John Kerry without the social conscience? No thanks, man.
Clearly you aren't aware of the sodium content in ketchup.
It's a threshold issue more than a direct relationship. It's very difficult to get good grades if you're not smart, but you certainly don't have to be really, really smart. You just have to be moderately smart and work hard. On the other hand, you can be anywhere from brilliant to dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks and get poor grades if you don't work hard. You can also get lousy grades if you aren't good at conforming, especially under certain professors.
My history throughout school (from elementary school to law school) is doing very little work and getting average to slightly-above-average grades. I am a very good test taker so long as the test doesn't require memorization, at which point I'm probably just good.
As an undergrad, my academic scholarship required the maintenance of at least a 3.0 GPA. I graduated with, you guessed it, a GPA of something like 3.0000001.
Actually I find it tedious and stupid, but YMMV.
I can't say for certain about university in general (and can't speak to Law School at all except to say I have one friend that went to law school and he did it around the age of 26 or 27. He's now a lawyer and possibly the dumbest person I've ever met) but it seems to me like undergrad is becoming increasingly irregular. Growing up I was under the impression that university was pretty much just four years and you're out. But of all the people I went to school with (2002-2006) in a broad range of subjects I'd say about 10% of them did it in four years.
EDIT: I did it in four years plus an extra semester. Partly because I'm lazy and partly because I had the hare-brained idea to take Latin as my mandatory language credit only to drop it before the first class...which I guess can be lumped in with the laziness excuse.
2nd EDIT: Just as an example of the mental capabilities of my lawyer friend...
He once got stuck in some snow on a back-lane highway, so he decided to weigh down the accelerator with a brick while he dug himself out...in the process of which he locked himself out of the car and had to wait around for the engine to seize up.
Instead of scraping off his entire car windshield in the winter he'd just make a hole about 4 inches in diameter and lean over the wheel peering out of it.
Before becoming a lawyer he wanted to be a cop and during the application process for the Edmonton police force he mentioned that he had been driving while intoxicated the night before.
And best of all...this is a conversation I over-heard from the next room while he was playing Madden with his brother
Friend: Touchdown!!! WE ARE MARSHALL!
Brother: huh? What does that mean?
Friend: It's from a football movie, moron. About some guy named Marshall.
Wow. And on the day the words "flimsy excuse" were redefined, we stood in awe and watched.
Yeah, I don't really understand why a 27 year old would have a leg up on a 22 year old in law school in the first place. Joe, I presume you didn't go to law school. Do you have stats showing that older students do better?
Nope, I can understand it's hard to believe, but I was room-mates with the guy at the time and I knew exactly what he meant as he was saying it. I had to try really hard to keep my laughter below a certain volume.
All this time, I assumed the HLR was something you had to grade onto. But I guess it's literally true that you can have bad first-year grades, and still be an "editor."
From their website:
"44 students are invited to join the Review each year. Fourteen editors (two from each 1L section) are selected based on a combination of their first-year grades and their competition scores. Twenty editors are selected based solely on their competition scores. The remaining editors are selected on a discretionary basis. Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review's affirmative action policy."
The HLR "President" used to be based purely having the top grade of all the editors, but by Obama's time it was voted on by the editors themselves.
So I guess that's literally true, too: you can get bad grades, and still be President of the Harvard Law Review.
I do find it kind of hard to picture BHO worrying all that much about being a Top Grade Person.
(we now return your off-topic conversation to its true off-topic topic, which is already in progress)
Well, the Polish pronunciation is "Szopen," so maybe that's not so bad.
Surely you jest. Though I'm confident that Joe will now perform a "quick Google search" and assure us all that he does.
Well, I'm kind of surprised by this, although I suppose I shouldn't have been.
Clearly it curtails the general argument I made with law reviews. I don't know that someone with "bad grades" would have made it on to law review at Harvard, but, from this it appears that less than stellar grades/writing competition are not necessarily a barrier. Because if they were, there would be no reason to make the bold-faced statement to begin with.
Though that is still not evidence that Obama was not a good student at Harvard Law.
Nah, he was using a hard "cha" sound like chop.
I thought the rule of thumb was that slightly older grad students did better because they're more mature and more likely to truly want to be there, but I can't find stats either way. (I did find a study that says law students with kids perform miserably, but that's not unexpected and it wouldn't have applied to Obama.)
If the average age of a starting law student is 27 now and/or was 27 then, I guess the whole thing is moot. It seems hard to believe that there's an average of a five-year gap between undergrad and law school, or even a three-year gap at the top-14 schools.
Pretty much all you need out of Harvard Law School happens the day you are admitted.
When I was there in the mid 90's, I was expecting the place to be significantly more diverse than it was. I'm no fan of affirmative action, but it was pretty surprising how white and male the place was. I don't think the admissions department was exactly going out of their way to admit minorities, but maybe the admissions pool was just so overwhelmingly white and male. If the law review had a more aggressive policy regarding affirmative action, it probably would have been even easier to make it as a minority.
But I didn't run into many dummies in my time there, much less dummies on the law review. (That probably means I was the dummy.)
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