Lawyer stuff.

Some things make a guy question his assumptions.


1. The state of Iowa took away a woman's kids.

2. She hired a Waterloo lawyer to get them back.

3.  Attorney and client spent some of their office conference time making two-backed beasts. (It is unclear who, if anyone,  billed whom for those hours.)

4.  Ms. Client had second thoughts and filed an ethics complaint.

5. About a month later, Ms. Client had third thoughts and married the guy.

6. Ms. Client or the esquire then  had fourth thoughts and, in about six weeks, became divorced..

7. This week, the Iowa Supreme Court lifted his law license for 18 months.

There's no word in the news report about who gets the kids. 
My anti-statist  principles are shaken to their roots with the notion  that, in this case, maybe the politicians and bureaucrats could serve the tykes better than mother,  lawyer, or any friends the two are likely to have.

This will not end well

The Headline is: 


"Pepsi Honors Women by Launching Skinny Cans."


The company marketing expert fleshes it out:


"Diet Pepsi has a long history of celebrating women through iconic fashion imagery seen in our infamous and historical campaigns, and we're proud to continue that tradition as an official sponsor of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Our slim, attractive new can is the perfect complement to today's most stylish looks... ." 


Infamous? (giggle)


If I owned  stock in Pepsico, I would sell it.

So that's what I should call it

Police in Raleigh, N, Calinky, just hate whores. (If you don't believe me, Google.)

So word that some of the cops are renting horizontal girl time embarrassed the chief until he found just exactly the right words to characterize Officer Friendly's little lapses. He explained  that

"...administrative violations may have occurred and that they stemmed from voluntary interactions between a small number of officers and non-departmental individuals," 

Reminds  me I need to take New Dog to the vet to confirm that she's been immunized against voluntary interactions.

Damn, I thought all those guns spoke Gringo.

It's our politicians'  article of faith that 90 per cent of all those guns murdering women and children in Mexico come from the United States. I mean, don't we hand an  M16 to every high school kid in Texas and Arizona?

It occurs, however, that the politicians are wrong.  Almost 90 per cent of the crime weapons confiscated by Mexican cops and Federales do not come from the United States. Their cradle language is more likely to be Spanish, Korean, or Chinese.

I post the source with a caution. It's somewhat long and  full of number-crunching and other miscellaneous geekery.  Admirably so, but you may want to wait until you have a few minutes, a cup of coffee, and an appetite for detailed  analysis before clicking here, to STRATFOR.

A sample: According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.


That is, Officer Hernandez and his Jefe set aside their powdered enchiladas, look over  last month's weapons haul (slipping the especially nice or salable ones into their personal tucker bags) and make two piles. One is for those guns which might have come from the north. The other one is for guns so obviously non-U.S. related that not even a BATF  desk pogue would be fooled. They send the  data on the former  to Washington, salted with just  enough possibly non-U.S-loophole weapons to create a veneer of credibility.

It would take only a C+ student of sixth-grade arithmetic to suggest that  the 3,840 identified as U.S.-acquired be divided by the 30,000 seized to announce that 87 per cent  of of the crime guns in that woebegone country were acquired from non-U.S. sources.

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With 3,000 murders  a year in Jaurez alone, doesn't that 30,000 total crime guns seized  across the country  suggest a certain relaxed  attitude toward solving crimes down there? Manana, Senor Jefe

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I'm indebted to my pal Alan for STRATFOR piece.