Martha Woodworth from Henderson writes:

I read with interest Andrew Kiraly’s feature, “Personal injuries,” about the alleged mistreatment of females employed by attorney Adam Kutner. In my twenties and thirties, I worked for attorneys in Boston and New York. Despite my jaundiced objectivity (I have always been wary of employers in general), I found that lawyers were the worst employers. For example, in my 14 years as a legal secretary, I encountered louts, boors, bullies and infantile practitioners on a par with (allegedly) Kutner.

There was the attorney who invited me into his office to examine his new gun, which he pointed at me, imitating Clint Eastwood; the Mafia lawyer who leaned over my desk and whispered, “Are you ever going to sleep with me?” When I responded with a loud, startled, “NO!” he tried to get me fired, claiming that I was “not at all helpful.” One attorney’s desk was impossible to breach, as the rug before it was strewn with large piles of pornography. Yet another would leave the office a sane man and return insane, having downed multiple martinis at Bogart’s, a Chinese restaurant popular with lawyers in Boston for its lunchtime triple shots. Wild-eyed, swinging his briefcase at the head of his cowering secretary, he would berate her to the end of the day. I exhorted my associate to quit, but she was so afraid of him she thought he would kill her if she tried to leave him.

Not all legal bullies are men, by the way. A woman attorney, a partner at a large, prestigious firm and later a notable judge, had me running back and forth between her and another partner with love notes. When he was pouting and unresponsive to her flirtation, I was her scapegoat, subjected to withering slurs about my “competence” and her “sloppy desk,” which I was ordered to dust and straighten three times a day.

It’s not a “nice” profession, in case you haven’t noticed.

You probably missed this one, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer went all X-Files earlier this month, telling reporters that believing in aliens doesn’t mean you can’t believe in God, too. Damn, that’s gotta be a relief for the world’s estimated 1 billion Catholics. Nothing frightens the faithful more than having to trade one figment of their imagination for another. That sort of spiritual sea change hasn’t happened in our little corner of the Milky Way since the Crucifixion, when so many traded in Yahweh for the Holy Trinity (that’s three … three … three gods in one!).

However, there is a school of “thought” out there that claims the so-called Original Jesus (or, O.J, as they prefer) was the product of an alien experiment designed to show humanity that the religious and the paranormal are nearly one in the same. According to these paratheologists, you’ve already traded up to believing in aliens if you follow the Lamb of God. So, you’re good in almost every cosmic sense of the word.

We ask you: Isn’t it bad enough that this age-old system of social control (aka The Church) is allowed untold billions in untaxed profits (or, as ministers call them, donations) while still, to this day, refusing to use its Third World missionaries to teach that it’s wrong to kill in God’s name? What’s it gonna take for a true Great Awakening, that all of this is all total bullshit, that there’s not a sliver of scientific evidence to back up any of the world’s “great” religions and that you might as well waste all that free time believing in flying spaghetti monsters or pink unicorns?

Secretary of State Ross Miller sent a letter today to Scott Scherer, saying that petitions that don’t conform exactly to Nevada law will not be counted. This could spell doom for a trio of petitions bankrolled by Las Vegas Sands Inc. Chairman Sheldon Adelson: Two that would divert room tax dollars to education, or education, public safety and roads; and a third that would require all taxes raised by initiative petition to receive two thirds vote.

Scherer had argued previously that because the petitions were in “substantial compliance,” they could and should be counted. But Miller’s ruling says that words like “must” and “shall” in initiative law show that petitions must strictly comply with rules to be counted.

Could we be seeing a lawsuit? Adelson hasn’t done too well in court lately, but it seems this one is ripe for the filing.

The letter is linked below as a .pdf. (We hope. We’re still learning how to use the series of tubes known as the Internets.)

petition-response.pdf

HBO has scored again with the premier of its film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Tom Wilkinson as the two top characters fighting over the disputed 2000 election in Florida. (And don’t forget the unforgettable Laura Dern as then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. She’s delightful! Dern, that is, not Harris.)

Now, there’s been plenty of controversy over this movie. Former Secretary of State William Warren Christopher (played by John Hurt) is portrayed as somebody unprepared and unwilling to stage the street fight brought by the Republicans, led by Secretary of State James Baker III (Wilkinson). Spacey’s Ron Klain (one of ex-Vice President Al Gore’s top lawyers on the case) says at one point he’s not even sure he likes Gore, which the real Klain says he never said. And whole parts of dialogue are essentially made up, which happens in drama.

By the way, for our money, the scene-stealer in this production is Denis Leary as operative Michael Whouley, whose affinity for the word “fuck” is both humorous and (we know since we deal with political operatives every day) realistic. And given that the election was being stolen right out from under the Democrats, we’re sure the word got more than its fair share of use in December 2000.

What’s most poignant about the movie, however, is not the disputed parts, but the undisputed: Votes were not properly counted. Black voters were disenfranchised. Recounts were begun, but stopped before they were completed. And the Supreme Court of the United States essentially ran out the clock on the whole process, and handed the election to George W. Bush, when it’s entirely possible he was not the true victor. “I want to know who won this fucking election!” an exasperated Klain shouts at one point. So don’t we all, sir. But we never will: The movie ends with boxes of ballots stored in a huge warehouse, reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a safely stored government secret far too dangerous for the public to know.

(Now, you want some hard truth, check out Vincent Bugliosi’s book The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined Our Constitution and Chose Our President. It’s a devastating legal analysis of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision and the facts surrounding it that would make even the most hard-core Republican blanch.)

The outcome of that Supreme Court ruling — which, by the way, the court said shouldn’t be considered precedent, a precedent in itself for legal mendacity — has literally changed the face of the world. Would Gore have invaded Iraq after Sept. 11? Would he have signed the Patriot Act? Endorsed torture? Established a military gulag in Cuba? Would his heartfelt concern over global climate change have led to a wholesale revision of U.S. environmental policies? What would America look like right now, had all the ballots in Florida been counted properly?
Like the true winner of the 2000 election, we’ll never know.