I was out at a restaurant a week ago and spotted a nice enough family out with their kids. It was final four season, so it isn’t all that unusual to see them wearing college sweatshirts. What got me was the school whose sweatshirts that they were wearing. It was Liberty University. This irked me.
I know that it shouldn’t. Perhaps their daughter went to school there. Maybe the couple met there. All I could think was that they were making a political statement about how they felt about Jerry Falwell and his ilk.
I am trying to imagine if there is some equivalent school sweatshirt that would bother conservatives. Berkeley? The Banana Slugs of U.C. Santa Cruz? I fear that I would have the same reaction to a Bob Jones University sweatshirt. I guess the first step to recovery is recognizing that I have a problem…
DelawareLiberal.Net 
April 9, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Pat Robertson’s “Regent’s University” with it’s stated mission to overthrow the Constitution of the United States is even worse than Liberty.
As for liberal schools that give wingnuts heartburn…hmmm? They think every school is overrun with leftists so it is tough to just pick one or two.
April 9, 2007 at 4:19 pm
I tend not to react to university sweatshirts one way or the other, since it’s no guarantee that the wearer has any connection to the school represented. A Notre Dame sweatshirt, for example, most likely means the wearer is a sports fan (probably Catholic) and not an alumnus. As a Buckeye, however, I’m filled with disgust by anyone wearing a Michigan shirt. (I even have a hard time watching the Blue Hens, since they wear the same uniforms.)
I wonder if Hube has a Starfleet Academy sweatshirt?
April 9, 2007 at 4:36 pm
As a Buckeye, however, I’m filled with disgust by anyone wearing a Michigan shirt. (I even have a hard time watching the Blue Hens, since they wear the same uniforms.)
HAHAHA!!
yeah, UD inherited the sporting look from Michigan.
My mom and dad are Buckeye’s too.
Dad even lived in the tower in the OH State stadium itself, reserved for “money challenged young men”.
🙂
April 9, 2007 at 4:42 pm
MAx Blumenthal just published an excoriating expose of the influence of Pat Robertson in our government from Ashcroft and continuing on to today. It is scary as hell.
What this Monica is made up of is like the robotons of Stepford.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/monica-goodling-one-of-1_b_44588.html
150 of these robot for Jeebus are ensconced now.
Max:
“Regent has assiduously cultivated close ties to the administration and its Republican outriders. Gonzales’s predecessor, John Ashcroft, is currently cooling his heels at Regent as the school’s “Distinguished Professor of Law and Government.” Christian right super-lawyer Jay Sekulow, who also teaches at Regent and shares a Washington office with Ashcroft, participated in regular briefings with the White House on court appointments. In 1998, he leased a private jet through Regent to fly Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to speak at the school’s 20th anniversary (Though Sekulow regularly argues cases before the Supreme Court, he apparently did not view hobnobbing with Scalia as an ethical breach). “
April 9, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Hi G,
I’m with you on normally not giving a damn. I am also with you on pro-Ohio State and anti-Michigan. But I can see someone wearing that sweatshirt as a political statement. Can’t you?
April 9, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Under the “innocent until proven guilty” rule, I would tend to assume anyone wearing that sweatshirt is an old school Christian who thinks the ministry of Jesus is about compassion and peace.
Of course, I’m a sucker.
April 9, 2007 at 7:05 pm
There’s an interesting piece on “innocent until proven guilty” on the Dick Cavet blog at the NYT Select. Sorry for you non-subscribers. But, he says and cites sources, that innocent until proven guilty doesn’t appear in the Constitution, the Magna Carta, the 1600? English Bill of Rights, or any other basis for English Common Law, or for that matter our law. It comes from the rules of evidence that are applied in English and American courts. The burden of proof rests with the prosecutor not the defendant.
So as prosecutors, if we can prove they are not innocent then they are not. At least as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a guaranteed right that everyone is innocent. Hang em all!
April 9, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Hey Rebecca, interesting stuff.
Cavett can cite what he wants but I think any scholar of the western liberal tradition would allow that the notion of presumed innocence is so fundamental to human rights and our jurisprudence that it is assumed as inseparable from the whole ball of wax.
Why write or codify something that is ‘endowed’ upon us by mere existence as human being, as the forebears of our enlightened tradition would have it.
What is scary is how Cavett’s point so directly bears on a concentrated nucleus of misguided, twisted “Jesus freaks” in our DOJ, people who in truth represent the fundamental opposite of the type of justice for which Jesus was murdered in the first place. With these types planted and festering in positions with the authority and obligation to administer justice, the most fundamental pillar of presumed innocence could actually be brought into play. They have already played out this wicked slithery slide towards evil in such concentration camp precursors as Guantanamo Bay.
The stacking of the Justice Department with an un-Godly # of people from just one law school (let alone one so dominant with religious fanaticism that one could question its very accreditation as a school of ‘law’) is prime facie evidence of an effort to ensure either ideological or personal network concentration on a rerehensible scale.
How many 100’s (1000’s) of law schools are in this nation? And we instead have crucial DOJ positions overloaded with scores of true believers from (*snicker*) Regents’ University?
God please help us, this administration is worse than Hitler.
April 9, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Pure crap:
Blackstone ((1723-1780), Professor of Common Law, Oxford University) is THE go-to authority on English common law.
From Of Public Wrongs (his treatise on criminal law):
(f’s are s’s and so are s’s)
1) Need two witnesses to be convicted of treason:
“FIRST, in all cafes of high treafon, petit treafon, and mifprifion of treafon, by ftatutes 1 Edw. VI. c. 11. and 1 & 2 Ph. & Mar. c. 10. two lawful witneffes are required to convict a prifoner; except in cafes of coining x, and counterfeiting the feals; or unlefs the party fhall willingly and without violence confefs the fame. By ftatute 7 W. III. c. 3. in profecutions for thofe treafons to which that act extends, the fame rule is again enforced, with this addition, that the confeffion of the prifoner, which fhall countervail the neceffity of fuch proof, muft be in open court; and it is declared that both witneffes muft be to the fame overt act of treafon, or one to one over act, and the other to another overt act of the fame fpecies of treafony, and not of diftinct heads or kings: and no evidence fhall be admitted to prove any overt act”
2)
“all prefumptive evidence of felony fhould be admitted cautioufly: for the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty perfons efcape, than that one innocent fuffer. And fir Matthew Hale in particular j lays down two rules, moft prudent and neceffary to be obferved: 1. Never to convict a man for ftealing the goods of a perfon unknown, merely becaufe he will give no account how he came by them, unlefs an actual felony be proved of fuch goods: and, 2. Never to convict any perfon of murder or manflaughter, till at leaft the body be found dead; on account of two inftances he mentions, where perfons were executed for the murder of others, who were then alive, but miffing.”
April 9, 2007 at 9:42 pm
arg! the “f” “s” substitution hurts my head.
April 9, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I wonder if Hube has a Starfleet Academy sweatshirt?
I ain’t THAT much of a Trek fan, yo!
God please help us, this administration is worse than Hitler.
If this isn’t just play-fun hyperbole, Tyler, then frankly, you’ve completely lost it.
April 9, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Is it me or does “alive, but miffing” sound kind of sexy?
April 9, 2007 at 10:48 pm
I have, Hube…the whole illusion.
Worse. Than. Hitler.
April 9, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Oh, and if you want to respond to the substance of what I wrote, Hube, feel free. Send your mind, buddy, not just your judgment.
As far as losing “it”, I would be curious to see what illusions you could possibly still retain about the alternately warmongering/bumbling neo-fascists in the Exec Branch.
April 10, 2007 at 1:40 am
Regent is one of the lowest rated law schools in the nation as well.
This is what is loosed upon us and this is who decided how and when the US Attornies came and went.
April 10, 2007 at 7:44 am
http://www.quizlaw.com/blog/crim_law_replaced_with_the_bla.php
April 10, 2007 at 8:48 am
bc
did you see that the creator of bc (Hart) died the other day while drawing?
(not that you should care)
April 10, 2007 at 8:51 am
Great link btw bc, I am going to pass it along.
April 10, 2007 at 9:53 am
Nancy
thanks to you, i did take special note of the bc’s creator’s death
January 4, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Why on earth would a sweatshirt irk you?! Seems to me like you need a life more than anything else.