1203

 Saturday, December 3, 2022

In bed at 9, up at 5:45, but much IC pain throughout the night, many pss. no alcohol, soda, or coffee but a couple cups of herbal tea and pizza for dinner; bladder, stomach, lower abdomen, continuing.  25 degrees outside with a wind advisory.  Wind chill is 9 degrees, with wind out of the west at 24 mph.  High of 46 expected, then many days of highs in the 30s.

Thomas More Society is in the local news this morning, representing the former deputy director of the Milwaukee Election Commission who is charged with fraudulently requesting military absentee ballots for the midterm election.  This should be an interesting case since the defendant will plead that she was doing a good deed, demonstrating how easy it is to obtain these ballots fraudulently, i.e., she had no mens rea, no criminal intent.  What interested me in the news story was the connection between Thomas More Society and former Wisconsin supreme court associate justice and right-wing whack job Michael Gabelman, who I discovered is "senior counsel" to Thomas More Society.  This news story calls to mind so many thoughts about our disgraceful supreme court, about elected judiciaries, about Gabelman's disgraced 'investigation' of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, and about the Thomas More Society.  To the best of my knowledge, it has always been a predominantly Catholic organization of lawyers and judges, the traditional sponsor of the annual Red Mass in Milwaukee and many other cities.  I never joined it since for many years I was not a practicing Catholic, nor was I ever invited.  I did however, presumably by request, deliver a speech to the local Thomas More Society on October 17, 2000.  I suspect it was not the kind of speech they had expected, entitled as it was "The Practice of Law as Occasion of Sin." I reread the speech this morning and (he said modestly😉) it's not bad though it certainly does not paint a pretty picture of my chosen profession, as the title suggests.  I had delivered a similar speech earlier that year at a State Bar seminar,  that one entitled "The Ethics of Legal Ethics," another downer.  The conclusion was a quote from Bertolt Brecht.  Shen Te, the Good Woman of Setzuan, says:  "I’d like to be good, it’s true, but there’s the rent to pay.  And that’s not all: I sell myself for a living.  Even so I can’t make the ends meet, there’s too much competition."    I guess it wasn't too politic of me to suggest to my fellow lawyers that we were, at bottom, whores,  It seems I have some Kamikaze genes.