Rusty’s Blog

Not too long ago, Amber and I took a landlord from an apartment building we used to live in to court — magistrate court, to be specific. We have yet to write much about this encounter, but probably will someday. That’s not what this post is about.

This post is about clown parades.

Magistrate court is a clown parade: an endless source of amusement, sadness and unsettling epiphanies about how miserable, stupid and unfair life can be.

In magistrate court, people frequently forgo the services of an actual lawyer to sue and defend themselves against lawsuits. With rare exception, these people have not the slightest idea what they’re doing. They fill out forms incorrectly, they speak out of turn, their arguments (if you can call them that) trail off into tangents and they are reprimanded by the judge and bailiffs over-and-over again.

Sometimes people just can’t afford a lawyer. Sometimes people have seen enough episodes of Law and Order to think they can get by against an actual lawyer. Regardless of the reason, where magistrate court stops being amusing and morphs into the macabre is people often will torpedo a legitimate claim with their ineptitude.

In one case that came up in court before ours, a man appeared to have a legitimate beef with his landlord. I don’t remember the details of the case, and they’re unimportant now. The man was suing the landlord for probably a couple of thousand dollars. When the judge asked him to explain how he came up with the number, the man just said something like, “that’s what seemed about right.” Not surprisingly, he was lectured by the judge and the case was thrown out.

I was reminded of this clown parade by another one that’s been unfolding this week.

President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake asked Congress for $700 billion this week to bail out some failed private investments.

When asked for a justification for this number, a Treasury spokesperson said, “It’s not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Now, if that poor sap in magistrate court is required to provide a reason to ask for a couple of thousand dollars, one would think that the president, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve would need to provide a reason when asking for $700 billion.

Apparently not.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 5:14 pm. It was tagged bailout, bailouts, barack obama, Ben Bernake, clown, clown parade, clown parades, clowns, congress, court, Federal Reserve, george w bush, Henry Paulson, john mccain, law, Law and Order, lawyer, lawyers, magistrate court, politics, Treasury Department, wall street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.