IRAQ CASUALTIES

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 814 (up 17 from last week)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,682 (up 158 from last week)

In the past month, 60 U.S. soldiers have been killed; approximately 800 have been wounded.

WE F%#KING HATE THE WRITING COMPETITION

There. We got that off our chests. Now we'll go back to work. F%#k.

IRAQ CASUALTY UPDATE

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here. (We did not publish an update last week.)

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 797 (up 26 from two weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,524 (up 391 from two weeks ago)

In the past month, 76 U.S. soldiers have been killed; 660 have been wounded.

WHAT'S LONG AND HARD AND FULL OF ...

Which brings us to the topic of this year's Fordham Law writing competition. Which we are forbidden from discussing. With anyone. Even you.

LET LOOSE FROM THE NOOSE THAT'S KEPT US HANGING ABOUT

We're back after a long post-finals decompression. At first we felt bad about neglecting our little blog for so long. But when we checked our site visits reports, we discovered a curious thing: traffic to our website actually increased during our absence. More people came to splendidbauble.blogspot.com when we published nothing than when we were publishing almost every day. We can think of no explanation for this.

Anyway. We are tempted, now that we've made it through our first year, to offer various observations and pieces of advice for 1Ls. But we think we will hold off on that until we receive our grades. We have definite ideas about the way things should be done. First semester went very well for us. But this second semester, it nearly killed us, what with civil procedure and our strange con law professor and all. So we won't subject you to our thoughts on how to conduct your first year until we know whether what we did worked.

In the meantime, we're going to be concentrating on how to make this blog look better. Let us know if you have any ideas about where to find a good template.

JUST IN TIME, TOO, SINCE OUR "LIQUOR IN THE FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR" UNDERGRAD FRAT T-SHIRT IS ABOUT WORN OUT

The new spring fashions are hitting the Fordham runways. Get yours while you still can!

MONDAY WAR REPORT

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 771 (up 17 from last week; up 69 from three weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,133 (up 864 from three weeks ago)

MOVE ALONG ... NOTHING TO SEE HERE

Finals have us down. But allow us to direct you here. Or here.

WE DOUBT THE PROSPECTIVE STUDENT TOUR LEAVES THE FIRST FLOOR

Brooklyn Law 2L Andrew Raff covets the Herman Miller Aeron chairs in the main reading room of our little old Fordham law library.

If it makes you feel any better, Andrew, the only Aerons in there are the ones visitors can see from the window. If your ass is on any other floor of the library, your ass is on wood.

WE'RE THINKING THAT WHEN HE SAYS "BY FAR," HE MEANS THE ANSWER IS "NOT MUCH"

Jeffrey Toobin's profile of John Kerry in the current New Yorker begins under the subhed "What the Candidate Learned as a Lawyer."

And it ends like this:

"In all, Kerry’s achievements as a lawmaker, while real, are also modest. To parlay them into the Presidency would be, by far, the most successful advocacy of his career."

MONDAY WAR REPORT

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 754 (up 33 from last week; up 52 from two weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: No updated figures available (3,864 as of last week)

A concerned reader (see the comments following last week's post) writes to say that he considers our Monday postings to be part of a growing alarmist tendency in the press to handwring over setbacks in Iraq while ignoring positive developments there. He writes that it is unfair to compare every military action to Vietnam and that in any conflict a certain level of loss of American life is necessary and to be expected.

We do not see American casualties as ever being a reason to cut and run from a legitimate conflict. We find it sad -- outrageous even -- that the loss of 19 U.S. soldiers in Somalia caused us to abandon that country and to make excuses for not intervening in the Rwanda genocide.

We do, however, find in the mounting losses in Iraq a reason to question the leadership that put our military there. Remember: that leadership provided a fraction of the troops the Army itself estimated it would need to secure the country. We don't advocate abandoning Iraq, but we grow increasingly doubtful that the current administration will bring things to a successful end.

We didn't bring up Vietnam, but since the subject is on the table it's also worth remembering that so far the number of U.S. troops dead in Iraq is almost double the number of troops killed during the first
three years of major U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (The linked-to article puts the two conflicts in perspective, noting that the number of troops in Iraq far exceeds the number of troops present in the early years of Vietnam.) It may be that we can stay in Iraq for the "next 100 years" and never see Vietnam-like casualties. But that's impossible to predict. We doubt any American in 1964 would have guessed what the next decade had in store. U.S leadership failed then, and there are signs that it's failing again, in many of the same ways.

IF LAW SCHOOL WERE FRENCH CLASS, THEY'D JUST LOCK YOU IN A ROOM BY YOURSELF WITH A FRENCH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR NINE YEARS

Okay class of 2007. You want to know how it feels? It feels like there was once a clean, crisp picture of contract law. Then someone cut that picture into tiny, irregular pieces and spent the last nine months flinging the pieces at us, one by one, in no particular order. Some we caught, some we didn't. Now it's up to us to put those pieces together. How do we do that?

Imagine that those pieces we're holding is a jigsaw puzzle. Now imagine that our commercial study aid is the picture on the box that the puzzle came in. We take each little piece and hold it up to the picture, trying to figure out where it goes in our outline. We spend days -- weeks -- doing this. And all we get in the end is a shitty half-picture -- one whose lines don't quite match up and that gapes with holes.

There has got to be a better way to teach the law.