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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Save the Dog!

Someone must kidnap the dog.

This is not the sort of thing I suggest lightly, but the economy is in dire straits. This is a time for extreme measures.

Hearken back to the Great Depression.

Really. Go ahead. Hearken.

I'm not suggesting this just to cheer you up. There's a lesson there.

What got us out of that depression before psychotropic drugs?

Well, the New Deal stuff was nice, but a lot of historians and economists think a great big war did the trick.

They were wrong.

In case you hadn't noticed (and a lot of people don't seem to notice), we have a war or two going on now and all it seems to do is drain money out of the economy.

The real solution is to get millions of people willing to pitch in and make sacrifices. Everybody needs to work together on a massive scale.

Think war bonds and riveting Rosies.

You'd think unity of purpose would be easier in a time of mass communication, but, instead, it's harder. All those babbling voices on TVs, computers, and in our heads (or is it my head?) just split us up. They don't bring us together.

What we need is an undebatable common purpose: saving a presidential dog in peril.

Someone needs to step up and kidnap the presidential dog so that the United States can unify behind a massive canine rescue program.

Think dog bonds and data analyzing Rosies.

Imagine Sean Hannity and Keith Olberman coming together to plead with the dognappers.

It will not be a time for political debate and divisiveness. We'll all benefit working together.

Just please be nice to the doggie while this takes effect. Give him treats.

GOOD BAD TIMES. On the very same day last week, the Los Angeles Times offered a front-page story about underfunded courts not being able to afford to conduct trials and a front-page business section story about a potential "tidal wave" of lawsuits touched off by the economy.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

How are you going to earn those contingency fees if you can't get into court?

I've offered all sorts of money-making ideas for courts in the past - pay-per-views, selling commercial time, concessions stands, souvenir gavel sales - but none of those may be enough in this time of crisis.

So I have a new suggestion: go public.

By which I mean go private.

Set up a corporation to sell shares to the public in a company that runs the courts - thus taking them out of the public domain by going public and becoming a private business. (Don't you love semantics?)

This way you raise hundreds of millions of dollars to put into courthouse infrastructure and hiring. You put bars and restaurants in the buildings, charge admission to trials held in state-of-the-art comfortable courtrooms, and finance some of this by collecting a percentage of each lawyer's fees.

The cheerleaders during recesses should be the main attraction.

If it doesn't work, the corporation will be too big to fail - and you know what that means....

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