SYWFTexas

James Rogan (one of the House impeachment managers) was on Hugh Hewitt's show today, plugging his new autobiography Rough Edges. Normally these book pimp sessions are a total snooze but I remember Rogan as one of the few impressive House managers during the impeachment trial and I was glad to tune in.

I assumed Rogan was blue blood or whatever approximates the equivalent in California. What a shocker -- here's a sample from the book jacket reprinted in the Amazon reviewer's comments linked above:

Jim Rogan was born to a single mother -- a cocktail waitress who was later convicted of welfare fraud; his bartender-father abandoned them both before he was born. After a rough-and-tumble childhood in San Francisco's hardscrabble Mission District -- where he was raised by his colorful extended family -- he became a political junkie at the age of nine, and once received help with his homework from Harry Truman. But Rogan traveled with a tough circle of friends; after years of borderline delinquency he was expelled from high school, became a porn theater bouncer, and then a bartender at a strip joint and a Hell's Angels bar. Along the way, a young Arkansas politician advised him to study law and become a member of a different kind of bar.

On the Hewitt show, he talked about how as a criminal court judge, attorneys for gang members would try to argue that their clients lived in conditions guaranteed to cause criminal activity with no other alternative -- victims of horrible conditions impossible for ordinary people like a judge to comprehend. Oops.

^{Semi-spoiler Update}
I bought the book at the local B&N tonight and in the first few pages Rogan reveals that after a political conference in Memphis, newly-elected Gov. Bill Clinton inspired Rogan to attend law school as good entre to politics. Double oops. BTW I counted over a 100 copies of Clinton's bio on various table displays, end caps, wherever throughout the store -- the markdowns don't appear to be working.

Posted by ter0 at 7:15 PM