Monthly Archives: February 2011

Upgrade to WordPress 3.1 Breaks Permalinks (Updated)

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I upgraded discourse.net to WordPress 3.1 and while my front page is fine, and my data is fine, most individual blog posts are no longer visible but come up as not-found.

I haven’t lost any data — I can see the posts them in the post dialogs. But no one else can see them.

It seems to be related to the permalinks: I use custom permalinks of the form 

 /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

If I switch to standard permalinks then all is well, but all my links would be broken, both internally and externally.

It’s not any plugins – turning them all off didn’t solve it.

I tried deactivating my child theme (I use a modified Twenty Ten theme); that did not solve the problem.

I tried installing the Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack, and this didn’t fix it. [Update: which is hardly surprising, reading the fine print of that plugin, since I’m on a straight Debian box]

Other links, like the “older posts” link at the bottom of the front page, are broken too….

Can anyone give me some advice, please?

UPDATE (5:35pm): OK, the major weirdnesses are fixed, I hope, although I think there are still some subtle problems here and there. It seems I needed to have some plugins on, and some off, not all on or all off.

In the process of fixing things, though, I also lost the customization I had for some archive pages, that gave full-text of posts instead of little summaries without links. I’ll have to try to remember how I did that….

Posted in Discourse.net | 3 Comments

11 Good Charts

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Mother Jones, It’s the Inequality, Stupid.

My attention was drawn to this by rc3‘s use of this chart:

Posted in Econ & Money | Comments Off on 11 Good Charts

Frank Pasquale Has Been Radicalized

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

One of the finest young(ish) legal scholars in America has been radicalized:

… consider the recent raise in federal taxes for the working poor, compared with Obama-GOP unwillingness to tax those in the top 0.1 or top 0.01% more. Households in the top 0.01% make over $27 million annually, on average. Those in the top 1% captured 67% of all income gains from 2002 to 2007. And yet budgets must be balanced on the backs of teachers and the working poor? Even as the scandal of tax havens, costing taxpayers $100 billion each year, goes unaddressed?

…. Bruce Ackerman has feared a “decline and fall of the American Republic,” given that escalating power struggles between the branches of government could leave “the military as a potential arbiter” (85). If the recent uprisings in North Africa teach anything, it is the critical role of army officials at moments of political turmoil.

As Ackerman has noted, in our military, “by 1996, 67% of the senior officer corps were Republicans, and only 7% were Democrats”—a pattern that had continued at least through 2003. Does anyone think that political skew would have no bearing in case another Bush v. Gore-type dispute degenerated into constitutional crisis? If one ever wanted to prove the insularity of the US academy, one could do worse than compare the gallons of ink spilled on viewpoint diversity on campus and the near-invisibility of the partisan skew of the actual guarantors of order in our society. Even demonstrated cases of political targeting by the US domestic intelligence apparatus have generated little outcry.

… those at the top push for a punitive austerity that promises little more than intensification of our current economic woes.

via Balkinization.

Posted in Econ & Money | 1 Comment

Voldemort Sold FL State Planes. But Was It Legal?

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Gov. Voldermort decided to emulate Sarah Palin and sell the Florida state planes. Now it turns out there’s some reason to doubt whether the sale was legal. The Buzz reports on a demand by a Florida State Senate budget honcho for Voldermort to name names, show me “legal authority” for state plane sale.

Some state legislators are also questioning whether Voldermort has the authority to unilaterally refuse federal money for the high-speed rail project given that the state legislature approved the project last year.

It remains unclear if Voldermort simply doesn’t understand concept of bicameralism and presentment and thinks that since he is the CEO he can do what he likes, or if instead he has made a calculated (or instinctual) decision that Florida will respond to Peronist rule.

Posted in Florida | Comments Off on Voldemort Sold FL State Planes. But Was It Legal?

Obama’s Rope-a-Dope Strategy

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

This TalkLeft article articulates something I’ve been worrying about for a while. (See How To Lose An Argument In Order To, Maybe, Win An Election.) The basic idea is that Obama is playing to lose on the budget and the economy, and maybe even social security. The idea is to goad the Republicans into making outrageous demands by signaling preemptive surrender to them.

When the GOP seizes on the red meat being trailed in front of them and enacts their plans, it causes pain.   The plan then is to blame them for all the pain, collect lots of campaign money from Main Street, and get re-elected.

I hope this is wrong, but where is the evidence for that proposition?

The cheerfulish form of this theory is that if you have a weak hand all you can do is get the other side to overplay theirs in order to spark a reaction that will strengthen your hand; i.e. the is just the sort of long game that great n-dimensional chess players engage in.  But it’s not a cheerful process, and in a world of path-dependence lots can go wrong on the way.

Posted in 2012 Election, Econ & Money | 7 Comments

We’ve Hired Susan Bandes

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Looks like the cat is out of the bag: Brian Leiter reports, accurately, that leading crimlaw scholar (and Jotwell Criminal Law Section Contributing Editor) Susan Bandes is moving from DePaul to Miami Law. I understand she turned out a chaired offer at another law school in favor of us. Yay!

Here’s Susan Bandes’s bio page.

Posted in Jotwell, U.Miami | Comments Off on We’ve Hired Susan Bandes