Discourse.net

More on Fallujah

It seems I wasn’t real clear in the previous post. I don’t mean to suggest that the right answer to the Fallujah crisis was starting a major urban campaign and killing lots of civilians. I do mean to say that:

1. If this is the end state, the seige was a blunder.

2. But, because I don’t think the administration is willing to accept the likely consequences of this move — it will be seen as the weakness that it is — I fear even more what this seems likely to lead to, which is bloodier consequences in Fallujah and especially elsewhere. And I suspect that the US administration’s response to those facts — when faced with possible widespread chaos as Iraqis decide the US can be driven out — will end up with more casualties on both sides. Therefore, I think that leaving in these circumstances has very bad side-effects. That doesn’t mean that turning up the violence (“going in” to urban warfar) made any sense either.

3. Putting a Baathist in charge doesn’t seem real smart unless he’s a very unusal one. Is this a calculation that Baathists are better than Islamicists? Is the best-case exit scenario now reduced to a Saddam-like regime without Saddam? Is Saddam lite really the best we can do?

Another Such Victory and We Are Undone

George W. Bush today, defending the famous flight suit speech announcing the end of major combat operation in Iraq:

“we’re making progress, you bet” in bringing stability to Iraq.

What the grunts say about about today’s pullout from Fallujah, turning the town over to a Baathist general (source: UK Daily Telegraph, Saddam’s man takes over in Fallujah )(reg. req.):

Many ordinary marines said they did not believe the initiative would work and it could endanger their lives when they had to revert to the “plan A” of a full-scale offensive to take Fallujah.

“Honestly, I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it,” said Cpl Elias Chavez, 28.

“We had the insurgents cordoned off, they couldn’t go anywhere, we had a chance to get them. Now they can flee wherever they want and we’re still going to have to deal with them.”

He said the new force, largely made up of Fallujah residents, would be unlikely to apprehend or clamp down on anti-coalition fighters.

By leaving without defeating the insurgents, their deployment since April 5, following the killing and mutilation of four US defence contractors, “was a waste of time, of resources and of lives”.

“Everyone feels the same, especially those who know someone who was killed.”

L Cpl Julius Wright, 20, said: “Now it’s going to get worse. We pulled out when we should of gone in.”

I’m with the grunts on this one. This is “progress”?

Characteristically Funny

After a week or two of trying (and failing) to be fair and balanced by finding a flaw in Firefox to match the problems with IE, User Friendly explains why we don’t have Lynx -friendly cartoons.

Joi Ito: Did Google Help China Censor Search Results?

Not trying to make this an all Google day, but given what a clean reputation google has, and given all the stuff in their IPO about how they plan to Be Good and not be short-termists, it’s a little disturbing to read this Joi Ito item collating various bits of info suggesting that Google colludes in government censorship.

Venturpreneur Throws Cold Water on Google IPO

The Venturpreneur is an interesting blog I stumbled on last week. Now I discover that the author is Gordon Smith, someone I met in Tilburg, the Netherlands (not as strange a place as it may sound for two Americans to meet — Tilburg, along with Amsterdam, is an Internet studies powerhouse).

Gordon is now a law professor at Wisconsin, and he’s writting some provocative comments today about the new Google IPO:

The Growth Story: Selling stock in an IPO is not about convincing people that your present performance is stellar. It is about your growth story. People who invest in IPO shares are hoping that your company will become the next Microsoft. A compelling vision is crucial. I have been reading the prospectus for clues about Google’s growth story, and this is what I have found.

…

Bottom line: The prospectus is worse than I imagined it could be. I assumed Google would have a difficult time telling a growth story, but I thought that they would give it the old college try. Instead, their growth story is nothing more than a celebration of past accomplishments. “Don’t you just love our search technology?!”

Yahoo is currently trading at a price/earnings ratio of approximately 125. Google is currently less efficient at servicing the bottom line, and it admits that operating margins will decline. In the face of these realities, it will need to achieve a price/earnings ratio higher than Yahoo’s to obtain the kind of valuations projected over the last few days. While it may reach such lofty heights if retail investors get overly enthusiastic, those prices are not sustainable under any scenario contemplated in the prospectus.

I hope this is pessimistic, although it certainly seems right as far as I can tell. I’d like the first major IPO which is run on a pure public auction, without huge margins to the parasites investment banks, to be a stunning success.

Update: John Battele’s take on the IPO

A Good Start on our British Problem

It’s good to know that those alert authorities at JFK are taking no chances with dangerous visiting British accountants. You never know what they might do in New York — maybe go shopping and reduce the trade deficit a little.

Briton ‘in chains at JFK airport over bogus debt’ (UK Telegraph, reg. required): An accountant claims that he was kept for more than 24 hours in “leg chains” and denied food and water after flying into New York’s JFK airport with his wife.

David Pattison, 52, of Beeston, Norfolk, was held by US security officials because an Interpol notice alleged that he was wanted in Qatar for debts of up to $10,000 (£5,800).

He was deported on Monday night without having been allowed to enter America.

Mr Pattison, who disputes the alleged debt, said he was subjected to “inhumane and degrading” treatment by the US authorities and a “lack of assistance” by the Foreign Office.

He arrived at the airport’s immigration control on Sunday afternoon, at what was to have been the start of a two-week holiday with his wife, Janice, 49, the mother of their six children.

There he was told of the Interpol notice. Mr Pattison worked for an oil company in the Gulf state in 1999 but denies that he left behind any debts. Although about $5,000 (£2,900) had been outstanding on a car he used for work, this was settled after the agreed sale of the vehicle in 2000.

“This was the first I had heard of any warrant against me, and I have travelled all over Europe since 1999,” said Mr Pattison.

“I told the US officials I had a letter at home to prove all matters in Qatar had been settled but they were not interested.”

Mr Pattison was then told he would not be allowed into the country and would be deported. “I requested a call to the British consulate in New York and I spoke to a man who refused to give his surname. He said he couldn’t help because I hadn’t been admitted to the country and I was in limbo.

“But that is exactly when British subjects in a situation such as mine need assistance. God knows what it would have been like had we been travelling with our children.”

Mr Pattison claims his wife was then escorted out of the room in tears and left to fend for herself. He said cuffs were placed on his hands and ankles and that a wooden restraint was put across his chest.

“I was escorted to a facility with no food or drink and my angina medication was locked away from me. I was placed with eight other unfortunates, two of whom were also British, but we weren’t allowed to speak to each other.

“We begged for water but the [Department for Homeland Security] staff just sat there eating hamburgers. There was nowhere to wash or sleep and I observed verbal abuse by US immigration personnel to most of these people.”

It’s especially important to be tough on Britons as we would not want them to think that their government’s supporting the Administration in Iraq should give them any right to the decent treatment we deny to foreigners from other countries. And you certainly wouldn’t want to let in people with debts, especially not big debts like up to $10,000. Especially not an accountant who racked up debts like that. Why, it’s not as if Americans were ever in debt!

It’s also important to discourage tourism to New York, as there will soon be a Republican convention there and we’ll need all the hotel rooms and lots of space for drunken parties on the streets.

Oddly, the government of Quatar claimed to have no knowledge of the warrant for Mr. Patterson, but they’re from the Middle East, so why believe them?

More American Censorship (Patriot Act Dept.)

No, it’s not a typo: Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act:

“It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court,” Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s associate legal director, said in a statement. “President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it.”

Yes, it’s still a free country. Just not as free as last year. (spotted via boingboing)

Censorship American Style

David Farber writes to the Interesting People list,

I gather that there is a report that Sinclair Broadcast ordered its ABC affiliates to preempt tomorrow’s broadcast of Nightline which will air the names and photos of U.S. military personnel who have died in combat in Iraq, saying the move is politically motivated designed to undermine the efforts of the US in Iraq.

Sinclair owns 62 US TV stations.

And so there is.

Is it legal? Probably — we impose only the loosest public interest requirements on the beneficiaries of the publicly created broadcast oligopoly, and what little I know of broadcast law this doesn’t come close to violating it.

Is it in good taste? I think reasonable people might differ about the good taste involved in refusing to broadcast the show, especially if those people didn’t see it as honoring the dead. (Not my view at all, but people differ.) I do think that accusing ABC (of all bodies!) of what amounts to treason (in effect the old accusing them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy) is not only not in good taste, but contemptible.

Are we not allowed to talk about the costs of this war project? Especially as the goals diminish from a free and democratic Middle East, to a free Iraq, to less violence, to getting out without humiliation?

Apparently not on Sinclair stations.

Florida Is a Bloghaven?

This is surprising:

=< Halavais: News>=: Where have all the bloggers gone? Well, basically the places you would expect. Lots in Boston, lots in Austin, lots on the coast, and a surprising dispersal in Florida (?)

See the cool map too (albeit only for blogs hosted by Livejournal and Diaryland).

When Judicial Nominees Tell Porky Pies

If he said what is reported at Bush Aide on Court Nominees Faces Fire as Nominee Himself, Brett Kavanaugh as much as perjured himself yesterday in front of a Senate committee when he stated that the White House had no ideological considerations in choosing judicial nominees. That obviously isn’t true of this administration, just as it hasn’t been true of many in my adult life (the exception that comes to mind is Jerry Ford, who seemed to care more about party affiliation than ideology per se).

I look forward to the same forces who explained, with some justice, that a person who lied to a grand jury was a poor choice to be President, now coming forward and explaining that a person who tells transparent porky pies to the Senate is unfit to be a DC circuit judge. (He’s sorta young too. Judicial temperment, especially for federal appellate judges, does seem to tend to be a function of a certain age and experience much more often than not.) But I’m not holding my breath. Well worth a fillibuster. And I don’t care how nice he is, how smart he is, or that he went to the right law school.

I Always Suspected There Were Too Many Kinds of Toothpaste

I always sort of suspected that the world might be better off with fewer kinds of toothpaste — an intuition that flies directly in the face of all the free-market stuff I usually believe. Now comes Ben Hyde, summarizing Barry Schwartz’s book Paradox of Choice, to explain why this intuition might actually be right:

The punch line of Paradox of Choice is made in a simple cartoon. Partition the world into two kinds of people. The maximizers and the satisfiers. Maximizers spend more resources on getting the best possible outcome while satisfiers don’t.

The joke? Maximizers do tend to achieve their goals. They do accumulate more than the satisficers. The ironic revenge of the Gods? They are never satisfied.

He reports that depression is highly correlated with maximizing behavior. Then he lays down the cornerstone of the entire book.

Can you conspire to change a person’s behavior? Convert them into a maximizer? How? Yes - you just present them with more choices. That increases the chances their behavior will switch from happy satisfier to depressed maximizer. It’s a denial of service attack on the problem solver. It’s restructuring the game so that the search algorithms are no longer effective. It’s the old chestnut that marketing is war. It’s the cliche that planning is what you do to avoid action.

In other words, marketers make more choices to turn rational people into shoppers. But these choices make people less happy than they would otherwise be (the paradox).

But wait. This (as opposed to, say, the quest for shelf space) doesn’t alone explain why firms make so many different varieties of what’s more or less the same product. What’s in it for the firm, which presumably forgoes some small economy of scale? Do unhappy consumers spend more money in a quest for more happiness (either in product quantity or quality or price), or do they just spend more time searching? Do they buy eight kinds of toothpaste to try them out? Does the increased search time expose them to more goods that would have chosen to buy had they but known of them, in which case search makes you happier but poorer? Or do the consumers spend so much time searching they buy less? Or is the depressed consumer an impulse buyer? There has to be some mechanism by which the ‘more search, less joy’ mentality gets translated into goods or this fails to explain the marketers’ incentives. And even if a greater variety of toothpaste on offer makes you generally unhappier it’s not at all obvious to me how this translates into toothpaste sales given the fixed quantity of mouths per person.

On a related note, the suggestion that there may be an economic grounding for my suspicions about toothpaste makes me hope that someone will be able to confirm my claim of an economic justification for another of my other potentially irrational beliefs. I have a tendency towards comparison shopping for the lowest price, a maximization behavior that my wife likes to laugh at as obsessive (while no doubt enjoying the savings). I like to rationalize this tendency as a public-spirited behavior with positive externalities: by doing my best to embody Rational Economic Man, and finding the low-cost supplier I am rewarding the low-price supplier (and, especially, failing to reward the price gougers) and thus helping the market be efficient, which contributes to lower prices for everyone. Any truth to that in a world of sensible satisficers?

Chernobyl Images

This is one of the strangest and most disturbing things I’ve seen on the Internet: KIDDofSPEED - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Images. The daughter of a scientist who does testing in the devastated Chernobyl area has wangled a permit that allows her to ride her motorcycle through dangerous radioactive areas. Despite the attention she pays to her geiger counter, I can’t help but think this is a really stupid thing to be doing.

The pictures she publishes of what the land and buildings and remains look like in the contaminated area are simply horrific.

More on Digital Public Goods

In a comment to an item below, John Quiggen gently and correctly points out that the insight for which I credited Brad is at least as much his:

If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.

What’s more, he’s already working on an article about it. So that’s one less project I have to worry about — I can wait for him. The provision of public goods is already one of the major challenges for modern society, one that the US at least responds to fairly badly (see, e.g. the lack public transport in Miami and the really clogged roads) and it’s really interesting to speculate about what we should do if the increase in importance of digitized information and tools to play with it makes this problem worse.

Brad and I have written one article which cataloged some of the issues, but it doesn’t offer very much in the way of solutions. Much remains to be done here.

Apache Was Resting

The site was down for several hours this evening as the apache server decided to go on strike. Dreamhost Support reports it “had a bad user” and fixed it. I hope that’s not a moral judgement.

Meanwhile I had a tour through my http logs, always a fun way to spend time, and noticed many entries of the form

junk after document element at line 2, column 0

I have no idea what that means.

Plus I found substantial evidence that a machine hosted at Brown has been trying to hack in here. And failing. But I sent a note with a log extract to the tech contact for the IP number on the off chance it might do some good.

There's an Article Here

In an otherwise normal science look at Valuing Google, Brad writes a sentence that deserves an article:

Social value is drifting away from potential profitability, and this threatens to become a huge problem in our collective social resource allocation mechanisms.

Hey Brad, maybe that should be our next collaborative project (after the one I already suggested we do this summer…)? I have ideas floating around about how you organize efficient state ownership of (some) things.

Florida Has A Cement Shortage

First we put half our stuff in storage. Then we moved into the front half of the house, about the size of a NY two-bedroom apartment, putting the kids into a bunk bed. The idea was to start the project in the fall, and finish by about, well, May or June. Then we had permit delays. Then, finally, in January we knocked down the empty half of our house — including a piece of the kitchen — so we could rebuild it better and bigger. Then they started to build, poured a foundation, built some walls, and almost a month ago got ready to pour the beam and install the trusses.

But wait! We failed inspection! The city of Coral Gables has tougher requirements than the County and even though these were noted on the plans, the engineer just did the routine calculations. Three week delay to recalculate, get twice as many trusses, re-inspect. Ok, that takes us to last week. Good to go to pour some beams, right?

Oops. Seems there’s a cement shortage. As the contractor tells it, there were three local plants that supplied about 60% of south Florida’s needs with the rest coming from abroad. Most of the imported stuff is being diverted to other places, like China, that are willing to pay higher prices than Florida (!). And all three of the local plants are having mechanical problems. The biggest plant has problems so severe that the owners have decided not to repair it, but just to wait for the new plant to come on stream in about a month.

So after a few days extra delay we managed to get a truck to come and bring some of this precious commodity, and we poured yesterday. Except we ran out.

Question: Is it more reasonable to imagine we’ll finish in August (contractor’s current estimate), December (my guess), or some time after next March….

Chilling Effect (Chill Them Young Dept.)

One of the marks of a free country is that you can criticize the Maximum Leader without fear of investigations or reprisals.

Not in Seattle Prosser, Washington State, USA, where a boy was Investigated by the Secret Service, then disciplined by his School, for drawing Bush as the devil in an art class assignment on the Iraq war.

Art students at Prosser High School were told to keep a notebook of drawings depicting the war in Iraq.

One 15-year-old turned in a sketch showing President Bush, dressed as a devil, launching a missile.

Another of his drawings was of a Middle Eastern-looking guy holding a rifle in one hand, while in the other hand was a pole with an oversized head of President Bush stuck on it.

The art teacher found the drawings troubling.

Maybe it was the caption that said: “End the War.”

Anyway, the drawings were turned over to school administrators.

School administrators took a look and tossed this political hot potato to police, who took one look at the “Vote For Ralph Nader” slogan and called in the Secret Service.

Last week, Secret Service agents trekked out to Prosser and grilled the 15-year-old artist.

They left without charging him with anything, but that didn’t stop the school district from punishing the kid anyway.

(emphasis added) AP version of the story. And this hyperactive tendency to investigate people is not a fluke but is now shared by many law enforcement bodies: Recall this previous incident? Or this one? All of which leads to self-censorship

Teach the children well, indeed.

[Corrected to remove slur on Seattle, per comment by froz]

New Traction for Bush Records Story

Finally. The Bush records story is getting new traction, probably because Kerry himself is making an issue of it. Helpfully, Salon has published a child’s guide (suitable for busy reporters) to some (only some) of the major gaps in the record. And the thoughtful and much-read Joshua Micah Marshall has endorsed this as an issue, going so far as to say that, aw shucks, he doesn’t quite follow all the complicated details, but, it sounds important:

I just don’t know the details of all this well enough any more to make a judgment about these various claims and accusations.

But why exactly can’t the president just release his records the way McCain did?

And, is that story about [Maj. Gen. Danny] James[, commander of the Air National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va.] getting a chance to go over these files true? If it is, I’d say some scribblers in town got suckered.

Big time, as the vice president would say.

So maybe the issue is not dead yet. When will a reporter stand up the press gaggle with a release from and ask if the President will sign it? Or, how about at a press conference if there ever is another one?

Small World. Good Radio.

How absolutely amazing to find that two of the more interesting people I know from such different parts of my life are almost related. It turns out that Ed Hasbrouk, the Practical Nomad, whom I know virtually and from conference calls, is partnered with the cousin of Eric Muller, a law school classmate and now fellow law prof. The occasion for this discovery is that both of them are participants in a great NPR segment called Making Contact.

The show is not being played on either of the NPR stations I can get on my radio, but Ed notes that it can be heard online “from the National Radio Project. You can listen to streaming Real Audio or download a high or low bandwidth MP3.”

For the very interesting details as to how Ed and Eric met, and what they have in common and what they argue about, see Eric’s blog entry and Ed’s.

Dreamhost Says it is Being DDos'd

The host for this blog, Dreamhost, has just sent out an email reporting that it has been under attack but is coping better than last time,

Starting at around 2:45 PDT this afternoon, we experienced yet another Denial of Service attack launched at a completely different target from the previous attacks. Within 15 minutes, we had established the destination of the attacks and had them blocked at our network’s edge. We’re currently waiting for our upstream providers to provide us with more global protection from the attacks, but for now network performance is running at only a slightly degraded state. We hope to have full service restored within the hour.

Miscellaneous Formatting Changes

I’ve made some stylesheet and template changes in order to make user-inputted type bigger. In addition I added some links to recent related stories to fill up what seemed like a large empty spaces in the comment pages.

If you encounter any ugliness or surprises due to either change (or anything else), please let me know via a comment here.

I’ve also thrown in an experimental style-switcher. Of the styles I’ve swiped from the public domain, so far the only alternative style I’ve been able to make work (in the sense of 3 columns looking ok) is quite lurid, and extends just a bit too wide for reasons that escape me. If you want to try it, you can find the switcher part way down the right hand column. Be prepared to reload the page if it all goes wrong…

What Belongs on the Faculty Desktop?

My colleagues at UM Law endure a hyper-centralized information technology regime. Unless they raise a great ruckus, faculty members here get issued a Windows XP computer in “lockdown” mode, which prevents the installation of new programs on the desktop. (I raised a ruckus.) What’s worse, the suite of programs offered to faculty has actually shrunk in the last few years, as the IT dept discovered that if you hand out fewer programs, they are easier to support.

The faculty has finally rebelled, although the actual flashpoint was lousy network performance and downtime. As part of an effort designed to head off what might otherwise become a pitchfork-wielding mob, the administration has asked for suggestions as to what programs should be part of the default faculty suite. Of course, since most of us haven’t much experience with other office environments recently, we’re not that well placed to know what’s out there or what we might find enhances our productivity or makes new things possible or even easy..

I’ve made my own little list, but I’m sure it’s deficient in imagination if not necessarily length. Suggestions needed and welcome. Please assume that the desktop will be a PC with XP as the OS—I think the odds of getting anything else on the faculty desktop in this iteration are about zero. And the network itself will probably stay Novell. You’ll see from my list, though, that I have assumed the existence of a *nix internet server as we currently have one, even if it’s not that well maintained.

So, what should be on my list?

Here’s my first draft. Needless to say, it’s somewhat different from the current default.

Basic Tools

• Choice of Office Suites: (1) Open Office free, open-source clone of Word; (2) MS Word, (3) CorelWordperfect
• Powerpoint
• Firefox (browser)
• Common browser plugins e.g. Flash, Quicktime, Realplayer
• Thunderbird (email)
• a SIMPLE standards-compliant (ie. NOT front page) HTML creation tool. There are many free ones. (Nvu is one possibility — works well with firefox/thunderbird)
• Acrobat Reader
• a PDF creation tool [built into WordPerfect but needed for OpenOffice and Word users]. Either “Acrobat” itself, or a less expensive alternative [I have not tested these] e.g. Pdf995 (free), or ExpertPDF ($35/license)
• FTP (I suggest WinSPC2 - free)
• An ad-blocker (either AdSubtract, or get free Adblocker plugin for Firefox, combined with flashblocker plugin)
• Clipmate (a superb, essential, clipboard extender — makes moving data between programs and especially from WL & Lexis to wordprocessor very easy; also remembers last N hundred things you moved to clipboard for re-use). This one is really essential!
• Irfanview [viewer for many file formats] Free [N.B. also should install 100% of plugins, which is a separate file]
• An RSS news reader.
• Telnet program (Powerterm, provided by university, or a free tool such as putty.exe)
• A way to send faxes directly from wordprocessors FaxWare
• Anit-Virus tool
• Calendar program (Sidekick 98? Something more modern w/ group functions?)
• Winzip
• PGP (Freeware version available, current version is 6.5.8)

Advanced Tools I’d Like But Most People Won’t Want Yet

• A CSS editor (preferably WYSIWYG, ie something like StyleMaster)

Server-side tools

• Updated version of standard tools, e.g. Apache, Perl, Pine, mySQL, PHP
• Common cgi programs e.g. web counters, forms, for inclusion in faculty created web pages
• Mailing lists that are easy for faculty to configure, that allow students to sign up via a web form, and that automatically archive content
• A tool, ideally web-based, that allows faculty to password protect online documents and directories [law profs are not going to code .htaccess files], and to manage password access
• Blogging tools, e.g. movable type

We've Hired and We Plan to Do it Again

Larry Solum’s list of new hires reminds me that I failed to blog the fact that we’ve hired one new tenure-track faculty member for next year. He wowed us with his faculty presentation, and with the paper he has ready for publication, and I think he’s going to be great.

Mario L. Barnes, Associate Professor of Law. A graduate of the University of California Law School at Berkeley, where he was the Co-editor-in-Chief for the law review, African-American Law & Policy Report, Professor Barnes is a twelve year veteran of the U.S. Navy. Prior to receiving his honorable discharge in 2002, he served as Admiralty Counsel in the Office of the Judge Advocate General where he was involved in the investigations of the 2001 sinking of the Japanese vessel Ehime Maru by a U.S. submarine and the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. Currently a Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, he is in the process of completing his thesis, The Stories They Did Not Tell: Race, Family Silence and the Legal Recreation of Inequality. He will join the faculty this fall. He will teach Substantive Criminal Law and Constitutional Law I. In future years he will teach an additional course, most likely in the areas of military operations law, race and the law, or national security law.

Despite this great hire we still have a large number of openings. Next year’s appointment committee will be busy, although we also have some specific subject area needs which may narrow our search. I don’t know which ones the Dean will choose to make a priority next year, but if I had to guess I would say Health Law, Commercial Law, maybe Family Law, and general business subjects, especially international business transactions. And of course even though we have some strength in the subject already, we have a perennial interest in persons who are interested in Latin American private law, ideally people familiar both with the US legal system and at least one South (or maybe Central) American legal system.

It’s always possible that some of these openings might be filled by lateral as well as entry level appointments. But that’s next year’s problem…

Academic Seeks Chair

When an academic says s/he is looking for a chair, you might naturally assume that s/he seeks promotion. Once you become a full professor, there is no promotion other than administration, perks, money or prestige. A desire to avoid administration being one of the things that often attracts people to the Ivory Tower, academics who are not content with their lot and don’t want to be Deans usually go hunting for perks, money, or prestige. And the thing in academe that wraps them up in one package is a “Chair” — a title and usually some perks or money.

As it happens, however, I’m not looking for that sort of chair (not that I’d reject it if it came looking for me) — and a good thing it is too, as we only have two chairs here at UM and they are earmarked for lateral hires. No, I’m looking for the sort of chair you sit in.

I have a very nice desk chair. Or rather I had one. One day I came home and the back was broken. (Not broken as in in two pieces, but broken in that the main support snapped and it no longer stays upright when you lean back.) The children deny everything. There is no dog or other large pet. It is vaguely conceivable that I leaned back once too hard or once too often and broke it myself, although I sort of think this is the kind of thing even I might notice about my environment. In any case, there seems no point finding anyone to blame. The chair is broken. I need a new one.

Due to past bouts with carpal tunnel, I have fairly particular ergonomic requirements. I suppose I could get another chair like the one I had before, but it isn’t sold in stores, being marketed by mildly sleazy salespeople who sell to the ‘physically challenged’. I’d prefer not to deal with them. And the back wasn’t the first part to fail; various knobs and stuff whose purpose I never fully understood have fallen off over the years. It was a nice chair, but didn’t seem worth the huge sum I paid for it.

So, in the next day or two, I’m going downtown to do some trial sitting.

I Need A Research Assistant

If any law students from UM are reading this, I need a research assistant for the summer. Contact me by e-mail, or drop off a copy of your transcript (unofficial copy is fine), a c.v. and a short writing sample (non-legal is fine). Ideally I’d want 10-20 hours of your time per week (the exact amount is negotiable). If you need more hours, I might be able to put a package together with another professor.

The miserly wage rate is set by the University, but some of the tasks, primarily research, may be interesting; there’s also some blue booking, but not too much. If you have computer skills, that’s a plus but not a requirement. You could probably do a fair amount of the work from home, but you should expect to be on campus at least once a week.

If it works out, we might continue the arrangement into next year. First year students are especially encouraged to apply.

(If students from elsewhere are reading this, I’m sorry but our RA money is earmarked for our own students.)

Would You Like Some Politics With that SQL?

Here’s an interesting controversy. In I Don’t Like Your Examples! Steven Feuerstein explains why he used controversial political examples in a technical O’Reilly book on Oracle PL/SQL Programming and shares some reader reaction.

Obviously there’s no legal issue here: in a free country an author can be political even in a technical reference book. And, equally obviously, political examples pose a commercial issue for a publisher: will a reference/instruction book with ‘interesting’ examples sell better because the reader stays awake (or because people buy it for the notoriety), or sell worse because those who find the examples distasteful will avoid it? (There’s also a question of editorial principle—how much freedom should authors be entitled to have? It’s not obvious to me that the answer is the same for technical books in a series as for a novelist or a polemicist, although in the hands of an enlightened and brave publisher it might be. I wonder what Theresa Nielsen Hayden thinks about this…)

But there’s also a moral, or at least aesthetic, issue as to whether it’s meet to introduce suggestions that Henery Kissinger is a war criminal for bombing Cambodia, CEOs are paid too much, or the gun lobby is too strong. And that’s the question which really interests me. In his article Mr. Feuerstein quotes feedback from readers, or might-have-been readers, who think inserting politics into programming examples is at least icky, maybe gross.

Having thought hard about it for several seconds, it turns out that on this last question I have no doubt at all: it is proper, even admirable, to witness one’s strongly held beliefs about the society we share in any book you write, and in most (but not all¹) daily activities, especially in circumstances where your listener/reader is able to walk away or put down the tome. If this hurts your sales, that’s your problem. In general though, I prefer my fellow citizens to be engaged, not passive, committed not apathetic, even if it should happen we don’t agree.

¹ Which activities? Depends. Class is a bad time for students (or professors) to stand up and read agitprop, but a good time for students to wear political t-shirts. See also More on Civility.

Latest US Plan for Interim Iraqi Government Envisions 'Sovereignty' Without Any Power

The White House’s overriding goal for Iraq is to keep the lid on it until after the election. This is not easy. Cutting and running would, in the best case, leave Islamic fundamentalists in charge (bad TV), and in the worst case lead quickly to civil war (very bad TV if reporters are brave).

Staying in charge leads to casualties like we are seeing. They can keep the images off TV, but probably not the newspapers. Staying in charge incites the militants.

The original plan was to transfer sovereignty on June 30, declare victory, and bring a few thousand troops home. This would allow Bush to say that the rest would be home soon — see the downpayment. Meanwhile, in the background, there would be a Status of Forces agreement with the new Chalabi government in which the US got to have nice forward bases well suited for defending or quietly (or not quietly) menacing strategic oil reserves. [The very original plan had been to sign the SoF agreement with the current Governing Council, but that proved too raw for everyone.]

That’s all gone pear shaped. The administration is now reduced to forlornly chanting that it is staying on schedule for a handover of sovereignty, although it no longer has control over to whom that will be, the initiative having passed either to the UN or to the arab street (funny we don’t hear about that street these days, isn’t it? that meme was all over the papers a year ago).

One obvious consequence of handing over sovereignty in ten weeks to unknown parties is that it’s no longer certain they will be the tame poodle that the administration persists in believing it has in Chalabi (despite the contrary evidence). If serious Islamicists are going to be in charge, or even in partial charge, they are not going to sign a status of forces agreement, and they are not going to do what the US tells them.

The writing being on the wall, it is being read. And folks in the administration don’t like what it says. Thus, the logical next move is to float the trial balloon that maybe the handover — still on schedule, you understand — will be somewhat more formal and less substantive than in version 1.0.

White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited. The Bush administration’s plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.

Sovereignty without meaningful control. A ‘sovereign’ government that can neither change existing laws nor command the armed forces. Sounds like Cuba in Guantanamo to me. The administration’s position in front of the Supreme Court this week was that the Cubans have ‘sovereignty’ over the base, but the US has control. In this view, as a result of the lack of this metaphysical ‘sovereignty’ the US courts have no power there … but neither do the Cubans.

It appears that the administration now proposes a transfer of ‘sovereignty’ for Iraq that will give the recipients the same great powers over their country that Castro enjoys over Guantanamo—and for the same sorts of reasons. The locals cannot be trusted to do what they are told.

How nice that we are instructing the Middle East on the finer points of democracy. What a shame that the lesson is so expensive, especially in lives, both for us and for them.

Ten weeks is a long time in warfare, and the situation remains very fluid on the ground. The diplomatic position, however, may be less fluid, and the administration’s trial balloon is likely to be shot at by numerous foreign governments—and even our own. As the NYT describes it,

These restrictions to the plan negotiated with Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy, were presented in detail for the first time by top administration officials at Congressional hearings this week, culminating in long and intense questioning on Thursday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearing on the goal of returning Iraq to self-rule on June 30.

…

The administration’s plans seem likely to face objections on several fronts. Several European and United Nations diplomats have said in interviews that they do not think the United Nations will approve a Security Council resolution sought by Washington that handcuffs the new Iraq government in its authority over its own armed forces, let alone foreign forces on its soil.

These diplomats, and some American officials, said that if the American military command ordered a siege of an Iraqi city, for example, and there was no language calling for an Iraqi government to participate in the decision, the government might not be able to survive protests that could follow.

The diplomats added that it might be unrealistic to expect the new Iraqi government not to demand the right to change Iraqi laws put in place by the American occupation under L. Paul Bremer III, including provisions limiting the influence of Islamic religious law.

Democratic and Republican senators appeared frustrated on Thursday that so few details were known at this late stage in the transition process, and several senators focused on the question of who would be in charge of Iraq’s security.

Asked whether the new Iraqi government would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a senior official said Americans would have the final say.

“The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account,” said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will “have the right, and the power, and the obligation” to decide.

That formulation is especially sensitive at a time when American and Iraqi forces are poised to fight for control of Falluja.

In another sphere, Mr. Grossman said there would be curbs on the powers of the National Conference of Iraqis that Mr. Brahimi envisions as a consultative body. The conference, he said, is not expected to pass new laws or revise the laws adopted under the American occupation.

Sovereignty, but no control over the major military force in-country, and no power to pass laws or revise old ones. At least it should make the Iraqi interim government’s task of ‘governing’ quite easy…

US Troops on Guard Against French Lobster

French ‘lobster’ alarms US troops: A seemingly innocuous codename chosen by French special forces in south-east Afghanistan caused alarm among US troops searching for Osama Bin Laden.

A newly arrived French commander picked “homard”, meaning lobster, as an alias, the newspaper Liberation reports.

He did not realise that it sounds like Omar, the first name of the Mullah who led the Taleban and is now on the run.

Concerned US intelligence services monitoring French communications raised the alarm and the codename was changed.

Of course, those of us in the know realized immediately that this fish story was just a cover to explain why the US spies on the perfidious French! And the great thing about the story is that Europeans immediately believe it!

What’s even stranger is that the BBC buries the really interesting part of this story:

The incident, said to have happened in July 2003, marked the start of French special forces’ involvement in operation Enduring Freedom, the US-led action to find the al-Qaeda leader.

The presence of more than 200 French troops in the area has only just been acknowledged by Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.

So the French have been helping hunt Osama all the time the Republicans have been jumping up and down about them? Such great diplomacy on the part of the US!

NOTE: ‘Homard’ is no relation to the Medium Lobster

I Didn't Even Know He Was Running

Ex-N.H. Senator Ends Bid for Fla. Seat: MIAMI - Former New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith on Thursday ended his campaign for a Senate seat in his new home of Florida, citing a poor start to fund-raising.

Darn. I didn’t even know he was running, and now we don’t have Bob Smith to kick around any more. Oh well, plenty left:

Several Republicans are seeking the Republican nomination to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, including former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez, attorney Larry Klayman, House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, former Rep. Bill McCollum and businessman Doug Gallagher.

Is This Ad Effective?

Better Angels of our Nature: Notations argues that “The first great negative ad of this campaign has surfaced.” and provides links to the Windows Media Player version, and the Real Player version.

I don’t claim to have my pulse on the finger of the American television-watching people, but is this ad really that good? Or shouldn’t someone at least jazz it up a bit with visuals: the flight suit, for example? One of the stills of the flag-draped coffins that just got Tami Silicio—and her husband—fired?

More generally, does Kerry win by going negative or by going positive? The John Edwards campaign (and early Dean) suggests this is a year for positive. On the other hand, Edwards didn’t win.

Fafblog Doesn't Waffle On Iraq

High-octane commentary from Giblets at Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

Now and then I see something intelligent on the internet like this piece of reporting from Iraq from Andrew Sullivan. You know it is true because it comes from a military chaplain (he’s from the military and the church - two great flavors that go great together). He explains for all the stupid people why it looks like things are getting worse in Iraq when they are actually getting not-worse:

“This country became a welfare state under Saddam. If you cared about your well-fare, you towed the line or died. The state did your thinking and your bidding. Want a job? Pledge allegiance to the Ba’ath party. Want an apartment, a car, etc? Show loyalty. …

“So, we come along and lock up sugar daddy and give these people the toughest challenge in the world, FREEDOM. You want a job? Earn it! A house? Buy it or build it! Security? Build a police force, army and militia and give it to yourself. Risk your lives and earn freedom. … they want a sugar daddy, the U.S.A., to do it all. We refuse.”

Damn straight! Giblets for one is sick of these pampered Iraqi welfare moms and their “ohhh feed my family” and their “ohhh rebuild the infrastructure you blew up.” Learn some gratitude, Iraqis! We come halfway around the world and take the time to give weapons to your dictator, start a war with him, crush your economy with sanctions, start another war, blow up your power plants and your cities and disband your police, and we did it all for you, so you could grow up to be as mature and developed a nation as we have become. And this is the thanks we get! Freedom is not free, Iraqis! It has a price. And that price is being invaded crippled and occupied by a foreign military. If you cannot handle freedom we’ll just have to hand you over to a “democracy-minded strongman.” And this one might not be the sugar daddy that Saddam was.

Cheer or cry?

ID Cards At Their Worst

The biggest trouble with national ID cards is that if you have an evil government, they make bad things easier.

Shanghai monitors Internet cafes: SHANGHAI’S INTERNET cafes and bars are being plagued with video cameras and hi-tech logging software, put in place by authorities to make absolutely certain no “forbidden sites” are viewed.

According to yahoo.com and the Shanghai Daily newspaper, Yu Wenchang from the Shanghai Culture, Radio and TV Administration said monitoring will begin in all 1,325 of Shanghai’s geek centres by the end of June.

Banned websites include both pornographic sites and sites with “superstitious content,” such as Falun Gong, the site of a spiritual group.

A number of people have already been sent to prison for downloading and uploading banned material, and it looks like with the new system in place even more will get busted.

The newspaper report also says that all people in Internet cafes will now have to enter the number on an identification card, as proof that they are over 16 years of age. Cafes allowing underage users to surf the web will be fined at first, and if caught again they will have their licenses revoked.

It doesn’t follow from this, necessarily, that ID cards make bad government more likely, or that they necessarily have the same bad effects under decent governments.

I’m certainly prepared to believe that if you have a government that wants to engage in thought control, you have much bigger problems than a little card. On the other hand, governments and indeed everyone, tend to go for what’s cheap and easy. If an ID card regime makes some choices cheaper and easier than they were formerly, surely it increases the odds that people will advocate them?

Why Did the Media Suddenly Drop the Bush Military Records Issue? No One Knows.

Long ago I asked why on earth no one seemed to care any more about the missing Bush Military records. Now comes CJR Campaign Desk: Spin Buster to ask that question again.

Campaign Desk has been curious for a while now about what happened to the story of President Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard. After the White House’s February 13 Friday night data dump of all assembled records, there was little press follow-up. We never read anything that sorted through the details of the over 300 documents released to figure out what, exactly, happened back then; all we ever got was a few pieces noting that little of the information was new, and listing still-unanswered questions.

Why, exactly, did the media drop the matter?

Campaign Desk thinks it has part of the answer,

In part, no doubt, it’s because some of the details seem to come down to personal memories. But that doesn’t strike us as an excuse for throwing in the towel and failing to clarify a controversial story that the press had resuscitated itself (largely courtesy of Bush’s “Meet the Press” interview on February 8).

In other words, Campaign Desk is mystified.

I’m not mystified. Stupefied. Incredulous. But not mystified. See, there’s no Democrat banging the gong on this (and if there were s/he’d be attacked by the press for being shrill). And the press is just not up to doing the hard work itself. Haven’t been since they became ‘professionals’ instead of working stiffs.

Plus, who’s got the story for the agenda-setting New York Times? Why none other than Katherine Seeyle.

Secret Presidential Briefing Memo Revealed!

Thanks to special contacts who do not wish to be named, I have secured an exclusive copy of a key Presidential Daily Briefing, complete with GW Bush’s own marginal notations. Click here to pop up a full size copy!. I think this document puts to rest any question of what Bush knew and when he knew it!

I Start A Legal Academics' "Copyright Experiences Wiki"

Prompted by discussions on various law professor mailings lists of abusive copyright demands by law reviews and legal publishers, I’ve set up a quick wiki for legal writers to document their copyright experiences.

I don’t know if law professors — many of whom will have never seen a wiki before — can be persuaded to contribute to this, especially as the instructions I’ve provided are pretty light weight. But it would be nice if this caught on.

So if you have ever published in a law review or a book with an academic press that does legal topics, please consider adding your copyright experience to this database.

Wilmer, Cutler to Merge with Hale & Dorr

I spent three years as an associate in the London office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and still have warm feelings towards the firm, even though it has grown a lot in the decade plus since I was there, and there are fewer and fewer of the folks I knew. Now it’s going to change (with the times?) by merging with Hale & Dorr, a Boston-based law firm, according to an email to firm alumni from WC&P managing chairman William Perlstein.

The initial word from the trade press seems positive, e.g. this item in the Washington Business Journal:

On the surface, the firms’ practices mesh well: Both have strong litigation departments, and Wilmer’s regulatory expertise combined with Hale and Dorr’s corporate work would complement each other.

The firms’ cultures also match, according to former attorneys at both firms.

“I would say that most law firm mergers are two dinosaurs mating, hoping to get a gazelle. That would not be the case here,” says Bill Flannery, president of WJF Institute, an Austin, Texas-based law firm marketing consultant. “Here you have two superior, cutting-edge, strong law firms. I’m very impressed by this merger, if in fact this is going to happen.”

Firm mergers tend to be difficult; for the sake of the folks I know at WC&P, I hope this one works out.

When I was there WC&P had a very intellectual and public-spirited culture, even in the branch offices (albeit slightly attenuated by distance); my sense is that this ethic has so far survived despite being under pressure from the exigencies of law firm economics. It’s even possible, given the economies of scale in legal practice (which seems to push firms to being small boutiques or megafirms, with little room for midsize), that growth of this sort may be the only way to preserve that culture. It would be interesting, though, to hear from more recent and more senior WC&P alumni (hint).

Perstein’s letter:

We are proud to announce some exciting news about WCP. The firm has agreed in principle to combine with Hale and Dorr LLP, effective by the end of May, to form Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.

We will be combining two great firms at a time when each standing alone is stronger than it has ever been. Each firm has several practices with unsurpassed reputations, and no single law firm now provides the same level of excellence in so many practice areas. We also share core values of professional excellence, exceptionally cordial work relationships, an emphasis on training and development, and a strong commitment to pro bono and the public interest. This is the first combination of two firms on The American Lawyer’s “A List” of elite firms, a ranking based not only on financial performance, but also on pro bono service, the treatment and development of associates, and diversity.

The combination will be a true merger of equals between firms of roughly equivalent size. When the combination takes effect, we will be a firm of about 1000 lawyers, with offices in Washington D.C., Boston, Baltimore, McLean VA, New York, Princeton NJ, Waltham MA, Berlin, Brussels, London, Munich, and Oxford.

For law students and lawyers joining us in the coming years, the combination will be very good news. It creates an even richer mix of the highest-level work, gives our lawyers a broader range of professional opportunities, and ensures the continued growth of our professional development and training programs. Both firms have historically provided superb professional development programs for their associates. In the 2003-4 Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, Hale and Dorr was ranked third in the country for training. Together, we expect to make our programs the best in the country. In addition, both firms share a long-standing commitment to individual mentoring that we fully expect to continue and build on.

In a world that is increasingly competitive globally as well as nationally, and in which the scale and breadth of a firm’s practice matters, we look upon this opportunity as a tremendously exciting platform for continuing to build our practice — while enhancing our reputation for excellence and the culture in which we take so much pride. We are looking forward to the new paths that the combination will open up for the firm and all of its lawyers.

Sincerely yours,

William J. Perlstein Managing Partner

NYT Covers Archivist Flap

The New York Times has an article today, Bush Nominee for Archivist Is Criticized for His Secrecy, on the controversy over the Bush administration’s attempt to replace the Archivist of the US before he is willing to go.

The NYT item has lots about the prospective nominee, some positive, some not so positive. What it lacks is discussion of the timing issues that might motivate an administration to want to have its tame Archivist in office quickly. For those, please see last Saturday’s blog item, Politicizing the Archives.

Feed the Homeless. Go to Jail.

Unless there’s something we’re not being told here, this is a sign that some people have lost all sense of morality. Can it really be a CRIME to share your picnic with homeless people? Even if the sharing is premeditated and the picnic somewhat pretextual?

It’s legal to feed stray dogs but not hungry people? The ants can have their picnic but not the homeless? You need a FEEDING LICENSE TO GIVE FOOD TO THE HOMELESS IN TAMPA?

3 Arrested During ‘Picnic’ With Homeless In Park: The feud between the group Food Not Bombs and the police has been going on since at least March 21. Group members, many of whom are students at the University of South Florida, say it is their right to feed anyone, anywhere they see the need.

City officials say any group wanting to gather in the park must pay an application fee and buy insurance. Mayor Pam Iorio has said Massey Park does not have the facilities necessary for feeding the homeless.

Durkin said the group could also affiliate with a recognized feeding organization.

Members of Food Not Bombs, including Anthony Schmidt, say they do not feel they should have to do that.

“It’s a contradiction to say we can’t have a picnic and share with our friends,” he said.

(spotted via the aptly-named The American Street)

We should be giving awards to people who feed the hungry, not arresting them.

How low can we go?

Wiki List of 'Scholars Who Blog'

Alexander Halavais has started a wiki list of Scholars Who Blog. So far he has about 400, and invites those missing to add their names.

Paul Vixie Prophesizes that Spam Spells Doom for DSL Users

Lots of people are suggesting that the ever-increasing wave of spam may bring e-mail as utility to its knees. Others are saying that when something is threatened, it fights back.

Paul Vixie is a genuine Internet pioneer, and a (the?) DNS guru. He was behind one of the big — and somewhat controversial — projects to ‘blackhole’ ISPs whose equipment was used by spammers. But although those projects did block some spam — and also caused harm to innocent bystanders — they proved insufficient to stem the spam tide.

Yesterday, Vixie (on the Nanog mailing list) delivered a prophesy about where this is leading. It deserves to be taken seriously. It is not pretty. In Vixie’s view, if blackholing fails, the next step is a whitelist Internet—at the service provider level.

… you’d better prepare for the inevitability of widespread filtering against your DSL/Cable blocks

[…]

DSL/Cable is a fine access product, it’s better than a phone line & modem because it allows faster web surfing, movies/mp3/etc on demand, and soon VoIP. but no e-mail server anywhere can afford the risk of accepting e-mail or any other push-data from them. risk management, in this case, is going to come in the form of widespread e-mail rejection from all DSL/ Cable blocks. “talk to the hand.”

[Then, in response to an earlier poster’s suggestion that the solution to spam is “better ways to identify the specific sources of the unwanted traffic, even if they change IP addresses”]

my informal survey says the bad guys are better at this stuff than we are,
and they’re getting better every day, and we’re not. the trend isn’t good.

As a DSL user I find the idea that my email will be seen as ‘high risk’ to be very ominous.

Someone is unFurling a Solution to One of My Search Problems

Dream about an application, and someone is already building it!

Back in November I wrote,

It’s true that linkrot is a serious problem. It’s also true that archive.org is only a partial solution since it doesn’t get anything and some big content providers — like the Washington Post — block it.

Is the only solution to make (copyright busting?) offline copies of everything? If so, where’s the tool that will automate that for me, and — more importantly — index all that content on my drive, disk, or tape?

Maximillian Dornseif wrote in the comments section that,

I have build such a beast. Basically it snatches your browsers browsers history and downloads the pages you have visited. Its running on a server because my notebook hasn’t enough harddisk space for such experiments. Searching in this Archive is possible although at the moment only via the command line.

I share that installation with a few friends and we are looking at it as an research project. We would love to make it available to others but on thee other hand we have no desire to to though evaluation of the restrictions based upon us by the various laws governing immaterial goods.

See http://blogs.23.nu/disLEXia/stories/1412/ and http://blogs.23.nu/c0re/stories/1928/

That project looked a little experimental for me…but now it seems that someone else is trying to make a commercial version of a web memory/personal history full text search tool, and he calls it Furl:

John Battelle’s Searchblog, Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, And The Personalweb: Mike [Giles] started Furl about a year ago to solve a problem he - and a lot of us - had with bookmarks. Namely, bookmarking is a lame, half-assed, unsearchable, flat, linkrotten approach to recalling that which you’ve seen and care to recall on the web. Now, a lot of folks have made stabs at solving this particular problem, but Mike’s got a lot of very cool features built into his beta, and more on the way.

And from my conversation with him, he’s got one more thing that others might be missing: a clear sense of what Furl could do if it were part of a massively scaled platform like AOL, Yahoo, Google, or MSN. If I’m reading him right, he’s smart enough to realize that what he’s built will probably be a feature set on everyone of those platforms before the end of 2005, and he’s also smart enough to know that by launching Furl, he’s forced all of them to consider him as the person to watch in the space.

So what is it about Furl that made me write that past paragraph? After all, it’s just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your web browsing. It adds several features that others don’ t have - full text search on your saved pages, for example. But Furl saves the entire web page you’ve “furled”, not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I’ll call a “PersonalWeb,” on the other.

Now, having your own PersonalWeb is a very cool thing. Every page you care about is now saved forever, and is searchable. How I wish I had Furl while I was researching my book for the past year. This application was inconceivable before the cost of storage and bandwidth began to fall toward zero.

But wait…there’s more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you’ve already Furl’d. Now, let’s play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and…some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in…yup, far better search (and…far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).

Mark Kleiman Points To the Best Stuff in the Woodward Book

Another nice thing about the Internet is all the smart people who kindly act as filters for us.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Woodward so far: Two dynamite political issues and one impeachable offense

1. The President told the Saudi Ambassador about our war plans two days before he told his Secretary of State.

2. The Saudi Ambassador promised to knock down oil prices in time to help the President get re-elected.

3. Money appropriated for Afghan reconstruction was instead used, without Congressional approval, for preparations for the war in Iraq.

Well, it’s a start.

Rafe Colburn on Iraqi Blogs

Absolutely one of the best things about the Internet is how easy it makes it to get unfiltered perspectives from people unlike (or far away from) the ones you run into every day. And then there are nice people like Rafe Colburn who want to help you find them…

rc3.org | Surveying Iraqi weblogs: I’ve been reading Iraqi weblogs lately, and I thought I’d give a brief survey of the ones I follow, in case anyone else is interested. They come from varying perspectives, and I find all of them fascinating. Some of them I find more depressing than others. One thing you’ll find is that the Iraqis who write these weblogs have mistaken impressions about America. I find them illuminating as well, because the impressions of America that Iraqis have are far more important than the truth in terms of whether or not we have any hope of leaving Iraq better off than we found it.

The Kerry Rally

We went to the Kerry rally on Sunday. We arrived about the time the seating was supposed to open, that is about an hour and quarter before Kerry was to speak. The line was already enormous, and it doubled at least while we were waiting. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors before being admitted to the outdoor seating/standing area, which took a very very long time and which made me sad and nostalgic for the days when politics was less paranoid.

We were among the last admitted to the roped-off area, and had a very obstructed view. Standing on a small stone wall, I could just see Kerry from the neck up.

Kerry spoke surprisingly well — especially given what I had heard about him as a lackluster stump speaker. He was by no means the best I ever heard, but he was good.

Kerry began by noting that after 9/11 Bush had an opportunity to unify the nation; instead he divided it. The speech had a little more pandering than I would ideally like — especially the trade stuff about his plan to stop subsidizing the export of jobs, and the lengthy list of promises to make college more affordable (which, if I heard it right, actually doesn’t amount to that much per person unless the student spends two years in a domestic peace corps-like job either before or after college). It did have more detail and Senatorial reference to programs and such than you would find in the most classic stemwinder, but it never had so much detail that it got boring

The top applause lines were

• a number of lines about how Bush misled the nation and sent US soldiers off to die without revealing his real motives; [Update: I left out maybe the biggest applause line of this sort: “In America, we fight wars because we have to, not because we choose to.”]
• the pledge to increase energy independence via a push for alternative fuel sources so that foreign policy is no longer driven by Middle East oil [although even raising this to the 20% of consumption promised would only lessen not eliminate the US’s imports];
• the promise to stop the lies and level with the public;
• a promise to provide some form of healthcare for the uninsured (here Kerry was almost disingenuous, making it sound like everyone would get the kind of care Senators get; but while saying that is what should happen, I think it’s not what he actually promised);
• the promise to get an Attorney General who is nothing like John Ashcroft;
• “Within weeks of being inaugurated I will return to the U.N. and I will rejoin the community of nations.”

All these got a lot more applause than the trade stuff or even the college-costs stuff.

The crowd loved him. I left feeling more cheerful about the Democratic nominee then when I arrived, and the whole family clanked a little due to the several nice Kerry buttons we acquired.

Spain Says Adiós to Iraq

Spanish PM Jose Zapatero announced today he’s pulling Spain’s militarily small but politically significant contingent out of Iraq.

BBC—Full text: Spain’s PM calls troops back: Good evening. This morning, once the defence minister [Jose Bono] was sworn in, I gave him the order to make the necessary arrangements for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq to return home in the shortest time, and with the greatest security possible.

Combine this with the British commander in southern Iraq saying The moment that Sayid Ali says, ‘We don’t want the Coalition here’, we might as well go home, plus the very confused reports as to whether negotiations are going well, poorly, or not at all, and it doesn’t look good.

It now appears that the Bush ‘strategy’ is to hand off the whole mess to anyone who will take it and cut and run on June 30. The theory being that no amount of Islamic zealotry on TV from Iraq (a three day wonder at best) could be as bad as the endless casualty news. The original plan was to keep bases in country after June 30 under a status of forces agreement, but it looks certain there will be none — so the only fig leaf left would be protecting whatever international contingent stepped in for the US. If one does.

This sort of tail-between-the-legs defeat—which although not inevitable looks more likely today than it ever has yet—would be an international political disaster for the US, and I would say a domestic disaster for the Iraqis who would most likely end up with civil war or theocracy. What’s so awful to contemplate is the real possibility that this disaster would be better than any of the alternatives (for the US) that may be on offer next as soon as next week if the simmering civil war boils over. (Optimistic fact: the Iraqi community leaders appear to understand how much they all have to lose if this happens.)

Perhaps it’s more fair to say that if the US suffers a political defeat it will be the realization — in the economic sense of the term — of the political disaster that Iraq has been for the US since the decision was made to invade without UN backing. It has also in some sense been a military disaster, not in terms of military defeat, but in counting the cost in lives, resources, and attention better spent elsewhere.

More from Zapatero’s speech:

In March 2003, more than a year ago, I made a public commitment, which I repeated in February.

I said then that in the event of my being elected prime minister by citizens, I would order the return of the Spanish troops from Iraq if the UN did not take charge of the political and military situation.

With the information we have available and which we have gathered in the course of recent weeks, it is not foreseeable that a UN resolution will be adopted that matches the content [as heard] on which our presence in Iraq was made conditional.

Neither the public statements of the main players involved in this conflict nor the contacts held by the defence minister at my request in the course of the last month provide any evidence allowing one to foresee a substantial variation in the political and military situation existing in Iraq within the period envisaged, and in the manner demanded by the Spanish people.

These circumstances have led me to take the decision to order the return of our soldiers with the maximum security and consequently in the shortest possible time.

WP12 Under Linux (via WINE)?

I would dearly love this to be true: WPU Forums - Breaking News: WP12 Runs Under WINE (Linux)

A long history with WordPerfect…going back to version 4.1…is by far the most significant reason why I don’t switch to a Linux desktop. But before I do anything rash, I’d need to see a report by someone who had really used WP12, exercising lots of features on long heavily footnoted documents, for a period of weeks, not just someone who fired it up and ‘gave it a shot.’

I also see that Corel is reviving the long-lost WP8 for Unix (is that 8.0 or the better 8.1PE [not 8.1LE]? I hope and trust it’s the hard-to-find 8.1PE, not one of the inferior and easier-to-find versions). That’s an alternate solution, I guess, although I’d really rather not regress two versions from WP10. And I recall reading that it had some issues (printers? fonts?).

Update: Looks like it is an 8.1 version, at least, and that the ugliest usability issues have been mitigated. Hmm…

Politicizing the Archives

Politics as usual? Or just another minor perversion of democracy — keeping facts from the people not because they need to be secret, but because their release might embarrass Republicans? It’s unclear, but it doesn’t look good.

National Coalition for History Washington Update Concern is growing within the archival and historical communities regarding the Bush administration’s hoped for “fast-track” process to replace Archivist of the United States John Carlin with one of its own choosing — historian Allen Weinstein. According to informed sources, the administration hopes to short-circuit the normal confirmation process and see Weinstein confirmed through an “expedited” process. Their goal — place Weinstein in the position prior to the November election.

According to Hill insiders, the effort to replace Carlin is coming from the highest levels of the White House. Reportedly, Karl Rove who is widely viewed as one of the president’s chief political advisors, if not his political mastermind and, Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, want their own archivist in place for two overarching reasons: first, because of the sensitive nature of certain presidential and executive department records likely to be opened in the near future, and second, because there is genuine concern in the White House that the president may not be re-elected.

Indeed, the Society of American Archivists says it’s concerned:

We are concerned about the sudden announcement on April 8, 2004, that the White House has nominated Allen Weinstein to become the next Archivist of the United States. Prior to the announcement, there was no consultation with professional organizations of archivists or historians. This is the first time since the National Archives and Records Administration was established as an independent agency that the process of nominating an Archivist of the United States has not been open for public discussion and input. We believe that Professor Weinstein must—through appropriate and public discussions and hearings—demonstrate his ability to meet the criteria that will qualify him to serve as Archivist of the United States.

When former President Ronald Reagan signed the National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (Public Law 98-497), he said that, “the materials that the Archives safeguards are precious and irreplaceable national treasures and the agency that looks after the historical records of the Federal Government should be accorded a status that is commensurate with its important responsibilities.” Earlier in 1984, when the National Archives Act was being discussed, Senate Report 98-373 cautioned that if the Archivist was appointed “arbitrarily, or motivated by political considerations, the historical records could be impoverished [or] even distorted.”

OK, this may be small beer compared to secretly taking money from appropriations to help the Afghanistani people and spending it to do planning for the Iraq campaign. But it looks ugly none the less.

For an example of what is at stake, see this item about the Nixon documents [link fixed to remove superfluous “.”]

More from the article at the National Coalition for History

Though it is not widely known, in January 2005, the first batch of records (the mandatory 12 years of closure having passed) relating to the president’s father’s administration will be subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and could be opened. Another area of concern to presidential officials relates to the 9-11 Commission records. Because there is no mandatory 30-year closure rule (except for highly classified White House and Executive Department records and documents), all materials relating to the commission are scheduled to be transferred to the National Archives upon termination of the Commission later this year. These records could be made available to researchers and journalists as soon as they are processed by NARA.

Note that as these records are coming on stream this year, the line quoted above about how this is a contingency plan for losing the election is probably wrong. If the article’s basic hypothesis is correct, then the administration needs its archivist in place sooner than the next inauguration.

In what appears to be a calculated move by administration officials, Rove and Gonzales have advanced the nomination of Weinstein fully aware that according to the “National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-497) the Archivist of the United States position is to be an appointment based “without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office of the Archivist.” If Weinstein is confirmed and if President Bush is not elected, then President Kerry could be accused of “politicizing” the position should he try to replace Weinstein. In fact, though, the president’s strategy in seeking to replace Carlin at this time rather than later injects an element of partisanship that could give John Kerry, should he be elected president in November, ample justification to replace Weinstein in the same manner that the White House is seeking to replace Carlin.

Carlin has made it widely known that he anticipated stepping down from the Archivist position in July 2005, upon his 65th birthday, upon the tenth anniversary of his appointment to the position, and upon the completion of his ten-year strategic plan for NARA. His intention not to step down until then has been stated in several public interviews including (reportedly), in a recent interview with CNN’s Brian Lamb (26 November 2003 broadcast of “National Journal”). Months back, recognizing that Carlin intended to step down next year, archival organizations had begun to pull together qualification statements and a “highly qualified” list of names for the White House to consider in finding Carlin’s replacement. What appeared to be an orderly procedure to pass power from Carlin to a new archivist in summer 2005 has now been short-circuited.

There are two basic ways for the Archivist of the United States to be replaced — resignation or replacement by the President. In his letter to NARA employees last week (see “Historian Allen Weinstein Slotted by Bush Administration to be Next Archivist of the United States” in NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE, Vol 10, #15 8 April 2004) Carlin stated that he was not resigning and he would not submit his resignation until a new archivist is appointed. There is no indication that the White House has any cause-related reason to replace Carlin and no reason was communicated to Congress when Weinstein’s nomination was advanced formally last week. Some observers speculate that by refusing to resign until a new archivist is in place, Carlin is tacitly protesting what Hill insiders consider his “premature” removal.

If Carlin (a Democrat appointed by Bill Clinton) had resigned outright, the decks would have been cleared for the White House to promptly replace him. However, that did not happen. It appears that the White House does not want any adverse publicity that would be generated by officially coming up with a “reason” for communicating to Congress its desire to replace Carlin as required by law (“the President shall communicate the reasons for any such removal to each House of the Congress”). Hence, by advancing Weinstein’s nomination (which was received by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on 8 April) and by securing Weinstein’s confirmation, the White House can then quietly force Carlin’s resignation.

Owing to the controversy surrounding the anticipated resignation of Carlin, historians and archivists are calling for these and other issues to be addressed in Weinstein’s confirmation hearing. To that end, some historical and archival organizations believe that John Carlin should also be invited to testify under oath regarding the pressure he is under and what he knows about his “premature” resignation. Governmental Affairs Committee staff, however, report that such a move would almost be unprecedented in a confirmation hearing.

On 14 April 2004, archival, historical, and other governmental watchdog organizations concerned both the politicization of the appointment process and the qualifications of the nominee, issued a “statement” calling for the Senate to conduct a confirmation hearing consistent with other positions of importance requiring Senate confirmation. The statement drafted by the Society of American Archivists and issued on behalf of several archival and historical organizations (see http://www.archivists.org/statements/weinstein.asp ) raises a concern about “the sudden announcement on April 8, 2004, that the White House has nominated Allen Weinstein to become the next Archivist of the United States.”

According to the statement that has the endorsement of the Society of American Archivists, the Association of Research Libraries, Council of State Historical Records Coordinators, Northwest Archivists, Inc., the Association of Documentary Editors, Midwest Archives Conference, the American Association for State and Local History, and the Organization of American Historians: “Prior to the announcement, there was no consultation with professional organizations of archivists or historians. This is the first time since 1985 that the process of nominating an Archivist of the United States has not been open for public discussion and input. We believe that Professor Weinstein must — through appropriate and public discussions and hearings — demonstrate his ability to meet the criteria that will qualify him to serve as Archivist of the United States….the decision to appoint a new Archivist should be considered in accordance with both the letter and the spirit of the 1984 law.”

The statement also calls on the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs “to schedule open hearings on this nomination in order to explore more fully 1) the reasons why the Archivist is being replaced, and 2) Professor Weinstein’s qualifications to become Archivist of the United States.”

Sen. Kerry to Speak on Campus this Sunday

University of Miami: College and Young Democrats are hosting a visit by Senator Kerry to the UM campus on Sunday. The efficient Kerry operation also sent me an email:

We invite you to rally with John Kerry on Sunday, April 18th, at the University of Miami.

John Kerry’s college tour was a big success. The huge crowds brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm to the campaign. Let’s keep the momentum going. There will be a tremendous amount of media at Sunday’s rally — let’s make Sunday’s crowd the biggest yet.

Sunday, April 18th
University of Miami — The Rock
1306 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, Florida 33146

Doors open at 12:30 PM.

I think I’ll take the kids…hope they don’t yawn too much … not that we’ll be in the center of anything…

More On Civility in Politics (or its Absence)

It tends to be conservatives who push loudest for civility in public discourse. Given that uncivility is often part of a challenge to the status quo, and given that conservative politics tend to favor the interests of whoever is doing well out of the status quo, a strategy of cabining dissent to means that are less likely to disturb the status quo is a natural and sensible political strategy. (I happen to think civility is a good thing most of the time, but for other reasons; if that happens to dovetail with traditional conservativism, well, that’s the breaks.) The strategy runs into some trouble when the conservative movement allies with have-not populists; and it founders when the leadership of the movement is taken over by corporatists and especially by nuts.

Witness the following elements of civil discourse:

• The Bush re-election campaign plans to begin running an advertisement on Friday that questions Senator John Kerry’s commitment to American troops in Iraq.
• Senator Bill Frist, shielded from libel law by legislative immunity, accuses Richard Clarke of perjury, a charge now decisively rebutted by Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (via Mark Kleiman, who is futilely waiting for a retraction.)
• Rush Limaugh suggests that the Clintons could assassinate Sen. Kerry if it he wins the Presidency on a ticket without Sen. Clinton.

Compare to this much more civil and effective use of ridicule.

12 Million Channels and Nothin' On?

Jim Moore prophesizes about Personal Television Networks:

This afternoon Dave Winer and I were talking and he told me about his coinage of the term “Personal Television Networks”—PTNs. What are they? Think: what the personal computer was to the mainframe computer, personal television networks are to the current behemoth networks.

Which immediately makes me think of Bruce Springsteen.

Meanwhile, as we rebuild/remodel our house we are installing wiring for cable/satellite TV points in various places. But we still can’t decide if we actually want to buy a TV.

Not Your Number One Draft Choice (Or, the 83rd percentile President)

Must-read DeLong, If You Said to Me, Name 25 Million People Who Would Maybe Be President… He Wouldn’t Have Been in That Category (quoting an amazing interview with Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein). Brad then adds his comments:

Never yet has a grownup looked me in the eye and said, “George W. Bush is qualified to be President of the United States.” The most anyone has ever done is to say (around the time of the inauguration), “Look, Brad, he’ll be Queen Elizabeth; Colin Powell will be Tony Blair and Paul O’Neill will be Gordon Brown. There are lots of Head-of-State things that George W. Bush will do really well, and the government will be in good hands.” But I don’t think any grownup would say that or anything like that now.

Which just shows you that Berkeley is special. I suspect that many people in this community probably think Bush is just fine for the job. Some national religious leaders, after all, have said they think that his 5-4 election in the face of both contrary precedent and a contrary popular vote was a sign of divine providence. Others predict a divinely-ordained Bush victory in 2004. These views don’t exist in a total vacuum.

I bet it’s nice in Berkeley this time of year.

A note on calculation. There are at this writing about 293 million people in the US. So if you are the 25,000,001st most likely President, that still puts you in the 91st percentile. Top ten percent. Not so bad, surely?

But wait, I hear you say, we shouldn’t count the children. Or maybe we shouldn’t count anyone under 35 — the minimum age to be President. OK. Conveniently, in 2000 the median age in the US was 35.3, putting good ol’ number 25,000,001 at the 82nd percentile or so. Top twenty percent. Not great, but still perhaps two standard deviations from the mean?

Myself, I’d estimate a much lower percentile.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a very very funny related screenshot of a headline in the UK’s Daily Mirror.

Something Funny at MS-NBC?

This is odd. When I point Firefox at MS-NBC, I get this:

Network Error
Unable to read URL from host msnbc.msn.com: Not in GZIP format

But if I try to visit the site with IE6, it comes up just fine.

And yes, I tried it several times.

Is this a Firefox problem, a very very unlikely coincidence, or is MS-NBC blocking a non-MS browser.

Update: I only have this problem on the win98se machine, not on the win XP machine, which suggests it’s something local. But it’s very odd.

25GB 'Paper' Disk Invented

Even if the slashdot headline was slightly misleading, an optical disc made 51% of paper is still pretty impressive:

TOPPAN PRINTING CO., LTD (TSE: 7911) and Sony Corporation (TSE: 6758) today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California.

Using the disc-structure of Blu-ray Disc technology, the new paper disc has a total weight that is 51% paper.

Idle Question About Pre-9/11 Briefings

The papers and pundits are abuzz about the revalation that our CIA Director met with GW Bush at most twice in August of 2001, including only one meeting while Bush was on his extended vacation in Crawford, TX. Leaving aside the issue of whether other forms of communication might have worked — did they ever speak by phone? — here’s the real question I wish someone would ask:

How often did DCIA George Tenet meet with Dick Cheney during that period?

After all, it seems increasingly and unavoidably clear that GW Bush is not in charge:

Q. Mr. President, Why are you and the vice president insisting on appearing together before the 9/11 commission? And Mr. President, who will you be handing the Iraqi government over to on June 30?

A. We’ll find that out soon. That’s what Mr. Brahimi is doing. He’s figuring out the nature of the entity we’ll be handing sovereignty over. And secondly, because the the 9/11 commission wants to ask us questions. That’s why we’re meeting, and I look forward to meeting with them and answering their questions.

Q. Mr. President, I was asking why you’re appearing together rather than separately, which was their request.

A. Because it’s a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us, and I’m looking forward to answering them.

Let’s see. Hold on for a minute. Oh — I’ve got some must calls, I’m sorry.

Ed Felton Explains the DRM Designer's Mindset

Ed Felton has been peering into the mindset of the DRM designer. And what he sees is wheels missing a few cogs:

Freedom to Tinker: A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility: The whole point of DRM technology is to prevent people from moving music usefully from point A to point B, at least sometimes. To make DRM work, you have to ensure that not just anybody can build a music player — otherwise people will build players that don’t obey the DRM restrictions you want to connect to the content. DRM, in other words, strives to create incompatibility between the approved devices and uses, and the unapproved ones. Incompatibility isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of deficient DRM systems — it’s the goal of DRM.

A perfectly compatible, perfectly transparent DRM system is a logical impossibility.

The idea is so odd that it’s worth stopping for a minute to try to understand the mindset that led to it. And here [Leonardo] Chiariglione’s [the creator of the MP3 music format and formerly head of the Secure Digital Music Initiative] comments on MP3 are revealing:

[Scientific American interviewer]: Wasn’t it clear from the beginning that MP3 would be used to distribute music illegally?

[Chiariglione]: When we approved the standard in 1992 no one thought about piracy. PCs were not powerful enough to decode MP3, and internet connections were few and slow. The scenario that most had in mind was that companies would use MP3 to store music in big, powerful servers and broadcast it. It wasn’t until the late ’90s that PCs, the Web and then peer-to-peer created a completely different context. We were probably naïve, but we didn’t expect that it would happen so fast.

The attitude of MP3’s designers, in other words, was that music technology is the exclusive domain of the music industry. They didn’t seem to realize that customers would get their own technology, and that customers would decide for themselves what technology to build and how to use it. The compatible-DRM agenda is predicated on the same logical mistake, of thinking that technology is the province of a small group that can gather in a room somewhere to decide what the future will be like. That attitude is as naive now as it was in the early days of MP3.

Alas, what Ed leaves out is the attitude of the folks who hire DRM designers. They may know perfectly well that other machines can be built to defeat their systems. But they are prepared to make it all illegal (pace DMCA), and use the courts and the cops to spread fear and generally decrease respect for the legal system as it tries to hold back the tide.

Capt. Yee Wins on Appeal

The case of Capt. Yee came to an official end this week when the remaining (minor) charges against him got reversed on appeal.

Convictions Dropped for Muslim Chaplain at Guantánamo Bay: An Army general on Wednesday dismissed the convictions in the case of a Muslim chaplain who was initially suspected of espionage at the Guantánamo Bay prison for terror suspects but was found guilty only on lesser charges of adultery and downloading pornography.

The appellate decision by Gen. James Hill, the Army Southern Command chief who oversees military operations at Guantánamo, wiped the slate clean for Capt. James J. Yee, who ministered for 10 months to foreign terrorism detainees at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“This means there will be no official mention of it in his military record,” General Hill said.

The decision ended what one of Captain Yee’s lawyers, Eugene Fidell, called a “hoax” case.

The case had started to smell pretty bad since shortly after it was filed. Heads should roll over this one. But they won’t. Meanwhile Yee’s marriage, his career, his life, are all badly hurt, even if there’s nothing official in his file.

Sedna Doesn't Have a Moon

Sedna Mystery Deepens With Hubble Images Of Farthest Planetoid: Sedna’s existence was announced on March 15. Its discoverer, Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., was so convinced it had a satellite, that an artist’s concept of Sedna released to the media included a hypothetical moon.

Brown’s prediction was based on the fact, Sedna appears to have a very slow rotation that could best be explained by the gravitational tug of a companion object. Almost all other solitary bodies in the solar system complete a spin in a matter of hours.

“I’m completely baffled at the absence of a moon,” Brown said.

As you can see from this Hubble telescope photo, there is no sign of Sedna’s moon at all. Nope. Can’t see a thing.

It Only Hurts When I Don't Laugh, and I'm Not Laughing

ROEMER: OK. I’m just confused. You see him on August 6th with the PDB. TENET: No, I do not, sir. I’m not there.
ROEMER: OK. You’re not — when do you see him in August?
TENET: I don’t believe I do.
ROEMER: You don’t see the president of the United States once in the month of August?
TENET: He’s in Texas.

OK, we’re starting to get a picture of just how bad the technological lag was at the intelligence agencies… Imagine poor Tenet, desperately wanting to tell the president about this threat to national security: But no! The president is in Texas! Texas! “I just wish I had a way to speak to someone without actually being present in the room… some device that might transmit sound or text over wires… maybe even through the air!

Schneier: National ID is Single Point of Failure for Security

Security Guru Bruce Schneier (who wrote the book that was my intro to serious crypto) argues in an op-ed that A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer primarily because the GIGO problem for the data we’d use to issue the card makes it near worthless as a security device. What’s worse, he says, a national ID card becomes a single point of failure for security if people trust it.

I agree about the GIGO problem (everyone serious does too as far as I can tell). And I agree that the ID cards have about no value as an anti-terrorism tool, although that’s where the political push is coming from (their real virtues if they exist, are elsewhere). And I’ve argued before that over-reliance could be a problem in other ways, but didn’t make the single-point-of-failure argument. May have to add that to the list…

Another Cover-Up

New roadside attraction’s a cover-up. It seems someone complained about nude classical-style statuary at a garden center because the statutes were visible from the road:

… the statues weigh as much as 500 pounds each and are an ordeal to move. So owners Angie Langford and Pam Gregory came up with a different approach to customer service.

Nearly a dozen concrete statues are sporting crimson velvet two-piece sarongs.

I suppose this explains why people got so worked up about the Janet Jackson thing. No, actually, it doesn’t explain it…it’s just consistent with it.

You Get Used to the Monsoons

A UM first year encounters a local meterological phenomenon:

I like the weather in Miami — it’s usually sunny and warm — which is a distinct difference from anywhere else I’ve lived for nine months of the year. The problem? There’s this particular tendency for it to monsoon, sometimes out of the clear blue, that lasts for thirty minutes and then totally clears up. It’s perfectly tropical.

I think I prefer snow to this.

You do get used to it. And it usually ends before the end of the work day, which is convenient.

Listening to Bush

Did I hear this wrong? If I heard right, at one point Bush says that he looks forward to the election because it will give him the chance to show the American people that he has a (secret? at least currently undefined…) plan to win the War on Terror.

UPDATE1: Here’s the text of this part from the AP transcript: “I don’t intend to lose my job. Because I’m going to tell the American people I have a plan to win the war on terror.”

Then a few minutes later, Bush notes that people sometimes ask if you can win the War on Terror, and says that of course it’s not a war that has an end.

The two statements are of course completely consistent, but it’s rare to have a politician speak so frankly about his plan to lie to the public.

I must have heard it wrong. Maybe the second one was that you can win? (Although in fact it is very very hard to win a ‘war’ against an ‘ism’. It can be done — see e.g. ‘Communism’ — but it takes generations.)

Update2 I heard it wrong, although in context I also heard it right: “We are in a long war. The war on terror is not going to end immediately. This is a war against people who have no guilt in killing innocent people. That’s what they’re willing to do. They kill on a moment’s notice, because they’re trying to shake our will, they’re trying to create fear, they’re trying to affect people’s behaviors. And we’re simply not going to let them do that.

“And my fear, of course, is that this will go on for a while, and therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to learn from lessons or mistakes, and leave behind a better foundation for presidents to deal with the threats we face. This is the war that other presidents will be facing as we head into the 21st century.

“One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we’re asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course you can.”

So, the War on Terror will go on through multiple presidencies, but has an end somewhere.

One thing I know I heard right — no apologies, no suggestions that any mistakes were made. Colors nailed to mast.

To be updated as necessary once the transcript is fully online.

Fascinating Account of Baboon Mores (or Memes!)

The NYT has a fascinating article on Baboon mores, No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture. When a freak illness killed off the most dominant and aggressive males, the tone of the whole troop became, well, kindler and gentler. Amazingly as new males joined the troop they got socialized into the dominant culture. Two generations after the die-off, the troop was still operating on a lower stress, higher happiness level.

The implications for faculty politics are left as an exercise for the reader.

National ID Card Issues in a Nutshell

Here’s a story that implicates a vast number of the isses about national ID cards all in one debate. Florida’s own Gov. Bush lobbies for drug-tracking database.

The stated goals for this propsal are pretty laudable: to crack down on prescription drug abuse, e.g. the Rush-style doctor shopping.

The actual details of the proposal make it clear that the project has no chance of achieving its stated goals, since participation by pharmacists and doctors will be optional. If you are a pill mill, you won’t play. Plus, it won’t provide answers in real time, and will use old data, so it won’t be very effective in the best of circumstances. (Sounds pretty boondoggle-like … these are solved problems.)

No one knows what it will cost or how to pay for it.

The proponents are trying to push it through the legislature in a rush.

So far, this is all pretty standard for all too many ID card proposals.

Bonus Florida angle: if the proposal does make it through the legislature, it will be open to attack on the grounds that the legislature is now functus officio.

More On Privacy and Court Records

Just a few semi-random notes from the meeting I’m attending in Tampa on privacy and court records.

• Florida’s open records law doesn’t apply to judicial committees. Thus, although the meetings are open to the public and there’s even a court reporter here writing down everything said during the two days (hired by a private law firm for its own benefit; I guess it’s cheaper than sending a lawyer), groups of us are allowed to dine together socially without violating the law. Executive branch committees can’t do that in Florida without violating the Open Meetings laws. Alas, it was raining last night so a group of us dined in the hotel. Good food, but no way the state’s per diem will cover the bill.

• The Committee has an impressive amount of expertise. Many of the members are veterans not just of the bench and of judicial administration reforms but of several previous court committees on high tech subjects. One thing that I can’t help noticing, however, is how the dominant presentational style is North or Central Florida, rather than the South Florida I’m used to. That means people are frequently soft-spoken, vaguely Southern, almost always over-modest. Even the judges are remarkably kind and pleasant, which is not inevitable in my experience (is this a side-effect of an elected bench? Or just smart selecting by the committee organizers?).

• One of the speakers, Susan Larson, pointed us to a comprehensive web site she maintains on Public Access to Court Records, which looks like a treasure trove of material about what other jurisdictions are doing.

• I am not very impressed with the abilities of many of Florida’s politicians. I am impressed with the quality of the state (not local!) bureaucracy. My dealings with people in the Secretary of State’s office a few years ago on digital signature matters was a happy surprise. The people from the Supreme Court Clerk’s office are even more impressive.

• The problems that the committee is charged with solving are even more complicated than I feared, especially given the thicket of relevant federal and Florida constitutional provisions (and separation of powers issuess…), statutes, rules of court, and issues of relations between courts and regional court clerks (who are separately elected and powerful local officials).

Cover-Up Mode

Orcinus summarizes recent developments on other briefings to GW Bush besides the infamous smoking memo. Most interesting to me is the stuff at the end, discussing how the administration is abusing the classification procedures. The national interest certainly may be damaged by the release of sensitive information about the content of a briefing. But once the info is out, how is the national (as opposed to political) interest hurt by releasing the names of the recipients of a memo?

Excellent Summary of Digital Cops Conference

James Grimmelmann at Law Meme delivers an excellent Report on last month’s ‘Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment’ Conference.

An Example of the Fruits of Judicial Review

As the date for oral argument in front of the US Supreme Court approaches, the Pentagon underakes a PR offensive, and allows (carefully controlled) information to come out about the conditions at Guuantanamo. The Miami Herald gets the first exclusive.

U.S. military opens doors, sheds light on Cuba camp: For the first time since terrorism suspects were brought to the base two years ago, authorities in recent weeks opened the door to rooms used for interrogations, provided limited information on efforts to gather intelligence from prisoners and showed off a courtroom where military tribunals likely will be conducted.

They also allowed some photographs of restricted areas and permitted interviews with interrogators and others who deal with the prisoners.

The new access comes as attorneys for the families of 16 captives are seeking access to federal courts to challenge their indefinite detention. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 20.

Note what’s not in the article: information about suicide attempts, self-injury, or much about the conditions outside of Camp Echo — which is small, and is the luxury wing of the camp. Whatever its skills at nation building, the Pentagon remains champs at lobbying and PR.

Privacy and Court Records

I’m off to Tampa early this morning for two days for the inaugural meeting of the Florida Supreme Court Committee on Privacy and Court Records.

If the truth be told, I suspect that the fundamental problem which the Committee is supposed to solve is a typical tragic choice, one with no pure solution. Thus, when first asked to serve, I expressed reluctance. But when pressed, I capitulated: service on committees like this is part of the social contract I think ought to apply to law professors.

So here I am. If there’s a way to preserve the tradition of the fullest practicable public access to court records (a First Amendment right, and maybe a due process right too) in an age of cheap online full text access and also fully to protect the reasonable privacy interests of people caught up in Family Court or the like (especially pro se’s who often disclose too much about themselves in their filings), I have yet to hear of it.

Some compromises are better than others, but they have resource implications that may be a tough sell in Florida. (Indeed the whole issue is quite political in this state as the revenues from selling electronic access accrue to the offices of the clerks of the regional courts, and they may well object to anything that threatens this revenue stream to their offices or imposes expensive redaction duties.)

Background reading, if you are so minded, begins with the Florida Judicial Management Council Privacy and Electronic Access to Court Records—Report and Recommendations (Dec. 17, 2001) and Florida Report of the Study Committee on Public Records (Feb. 15, 2003).

British (Officers) Describe Ugly Americans

I have no idea if it is true that US forces in Iraq are acting like a bunch of racist Rambos; I would hate to have it be so. But even if it isn’t true, it ought to worry people just a little that our closest allies, the British, a people not renowned for their progressive attitudes about foreigners and non-whites, believe it to be true.

British commanders condemn US military tactics - Iraq

Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

One senior officer said that America’s aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of “unease and frustration” among the British high command.

The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for “sub-humans”.

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: “My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are.”

(via Juan Cole)

Cheney and the Soveitized Duck Test

Steve Koppelman explains how their similarly Sovietized hunting habits demonstrate that Vice President Cheney is at least 175% the leader Boris Yeltsin was.

Read it, and then consider whether there’s anything fishy about this AP story,

President Bush skipped a third round of fishing on his ranch pond Saturday with a crew from an outdoors show, though his performance the day before was something to brag about.

“He took the biggest one of the day,” a bass nearly four pounds, said Roland Martin, host of the Outdoor Life Network program, “Fishing with Roland Martin.”

When Bad Taste Is Acceptable

When I was an undergraduate at Yale, more than twenty years ago, my main extracurricular activity was being a reporter for the Yale Daily News. In my second year on the news I got the coveted “Bart Beat” which made me the student responsible for covering Yale’s President, A. Bartlett Giamatti, then early in his term at Yale, later Commissioner of Baseball, tragically dead far too young.

President Giamatti was a wonderful, erudite, voluble man, always very quotable. I very much enjoyed talking with him. While he often said things I might not have agreed with, there was only one subject that really seemed to make him irrational, and that was protest movements. In his heart (scarred, I thought, by his experience as a non-protestor at Yale in the late 1960’s, when he had been a graduate student and aspirant member of the establishment) I suspect that ‘Bart’ probably did not really approve of any organized protest against the power structure of which he was pleased to be a part. Intellectually, however, he certainly recognized the legitimacy and importance of both personal and even organized protest. Bart drew the line, however, at breaches of the public norms of civility that he held to be an essential part of the academic community. To hear him tell it, one of the greater crimes in the history of Yale was committed when students gathered during the Vietnam war era and shouted obscenities at Yale and national authorities. To scream, and especially to scream four letter words, was to trash all the ideals of civilized discourse that he held dear.

I felt then, and—perhaps demonstrating that I have learned nothing in twenty years—still feel now, that Bart’s rule was too encompassing. It’s a good rule most of the time, but there are extraordinary circumstances, like the Vietnam War, like today, when it is proper at times to break the norms of civility because the things against which one protests are themselves so evil or even obscene.

I thought of Bart this evening because Bart’s rule would forbid my linking to this painful, ugly, and true remix of a portion of George Bush’s recent speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, for it is not a very decorous form of dissent, and will doubtlessly offend many. But we live in special ugly times, and so I commend to you—with a warning—this quicktime movie.

[Movie found via Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing (“vicious, brilliant and true”), who got it via Dan Gilmore (“slightly unfair but powerful”), who got it via Wonkette(“Zany Laff Time…helpful”).]

Smoking Gun? No. Smoking Cannon.

The New York Times has the devastating report..

It begins:

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

Pesky Legal Speedbump for Florida Legislature

Columns: More than one route to the Hill for speaker is a political roundup column that’s mostly about how Flordians are not warming to Rep. Byrd, the loathsome, craven, special-interest sellout who is the Speaker of the Florida House. This despite Speaker Byrd’s tri-weekly spam emails to everyone in the state, his phoney push polls, and piles of special interest campaign money.

But the really interesting thing in this St. Petersburg Times column is the final tidbit, one that is catnip for constitutional law junkies (spotted via Flablog):

State legislators took this week off, but is it legal?

The Florida Constitution says the Legislature cannot adjourn its 60-day session for more than 72 consecutive hours without passing a concurrent resolution. The House and Senate passed no resolution when they left town last week, merely recessing for 10 days for Passover and the Easter holidays.

Former House Dean Carl Ogden says lawmakers could be forced to call themselves back into special session and re-file all of the bills that are pending or face having anything they do declared invalid by a court.

Indeed, the Florida Constitution states in Article III, Section 3, paragraph (e) that “Neither house shall adjourn for more than seventy-two consecutive hours except pursuant to concurrent resolution.”

Whether it follows that an excessive adjournment amounts to the end of the session isn’t 100% obvious to me, although it makes sense if the only other alternative is to say that it’s a political question for which there is no relief (always an awful answer in my book). A quick and dirty Westlaw search found little in the way of relevant caselaw. In light of State ex rel. Landis v. Thompson, 125 Fla. 466, 170 So. 464 (1936) (Legislative day can only be terminated by adjournment or some actual dispersing of assembled membership amounting to same thing), the viewpoint that an excessive adjourment terminates the session certainly seems arguble. I think Mr. Ogden has a point, and that the legislature becomes functus officio after 72 hours adjournment without a concurrent resolution. Meaning no more laws this year unless a special session is called…which indeed requires re-introducing them all.

Goverment Regulation Run Amok

USDA Rejects Meatpacker’s Mad Cow Plan:

The Agriculture Department has rebuffed a meatpacker’s plan to test every animal at its Kansas slaughterhouse for mad cow disease.

The facts are simple, and the politics raw. A super-premium meatpacker wishes to inspect 100% of his animals for mad cow in order to be allowed to export to the lucrative premium beef market Japan.

USDA won’t allow it. Why? Two reasons, one ignoble, one comprehensible if mistaken.

First, because the USDA isn’t about safe food, or indeed about consumers at all. Nor is it even about the interests of small agribusiness. It’s about keeping the Big Farm companies’ (read ‘bigtime Republican bedfellows’) costs down. And they don’t want the precedent of 100% testing because that’s expensive.

Second, and less evil, is the USDA’s desire to avoid setting a precedent that might weaken its hand in upcoming trade negotiations. The administrations claims, and I’m prepared to believe (although with any science claim by this adminstration you have to wonder), that there’s no scientific reason to require testing of 100% of healthy looking animals. I can understand that (providing it’s true…), although you’d think that even so a real free market administration, if we had one, would allow a system where people who wanted to offer extra safety at a price could do so.

But that wouldn’t be this administration: under George Bush you can’t get a license to offer certified, tested, mad-cow-free beef even if you want to and think there’s a market for it.

Holding up a Mirror to Faith in Politics

The Mirror of Justice has had an interesting series of posts debating the role of professions of faith and positions at odds with faith in Presidents and presidential candidates, the latest of which, by Rob Vischer, is More on Kerry as a “cynical nonbeliever”.

Pro G 2 TRE-T 1STITUAN 1 KONSTITU6ON POOR L'€P

“La langue de l’Europe c’est la traduction.”
— Umberto Eco

Roland Barthes would have loved this. A Euro-MP named William Abitbol has gone and had the draft European Constitution translated into Texto SMS ‘for the benefit of the younger generation’.

So here’s a hipness test, dear reader. Can you read this:

Kon6an ke l’€p ét 1 continan porteur 2 6viliza6on ; ke C zabitan, venu /vag suxSiv 2 p8 lé ler zaj 2 lumaniT, i on DvloP progrSivman lé valeur ki fond lumanism : légaliTD zètr, la libRT, le rSP 2 la rézon,

If you looked at that and saw the first paragraph of the Preamble,

Conscients que l’Europe est un continent porteur de civilisation; que ses habitants, venus par vagues successives depuis les premiers âges de l’humanité, y ont développé progressivement les valeurs qui fondent l’humanisme: l’égalité des êtres, la liberté, le respect de la raison,

Then you are hip indeed. And your French is good too.

(Credit: My wife, who teaches EU law, tipped me off to this one.)

The Death Clock

Now this is seriously depressing: The Death Clock - When Am I Going To Die?. According to this admittedly crude measure, I have less than a billion seconds to go. Sounds like a lot? Well it’s less than 30 years…

Then again, the Clock also thinks that just about every senior citizen I know is on borrowed time, so I think it’s a tad pessimistic here.

Cheney Revisionism

At Explananda Chris asks, Is Dick Cheney really so powerful?:

Up until a week ago it was an article of faith for me that Dick Cheney was a powerful figure in the Bush administration: fearless and tough. I have to confess that I’ve been feeling pretty foolish about that recently. I mean, if Dick Cheney is so powerful and tough, then why is he afraid to appear before the Sept. 11th Commission without George W. Bush? What - does he need the President to hold his hand or something?

Frankly, this is embarrassing for all of us who have spent the last few years trafficking recklessly in conspiracy theories about the man.

See also this Luckovich cartoon on joint POTUS-Veep appearances.

The Smoking Gun on 9/11

So know we know about the smoking gun: GW Bush got a memo entitled BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO ATTACK INSIDE UNITED STATES.

And they did nothing.

And that’s why the administration made such a fight about releasing the PDB’s to the 9/11 Commission.

When the 9/11 commission was created, I think no one who hadn’t seen this memo could have imagined it would exist. I don’t care how much Dr. Rice and the others spin the memo as “historical” or failing to spell out what should be done to the last detail. Short of capturing a memo stating the date, place and time of an attack, what more do you want? Do Presidents get memos like this every day? I rather doubt it.

In a normal world we might actually be having a serious conversation about impeachment at this point. Sleeping at the switch is serious. But we’ll have to content ourselves with an election. Let’s hope they count the votes this time. And remember that sometimes — sometimes — even the conspiracy theories are not damning enough.

Update: Billmon and others were struck by this also. Billmon, however, says that the title of the August 6, 2001 presidential briefing was mentioned in a news article by Bob Woodward published May, 2002. I missed it, and so it seems did he.

Which I suppose proves my point that no quanity of evidence of negligence matters here, except to the election. In that context having the telegenic Dr. Rice say this title on camera — and then beat around the bush to denigrate its significance — is much more important than having it on the Common Dreams web page. But it certainly disproves my point above that no one could have imagined such a damning memo. (New question, why didn’t any of the articles over the legalistic fights over the PDB’s mention this title?)

Meanwhile I’ve acquired the Clarke book…

New Gitmo Lawsuit

The NYT reports on a new Gitmo lawsuit. Its filed by Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a militiary lawyer (JAG) defending one of the Guantanamo detainees. The suit — filed in his own name! — challenges the fundamental legality of the military tribunal order setting up the procedure by which the detainees will be tried. That’s the process that foreign jurists call a Kangaroo Court.

Prof. Neil Katyal is on the case, and the complaint is on his webpage.

I have to say that I really admire the military lawyers who are pursuing these cases. They face a much more substantial career risk than the average partner who has to choose between billables and pro bono zeal. Suing Rumsfeld personally takes guts.

Eyewitness in Iraq

The American Street links to The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit by ‘A View from A Broad’ — a livejournal blog by a woman in the field of fire in Iraq.

Very compelling reading.

Real Video 22 Seconds Later

So I’m listening to Dr. Condi Rice on NPR. Idly I call up the real video at c-span to see the video. It’s 22 seconds behind the radio. I wonder how much of this is encoding delay, and how much is network delay and how much is load/cache time.

I’m very conscious that things often sound very different on radio than they look on TV. It was often said that Nixon won his debate with JFK if you heard it, but lost if you saw him looking shifty.

Here it’s rather the reverse. Dr. Rice’s voice quavers on the radio; she sounds very nervous. On the picture, she looks glamorous and composed.

Evil Lawyer Humor

Probably I’m the last lawyer-blogger in America to notice the Anonymous Lawyer, which I found via the also-anonymous Partner Blog, And What Thanks Do I Get. AWTDIG is sometimes funny, but has a more serious edge. The kind law students probably won’t like. Because it has enough truth to hurt.

The Anonymous Lawyer, on the other hand, mostly has the sort of truth that won’t hurt as long as you are not involved. It’s no doubt a sign of my moral degeneration that I found this post pretty darn funny. I don’t suppose everyone will.

Robert Waldman's Blog

Robert Waldman has had a blog for a while, but recently he’s upped the pace of his blogging. Read him. Link him (let’s raise him from a TLB Crunchy Crustacean).

Here’s Robert, making me feel almost sympathetic for Art Buchwald, something I would have thought was impossible,

“A Sorry State of Affairs” indeed

Art Buchwald, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Frist agree

Art Buchwald
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page C04

Washington is in a frenzy and it’s all because of Richard Clarke. In testifying before the 9/11 commission, he did the unforgivable, the one thing that no government official ever dared to do. He apologized.

…

When Clarke offered his mea culpa, the White House and Republican senators went ballistic. One leader said: “He had no right to say he was sorry. No one, not even the president, is allowed to apologize for anything that Washington does. It’s treason.”

Senator William Frist
reported Friday, March 26, 2004

“In his appearance before the 9-11 Commission, Mr. Clarke’s theatrical apology on behalf of the nation was not his right,”

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A25

“Indeed, one has to admire it — the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke”

Poor Buchwald. Too much time has passed. His column has such a long lead time that his attempt at satire is totally dated, because, by the time it is published, the op ed page has already printed a more ferocious attack on the crime of apologising than he could imagine. Buchwald has made a brilliant career of exaggerating the hypocricy and nastiness of Washington politics. I’m afraid he has to find a new schtick because is is no longer possible to exagerate the hypocricy and nastiness of Washington politics.

Scalia's Actions Speak Louder than Words

Two Reporters Told to Erase Scalia Tapes. Justice Scalia gave a speech today in which he said “The Constitution of the United States is extraordinary and amazing. People just don’t revere it like they used to.” Meanwhile, a federal Marshal was ordering two reporters to erase tapes of the speech, even though there had been no notice of a no-taping policy. In one case she went so far as to grab a digital recorder from a reporter who, unfortunately, whimped out:

The reporter initially resisted, but later showed the deputy how to erase the digital recording after the officer took the device from her hands. The exchange occurred in the front row of the auditorium while Scalia delivered his speech about the Constitution.

I’m curious as to what law authorizes a federal marshall — or any police officer — to enforce such a policy at a Justice’s request (as opposed to the property owner’s, where it might in some states be a form of trespass) outside federal property anyway. (There may well be one, but not doing criminal law, I don’t know of it.)

As an administrative lawyer I’d especially like to know how formalist Scalia would explain that when he fails to give proper notice, his new no-taping policy (an addition to his longstanding no-cameras policy) is nonetheless binding on all present. I’m certain he would not apply this nunc pro tunc reading to most other contracts. Indeed, Justice Scalia is the Justice most strongly identified with questioning the government’s right to take any retroactive decisions that harm well-founded expectations, e.g. in his concurrence in Bowen v. Georgetown University Hospital.

And, oh yes, since this is a (small) Takings, it’s a Fifth as well as a First Amendment violation, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s a lovely Constitution. Could its current disrepute have anything to do with the nature and quality of its custodians?

Depressing & Effective

American Leftist has produced a very effective and depressing piece of agitprop: a photomontage of GW Bush made up of photos of US service men and women who have died in Iraq.

Viewable in : small, medium, or large.

(found via Boing-Boing, which is on a roll this week).

Update: There’s a clickable thumbnail in the right margin above, which I see fine on firefox (and in Movabletype preview mode)…but I don’t see it in Explorer.

Making Plaxto Go Away

Via Boing Boing, via Dan Gilmore, a link to How to Opt-Out of email from that horrible Plaxto’s email.

Meaningless Personality Quizzes, Part 7

Postatem obscuri lateris nescitis. “You do not know the power of the Dark Side.” There are two possibilities: you are a Star Wars geek, or you are unreasoningly scary.

Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I Should Read Campaign Desk

In yesterday's coda to the Yawning Boy saga, I forgot to mention an illuminating report from Thomas Lang on the campaigndesk.org Web site on Friday.

Lang arguably gets to the bottom of the question of why CNN ever reported that the White House called to cast doubts on the accuracy of the yawning boy video. This has caused much huffing and puffing amongst administration critics.

Lang quotes CNN spokesman Matt Furman thusly: "When we aired the Letterman clip Tuesday morning a producer in the CNN White House unit called our national desk to raise an issue about the potential authenticity of the tape. That conversation was relayed among several people in the newsroom and by the time it made it to [news anchor] Daryn Kagan it had gone through several people in the news room and unfortunately [the on-air version] became 'The White House has said the tape is not authentic.'"

And speaking of yawning boy, reader Stephen Stackwick e-mailed me yesterday with this comment:

"Interesting that W. had time to scribble a note to Tyler but families of KIA servicemen get (duplicate) form letters."

Stackwick was referring to last Tuesday's Washington Post story by David Maraniss who told of one Iowa family who lost their son getting two identical form letters from Bush.

Florida Ballot Initiatives, 2004 edition

In “Starve The Beast”, Junior Division, Steve Koppelman brings me the news of three really lousy ballot initiative ideas being promoted in Florida:

One would somehow “protect patient rights” by limiting malpractice suits. I guess doctors and their insurance companies are patients too sometimes.

Another would require the state to further tax gambling operations and earmark the money for schools. If decades of experience with lotteries and gambling taxation nationwide have taught us anything, it’s that “earmarking” the proceeds for education means those proceeds quickly become the only source of education funds and that educational spending doesn’t budge upward one bit, as the liberated money once put towards education gets redirected to all manner of other things.

So the medical and insurance lobbies are trying an end run around the trial-lawyer and civil-liberties lobbies. All right. That’s to be expected. And yet another generation in yet another state thinks that it’s found a magical way to double school funding when all it’s really found is a way to give the legislature an incentive to deploy slot machines at every gas station, motel and convenience store in the state. Think Nevada. All right again. That’s to be expected.

But then there’s that other ballot initiative in the trifecta, the one that would increase the homestead property tax exemption from $25,000 to $50,000. At a time when the crush of newcomers to Florida has schools filling their parking lots with mobile classrooms attached to the mobile classrooms, looming water supply problems to address, and ever-growing demand for more police, more firefighters, more roads, more teachers, more, more, more, there’s this.

Despite this, I do not support the Governor and gerrymandered Republican legislature’s plan to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives. The Republicans are still smarting from the requirement that they shrink class sizes in schools, which may well require a tax increase — something Jeb wants to avoid at all costs in order to further his Presidential ambitions.

This state is not a progressive bastion, but it is more progressive than the regressive legislature. As they say, this is no accident, but a result of the way the Republicans have drawn the legislative districts plus the fact that the liberal elements are often in urban concentrations. So the ballot initiatives, for all that they are sometimes wacky are a Very Good Thing both in principle and often in practice. And if I don’t always agree with the outcomes, much less the proposals, well, that’s democracy.

Form Factor Matters

I am the very happy user of a Lexar secure Jump Drive. I love not having to carry a zip drive back and forth from work as I kept forgetting to put it in my backpack. (We can’t access our office hard disks from home. The functionality was promised ages ago, was installed some time ago, but we are not allowed to use it.)

My first beef with the Lexar was that it was so small that I kept misplacing it, but a snap-release keychain from the hardware store fixed that, and now it lives in my pocket when not in use.

But I have a second problem: the thing is too fat for my Tripp-Lite ultra-mini USB hub The hub has two USB ports on each side, very close together, and the short ends of the rectanguar USB ports are almost touching. When I put in the Lexar, there’s no room to put anything next to it.

Justice Dept Spokesman Offers Up a Whopper

In a front-page NYT story today by Philip Shenon, a Justice Dept. spokesman named Mark Corallo offers up a brazen lie.

Again on Monday, a Justice Department spokesman, Mark Corallo, said, “I don’t think anyone can argue with the fact that this president and this attorney general have made preventing terrorist attacks their No. 1 priority, and that was true before Sept. 11, 2001, and it is true today.”

In fact, as we all know, the evidence is overwhelming that before 9/11 preventing terrorist attacks was in no way the “No. 1 priority” — cutting taxes, a missile defense shield, and attacking Iraq were among the many things with much higher priority.

Although the Times allows this remark to go unchallenged on the front, it does carry a delayed rebuttal on the jump:

Commission officials said their evidence showed that Mr. Ashcroft had taken little interest in counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and, days before the attacks, had rejected pleas from senior F.B.I. officials for more money for counterterrorism even as intelligence agencies warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attack.

The article’s focus is the FBI and Justice, but even so I don’t think that excuses leaving the lie about GW Bush unrebutted.

Isn’t it sad that the Justice Department’s spokesman feels no obligation to avoid lying in this fashion? Shouldn’t that department be held to a higher standard than this? (And if he’s going to lie, couldn’t he find a more convincing one?)

Shorter William Safire

Shorter William Safire:

The Floo Floo Bird. Please stop asking questions about what the Bush administration has been doing on foreign policy, terrorism, and 9/11 for the past three years because I will not like the answers.

Jew

Tonight is the first night of Passover. What better time to try to remove an anti-Semitic link from first place in the Google results for Jew by linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew. (For more info about what’s going on see the explanation at normblog.)

Update: I wonder if google is smart enough not to count links that include links to the search result?

US Relaxes Ban on Editing Foreign Works

The US Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has relented and “eased” its ban on editing foreign work. (For background see this post on the attempt to control the work of the IEEE.)

Showing again that when pressured by bad publicity, the goverment sometimes does the right thing.

Another Everyday Injustice from John Aschroft's Justice Dept.

The Miami Herald’s best columnist, Carl Hiassen, The An arbitrary deportation campaign writes about the Aschroft Justice Department’s assinine campaign to deport productive, legal, US residents:

So this is the new America. Our government wants to deport an Oregon woman who was convicted 11 years ago of growing six marijuana plants.

Kari Rein, a Norwegian citizen, had never been in trouble before, and hadn’t been in trouble since. That changed Dec. 30.

She, her husband and two children were returning from a vacation to Norway when she was questioned at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport by officers of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They had run Rein’s name through a computer and found the old marijuana conviction. They asked her to step into a private room.

”And that,” says her husband, James Jungwirth, “was the last time we saw her for three weeks.”

The sentencing judge didn’t even think six pot plants for home use merited a jail sentence. But the loonies in Main Justice don’t care. The husband and two kids are US citizens. But Main Justice doesn’t care.

Remember folks, all this is being done in your name by your government. Be proud. Or throw the rascals out.

And, as Karl Hiaasen says,

Don’t think it couldn’t happen to someone you know. This is the new America.

Judge In His Own Case

It’s a little short, but Federal Judge Pulls His Suit From Courts Run by State sure makes it sound like something seriously wrong happened here: a “federal judge in Louisiana has taken control of an accident case involving his car and issued an order transferring evidence about his medical condition to a sealed federal court file.”

The Economist's Wonderful Cover

The Economist almost never comes on Friday. It sometimes comes on Saturday. It often doesn’t make it out here until Monday, leading me to grumble that they get better service in Cairo (they do). But this week’s came today, and the cover is just perfect. My kids loved it too.

100% Increase in UM Law Bloggers

It seems we now have two, count them two, student bloggers at UM, both first year students. Welcome Barsk to the aether! (His first substantive post, on Mel Gibson’s movie and the UM shuttle bus is certainly true to life. (Except maybe for the part where the grocery store is not out of matzah.)

Plame Investigation Metastasises

Prosecutors Are Said to Have Expanded Inquiry Into Leak of C.I.A. Officer’s Name. Seems the prosecutor thinks someone might have been lying to him.

I love the smell of justice in the morning.

1984: We're Just Behind Schedule

Who ever would have imagined that the same IETF which, in the RAVEN process, fought off a proposal to make the Internet wiretap standards compliant, would turn around only a few short years later and adopt the innocously titled RFC3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements. S. Bradner:

There have been a number of legislative initiatives in the U.S. and elsewhere over the past few years to use the Internet to actively interfere with allegedly illegal activities of Internet users. This memo proposes a number of requirements for a new protocol, the Omniscience Protocol, that could be used to enable such efforts.

In RFC 3751, issued this very day, we have nothing less than a standard that would determine, as the author so crudely puts it, who is a “bad guy” on the Internet, thus enabling those so labeled to be targeted for the treatment proposed by none other than Senator Hatch (“destroying their machines”). Sounds like a compensible Taking to me…at least so long as the parties doing it can be shown to be state actors (not always simple these days).

And it gets worse: the programs defined by this standard will run invisibily in the background, and will be secretly downloaded to all machines that touch the Internet. And they will need to know an awful lot about you to work.

Of course, compliant programs will have to be optimzed for local law, creating a lot of work for tech-savvy lawyers, so this isn’t all bad.

Suggestions for relevant futher reading:

• RFC 3514, The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header S. Bellovin. April-01-2003. (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

• RFC 3093, Firewall Enhancement Protocol M. Gaynor, S. Bradner. April-01-2001. (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

• RFC 3092, Etymology of ‘Foo’ D. Eastlake 3rd, C. Manros, E. Raymond. April-01-2001. (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

Tangled Web Is Now All @#$#!! Up

OK. Now I’m completely confused. The Washington Post reports — if reporting can be used to describe a story that LEAVES ALL THE BIG QUESTIONS UNASKED much less answered — Boy Yawns, CNN Bumbles, Letterman Yelps:

Did the White House find weapons of mass destruction at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, or did CNN mess up its report on a “Late Show With David Letterman” segment poking fun at President Bush?

Monday night Letterman debuted a new bit on his show, called “George W. Bush Invigorates America’s Youth.” What followed was a series of very brief clips from a recent speech in Florida in which the president said things like “it will not happen on my watch” and “we stand for the fair treatment of faith-based groups who will receive federal support for their work” to a Norman Rockwellian group of average citizens. Among them was one apple-cheeked boy of about 12 in a red baseball cap, rugby shirt and chino shorts, who is caught on camera yawning uncontrollably, twisting his head from side to side, checking his watch and otherwise looking pretty thoroughly bored, while the other people serving as background ignored him.

The folks at CNN got a kick out of it and the next morning, during “CNN Live Today,” ran the clip, crediting Letterman. CNN host Daryn Kagan quipped, “What is funnier, the kid or that everybody around him — not a single person even reacts to those high jinks?”

Then CNN cut to commercial break. Right after the break, Kagan told viewers: “All right — had a good giggle before the break, that video was from David Letterman. We’re being told by the White House that the kid, as funny as he was, was edited into that video, which would explain why the people around him weren’t really reacting. So, that from the White House.”

That night, Letterman struck back. He showed Kagan telling viewers that the White House said the footage had been doctored.

“Now that, ladies and gentlemen, as sure as I’m sitting here, is an out-and-out, 100 percent absolute lie. The kid absolutely was there and he absolutely was doing everything we pictured via the videotape.”

Two comedy bits later, Letterman read one of his trademark cards that he’s always fiddling with, and started to laugh: “God almighty, my life just gets more and more complicated. You know, just a minute ago … I was ranting and raving about the White House. According to this, CNN has just phoned and, according to this information, the anchorwoman misspoke, they never got a comment from the White House. It was a CNN mistake.

“What good does that do me? … I’ve already now called them liars. I think from now on we’re going to have to start looking into things,” Letterman said.

“Why start now?” his bandleader Paul Shaffer said.

“Because everything was fine, except now I’ve called the White House liars, and you know what that means — they’re going to start looking into my taxes!”

A CNN spokeswoman told The TV Column yesterday that the network notified Letterman’s show at 5 p.m. that CNN had been incorrect in attributing the suggestion of video-doctoring to the White House. Letterman’s show is taped at 5:30 p.m.

“It was their choice to continue to air it,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the problem had arisen due to “a misunderstanding among staff,” but would not elaborate.

Rob Burnett, president and CEO of Letterman’s Worldwide Pants production company, told The TV Column that he first received word of CNN’s call during the show.

“We did not doctor the footage in any way,” Burnett said. “We don’t need [special effects] to make our politicians look silly.” He also noted that CNN did not contact Worldwide Pants on Tuesday to ask whether the footage had been digitally altered.

“We’re not a news show, and if we had doctored the footage for comedic effect, we would say so,” Burnett said.

Last night on his show, Letterman recapped the story and joked that he’s hearing that maybe the White House did speak to CNN about “George W. Bush Invigorates America’s Youth.”

OK. Deep breath. There are three families of possibilities here:

1. Letterman made it all up. Deeply unlikely.
2. CNN made it up. In which case, the Post should be asking how this happened. Putting out a libel on the air with no evidence is pretty serious. (And accusing Letterman of doctoring the tape is surely libel. Doing it with no evidence is ‘reckless disregard for the truth.) Not to mention what it would prove about the ideological constraints on CNN. Calling this a staff mixup just won’t do.
3. CNN did not make it up — the White House did call CNN, and now for some reason they are in Denial Mode (but why would CNN go along).

A real reporter would have called Daryn Kagan, the CNN anchor who originally repeated the film-doctoring story, and asked who on the staff wrote it. Then called that person, etc. The truth is out there — and surely it’s worth someone’s time to pursue? Who exactly at CNN had what sort of a “misunderstanding”? And how much will they pay Letterman in libel damages?

The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

Via Slashdot, the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness.

(Also via Slashdot, how carrier Pigeons transfer data faster than networks)