There’s a piece of really good news buried at the very end of today’s “White House Letter”, for years now a none so blind captive of the Standard Narrative:
This is the last White House Letter by Elisabeth Bumiller, who is going on book leave.
I should know better than to tempt fate, but unless they give the job to Katharine Seelye, they could hardly do worse, could they?
Every so often, I toy with the idea of getting an iPod. Then I read another article about how iPods only last a year…
The California (state) Appeals court issued its ruling today in Apple v. Does, a case in which I participated in a minor way as a signer of an amicus brief.
We won: The Court held that the Stored Communications Act prevents Apple from requesting the emails it sought from the ISP; instead Apple must go to the account holders directly, giving them notice and a chance to argue why the orders should not be granted.
The Court also held that the website editors are journalists entitled to claim the benefit of California’s Journalist Shield Law, which prevents them from being held in contempt for not disclosing sources, and also lets them claim the First Amendment’s protections for journalists.
This is, I fervently believe, the correct result. Congrats to EFF, and to Lauren Gelman who organized our brief.
Bret Kavanaugh has been confirmed for the DC Circuit. We could do so much better.
While we were distracted with searches of congressional offices and the Enron verdicts, back in reality, the flu virus may be doing that mutation thing. Or not.
The ever-informative W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. reports on More evidence human-to-human transmission is occurring. The picture is murky. But the news ain’t that good. WHO says, “…it is likely that for the first time H5N1 has spread from human to human to human — three generations of cases, possibly four. This does not mean that a pandemic strain has started but it is another warning signal.”
Via Juan Cole, some interesting information about the management of the Iraqi dinar. Used to be you could get information like this in the Economist and sometimes even the New York Times.
If it has been in either, I sure missed it. But then again, I don’t read them as carefully as I used to — so much of the information was on blogs like Prof. Cole’s long before it made it into print…
Jotwell Blenderlaw