The good folks at POGO note that the Dept. of Justice isn’t following its own policy strongly suggesting that all agencies provide a link to its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request policy on all agency homepages.
Blogged in part because I like all-acronym titles.
My RSS newsreader of choice is something called feed on feeds (FoF), which is a light weight server-side aggregator with easily customized CSS. It’s certainly not for everyone — you have to have a unix-based server, it helps to be a bit of a control freak, and you absolutely have to hate glitz — but I really like it.
FoF was built to read RSS 1.0, then tweaked to read Atom feeds too. And it does that pretty well. But I have run into one bug I don’t know how to fix. RSS 1.0 reports the name of the author of a post in a field called “dc:creator”; FoF expects that and knows how to display it. But Atom puts the author inside nested “author” and “name” tags — and FOF just seems to ignore those. That makes it hard to read the increasing number of group blogs which only offer an Atom feed since you don’t know who the author is.
I’ve found the place in the FoF code where the interpretation of the dc:creator tag happens, but it seems linked to building and reading MySQL tables, and since I don’t speak MySQL, I know better than to play with that. I tried emailing the author of the FOF, but no reply. He’s commented on this blog in the past, perhaps because he has some sort of search going looking for mentions of feed on feeds, so that’s why I’m posting this here.
Hey Steve Minutillo, you still out there? Please?
Michael Madison writes,
I have set up a blog to track IP, IT, and Internet-related academic conferences.
The URL is http://madisonian.net/conferences/
Send conference announcements and save-the-date messages to
madison@law.pitt.eduSuggestions for improving the resource are welcome.
I think this is a great idea. Thanks, Michael!
So here’s my first suggestion: in addition to the blog/RSS announcements, we need a way to display a calendar of forthcoming events in calindrical form. Right now, the calendar in the right margin shows the date you posted the announcement, not the date of the event.
If nothing else, I want an easy way for people to check that the date they are planning to have their event isn’t already taken.
So I read this interesting blog post by Denise Howell, Google as KM, about how she uses Google’s RSS feed of news items about her firm to find out what her fellow lawyers are doing. And I figure, why not set up an RSS feed of Google news items about UM Law? And right away I score a hit about something big I didn’t know about: University of Miami School of Law Assistant Dean Marni Lennon — one of the most public-spirited members of the UM community — has been selected as the recipient of the 2005 Outstanding Law School Faculty or Staff Award from Equal Justice Works.
Lennon serves as Assistant Dean of Students, Director of Disability Services and Director of H.O.P.E., Helping Others Through Pro Bono Efforts. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California and graduated from UM’s School of Law in 1995.
Lennon established H.O.P.E. in 1998, offering a program to assess the desire for a public interest service within the law school community. The response was overwhelming, and the program has since grown to include multiple legal advocacy and community outreach projects.
Equal Justice Works will present the award to Lennon Oct. 27 during its national conference in Washington, D.C. The award honors a law school faculty or staff member who plays a pivotal role in developing a public interest ethic among law students.
Marni was a student in the first law class I ever taught, Civil Procedure I, fourteen years ago. She did well, and I think she’s forgiven me.
The internets are rife with wild ghoulish speculation that the Vice President might be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Plame prosecution. (Or worse?) We know so little about what is actually going on in Fitzgerald’s office — contrast this professionally run operation to, say, the Ken Starr ethics-free horror show — that all such speculation strikes me as wildly premature.
So let’s indulge in some even more wildly premature and irresponsible speculation in the nature of a parlor game: suppose Bush suddenly needs to appoint a new Vice President due to the unavailablity or resignation of the current incumbent. Who gets the nod?
The 25th Amendment provides, in Section 2, that “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”
The GOP has a majority in both chambers, but it would obviously be desirable to have a candidate who gets a less bumptious reception than seems to be facing Ms. Miers. That might mean a Senator, a popular governor, a member of the Cabinet, or an elder statesman. (Or, given who is doing the appointing, not.) Unless the person named was somehow disqualified by age they would immediately have a giant advantage in race for the poisoned chalice of the GOP 2008 Presidential nomination.
An additional complicating factor here is that some believe that Bush promised Sen. McCain tacit support in 2008, or at least the absence of support for rivals, in order to get McCain’s full backing in 2004. But they don’t like each other much, and I somewhat doubt that Bush would choose McCain to be so close to the levers of power.
A popular governor like Jeb Bush would be a possibility, but that nepotism thing might be a little too cronyist to work. And that might also violate the deal with McCain, if in fact it exists.
Leave your ghoulish speculation in the comments. I’ll name my name below. Names should be people Bush would be likely to like, easily confirmable, and either likely to raise GOP fortunes, or boneheaded in a plausible way.
Update: Just to clarify, given the first comment, the point of this game isn’t who Bush should pick, it’s who he would pick. Thus criticizing a choice as too sycophantic or not sufficiently reality-based completely misses the point.
PrawfsBlawg: A few (more) thoughts on the job talk offers ten job talk topics you should avoid at all costs.
It’s pretty funny.
What’s even funnier is that two of them might just make perfectly fine job talks if you did them just right…
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