Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Miami, OH But Not Miami, FL?!?

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

How come they have Miami, Ohio, but not Miami, FL involved in the Baobabs project?

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | Comments Off on Miami, OH But Not Miami, FL?!?

Call in a Collection Agency

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Back in 1912, Congress passed a statute prohibiting the “gag rule” under which Presidents stopped underlings from testifying to Congress. And in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, Congress restated that no federal money can be used to pay the salary of any federal employee who “prohibits or prevents, or attempts or threatens to prohibit or prevent, any other officer or employee of the federal government” from communicating with Congress.

Well, the in light of this law the GAO's Investigators Say Ex-Medicare Chief Should Repay Salary. It seem that the Bush administration illegally withheld data from Congress on the cost of the new Medicare law. Had the data been available, the bill would not have passed.

To keep the info from Congress, Thomas A. Scully illegally threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary. As a result, he should not have received salary from that point on and must refunde seven months pay.

This is the sort of facts that scream “DC Circuit”… so the inevitable lawsuit will take at least nine months to sort out and probably much more. But Congress's power of the purse is its core and most plenary power. So I think Mr. Scully better be looking to the Scaife people for some help.

[Thanks to bobcox for the correction]

Posted in Administrative Law | 1 Comment

Wanted: Tough Questions for the Presidential Debates

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

My brother wears a second hat at NiemanWatchdog.org, besides his Washington Post gig. Here's Nieman's request for tough debate questions

The Internet can make the presidential debates better. NiemanWatchdog.org will make it happen. Starting this week, NiemanWatchdog.org is soliciting tough, incisive questions that President Bush and Senator Kerry should be asked at the upcoming presidential debates.

The Niemanwatchdog.org Web site is a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The site's primary mission is to encourage watchdog reporting by drawing on authorities in various fields to suggest questions the press should ask.

For its presidential debate project, NiemanWatchdog.org is accepting submissions from experts and amateurs alike. The editors of the site will also be scouring blogs and other Web sites, looking for questions being posed there.

“This is no time for softballs,” said NiemanWatchdog.org deputy editor Dan Froomkin. “We believe that the collective wisdom of the Internet community can generate some superbly pointed questions that will oblige the candidates to provide the kinds of answers the public deserves.”

Several days before each presidential debate, NiemanWatchdog.org will select what its editors think are the best questions for each candidate, and will announce the winners on the Web site — as well as in a press release to major media organizations.

Internet users are encouraged to post their questions, or questions they've seen elsewhere on the Web, directly onto the NiemanWatchdog.org Web site, at http://www.niemanwatchdog.org. They can also e-mail them to editor@niemanwatchdog.org, along with their names, hometown, and affiliation if relevant.

Pity there's no way to have people vote on questions and then make the moderators ask the most popular ones. (Yes, yes, we'd have to prevent people voting more than once, and yes, yes, that's a complex problem.)

Posted in Dan Froomkin, Politics: US: 2004 Election | 15 Comments

A Simple Question from ‘Texans for Truth’

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

We know that nobody ever came forward to claim the $10,000 reward offered “If you personally witnessed George W. Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base between the months of May and November of 1972”. But how come no one has ever asked GW himself if he can name one person he trained with? That's what Texans for Truth wants to know. And they have a slick ad featuring Robert Mintz, who served in Alabama's 187th Air National Guard during the period that Lt. Bush perfected the art of invisibility.

I can name people I worked with in summer jobs 20 years ago (30 years ago I was in high school — I can probably name just about everyone in my 100 person class, but that's hardly a fair comparison)—can't GW name just one or two he trained with?

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 3 Comments

Eric Muller: ‘Astonishing Lapse at the FBI’

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Understatement of the week dept:

IsThatLegal?: the FBI's computer system has a drive onto which agents dump their raw reports, and from which supervisors upload and review them, and quite possibly edit them, before saving them as the official reports on a different drive. The “official” reports are made available, as required by law, to defendants, but the raw reports on the so-called “I” drive have never been. Indeed, the very existence of the “I” drive has been hidden until very recently. …

This is an astonishing lapse at the FBI.

Even if (and I find it very hard to believe) the “I” drive versions of the reports in thousands of cases don't turn out to contain undisclosed exculpatory information of which the Fifth Amendment's due process clause would require production as a matter of constitutional right, we can be sure that this computer infrastructure is a flagrant violation of the Jencks Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 3500, which requires that the government turn over to defendants all “recorded statements” of witnesses who testify at trial.

More evidence that contempt for civil rights flourishes in a climate created by John Ashcroft & GW Bush. Or does the buck stop nowhere?

Posted in Law: Criminal Law | Comments Off on Eric Muller: ‘Astonishing Lapse at the FBI’

Dreamhost is Having a Sale

Posted on September 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Overall I'm pretty happy with my hosting company, Dreamhost. Tech support is very friendly, and responds to most requests within the promised 24 hours. I've asked for a ton of Perl modules and they have installed them all, globally, within a day and without demur—except for one, and they gave me good reasons why they didn't want to do that, plus gave me something of a hint how to install it locally.

Uptime is not 100%, but it has improved a lot from ten months ago, to the point where downtime is increasingly rare and increasingly brief. (Oh, I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying that.) Server response is fast sometimes, and decent, but not spectacular, at peak hours. But then I'm not paying for a dedicated server. Instead I'm paying $20/month and sharing my machine with a lot of people. I would not recommend cheap, shared hosting at Dreamhost for a mission-critical application, but it's a very good deal for a blog. Their cheapest deal is less than $10/month if you only run one domain; I had to spring for $20 because I run several.

Hosting a number of different domains off one account is where Dreamhost excels: if you have a bunch of specialty domains, it is very easy to run them off a $20/month account, and I've done so happily for a year.

I mention all this because the annual bill is coming up to renew the sites, and in looking at the hosting plans I noticed that Dreamhost is having a sale. For $20/month you can get the code monster plan for which they usually charge more than $30. For a lot of people this may be overkill, as it allows you to host 15 domains, and 75 subdomains, store 2560 MB, and have up to 64 GB/month bandwidth (consider that this blog, by far the busiest of my sites, has never gone far over 2 G in a month, and that was one heck of a temporary spike). But as I was about to renew the already over-generous “Sweet Dreams” plan, and this didn't cost anything extra….

In the event that you should decide to host with DreamHost, please consider identifying me as your referrer so that I can collect the “reward” money. This costs you nothing and I am not going to keep the money. Instead, I will donate the reward money to a good cause.

Posted in Discourse.net | 4 Comments