Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Attacks on Kerry’s Vietnam Service Debunked

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It's pretty sad that this should even be necessary, but eRiposte Media: Liars and Haters Inc. offers a very thorough debunking of various implausible accusations about Kerry's second tour of duty in Vietnam.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 2 Comments

Blogging Forecast

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Light blogging forecast while I work like a dog for a few days.

Some political blogs that I read are especially good right now, including, in no special order, Hullabaloo, Brad DeLong, FafBlog, Is That Legal?, Whiskey Bar, The Daily Howler and The Cosmic Iguana.

And, I especially want to mention The Carpetbagger Report and TalkLeft, both which are going gangbusters this week, plus those other great blogs I should have mentioned above. Especially yours, of course.

Posted in Discourse.net | 3 Comments

FIU Law Wins Provisional Accreditation

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Congrats to our neighbors at FIU Law who (unsurpringly) have secured provisional accreditation. I'm sure it's deserved, and I'm sure FIU will be fully accredited as soon as it can be.

I do object, however, to the claim routinely repeated by the Miami Herald that because a majority of FIU's small class is Hispanic, this adds a great diversity element otherwise absent from the Florida bar. UM already has an substantial number of Hispanic students every year. Hispanics may not be a majority of our class, but they form a large fraction of a larger class than FIU fields. And we also have a substantial number of Black students. (I'd quote the actual numbers if I could remember what they are—they're good numbers and we are proud of them. And they are well-credentialed students who do well here too.)

The more the merrier and all that, but I sort of resent the implication that we have not been doing well in this area for at least the dozen years I've been watching, and indeed no doubt much longer.

Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

Roll The Tape

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It sounded pretty bad in the newspaper, but it sounds even worse on tape. Majority Report Radio has a rare tape of GW Bush attempting to answer an unscripted question by a member of the Minority Journalists association, who I'd wager is not a member of the White House Poodle Press Corps.

Next week, GW Bush explains federalism as when you are federal?

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 4 Comments

Miserable Failure

Posted on August 9, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

American Progress Action Fund has a list of broken Bush promises. It is a long list, although I'm not sure how much longer it is than a comparable list might have been after, say, Clinton's first term. Or Reagan's.

The difference between this administration and Clinton's, of course, is that Clinton did a lot of other things right: he managed the economy well; he lowered the deficit rather than increasing it; the tried faithfully to make peace in the mid-east; and he faced a hostile congress dominated by Republicans. (I imagine some conservatives would say something similar about the first Reagan administration.)

In contrast, in addition to his well-known economic and foreign-policy failures, Bush has no substantial domestic policy successes to brag about (except tax cuts if you are wealthy), despite having a solidly Republican Congress.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 5 Comments

Hypothesis: It’s Still A Free Country

Posted on August 9, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest:

Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We're defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets.

The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it's still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 2 Comments