Why I am not the least bit surprised that all three major Florida universities — UM, UF, FSU — are represented on this select list of institutions of higher education who have signed deals with Victoria's Secret for “pink” themed clothes and underwear?
All so very tasteful and revenue-enhancing, I'm sure. And so Florida. Although to be fair, there are lots of schools from both sunny and raininy states on that list…
(Spotted via Kieran Healy, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.)
I think Obama will be great on foreign policy. On domestic policy, not so much.
Today he as good as sold out the fight against FISA's immunity provisions. While the statement below might sound OK, it's failure to say that the bill is unacceptable in its current form, or to say 'filibuster' amounts to a surrender to the fix put in by the leadership. (And, no, this bill is not in any noticeable way an improvement over its predecessor draft. The judicial review provisions are a sham — they don't test for the legality of any wiretapping, they don't test for the legality of any request by the administration to engage in wiretapping, they don't test for whether the recipients of those requests thought or had reason to think that the requests were legal — no, all the court will test is whether the administration says that it made a request. Big deal.)
As one person put it to me, “Obama's national security state is going to be so much cooler than McCain's.”
The full text of Obama's weasly statement is below.
Update: Jack Balkin says, from Obama's perspective, what's not to like?.
The Democratic Congressional leadership has endorsed the new FISA sellout. (Text here; instant analysis by EFF here.)
The ACLU is enraged. See ACLU Blog: Because Freedom Can't Blog Itself: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » This Spade is a Spade: FISA Deal Is Bunk
You should be enraged too. Perhaps you might even consider a donation to the fund that seeks to punish elected officials who should know better (starting with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer), the Act Blue PAC vs. Retroactive Immunity, also known as the Strange Bedfellows Fund, as it's attracting support from a group ranging from progressives to supporters of Ron Paul.
Our only hope in stopping this is going to be the Senate. Is Obama going to step out to lead on this? (Meanwhile see the statement by Sen. Feingold.)
I have no idea why our congressional leaders feel a need to be so craven on this issue. Their position doesn't even poll well. It's as if they are suffering from some sort of battered person syndrome or something.
Not surprisingly, McBush's poll numbers are slipping in key battleground states…
The Great Grimmelmann writes in The Laboratorium: Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law that he's
just released Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer:
Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that? More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in “the law” for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.
This isn’t an academic piece. Instead, it’s designed to bring nonlawyers and people outside the open-access-to-law movement up to speed on the basics of the history, the context, the principles, and the law. Along the way, it tells some interesting stories. I hope you’ll find it equal parts informative, entertaining, and inspirational. Please have a look.
A fun read and a public service.
Glenn Greenwald, British debate highlights the cravenness and complicity of congressional Democratic “leaders” .
Please say it ain't so — they can't really be selling us out like this on FISA, can they?
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