Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Deposition Texas-Style

Posted on April 7, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Someone posted to YouTube a short video of a particularly horrific deposition excerpt, captioned “Joe Jamail and takes a deposition defended by Edward Carstarphen. Hilarity ensues.” Well, not exactly.

Joe Jamail is a famous Texas lawyer, who has won some big cases and collected some giant fees. Most notably, Jamail represented Pennzoil against Texaco and won a jury verdict for $10.53 billion, then the largest jury verdict ever. Texaco later settled for $3 billion, and Jamail pocketed a third of that.

I suppose it is possible that Mr. Jamail had been smarting from the loss of his title as world’s rudest lawyer. As reported in the National Law Journal in April, 2000,

Until recently, the classic example of incivility in litigation was famed Texas lawyer Joe Jamail’s defense of a deposition witness in the 1993 Paramount-QVC Network-Viacom takeover battle. According to the excerpts of the deposition transcript included in an addendum to an opinion by the Delaware Supreme Court, Jamail told the examining lawyer that he could ‘gag a maggot off a meat wagon’ and made other vituperative remarks that the Delaware court labeled ‘extraordinarily rude, uncivil and vulgar.’ . … Mr. Jamail’s ‘maggot’ rhetoric has now been displaced by a new classic in incivility: a pre-suit letter sent by a New York litigator that threatened the prospective defendant with the ‘legal equivalent of a proctology exam’ if the plaintiff’s claim weren’t satisfied without litigation.

Maybe he wanted his title back.

Posted in Law: Practice | 6 Comments

Our Brownshirts Wear White T-Shirts

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Just keep saying, It Can’t Happen Here.

The Tom DeLay campaign operation is going out in style. Last night it sent out this message to supporters:

We would meet tomorrow morning at 9:45 am on the first floor of the parking garage attached to the Marriott. Please get folks to call our campaign office 281.343.1333 and let us know they can do it – or e-mail Leonard Cash (in the cc field above) so that we can get some head count. Let’s give Lampson a parting shot that wrecks his press conference.

Not surprisingly, this call to action incited violence.

Eyewitness report and photos. More details here.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 3 Comments

Thoughts on the Libby Bombshell

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

This is a time when no amount of cynicism is too much. This is a time for Informed Comment.

The admnistration’s current line of defense is when the President does it, it’s not illegal.

Atrios has the perfect rejoinder:

It’s probably reasonable that the president can declassify whatever he wants, or at least I haven’t really seen an especially strong argument to the contrary, but that doesn’t mean that the president can declassify stuff, show it to Judy Miller, and then turn around claim the stuff is still classified. That’s where this argument falls apart.

The Carpetbagger Report: All of a sudden it’s a scandal again shows how completely the administration’s latest spin conflicts with the previous spin.

I wonder how long before the defense becomes, ‘Cheney said Bush authorized the leak, but in fact he was mistaken on that point.’ Nixon threw Agnew to the wolves. But it didn’t work.

(Here’s the full text of the Special Prosecutor’s filing)

Bonus: David Neiwert challenges the media.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze, Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 1 Comment

Libby Fingers Bush, Cheney as Ordering Plame Leak

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Why do I have to read news like this in my brother’s blog rather than major media? Read today’s column — scroll down to “Fitzgerald lets loose”.

[The NY Sun’s Josh] Gerstein writes that according to [special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s latest] filing, Libby “testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded ‘National Intelligence Estimate’ on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush.”

…

That reporter, of course, was Judith Miller.

Here’s an excerpt from Fitzgerald’s filing: “Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was ‘pretty definitive’ against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was ‘very important’ for the key judgments of the NIE to come out.”

Gerstein writes: “Mr. Libby is said to have testified that ‘at first’ he rebuffed Mr. Cheney’s suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according to the vice presidential aide, Mr. Cheney subsequently said he got permission for the release directly from Mr. Bush. ‘Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE,’ the prosecution filing said.”

That is, as my brother says “a shocker”.

Yet, he writes, “In fact, as of this writing, none of the major news outlets has published a word on the subject.”

(Although, I see that since he wrote that, at 12:35 the Associate Press has moved the story.)

Posted in Dan Froomkin, Politics: The Party of Sleaze, Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals, The Media | 5 Comments

Grant McCracken Is Interesting

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

I suspect that Grant McCracken’s deconstruction of marketing blog, This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is filled with rare insight interspersed with some small bits of utter nonsense.

But I do not have great confidence in my ability to tell which is which.

Let’s look at some recent items:

I think he’s got Sony dead to rights.

There’s music advice I can’t evaluate, although it sounds plausible.

Somehow, I have the feeing that the piece on vicarious adventure is missing something — rather than there being a new market here waiting to be born, it seems to me that the better “me blogs” already fill the niche. I understand the idea that some rich people might want more tailored experiences, but I suspect they’re rich enough to go have them directly themselves. I think what McCracken wants (although he doesn’t know it) is better search, or the blog version of what he wants for music.

McCracken’s deconstruction of Pink’s Stupid Girls video puzzled me. He seemed to be beating up on it, then said he liked it, just didn’t like Pink’s explanation for it. Personally, I’m fine with the video. It’s a little obvious and heavy handed for my taste, but it has two arresting images that I like: one of the little girl flouncing her hair, and one (overused but still good) of Pink in glasses doing a political speech that evokes a cross between Eva Peron and Hillary Clinton.

I fear he’s right about clutter, want him to be right about Donald Trump.

The item on the virtues of the small is beautiful marketing strategy of Birkenstock persuaded me, and the one on Australia’s national marketing plan charmed (I have a particular interest in branding nations). The piece on the dressing gowns at The Topaz hotel seemed very well observed; a little creepy, yes, but credible. (On the other hand, the item on the “Yalies of Harvard Yard” may or may not describe something real about Harvard, I wouldn’t know, but it gets most of Yale horribly wrong.)

But surely the item on M. Night Shyamalan’s AmEx commercial is the current tour de force. Not having seen the actual commercial before reading the essay, I can’t help but wonder, though, whether anyone less attuned than McCracken (or Roland Barthes) would get all this from the ad.

Whatever it all is, there is a real mind at work here, tackling things I don’t often think about and am happy to have explained to me. Plus it’s a joy to read.

Note to self: look out for his book.

(Previous posting about McCracken.)

Posted in Kultcha, Readings | 1 Comment

Some Old Jokes Never Quite Die

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Unqualified Offerings documents the transmogrification of an old joke.

Posted in Politics: International | Comments Off on Some Old Jokes Never Quite Die