The small minority of you who care about such things will be overjoyed to learn, as I was, that the server-side rss newsreader feedonfeeds, which had become something of a moribund project, has been forked into FeedOnFeeds-Redux (FoFRedux).
FofRedux 0.2 offers small but noticable improvements over Fof 0.1.9, notably the introduction of category sorting for feeds, and FofRedux 0.3, due out RSN, sounds as if it’s gonna be great.
Capitol Hill Blue is not a particularly reliable source, rating only a little better than the Washington Times when it comes to, say, reporting on the White House. But you would think they might possibly be credible when reporting on things they have personally witnessed.
Today CHB is alleging that they received a national security letter
In recent weeks, the FBI has issued hundreds of “National Security Letters,” directing employers, banks, credit card companies, libraries and other entities to turn over records on reporters. Under the USA Patriot Act, those who must turn over the records are also prohibited from revealing they have done so to the subject of the federal probes.
“The significance of this cannot be overstated,” says prominent New York litigator Glenn Greenwald. “In essence, while the President sits in the White House undisturbed after proudly announcing that he has been breaking the law and will continue to do so, his slavish political appointees at the Justice Department are using the mammoth law enforcement powers of the federal government to find and criminally prosecute those who brought this illegal conduct to light.
“This flamboyant use of the forces of criminal prosecution to threaten whistle-blowers and intimidate journalists are nothing more than the naked tactics of street thugs and authoritarian juntas.”
Just how widespread, and uncontrolled, this latest government assault has become hit close to home last week when one of the FBI’s National Security Letters arrived at the company that hosts the servers for this web site, Capitol Hill Blue.
The letter demanded traffic data, payment records and other information about the web site along with information on me, the publisher.
Now that’s a problem. I own the company that hosts Capitol Hill Blue. So, in effect, the feds want me to turn over information on myself and not tell myself that I’m doing it. You’d think they’d know better.
I turned the letter over to my lawyer and told him to send the following message to the feds:
Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.
If this is true, how serious it is depends on what the server was doing. If it’s a machine dedicated solely to serving a somewhat scurrilous publication that is a thorn in the side of the White House, I think this is a big deal. If on the other hand the server was operated as an ordinary business and has lots of clients and there’s reason to believe one of the others is the target, well there’s a good chance that this is just what has come to be business as usual in US2006. (And then of course there’s always the possibility they’re plain making it up.)
I hope someone gets to the bottom of this.
Please reassure me that the person responsible for this campaign commercial has no chance at all of being elected dog catcher, much less to the House of Representatives,
This is isn’t a joke or a parody commercial. It’s just insane. Robinson is running for Congress in North Carolina and he uses the Twilight Zone theme to attack gays, judges, African Americans and just about anything or anyone else you can think of.
(spotted at Crooks & Liars).
Maybe, probably, I’m not on the right mailing lists, but I just got the following e-mail, which was the first I’d heard of this event:
Rally to Support Striking UM Workers,
Friday March 10, 4:30 pm County Bldg. 111 NW 1st ST That’s Government Center in downtown!!
Every Miami Worker Deserves A Chance for a Better Life. You Can Help UM Janitors Get That Chance.
IT’S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE ENDS MEET in Miami on $6.40 an hour. Yet that’s all many contract cleaners at the University of Miami are paid. $51 a day with no health benefits. Less than half the county median wage. On these tiny salaries, we’re forced to make choices we never thought we’d be faced with in the United States: Do we pay rent or buy groceries? Buy shoes for our kids or fill a prescription? UM’s mostly Cuban-American janitors have been joining together to build a better life for ourselves one where we don’t have to make these choices. But the company we work for–UNICCO, the cleaning contractor hired by the university–has been punishing those who speak out by threatening, intimidating, and even suspending union supporters. So we’ve decided we must strike to make our voices heard. You can help send a message to UNICCO:
Give Miami janitors a chance to live the American dream.
Support Striking Janitors
RALLY: Friday, March 10 ? 4:30 p.m.
County Building, 111 NW 1st StreetFor more information, contact SEIU Local 11 305-672-7071, ext. 246
Service Employees International Union Local 11
This all seems rather last minute. I’m certainly not in a position to go. I hope they know what they are doing.
Update: The organizers’ account of the rally — 300+ is a good turnout for this sort of event.
The law school has set up a strike blog to aid communication between the school and students. It’s brand new, so there isn’t much content there yet, but I’m told there will be more within 24 hours.
From: “Coker, Donna K.”
Subject: Strike Blog & Other Related MattersDear Students,
I want thank those students who participated in the two events on Tuesday – the information session organized by students at noon and the town hall discussion in the afternoon. While faculty differ in their responses to the strike, the conversation at the town hall meeting made clear that they are strongly committed to student education. The video of the town hall meeting will be posted on the “web cast” page of the web site.
The strong differences of opinion and the robust nature of public debate regarding those differences exemplify the kind of thoughtful community that is the University Of Miami School Of Law. We would expect no less from our passionate and intellectually engaged faculty and students. While some of these issues divide us, we share commitments to intellectual honesty, to justice, and to the value of a community of learning.
The Law School has established a blog to continue the conversation about the strike. You can find it at http://www.umlaw.net/strike/. We asked faculty to post strike-related messages to students on the blog rather than via email. The blog, of course, gives students an additional way to communicate with each other as well as with administration and faculty.
We will continue to monitor the situation with the strike and the ramifications for the law school community. We anticipate sponsoring further informational sessions. If you are having difficulty with locating taped classes (web or otherwise), please let us know. Our AV department is working overtime to keep up with the demands of the current crisis.
Donna Coker
Associate Dean
This will probably get me in trouble, but I wanted to respond to one of the comments to UM Promises to Be Good About Something, which actually seems to be responding to something I said in Class Warfare. There I wrote,
I’d expect that most of the faculty see students as junior versions of themselves and their friends. After all, we were (almost) all law students once. What the current fracas reveals is that many students not only don’t see the faculty as senior versions of themselves, but seem quite unaware that even when it doesn’t feel their pain, the faculty wants them to learn, and to go out into the world prepared to do good and to do well.
The commentator disagreed,
Your students see you and your colleagues as the Havard/Stanford/Yale elites that you and they are. When a Miami student looks around, they do not see senior versions of themselves because you are not that. Miami students do not see themselves as attorneys in the top DC/NY law firms, as federal clerks (and certainly not federal judges), as US/DOJ attorneys, and certainly not as law professors. How are you a senior version of the students that you teach? Almost none of them will be a tenured professor at a law school. You know that.
To which a former student replied, “Shoot higher…people in other UM Law classes certainly saw themselves in those roles…and are currently in those roles.”
I think that’s absolutely the right answer, and that the first commentator has let his reverse elitism get the better of him.
It’s true that the odds of getting a teaching job coming from UM are low compared to a top 10 law school, although it has been done. But most of the students in any law school other than Yale, which is both small and a bit of teacher factory, are not going to be professors either, so this is hardly unusual. (If you want to teach, write publishable stuff: get on a law journal, publish a note and also write something else for publication in a non-UM journal — something a number of my students have done while in law school. After graduation, work a bit, then get a pre-teaching fellowship from one of the schools that offer them. It can be done.)
OK. Here’s where I get myself in trouble:
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