Category Archives: Blogs

Robert Waldman has had a blog for a while, but recently he's upped the pace of his blogging. Read him. Link him (let's raise him from a TLB Crunchy Crustacean).

Here's Robert, making me feel almost sympathetic for Art Buchwald, something I would have thought was impossible,

“A Sorry State of Affairs” indeed

Art Buchwald, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Frist agree

Art Buchwald
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page C04

Washington is in a frenzy and it's all because of Richard Clarke. In testifying before the 9/11 commission, he did the unforgivable, the one thing that no government official ever dared to do. He apologized.

…

When Clarke offered his mea culpa, the White House and Republican senators went ballistic. One leader said: “He had no right to say he was sorry. No one, not even the president, is allowed to apologize for anything that Washington does. It's treason.”

Senator William Frist
reported Friday, March 26, 2004

“In his appearance before the 9-11 Commission, Mr. Clarke's theatrical apology on behalf of the nation was not his right,”

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A25

“Indeed, one has to admire it — the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke”

Poor Buchwald. Too much time has passed. His column has such a long lead time that his attempt at satire is totally dated, because, by the time it is published, the op ed page has already printed a more ferocious attack on the crime of apologising than he could imagine. Buchwald has made a brilliant career of exaggerating the hypocricy and nastiness of Washington politics. I'm afraid he has to find a new schtick because is is no longer possible to exagerate the hypocricy and nastiness of Washington politics.

Dang, but Jim Henley is good sometimes,

UNworkable – Stupid unaccountable bureaucracy! Ineffectual talking shop on the Hudson! It took the UN seven months to fire the staffer the leadership considered most responsible for allowing the August 19 bombing of its Baghdad headquarters to occur. Seven months! You'll note that when the the government of, by and for the people suffered an even bigger atrocity in September 2001 it only took the government – um. Um.

The best thing about referrers is that they lead me to interesting places like the Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. This is a very serious effort run by a list of impressive, distinguished and serious people.

Just one thing: YOU GUYS NEED COMMENT SPAM CONTROL. MT-Blacklist works pretty well. You can find my (long!) list of banned sites at the URL for this blog with the filename blacklist and the suffix of txt after the dot. (Why no link? The file is behind a robot exclusion and I do not want search engines that might follow the link anyway to pick up all those terms and associate it with my blog.)

It looks as if it's been going a while, since July actually, but I only just discovered Abstract Appeal, which calls itself, undoubtedly correctly, “The First Weblog Devoted to Florida Law & the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals”.

Evan Schaeffer offers cash bounties to readers who spot errors in his blog, Notes from the (Legal) Underground

What will you earn? $20 for each typographical error, $10 for each grammatical error, and $5 for each clever demonstration of how I can omit needless words.

Who is eligible? All readers. While before, I welcomed your e-mails and comments informing me of my stupid mistakes, now I'm going to pay you too.

Why am I doing this? Number one, I hate errors. Number two, I love the way good copy editors can make writing sharper and more focused. Number three, by giving myself a financial motive to improve my own editing skills, I hope I'll accomplish these goals myself, without having to pay you very much.

There are a number of conditions and exceptions, so read the rules before you play.

I would no doubt be broke if I tried this, just on the typos alone. But Mr. Shaeffer blogs less frequently, plus he is a practicing lawyer, so he can probably afford it. Plus, looks to me like he's actually quite careful—and even he's out of pocket $195 since starting this open-source proofreading thing about three weeks ago.