The Obama administration won’t initiate Executive Branch investigations of the Bush administration officials in order to prosecute them; but that hardly precludes some sort of lustration process—say, in Congress, with grants of immunity—that documents their misdeeds and leads to prosecutions outside the US.
AP, “Obama Has More Threats Than Other Presidents-Elect” (15 Nov ’08):
[I]n a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to [...]
Next up: Switzerland.
AFP (“Swiss Fear More Pressure on Bank Secrecy after Obama Victory,” 10 Nov ’08):
Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes office in [...]
AP (Watkins, “Feds Say They Drive a Stake into Mongols Gang,” 22 Sep ’08):
But U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien has asked for an injunction that would seize the Mongols’ trademarked name. If the order is approved, any Mongol would no longer be able to wear a jacket displaying the gang’s name or emblem. “It would allow [...]
WSJ publishes a commonsensical defense of “piracy” by Lessig, who bridles:
Sorry to disappoint, but my new book, Remix, is not “A Defense of Piracy,” whatever the Wall Street Journal’s headline writers may think.
Note to Larry:
“Piracy” is defined by the Content Cartels, not by WSJ headline writers—and, according to the CCs, you’re defending piracy. If you [...]
EFF:
The firm of Jones Day filed the lawsuit against the real estate news site Blockshopper.com, alleging that using its trademark “Jones Day” to refer to the firm in a headline and linking to the Jones Day website could lead to confusion over the sponsorship of the site. In its amicus brief, EFF and Public Citizen [...]
Waxman to former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld:
In conversations with Committee staff, your counsel stated that he and his team are working on collecting your e-mails from this time period, but they expect to produce relatively few to the Committee because you were an infrequent user of e-mail.
Your counsel and his team have also informed Committee [...]
“Olympic Mottoes Borrow Lines from O Canada,” CBC, 25 Sep ’08:
Two phrases borrowed from Canada’s national anthem have been chosen as the mottoes for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, and organizers have already moved to protect the commercial rights to the lines.
The lines “With glowing hearts” from the English version and “Des plus [...]
Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC:
“What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.”
More (“Tugging [...]
NYT (Stolber “In Glimpses, Cheney Contemplates His Legacy,” 31 Aug ’08):
With her father’s blessing, Liz Cheney has been indexing his pre-vice presidential papers, which are in libraries around the country, and drafting timetables and outlines for his review.
Note to future researchers who will struggle with Cheney’s efforts to suppress his papers: Cheney is using public [...]
A large Australian eBay seller, EBS International Pty Ltd, skipped town with “thousands of dollars”—an understatement, given almost thirty pages of furious feedbackers out hundreds of AU$ each. In the resulting brouhaha, PayPal has come up with what it calls a “one-off process”: offering users compensation only if they sign (and fax) a statutory declaration. [...]
That’s the filename of a map published by the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 11 Aug. The MFA’s statements of 1–14 Aug ’08 offer a clear, blow-by-blow picture of how Georgia saw the unfolding situation as it escalated into an invasion. The full text of all the MFA’s statements with related images is below; [...]
AJC (Schwartz, “Drug Violence in Atlanta Tied to Several Cartels,” 31 July ’08): “Powerful Mexican cartels have assumed control of drug distribution networks throughout the United States, sparking worry from U.S. law enforcement and experts that they may export the same violent methods that have ravaged Mexico for years.” Kidnapping, for example. Vast tracts of [...]
That is the considered opinion of the Société pour l’administration du droit de reproduction mécanique des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs (SDRM) on the subject of the USSR’s national anthem. SDRM just billed the filmmaker Jean-Christophe Soulageon a bill for EUR1000 because someone whistled seven seconds of the commie anthem “L’Internationale” in his 2004 film Insurrection [...]
Lederman at Balkinization pulls this quote from US District Judge John Bates’s 93-page opinion in what he calls the “Miers/Bolton contempt case”:
There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress’s [...]
The LA Times’s “L.A. Land” weblog quotes President George W. Bush from his 15 July press conference:
If your question is, should the government bail out private enterprise, the answer is, no, it shouldn’t. And by the way, the decisions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—I hear some say ”bailout”—I don’t think it’s a bailout. The [...]
Bruce Schneier asks, “Did you know that, in some jurisdictions, police can inject midazolam into suspects to subdue them?” The article he links to (Demetria Kalodimos, “I-Team: Injection Used To Subdue Prisoners Medical Expert Says Practice Is Troubling,” WSMV [Nashville], 10 July ’08), seems either artfully or inartfully written:
But many people said that the injection [...]
Jane Mayer, in Harper’s (Scott Horton, “Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side,” 14 July ’08):
A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to [...]
A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” [...]
Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, with illustrations by David Cuesta:
This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering clear of ubicomp fantasies that may [...]
On 29 Apr ’08, the Seattle Times ran a story about Microsoft’s “COFEE,” or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, a special-purpose USB device “that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies” the previous summer and, a day before the story ran, “described … to the 350 law-enforcement experts” at an MS-sponsored conf. According [...]
Mutli-National [sic] Forces—Iraq (MNF-I)
Combined Press Information Center
International Zone, Baghdad, Iraq
As of: 20 NOV 07
NEWS MEDIA GROUND RULES (IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5)
Ground Rules Agreement
The following is a listing of ground rules that have been developed to protect members of the Armed Services from the release of information that could potentially threaten their security [...]
Citing the Veeck decision (7 June ’02), Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org have posted the building, fire, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical Public Safety Codes for the state of California. In itself, this may excite a handful of people, but the following statement makes its importance clear:
The courts have long held that the law is public [...]
AP recently caused a stink when it announced that it plans to charge $7.50+ for the right to quote as few five words. Their “Licensing Agent for Reuse,” iCopyright, announced in a press release that “AP Deputy Director/Business Development Bruce Glover [said,] ‘iCopyright makes it easier to monitor copyright compliance and to identify pirated and [...]
Rohit K. Singla, “Missed Opportunities: The Vaccine Act of 1813” (1998):
In February 1813 Congress handily passed and the President enthusiastically signed a piece of ground-breaking legislation which has been long overlooked by legal historians—An Act to Encourage Vaccination.[2] The Act established a national source for uncontaminated, smallpox vaccine. Without any textual basis in the Constitution, [...]