"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Christmas at Louie's Apartment...
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:48 pm EST, Dec 25, 2009
Louie decided to leave me his apartment keys for a week, so a group of friends and I decide to wrap his entire apartment in wrapping paper!
The Volokh Conspiracy - Supreme Court of Ohio Rejects Search of Cell Phone Incident to Arrest
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:14 pm EST, Dec 23, 2009
This is a messy decision but I think its important in that it recognizes the idea that a cellphone can contain a lot of valuable information and allowing the police full access to it incident to arrest has significant privacy implications.
The decision in State v. Smith is here, and the vote was 4–3. The majority’s reasoning is that while you can search a “closed container” found on a person incident to arrest, a cell phone is not a “closed container.”
My cellphone has a large email archive. Allowing the police to go through all of that email in the course of arresting me for, say, DUI, would be a fishing expedition - pure and simple. Its not necessary.
There is an "evidence preservation" argument the state of the cellphone at the moment of arrest might change over time while waiting for a warrant - but this gets you to a "probable cause required but warrant is not required" position, rather than a "search incident to arrest, no standard of suspicion required" position - the police would need to retrospectively establish probable cause to justify a search of the phone.
Incidentally, I think in this case the police possibly had probably cause to look at the call log but I haven't read it carefully.
This result is tangentally relevant to the issue of border searches of laptops in that it acknowledges that the volume of private information held in these devices puts them in a unique category that is different from traditional "containers" that are subject to search in these contexts.
Shocker! Banks with Lobbying Ties to Pols Get Bailouts! | The Big Picture
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:22 am EST, Dec 23, 2009
“Our results show that political connections play an important role in a firm’s access to capital. The effects of political ties on federal capital investment are strongest for companies with weaker fundamentals, lower liquidity and poorer performance — which suggests that political ties shift capital allocation towards underperforming institutions.”
-Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, University of Michigan School of Business
In practice this is like an advertisement for why businesses should invest in lobbying.
As much as I think the US needs healthcare reform, I sympathize with conservatives who feel that something crooked is going down. Something crooked is almost certainly going down. Unfortunately those Conservative voices ring somewhat hollow, because the same people have spent the past 8 years completely blind to their own party's corruption.
I've been thinking about the dialog on torture. We went from an administration that said things like "I'm not sure what we're doing really fits the definition of torture" to an administration that says "we're certainly not torturing people" while simultaneously upholding an opinion which states, in black and white, that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants."
After a year - Barak Obama's complete failure to take a stand on any actual principal regarding the Constitution is the final nail in it's coffin.
Principals are dead. The law is dead. We don't stand for anything. We'll do whatever we can get away with doing. We'll manage perceptions. We'll lie about it and you'll believe us. We'll use your outrage to serve our political interests and quickly forget about you when we've got what we want. If we have to, we'll immunize ourselves against prosecution retrospectively.
The only thing you have to hold on to is the notion that men like Dick Cheney and Barack Obama really do just want whats best for this country, because there is absolutely no law constraining their actions.
The only thing that really holds us back is a religious notion held by most of the people involved that we are supposed to be a free country. At this point that belief tempers people's actions more effectively than the Constitution. I'm beginning to think that Lee Greenwood has done more to defend our freedom than the Supreme Court ever has. I'm not being sarcastic.
The Obama administration has picked the worst possible case for its first torture trial. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:17 pm EST, Dec 21, 2009
The Obama Justice Department urged the court not to hear the appeal, claiming the lower court got it right when it determined, among other things, that Guantanamo detainees were not "persons" for purposes of American law and that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants."
This is a complicated legal matter that I haven't had time to parse through, but that passage alone ought to be enough to anger the majority of the population of the US, from McCain leftward. Why isn't the mainstream press reporting on this?
Georgia Super-Speeder Crackdown Starts Jan. 1 | Georgia Public Broadcasting
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:29 pm EST, Dec 21, 2009
As I've noted previously - now that we're in an economic depression you can expect governments to focus aggressively on law enforcement activities that generate revenue. Of course, they'll talk about it as if they're really trying to crack down on criminals and make the streets safer:
“If you want to be treating our roads like a race track… getting in the car and driving like there’s no tomorrow, you will have to pay," says Bob Dallas, director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
But they are really just in it for the money:
Lawmakers passed the so called "super-speeder bill" last session. They say it will help fund the state’s cash strapped trauma care system. Officials expect it will generate about $30 million in revenues the first year. Critics say the super speeder fine is a tax in disguise and there’s no guarantee the money will go to trauma care.
Its just revenue generation. Legislators have not agreed on how to pay for the Trauma care system, and high speeds on the freeway are a contributing factor to only a tiny percentage of the cases the Trauma system handles. There is no relationship between this law and the Trauma care system.
The Associated Press: Gov't imposes 3-hour limit on tarmac strandings
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:33 pm EST, Dec 21, 2009
Under the new regulations, airlines operating domestic flights will be able only to keep passengers on board for three hours before they must be allowed to disembark a delayed flight...
From January to June this year, 613 planes were delayed on tarmacs for more than three hours, their passengers kept on board.
Airlines have strongly opposed a hard time limit on tarmac strandings... past efforts to address the problem have fizzled in the face of industry opposition and promises to reform.
Clearly, Libertarian theories about the marketplace are correct, and Government regulations are never necessary. Thats why the airlines reacted to widespread outrage over tarmac strandings by creating their own reasonable policies and communicating them to them public. Oh wait, actually that is not at all what happened.
Because this type of blindness is based on a single, small gene in the retina, it's relatively easy for scientists to fix. They take an adeno-associated virus—a virus which is usually present in humans but not known to cause disease—remove most of its genes and patch a shiny, new, properly functioning version of the rpe65 gene into it.
Once injected into the eye, the virus goes to work doing what viruses do, i.e. invading cells and using their machinery to replicate its genetic information. But, in this case, that information is the rpe65 gene. Within a few weeks or months, the person has a supply of working rpe65 genes, churning out the enzyme they need to see.
We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site was offline for a while.
We’re looking into this and awaiting on a response from Twitter.
The message read:
Iranian Cyber Army THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST Take Care.
I've said repeatedly that I think the decision to close Gitmo was ill considered. It does not matter where the physical prison is located. Whats important is what policies apply there. Those questions have been resolved by the Supreme Court. Focusing on closing the physical prison instead of exalting what we believe to be the correct policy result is a mistake. It holds symbols over substance.
This is Republican Rep. John Boehner:
The American people don’t want dangerous terrorists imported on to U.S. soil, and time after time the House and Senate have reaffirmed this position with bipartisan votes rejecting the Administration’s plan. Yet this Administration is defying the will of the American people and importing them anyway. What’s worse, this decision is completely unnecessary considering that these terrorists were already being tried by military commissions, which were specifically designed under the law to prosecute such heinous acts.
That sounds about right. There is no policy difference so its not necessary to move the prisoners. The terrorists will use our detention of their "brothers" for propaganda purposes regardless of where they are detained or how humanely they are treated.
But wait, he makes the mistake of going on:
The American people deserve to know how importing these dangerous terrorists and giving them the same rights as U.S. citizens will make us any safer.
The same rights as U.S. Citizens? So he is suggesting that there is a policy difference between holding the terrorists in Gitmo and holding them in Illinois. Boehner went on about this point in his Congressional statement which I heard on CSPAN but can't find. Liz Cheney also repeated this talking point:
Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. “When you bring these terrorists onto U.S. soil, you give them all the rights of US citizens.”
The Supreme Court has held that there is no policy difference between holding these people at Gitmo and holding them in Illinois. The Republicans were wrong to try to create one in the first place and they are wrong to maintain that one should exist today.
“The main argument the government has had as to why these men don’t have rights is that they are held outside the sovereign territory of the United States,” says David Remes, legal director of the Washington-based group Appeal for Justice and who represents 20 Guantánamo detainees.
“The Supreme Court rejected that,” he says. “But the government is still arguing that the detainees have no constitutional rights beyond habeas rights because they are offshore.”
