Discourse.net

The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web.

Discourse.net's problems with Google have worsened. First page rank went to one (from seven). Then it went to zero. Now it goes to a “question mark” which means that Google thinks something is wrong with the site.

Google webmaster tools says things are basically fine. Similarly, searching Google itself for “discourse.net” doesn't reveal the signs of a hacked site. There isn't some pile of sp*m showing up as far as I can tell. But there isn't much discourse.net showing up either — lots of things seem to have been removed.

Does anyone have a clue as to what might be going on or what if anything I can do about it?

It's stuff like this that gets me mad at the Obama administration:

According to the NYT in Gates Cites Peril in Leak of Afghan War Logs by WikiLeaks, US immigration officials (along with the Army’s criminal investigation division) stopped US citizen Jacob Appelbaum to question him about his involvement (which he denies) in the Wikileaks somewhat Pentagon-papers-like release of US classified documents detailing how the war in Afghanistan is going less well than advertised.

So far, well that's routine. If the cops want to interview a suspect or even a possible witness to a crime and find him at the border, as I understand it (I'm not an expert here, I'm repeating what I've been told and invite corrections) they can detain him for questioning. And why not? If law enforcement have adequate grounds to arrest or detain someone inside the US, why should they have to play catch and release with criminal suspects (or even witnesses) at the border? Similarly, if the Army is involved in the investigation of a leak of their documents, I can't see a principled reason why they can't participate in an arrest or interrogation. But that's not what's at issue here:

Mr. Appelbaum said the agents at Newark Airport refused him access to a lawyer and threatened to detain him for similar questioning whenever he re-entered the country after traveling abroad, which he said he did twice a month for a day job as an online software developer.

“They questioned my ability to re-enter the U.S. even though I'm a U.S. citizen,” he said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas. “It's very troubling to think that every time I cross the border, I'd get this treatment.”

Two problems here: First, not giving a US citizen access to a lawyer when he's being questioned about a crime he's apparently suspected of knowing about or participating in. Second, threatening to misuse the US's border control powers to harass a citizen's lawful movements across the border not because he's suspected of carrying any contraband, but because he exercises his Fifth Amendment right.

Immigration law is quicksand for civil rights, so it's conceivable to me (recall that I'm not an immigration lawyer) that the no-lawyer rule is supported by some law or precedent, although I still think it's not in keeping with our traditions or aspirations for the rule of law. (Mr. Appelbaum had the fortitude to refuse to talk without a lawyer for the three hours he was detained.) But the idea that it might be proper to threaten to harass someone routinely at the border, much less carry out such a threat, strikes me as not only clearly illegal but very ugly. I think this threat from US immigration or customs officials would be illegal in any context when directed at a US citizen, but the case is even more clear when in response to a valid assertion of a Fifth Amendment right not to speak when interrogated.

I doubt Mr. Appelbaum wants to sue about this, but it seems to me that the particularity of the threat against him would give him standing to seek declaratory and perhaps injunction relief despite the bar on general suits of this nature set up in Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983).

Views from those knowledgeable about such things welcomed.

The Ballot Strategy Initiative Center has a new report grading the 24 states that allow citizens direct access to the ballot.

Their standards are pretty tough: only five states got a C or better. Florida got an F.

I'm not sure this is entirely fair, as it fails to account for the important role of the state courts in policing Florida's ballot access system. See, for example, Patrick Gudridge, Complexity and Contradiction in Florida Constitutional Law.

Advice from Quintin E. Primo III, co-founder and chief executive of Capri Capital Partners, a real estate investment and development firm based in Chicago:

Q. What's your best career advice to young graduates?

A. Three words: leave the country. Get out of here. That's what I tell everybody — just go. I don't care where you go, just go.

Q. Because?

A. Because the world is changing. It is no longer acceptable to speak only English if you are 25 and younger. It's unacceptable. You have little chance of being successful if you speak only one language.

If you don't understand Islam, you're in trouble because Islam comprises somewhere between 1.6 billion and 1.8 billion people, and there are markets that are untapped that need to be tapped.

So you've got to get out of your front door, get out of the comfort and quiet of your home, and your safety zone, and step into a pool of risk where you have no idea what the outcome is going to be. Out of it all, you will have a much broader understanding of the world's cultures, and you will have a much clearer idea of how the world perceives our culture, and all the value, and the benefits, and the beauty of our culture.

There is nothing more important. I don't care where you went to business school. I don't care whether your grades were good or bad. You have to leave the country.

I think this advice applies to lawyers too. Yes, there remain areas of practice largely untouched by globalization, but not many.

The headline (Is Italy Too Italian?) is silly, but the article is a good read. It uses bespoke textile maker Luciano Barbera as an example of Italian business strengths and weaknesses.

(The sub-head, “From Taxis to Textiles, Italy Chooses Tradition Over Growth” is much more representative of the content.)

Adam Smith of the St. Petersburg Times delves into Jeff Greene's history. It's telling stuff about the would-be Democratic candidate for Florida Senate. Here's just one of many anecdotes:

Harlan Hoffman, 37, was in a Fort Lauderdale yachting apparel store in 2007 when he saw a help wanted ad for Summerwind.

“There were two people from Australia there who said, 'Oh, good luck with that one… . We're still waiting to get paid by Summerwind.' I should have listened,” Hoffman said.

The deckhand was shocked while buffing Greene's yacht and wound up hospitalized.

A boat's owner is supposed to take care of on-the-job medical costs, but Hoffman said Greene — whom he never met — told the insurance company he had never heard of Hoffman and that he didn't work on Summerwind. It took eight months and legal action that included affidavits from other crew members vouching for Hoffman and trashing Greene to get his bills paid.

“This guy Jeff Greene threw tons of money into new diving gear, but the crew's basic equipment — food and supplies — he didn't want to spend any money on. Summerwind has a terrible reputation,'' Hoffman said. “Mr. Greene's yacht is known to be a party yacht. When it went to Cuba, everybody talked about the vomit caked all over the sides from all the partying going on.”

Just what Florida needs in a Senator: contempt for the working man so deep that he has to stiff them.

Previously: Meek Fights Back

These guys are right and these guys are wrong. Read about it at TPM since the ADL site is slashdotted.

Try to recall that “The mission of the Anti-Defamation League is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike.”

Except sometimes, apparently.

Poor Kendrick Meek. He was husbanding his resources, expecting to coast through the Democratic Senate primary, when three problems ganged up on him.

The first problem was predictable: low name recognition outside South Florida. But there are ways of dealing with that if name recognition your only problem. (To the extent that there was also lingering animosity among South Florida progressives for Meek’s very weak support of South Florida 2008 congressional candidates such as Annette Taddeo, well that was just the cost of positioning Meek as a middle-of-the-road candidate who could win votes upstate.)

The second problem was less predictable: Governor Charlie Crist got hammered by Tea Party fellow traveler Marco Rubio in the GOP primary polls, so he decided to run as an independent. Between that and his grandstanding on the gulf oil spill, Crist sucked up most of the media oxygen in the race. Plus he started leading in the polls, winning many independents and even some Democratics (see problem one above).

The third problem is just gross: a sleazy billionaire named Jeff Greene decided to try to buy the Democratic nomination. It’s hard to exaggerate just how bad Greene is. Here are a few choice facts.

• Jeff Greene has been a Florida resident for all of three years.
• Jeff Greene is not really a Democrat. He’s been a Republican for much of his life, and even ran for Congress as a Republican in California 1982.
• Jeff Greene made his billions betting that people would lose their homes in foreclosure. (Personally, I don’t hold this economic savvy against him — it might even be a positive — but it sure won’t win votes.)
• Jeff Greene’s personal life suggests he is completely unsuitable for the Senate.
  • Jeff Greene spent a year living with famous madame Hedi Fleiss
  • Jeff Greene partied in St. Barts on his yacht with the likes of famous druggie Lindsay Lohan
  • It’s reported that Jeff Greene imported Ukrainian strippers for a show on that same yacht

But if you have billions you can buy a lot of campaign commercials, and flood the zone with fancy glossy mailers (I’ve gotten at least two fat ones).

And it seems to be working: although there is a huge pool of undecided, Greene now leads Meek in the latest polls.

So Meek has gone on the air. But Meek’s second campaign commercial looks awfully defensive.

There is a mixed message here. Neither a “meet Kendrick” nor 100% an attack ad, the spot tries to do both at the same time, and maybe flails a bit at both. And any time you have to pay money to say “Kendrick Meek is not part of a fraud case,” you are in trouble.

Given his lackluster record on progressive issues, Meek is a difficult candidate to get excited about; only the abysmal quality of his opposition spurs one to sympathy. Charlie Crist has to be laughing: if Greene manages to buy this nomination, people like me may have to vote for Crist, even though he’s as principled and as reliable as a weathervane, just to avoid getting a hard-core rightist in Marco Rubio. Or we may sit that race out. Either way, if Greene wins, then Crist wins.

Via Larry Solumn I learn that,

Brannon P. Denning (Cumberland School of Law), Marcia L. McCormick (Saint Louis University - School of Law), & Jeffrey M. Lipshaw (Suffolk University Law School) have posted Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This is the Table of Contents and the Introduction to a forthcoming book from the American Bar Association. The authors provide detailed advice and resources for aspiring law professors, including a description of the categories of law faculty (and what they do), possible paths to careers in the legal academy, and “how to” guides for filling out the AALS's Faculty Appointments Register, interviewing at the Faculty Recruitment Conference (the “meat market”), issues for non-traditional candidates, dealing with callbacks and job offers, and getting ready for the first semester on the job.

Larry himself has written the Foreword.

It sounds as if this book will be a must-read for law job candidates as soon as it comes out, although the bottom line for getting a job couldn't be clearer: Write. Lots. And well.

News from the superficial world of online dating:

It turns out, women really care about men's height. I'm 5'9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who's 5'10”, right, another inch? I would have to make about $35-40,000 more a year.

This and other, deeper and more interesting, observations about human motivations and the psychological discount rate, in the Big Think Interview With Dan Ariely.

Today's Miami Herald has a report that raises as many questions as it answers about a dirty trick gone bad, originally aimed at Joe Garcia, the likely Democratic candidate for the open House seat in FL-25.

As I haven’t blogged much about this race previously, forgive me for taking longer than usual to set the scene, but I think the background is relevant.

The primaries are not until the end of August, but the smart money is for Garcia, who ran a strong campaign against an incumbent two years ago, to win the Democratic primary and face the likely victor on the Republican side: increasingly beleaguered state Rep. David Rivera. If fundraising numbers are any guide, both candidates should coast to easy wins over their less-well-known and underfunded primary opponents.

That said, Rivera has had a really, really bad month or so. (Bear with me.)

• A house Rivera co-owned with Marco Rubio was foreclosed on after they failed to make five mortgage payments. After it hit the papers they found the money. And went on to fundraise together. (6/17/2010)
• Rivera demonstrated a Mark Kirk-like tendency to dissemble when faced with a tough question about his associations: When asked by the Miami Herald, Rivera lied about his relationship with Ariel Pereda, a local businessman who trades with Cuba. (7/1/2010)
• News broke that Rivera was accused of domestic violence — back in 1994. Rivera's girlfriend filed a restraining order but did not show up in court, and the case was dropped, but the revelations sparked an attempted palace coup to topple Rivera as chairman of the Miami GOP. (7/8/2010)
• Rivera supporters at FIU, a local public university, made headlines when they got into trouble for sending an email on the Rivera campaign’s behalf to 4000 faculty and staff seeking to raise money for Rivera. Rivera sits on the state Senate committee that controls the money spigot for public universities, leading critics to call this a “shakedown,” and FIU’s Provost to send out a general note warning about improper political activity. (7/9/2010)
• Paul Crespo, one of Rivera’s primary opponents, is running as the Tea Party candidate.
• Rivera’s quarterly fundraising numbers were not as good as he would have hoped. Just over half a million is a lot of money for a congressional campaign to have raised — but Garcia raised more — $729 thousand. This fundraising shortfall is particularly ironic given that after having promised to attend, Rivera skipped the Downtown Bay Forum, apparently because he needed the time for fundraising and comes on the heels of earlier allegations of improper fundraising by Rivera.
• Presumptive GOP senatorial Candidate Marco Rubio — whose “disciple” Rivera claims himself to be — has started distancing himself from Rivera

So, to sum up, the Rivera campaign has some reason to be feeling a little worried.

Utterly coincidentally, someone cooked up the idea of sending voters in Collier County a campaign mailer that tries to suggest that because he served in the Obama Energy department – as head of the Office of Minority Economic Impact – Garcia is responsible for the Gulf Oil spill. It also tried to suggest that Garcia, the former director of the Cuban-American National Foundation – is somehow anti-Cuban. Yes, really: see the Miami Herald’s Student's bizarre attack ad targets Democrat Joe Garcia (7/23/10).

The mailer claimed to be paid for by a newly registered independent expenditure group, a so-called 527 organization, called “Progressives for Prosperity.” The head of this group was a 19-year-old college student at FSU named Matthew Slider who claimed to be a Democrat supporting one of Garcia’s primary rivals. You can see a picture of the mailer over at the Reid Report.

That story didn’t last real long. Today’s Miami Herald reveals that in fact the moving force behind “Progressives for Prosperity” is Evan J. Power, a Tallahassee lobbyist and political operative with a history of dirty tricks. And the student whose name is on the registration papers, well, he’s angry and says he was conned (7/28/10):

Slider said he met Power through a friend, fellow FSU student Chris Spencer. Spencer and Power told him they needed a registered Democrat to head the political group and showed him copies of a positive mailer they planned to send out that outlined Meurice's best qualities. That mailer was never sent.

But it gets better. Not only does Matthew Slider now say (under oath!) that Power tricked him, but he claims that there is no way his organization could have paid for the mailers since it only ever had $100 in its bank account. As reported in the Naples Daily News,

“Evan Power told me that despite the difference in their political parties, he was supporting Luis Meurice and cited polls, which I never saw, that supposedly claimed Mr. Meurice would be a strong general election candidate versus David Rivera,'' Slider said in his sworn statement.

Lobbyist Power says someone hijacked the group’s name the very week he was creating it, and the mailers were a complete surprise to him. The lobby group that employed Power seems to have taken a dimmer view of the situation, as it has fired him.

The timing is especially suspicious here. According to the Naples Daily News,

Slider said he was assured that he would get to see and approve any piece of mail sent out by the 527 group and that no mail had yet been distributed.

…

What struck him most about the mailer, he said, was that it was sent from Miami on Saturday July 17, but the group wasn’t formed until Monday.

“It all just clicked,” Slider said. “I realized I had been duped.”

According to the Herald, “Garcia's campaign said it is considering legal action, especially since the bank statement shows money was never withdrawn to fund the mailers.”

Usually campaigns don’t like to get involved in lawsuits since it drains time and money away from the main task of reaching voters. But this is one time where I wonder if the lawsuit might not be worth pursuing. Discovery could be very interesting, as witnesses will have to explain under oath just how independent of Rivera they were, and where the money came from.

(Of course if they deny everything under oath, then it all grinds to a halt unless someone can find the printer.)

Didn't set off a thing.

Previous relevant post: What I Expect to Learn Today

…is whether the metal valve in my aorta sets off airport metal detectors.

Yes, the family is leaving early in the day for a quiet (two teenage boys, cough cough) week's holiday to a house in a location which if not in the absolute middle of nowhere is at least on the edge of it. But only, promises the rental ad, about 30 minutes from somewhere. Even if it is, we later discover, some 75 feet from the road to the house.

To get there from here will involve a short flight as I didn't feel up to the very long drive we might otherwise have taken. Then we will still have a car ride of some length. The house is well suited, allegedly, for lounging about — something I'm getting quite practiced at. There are supposed to be great views. And if I want exercise, well, the house is on a mountain side.

There's supposed to be broadband, so we may be on the information highway even if we're just on the edge of the paved grid. Or there may not be broadband, in which case there will be very little posting for a week, but that doesn't mean I've had a relapse. Or, there may be broadband and I still may not be posting much.

(As regards the metal detectors, I have this card I'm supposed to give anyone who wants to point a magnetic field at me about the metal inside me. It tells them the safety parameters beyond which the fields can hurt me. It looks terribly easy to counterfeit, so I wonder if the TSA will accept it if I do set off the alarms, or if I'm headed for the back room to show them my scars.)

All this is due to the fact that I'm feeling considerably better than I was, say, two months ago. There is no question that I am recovering, slowly but generally surely. That said, I still have some way to go before reaching normal strength and especially stamina. I can do most of what I used to do — but not nearly as much of it in a day. And a cold really really knocks me out. And I'm not up to doing much work yet.

The docs said it would take six to twelve months to feel 100% and it has been about five (or four if you count from my hospital discharge) so far, so I suppose I'm on track. Teaching starts in a few weeks, and I'm confident I'll be ready to handle the one class I'm scheduled for. Whether I'll be up to much of anything else remains to be seen.

The Harvard Crimson (they publish in summer?) has a nice story on Edmond Joseph Gong who flunked out of Harvard Law after his first year — they said he would “never become a lawyer” — but after a stint as a reporter found a second chance in his home town, at the University of Miami School of Law from which he graduated in 1960.

Mr. Gong went on to become an Assistant US Attorney, then got elected to the Florida House, then the Florida Senate in 1966, making him the only nonwhite state Senator at that time.

It seems the letter telling him not to come back to Harvard Law served as a powerful inspiration…

Pay czar chose not to go after $1.6B in bank pay - Yahoo! News

The Obama administration's pay czar said Friday that he did not try to recoup $1.6 billion in lavish compensation to top executives at bailed-out banks because he thought shaming the banks was punishment enough.

Yes, such humiliation. How will they ever be able to look themselves in the mirrors of their Ferraris?