Discourse.net

Obama! A Modern U.S. President:

(thanks to ES)

I've said for years that I wasn't going to give to NPR until they canned Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts, two wastes of airspace who routinely parrot conventional wisdom (leavened with the weekly GOP talking points) and call it “analysis”.

Well, we're 50% there: NPR Ends Juan Williams' Contract After Muslim Remarks.

One more to go.

Crooks and Liars predicts the trolls will be out in force on this one:

Cue the right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth: The NAACP has now fully backed up its accusations of racism within the Tea Party movement with a meticulously documented report on the Tea parties' multifarious connections to racists and various far-right extremists.

The report, “Tea Party Nationalism,” looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations — FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express — and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right “Patriot” extremists of various stripes.

“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment,” write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.

The heart of the report is the section titled “Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse, which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:

(There's lots more where that came from.)

The St. Petersburg (FL) Times has a good story today by Jamal Thalji, Should authorities need a warrant to put a GPS tracking device on your car?.

I'm quoted towards the end:

Those conflicting rulings mean the U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide the issue.

The real issue is resources, said University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin. When the courts first gave the government the right to remotely track suspects, no one thought they'd one day have the money or technology to do so constantly.

“There was an unstated assumption behind a great deal of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in our history that says surveillance is expensive and therefore has natural limits,” he said. “That unstated assumption that people took for granted is no longer true.”

And therein, I think, lies the problem — we are working with doctrine that doesn't fit the new technical and economic realities.

Jerry Brown (D) casts Meg Whitman (R) as an echo of roundly disliked California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Could this be the best ad of this election?

Wow.

One of the things that is worrisome about movements like the 'Tea Party' is the potential for fascism. That's not to say fascism is part of the ideology, or an inevitable consequence of it, but there's a certain fellow-traveler feeling that is hard to ignore. Here's an example relating to the Tea Partyiod GOP candidate for Senate in Alaska: Miller security guards handcuff editor. Note that the guys imprisoning the reporter/editor are private security, not cops.

And from Florida (via Political Animal), where Florida congressional candidate Allen West (R) is running his nutty (and very successful) campaign against the estimable Ron Klein:

NBC News ran a report documenting West's background associating with a violent gang of criminals, which the Justice Department believes is involved in drug running, arson, prostitution, robbery, and murder.

Yesterday, things managed to get even worse, still. West spoke at a public park in the South Florida district, and a 23-year-old videographer was on hand to record the candidate's remarks, which is hardly an unusual modern campaign practice. But things got ugly when West's gang allies were caught on tape harassing and threatening the Democratic staffer.

As the local NBC affiliate noted, “Threats can be heard on the video tape. The West supporters forced him to get back into his car.”

The threats worked — the Democratic party decided to take “videographer off the campaign trail altogether yesterday” because they felt they couldn't protect him.

Grant McCracken, my favorite contemporary ethnographer-provocateur, writes:

We are adding a new name to our blog roll. Please welcome Ruby Kariela. Ruby is 10 and I believe this makes her the youngest ethnographer working today. I like to think of her as “reporting from childhood” but she will have her own way of describing what she does. Please visit her blog at here.

Visiting the blog, you might see an extraordinarily precocious ten-year-old. Or not. While I just might buy most of it, I cannot believe that a ten-year-old would think to use one of my favorite bizzaro cultural incidents from 1986 as the title for a blog post. I suppose it is vaguely possible she heard the 2008 REM song, but I doubt it.

I tend to like tough Democratic ads, especially if they deliver the shiv with a gentle touch. I think this Joe Sestack ad (PA-Sen) hits the spot:

… but will voters agree, or will some be offended?

On the other hand, I suspect this Jack Conway ad (KY-Sen) will work for it intended audience, although it doesn't work as well for me:

Conversely, this Solomon Ortiz ad (TX-) has a good concept, but I don't think the execution is all it could be (especially as it stomps on the last point, which suggests the opponent could be a big target):

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Joe Garcia, the Democratic candidate for FL-25. And more we learn about this opponent, the more David Rivera sounds like has a serious honesty problem.

Garcia is a serious, smart guy, who genuinely cares about the community he grew up in. He'll be a great Congressman. But nobody is perfect. And if Joe Garcia has a weakness, it's a taste for jokey campaign commercials. I actually liked the ones he ran two years ago, but I don't think the voters did. And IMHO this year's web-only effort, “The Politician Who Shagged Us”, is just a mistake. But then I don't like Mr. Bean much, either.

xkcd: Tech Support nails it.

I mentioned last week that there was some good news about the sequel to the University of Miami Law School Foreclosure Fellowship program. (See U Miami Law Foreclosure Fellowships 2009-2010 Final Report.) We placed eleven recent law graduates with a variety of organizations providing legal assistance to homeowners facing foreclosures. We helped a lot of people, and we also helped some of our graduates find jobs. The program died for lack of funding, but I'm glad to report that it has spawned a bigger, and I hope better, successor in the UM Law Legal Corps Fellowship Program.

Dean Patricia White has announced that she is, in effect, going to clone the Foreclosure Fellows program and expand it beyond fighting foreclosures to encompass a wide range of pro bono activities, and not just in Florida. The law school will pay students who pass a state bar after graduation a stipend of $2,500 per month for up to six months after graduation to do pro bono work. The plan — although I gather things are still a bit fluid — is to run a massively larger program than my eleven graduates, with the goal to reach perhaps as many as 100 new lawyers, or even more (the press release quoted below speaks of “more than 200 potential placements” but one can have more opportunities than takers).

As I understand it, details are still being worked out — including what students will have to do to qualify (although the press release suggests all graduates who pass a bar will be “eligible” it also speaks of those “qualified,” neatly leaving open the issue of whether it will take more than passing a bar to be qualified for a Fellowship), whether we can find a way to provide Fellows with affordable health insurance, the extent to which the law school will take on the responsibility of finding placements for the graduates, and the legal implications of each of these decisions for tax, malpractice, and other types of liability. I'm also a little unclear about how the out-of-state component will work. On the one hand, I think it's great to open up the program to out-of-state bar takers, who would then do pro bono work in the state where they plan to stay. On the other hand, it may be quite hard to arrange for the out-of-staters to participate in the planned “rigorous biweekly professional development sessions” either where they are located or remotely. Not to mention getting them CLE credit. But these are details, and good problems to have as they are the sign of an ambitious program taking off.

What I liked best about Dean's White's presentation of the idea to the faculty at a recent meeting is that she emphasized that her objective was to make the Fellowships both meaningful and prestigious — to match strong graduates with placements where their participation would result in good works; that her aim is to make the Legal Corps something that our graduates will brag about being a part of. That, I think, is a critical goal.

If this sort of thing takes off, I wonder if US legal education will end up with a de facto equivalent to a medical residency, or the UK barrister's pupilage and solicitor's articles. There are pluses (it can be very good training) and minuses (more time before the graduate starts earning a real salary) to these semi-apprenticeship models, but it's something to think about. Arguably, we've had something like that already with judicial clerkships (although they pay better) but we limited them to a small number of students.

Below I reprint the University of Miami School of Law's press release, issued today, announcing the Legal Corps program:

First there was the original ad that started it all

Then the Saturday Night Live parody version,

And then it all went very viral, very fast:

• The inevitable Monty Python treatment
• The Wizard of Oz version
• The Barbie Doll/Harry Potter version
• A post-modern cat does his bit
• The space alien version
• Christine O'Donnell, The Musical
• The Nixon angle
• And a silly chaser

David Rivera has a problem with the truth. A big problem. And the Miami Herald has Rivera in its sights.

We've known for some time that GOP Congressional candidate David Rivera (FL-25) was sort of weird and shifty, but the narratives were a little complex and weird. (Rivera ran a delivery truck off the road to prevent his opponent's mailers from getting to the post office? Rivera either was battering a woman or having an unknown doppelganger with the identical name who had a restraining order? Rivera was saying one thing in Spanish, then denying it English? Rivera was accused in an FEC filing of illegal campaign activities?)

But here comes something easy to understand: today's paper reports (Source of Rivera's income unclear) that Rivera has for years been getting money from a secret source that Rivera will not disclose. Yes, the one and only David Rivera in the Florida state legislature has either been lying on his sworn financial disclosure forms, or taking some kind of secret payoff, or both.

See, there's this money he has been saying for seven years that he gets in salary from consulting for the USAID, a federal agency. But the Herald discovered that USAID says it has never heard of him. Oh, says Rivera, I was a subcontractor. But I won't tell you for whom. I didn't mention the subcontractor in my sworn ethics disclosure form because the money originated at USAID (which I'm sure is an ethics violation right there). What, asks the Herald, did you actually do for USAID? I took trips like these, says Rivera, showing receipts of three trips to Mexico and Chile.

And here the Herald does real journalism: it looks into those trips and finds they were funded exchanges by the US State Department, on which Rivera got expenses and $200 per day – not the thousands he lists on his ethics forms. Oh, says Rivera, well those were just examples of what I did. And it goes round and round and round, including the creation of a possibly sham company in Puerto Rico (to launder the money?).

Somewhere in all this I lost track of the number of times the Herald caught Rivera lying, but it's a large number. And don't miss the last few paragraphs of the story, in which the Herald, purely deadpan, presents facts relating to large payments by previous Rivera campaigns, for what seems like not much, to a corporation that had a close relationship with his mother. At least he's a family man.

This Alex Sink 2-minute ad, Profits Over Patients: The Rick Scott Story, is hard-hitting and, I would hope, devastating.

Devastating, that is, unless TV viewers are inured to scandal…which is always possible in Florida. Polls in the Governor's race suggest a very close race.

It must be a cold cold day in the nether regions when I find myself substantially in agreement with ultra-right-wing activist Karl Denninger. Yet, his plan for dealing with the spiraling mortgage mess (incentivize quiet title actions on a mass scale) seems — at first glance — to have quite a lot going for it.

See What Must Be Done - Today. What do you think? Am I missing something other than the fact that our courts don't currently have the capacity to hear all these cases?

I think this is a very striking image:

Copyright © 2008 - Mirko Ilic Corp All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

As I work on a blog redesign, it's one of my favorites for a theme. But unfortunately, both its verticality and its greenness make it hard to use; it looks like I'll end up with something a bit less striking, more soothing, and much more horizontal, as a banner.

The artist — whose work came to my attention because of this great image regarding court decisions supporting gay rights — very kindly gave me license to use it if I wanted to.