For the last twenty years or so, my wife and I have spent every Thanksgiving with my parents. However, my parents both passed away this year. Everyone says the holidays are hard times after a loss, and I've had two of them, so I've been a bit concerned about how this [...]
Random shots around the web:
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been returning overhead photos of the Apollo landing sites. Cory Maye is getting a new trial. Steve Landsburg slams Krugman and then praises Krugman. Sounds right to me in both cases. It just kills me that teachers grade students all [...]Putting a public option in the comprehensive healthcare reform bill is a stupid idea.
Note that I'm not saying that the public option is a stupid idea, nor am I saying that comprehensive reform is a stupid idea. Either or both of those things could be stupid, but that's not what' [...]
The anonymous multi-author blog Popehat has a lot of good stuff, but earlier this week, blogger "Patrick" posted some irresponsible alarmist claptrap that I cannot in good conscience allow to remain unanswered. I'm talking, of course, about his long-winded and poorly-reasoned discourse on the so-called "zombie apocalypse."
Patrick tries to frame the' [...]
What happens when a bunch of students at Danvers High School in Massachusetts have fun at school by saying "Meep" like Beaker on The Muppet Show?
Principal Thomas Murray bans it and threatens them with suspension.
Then, when a smart-ass lawyer sends an email to school officials saying, in its [...]
Looks like the Fox network killed off yet another show I like, adding Dollhouse to a list that includes Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Drive, John Doe, Strange Luck, Profit, Millenium, The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr., and of course Firefly.
Special note to Joss Whedon, Tim [...]
Veteran's Day always made me think proudly of my father. Now that he's passed on, it's kind of a sad day. I've got nothing else to say, really.
' [...]At the end of a plodding news conference, Politburo spokesman Guenter Schabowski offhandedly said East Germany was lifting restrictions on travel across its border with West Germany.
Pressed on when the regulation would take effect, he looked down at his notes and stammered: "As far as I" [...]
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Economist Steven Landsburg is blogging to promote his new book. Another example of using civil forfeiture to turn a police force into a theft ring. The war on people in pain continues.(Hit tip: Pete Guither)
[...]Radley Balko explains why she was one of the worst prosecutors in the country.
This was one of the items on my Obama freedom scorecard, although I don't know how to tell if he gets full points for forcing her out or if she's just' [...]
Miami Criminal Defense Lawyer Brian Tannebaum asks us "Why do conservatives apologize for the government?"
But there is a more disturbing trend in conservative thought when it comes to criminal justice. Maybe it's not a trend, just more visible with the advent of blogs and online comments on newspaper websites, but [...]
The lights went out around 12:15 last night. Some people talk about how nice it is to relax and do nothing while the power is out, but for me, losing electrical power is like losing a limb.
When the power failure hit, I was sitting in front of the computer working on [...]
When I was on a criminal jury a few years ago, the judge impressed on us how important our job was. He made sure we took it seriously. Which is one of the reasons this bullshit makes me so angry:
The Minnesota Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, has now [...]
I don't blog about the death penalty very much, mostly because I don't care about the death penalty very much. I'm not saying it's unimportant, but I just don't have the urge to write about it. My position on it has been pretty bland: Some crimes are so evil that' [...]
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Don't mess with Texas. Or Texas' pecans. When you've made the sale, quit talking. Remember when I called Money Laundering a fake crime? Sound like we should hire casino security experts to do the TSA's job.' [...]Random shots around the web:
Lousiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell just denied a marriage license to an interracial couple. Money quote: "I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way." No cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients this year, presumably because their cost of [...]I really don't understand healthcare reform.
People keep saying that one of the biggest problems with our current system is that about 45 million people don't have health insurance. There are reasons why that number doesn't tell the whole story, but I can understand why people are concerned. What I don't [...]
Over at Popehat, blogger Ezra has a suggestion for future awards of the Nobel Peace Prize:
I submit that the prize be awarded each year in perpituity to the nation of Bhutan. In 1972 their king uttered the simple phrase "Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product." [...]
Popehat has Blawg Review #233 today, and the theme is based on the story of Joshua Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. If you haven't heard of Emperor Norton before, it's a cool story.
By the way, thanks to my co-blogger Joel, Blawg Review will' [...]
A friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times piece by Randy Kennedy about photographer Mitch Epstein. He's doing a series of photographs about America's energy policies, photographing things like gas stations and power plants. As you might expect these days, he gets stopped by [...]
Well, now that the Nobel Committee has decided that the major qualification of a peace prized laureate is being Not George Bush, I think there's a few folks worth considering, beyond those usually being mentioned.
Hell, restricted this just to folks who, like Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter, have been President, we've' [...]
[I started writing this days ago, and the story's gone stale, but I'm posting so little these days that I figured I should get it out there.]
Some time ago, Radley Balko brought us the story of Sally Harpold, who bought two boxes of cold medicine within a few [...]
About the only good thing I can think about in the whole Polanski fooforaw is that it gives folks who wouldn't otherwise have had one an easy opportunity to stake out a not particularly morally difficult or brave position against middle-aged guys raping young girls, and in favor of said assholes' [...]
The AP's Deborah Yao explains:
The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.
The FTC said Monday its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final Web [...]
The AP's Deborah Yao explains:
The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.
The FTC said Monday its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final Web [...]
We lost the Olympics bid. Whew.
Mayor Daley will now have to find a different excuse to raise our taxes so he can funnel cash to his buddies.
[...]There's folks who say (I'm one of them) that the MCPPA is one of the best carry permit laws in the country. They -- we -- have a point.
Quick digression: I'm occasionally [...]
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On a per-capita basis, Jericho, Arkansas has got to be the worst-run town in the country. A lot of trouble comes from people forgetting this: "The sad truth is that the parties who seek to develop sophisticated and sensible schemes for state control quickly lose" [...]Via the mysterious Dr. X comes an interesting lawsuit that touches on the issue of medical professionals performing forensic tests, a subject I recently blogged about. Here's how Frank Main at the Chicago Sun-Times describes it:
Lisa Hofstra said she was the "charge nurse" in the emergency room [...]
As a libertarian, I'd like our government to be a lot smaller, but even I acknowledge that there are a number of essential government functions. One of the most important of these is the justice system.
That's why it angers me so much that our justice system (at all levels) has [...]
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How not to conduct an emergency drill. Scott Greenfield: So badass he doesn't remember how to give up. I agree with Peter Suderman: Patrick Swayze's coolest movie was neither Ghost nor Dirty Dancing. ...as well they should.' [...]
I haven't done a Sunday Song Lyric in a long time, but I just recently heard a cut off the Scissor Sisters' debut album, Scissor Sisters , and I found an insight that I have to share:
Creamsicle sky while the sun sets in the west
Where [...]
[Update, 12/29/09: the village idiot himself weighs in; see the comments.]Here we go again . . .
Near as I can figure out, Josh Hendrickson of Minnetonka MN, didn't have anything useful to do last Saturday, so he headed on down to the Obama Worship Seminar' [...]
Nobel prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died yesterday at the age of 95. If history is just, people a thousand years from now should still be talking about him. I wrote about him here.
[...]A few days ago, when I wrote about a guy who was forcibly catheterized to test if he was driving drunk (he wasn't) it seemed to me that this violated the requirements of medical ethics that medical procedures should only be done with the consent of the patient and for' [...]
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Norm Pattis continues his quiet war against his former sensei. Eric Turkewitz has some interesting things to say about his wife's ass. Fascinating discussion of medical responsibility for Michael Jackson's death in the comments at Kevin M.D. A new book about a heroic former prosecutor being [...]Over at Defending People, from time to time, Mark Bennett has taken out his box of knives, given them a quick stropping, and metaphorically disembowled some sleazebag lawyers, mainly -- but not exclusively -- focusing on the scumbags who engage in Black Hat SEO.
For those who came late to [...]
I don't understand how stuff like this happens:
According to the suit, police arrested Jamie Lockard, 53, on suspicion of drunken driving in March.
A Breathalyzer test showed he was under the legal limit, but Officer Brian Miller doubted the findings.
Lockard and his attorney claim in the suit that police' [...]
See update, below. Timmy Dolan isn't taking the disgrace of his deparment lying down; he's issued a stern memo decrying . . .
. . . the criticism. Sigh.
The Minnesota Metro Gang Strike Force scandal continues to unravel; hopefully some of the various coverups will, as well, sooner than [...]
When it comes to judicial oversight of law enforcement intrusion into our privacy, I'm pretty suspicious of claims of exigent circumstances.
For example, I don't believe the claim that terrorism investigators need to conduct warrantless surveillance because there's not enough time to get a warrant. Some places have judges stationed at [...]
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I guess this is easier than, you know, catching criminals. More evidence that our harsh treatment of released sex offenders is just ineffective security theater. I should have seen this coming: Michael Jackson sightings. The death of Spiderman? Or at least the death of an interesting [...]The Ninth Circuit just decided United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing which includes some very important new rules for seizing data on people's computers. Or so I'm told by folks like Scott Greenfield and Orin Kerr, who understand these things far better than me.
As I understand the [...]
My mother died in April, I moved in with my father for a few months to take care of him until I could find a nursing home, I moved him to the nursing home, I cleaned out his apartment, and I straightened out his finances. Now my father's died too, and [...]
Nah. Updating doesn't go quite far enough; I really should eat a little more crow. But just a little.
Let's try that again -- and I'm going to leave the original up, for historical purposes. Bloggers -- well, ones who care to do it right -- don't throw [...]
Let's start off by reviewing the key paragraph in our last episode:
On April 16 of 2008, Sheriff Bob Fletcher and Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner filed a hundred-page petition (here's Part 1; here's Part 2) with District Judge Joanne Smith, requesting that the judge revoke what they' [...]
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Motorola goes back to the brick with a mil spec cell phone.[It was kind of a rough week.]
[...]
Really.Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield has taken time off from bashing marketers to bash coupon settlements. That's when some lawyers initiate a lawsuit against a corporation on behalf of a large number of people, and then settled for a payment that allows the corporation to send out some [...]
Reason's Brian Doherty raises the alarm about Justine Varney, the new head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. According to a Wired article, she might be planning to go after Google.
The technology industry, she said, was coming under the sway of a dominant behemoth, one that had the [...]
My father, Burnett Draughn, was born in on Decoration Day, May the 30th, in 1919, somewhere near Daniel's Branch, Kentucky. He was Joe and Melissa Draughn's eighth child out of an eventual total of ten. My dad liked to say that he had nine brothers and sisters, and every one [...]
I gave Avvo Answers---Avvo's forum for lawyers to answer questions for free---a test drive a couple weeks ago with a test question about bailing someone out, and the result was a bit confusing, but I eventually got the answer I was looking for. You can read about it all [...]
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Postal service hell. Launch a fake North Korean Twitter feed, watch real media pick it up. Kudos to Popehat. Whatever else I may think of Obama, I really hope that on his last day in office he provides the "vault copy" of his birth certificate that [...]I've been posting about my attempt to get an answer to a simple question using Avvo Answers. In Take 1, an out-of-state lawyer provided a wrong answer. In Take 2, our own Jeremy Richey provided a good answer that missed a part of the question. I clarified my question, and' [...]
Out of some curiosity about how bail works, I posted a question on Avvo Answers. The first answer I got was a clean miss by an out-of-state lawyer. Now Illinois's own Jeremy Richey has stepped up.
To review, here's the question I asked:
What's my exposure if I bail' [...]
After a recent episode of Raising the Bar, I've been wondering if some do-gooder could go around bailing indigent people out of jail so they can go home to their families even though they don't have $500. Not that I could afford to do that, but how would that work? [...]
In response to my recent missive ("Beating Customs Agents With Your Laptop") about the fourth-amendment-free zone overseen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Lawrence Friedman at Customs Law sent an email explaining some of what can really happen when you try to apply technogeek law to the real [...]
Columnist Steve Chapman has a piece today complaining that the coming increase in the minimum wage will cause unemployment:
Come Friday, the federally mandated minimum wage will jump to $7.25 an hour from $6.55 -- an 11 percent increase. At a time when employers are laying off workers, Washington is [...]
One of the recent kerfuffles in the legal blogosphere (or, if you must, the blawgosphere) is about anonymity. On blogs.
Yeah! I know! But they all sound so serious!
Dan Hull started it (this time) with his declaration that What About Clients was now a "Wuss-Free Zone."
Effective July 1, 2009, [...]
[Excuse me while I rant...]
I've never been out of the country, so I've never had to deal with the U.S. Customs Service (or whatever self-important name these tax collectors are using lately), but I hate the whole organization on principle anyway because they're a bunch of weasels who insist on conducting' [...]
In George Orwell's famous distopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most oppressive features of his totalitarian world is the ubiquitous surveillance. Every public place---and every private room as well---is always being monitored through a massive network of two-way video cameras called telescreens. Do anything that angered the tyrannical regime [...]
The New York Times has up a story about distracted driving and cell phones. I only skimmed the story---I'm skeptical about the issue, but I don't know enough to really have an opinion---because I was looking at the picture. Radley Balko had pointed it out in a passing [...]
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Obama cuts major weapons system from military budget! Robots that can feed off of humans. That never ends well.* I'm a libertarian, but...uhh...too weird. Ouch. Ouch. A billionaire who wants to control the weather. That never ends well. Cool interview with Adam Savage of MythBusters.*Update:' [...]
In my latest attempt to make blogging pay well enough to afford new camera equipment, I've started displaying Chitika search-targeted advertising. The cool thing about this is that all of you who read my blog regularly won't be seeing any additional ads because of it.
When somebody out there clicks [...]
So there I was, writing a short post about something, when I needed to embed an image. I cliecked the "Insert Image" button in my Movable Type blogging software, uploaded the image, and...it wouldn't let me create a thumbnail image.
Thumbnailing is done by the Perl Image::Magick module and, sure enough,' [...]
I'm continuing my search for a half-way decent Chicago-themed criminal defense blog. The standard isn't that high. I'm not looking for a national-quality crimlaw blogger with a huge following and tons of great articles. You just have to blog criminal defense better than me, and I'm not a lawyer.
In [...]
The other day I was once again lamenting the state of Chicago criminal defense bloggers---which is, basically, as I've complained before, that there aren't any---when I had a shocking revelation: There is, in fact, one person in Chicago blogging about criminal defense issues: Me. Thus, by default, I, Windypundit, am The [...]
I just visited the Apple store in Old Orchard for some accessories for the new hotness, and I spotted something I've never seen before:
License-plate-specific reserved parking? This must be reserved for one person, and including the plate number makes it easy for mall security to recognize the right car,' [...]
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Awesome Train v.s. Tornado video. Movie Preview: If the vampires defeated the humans, what would be left for them to eat? Don't try to break into the home of a former boxer, even if he's 72 years old. Pigs flew. Movie Preview: They're not just [...]With regard to the issue of giving credit for discovering the "Sotomeyor & Associates" issue, Eric Turkewitz comments:
Something might be in the public domain, but it if is buried in a box of other documents, someone still has to go find it.
Whether this qualifies as that proverbial box [...]
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I have a lot of stuff to plug in, so this would work for me. Criminal law in Metropolis and Gotham City. Things that have changed since the early days of the blogosphere. Ever wonder what happened to Milli Vanilli's Fab Morvan? I can't decide if' [...]I went out last night to take pictures of the fireworks going off in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, it was raining earlier in the evening, and I think that discouraged some people from bringing out their fireworks. Several of the locations I usually hit were totally dead.
To make matters worse, fog [...]
So on July 4, 1776, the United States of America declared itself independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain. And then it was July 5, and there was work to be done. Britain was a superpower, but through war and diplomacy our small nation wrested sovereignty from the king's hands, and' [...]
In response to my earlier post of a couple of thoughts on healthcare, a reader called "bunkerbuster" throws a few interesting questions my way:
What's your view on demand for health care?
The market model would have it increase to infinity if it becomes zero cost to the consumer.
Generally, that [...]
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Federal conspiracy charges coming in 5...4...3...2... Turns out many diagnoses of Shaken Baby Syndrome weren't actually caused by people shaking the baby. Lots of people may have gone for jail for mild accidents that took place days before the murder-by-shaking supposedly occurred. This sort of' [...]I'm probably being unfair, but it seems like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a bit of a dumbass. (Or maybe, as fair Jennifer says, we should have listened to Anita Hill.) That's really the only way to account for his explanation of why it was okay for a' [...]
Now that Michael Jackson is dead, I'm not going to miss him. I didn't know him. I don't think many people did. I do, however, miss the Michael Jackson I once thought I knew, back before it all got so weird. You see, there was a time...
I never really loved' [...]
A few random shots around the web:
When I heard that bartender-beating Chicago cop Anthony Abbate got a light sentence, I wondered if someone who wasn't a cop did the same thing, would he get off as easy? When Moser did some research, and the answers is probably yes. It' [...]Chicago police officer Anthony Abbate---caught on video beating up a young woman bartender---has been sentenced. He got probation.
Note that Abbate is still a police officer. The Independent Police Review Authority has recommended he be fired, and it sounds like he was convicted of a felony, which should disqualify him [...]
Illinois's own Jeremy Richey does some actual journalism and interviews California civil attorney Brian Pedigo about his experience as a juror for a murder trial. He talks about deliberations, and what he thinks each side did wrong or right.
By the way, he has one piece of advice [...]
Scott Greenfield, font of so much that I can riff off of, has a complaint about gang experts who try to paint every action by the defendant as related to his membership in a gang:
If a defendant has a tattoo, the expert will testify that tattoos are "brands" typically worn [...]
Back on my latest I'm-going-to-be-blogging-about-healthcare post, reader Seth makes a few points in the comments. Here's the first one:
Making healthcare cheaper by saving money on billing data, etc. is saving money on clerks and bookkeepers. Whether the amount is large or small, it has no effect on the amount' [...]
