Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and often a path to profit

When I was a little kid in school, the teacher used to dole out little star stickers for good behavior, getting all the questions right on your homework, and so on.

As of yesterday, Google is giving out badges for reading the news:

http://www.google.com/support/News/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1237021

As best I can tell from the Google blurb, instead of being a Foursquare “Mayor” I can get colored badges for reading categories of news.  More news in a category means a better color: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, with an eventual rise to “Ultimate.”

I’m really not sure what to think of this.  Is reading a lot of news articles like “eating your peas” as the President wants the Republicans to do?  Maybe Google is on to something here.  Colored badges for the GOPers that play nice on the debt ceiling debate!

Google is on an imitation roll lately.  Google+ seems to be attempting to combine Facebook (Stream), Twitter (Following and Inbox), Skype (Hangout), and pick your own flavor of photo sharing (Photos) and instant messaging (Huddle), with its own RSS/news feed thrown in (Sparks).

Google is getting a bit of media flack for its imitation; but, it’s also getting a bit of praise for the slick and often improved way it does what its competitors have been doing.

Ford wasn’t the first car company; but, it invented the assembly line.  Microsoft stole Windows and made it ubiquitous.  My Space came before Facebook, which pretty much drove it out of business.  Remember Dogpile and Alta Vista and Google’s other early competitors?  (Interestingly, they are both still around – Dogpile.com and Altavista.com – the latter looks like an early, stripped down Google.com.)

The interesting thing about Google+ is its shopping mall versus boutique approach to the internet.  In a way, it’s a throw back to the early Yahoo and AOL – come here (and stay) for all of your World Wide Web needs!

I signed up for Google+ the other day, as those of you that got here from my Stream know.  So far, it’s Facebook with a much better interface but only a couple of “friends.”  (Be an early adopter, hang out at the mall with me, sign up so I’m not lonely!)  I can say that Sergey Brin is boring and the Mark Zuckerberg has nothing to say, literally, nothing. 

Until you get here, maybe I’ll spend my time getting some nice shiny, colored badges.

Nope, No Way, Maybe

I’m not paying Netflix double what I’m paying now for what it gives me.

I used to get three at a time DVD’s with the streaming service when it came in. I added the Blu-ray when it became available.

I cut back to one DVD at a time when I ran out of new movies I wanted to watch.

All the while, I read about the business model. I should have known.

Netflix doesn’t want to send me round pieces of plastic. That costs too much money. And, most people want instant gratification.

People pay more for instant.

Then too, Netflix’s content providers saw all the money it was making on the sweet streaming deals it had signed. They wanted more of the pie.

What to do, what to do.

The future is streaming and streaming content is going to cost more money. And, DVD’s have high overhead.

We have no real competition for either service.

Ta Da!

Split it Netflix decided and it is a good decision for Netflix. More money to pay the content providers on the streaming and plastic ends of the business. More marginal income on both sides too.

They’ll lose some people, probably like me on both ends and keep one or the other income streams from most people.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’m almost sure I’ll drop the DVD service – Redbox and Amazon will be the beneficiaries of my plastic or streaming purchases of new releases. The question is whether I’ll succumb to Netflix being the only real source of broad choice streaming content. I don’t want to; but, I might. Doing so, gives Netflix about the same revenue it gets now with no physical costs and I really don’t like the fact that Netflix has the leverage and I don’t.

I’m off to research steaming content sources and will let you know what I come up with, if I come up with something.

Bring On the Default!

I’m ready to see us exceed the debt ceiling and see what will happen. 

Greece seems to be doing okay, Spain and Portugal are still clicking along.  I’m pretty sure Ireland and Iceland are still there.  Us?  Talk about too big to fail.

Minnesota, last I heard has not slide under Wisconsin, which hasn’t slide into Lake Michigan.

I did like the President’s line today that it’s time to “eat our peas.”  But his buds and their opposition only want dessert in the way of scoring points with those they see likely to vote for them next year.

On the left, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are off the table.  On the right, that’s pretty much all we can cut from, and no tax increases on anyone, anytime, for any reason.

Boys and girls, that ain’t going to cut it. 

Maybe a double dip recession will help for those of us with jobs.  Think about it, the markets will tank again and you can ride them back up (assuming you get out in the next week or so).  If the markets crash, gas will probably go back down with them.

The poor, the halt and the weak?  They’ll still be around, in about the same shape as they were before the default same as in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The boys and girls in Washington will eventually cobble something together, fixing none of the structural problems, same as they did a couple of years ago to “fix” the most recent recession.

Then for a few years we can go back to our desperate, or not too bad, lives till the next time our representatives let things get to yet another crisis.

Why are you down on our schools?

That’s what a friend asked me in a comment to a Facebook link I posted to this opinion piece by Roger Ebert to which I’d added a header of “another thing wrong with our schools.”

For those of you that don’t feel like clicking over, Ebert bemoaned the MacMillan Reader edition of The Great Gatsby, which dumbs the novel way down, promoting it as some sort of gateway to reading to be used by teachers.

I take Ebert’s side; but, that isn’t the point of this post.

My friend and I went back and forth in the comments, the gist of my end of them being that schools “teach to the test,” and don’t teach a love of, and the method of, learning.

Here in Atlanta we have a current scandal running because a hundred or so Atlanta teachers and administrators made wholesale corrections of students’ achievement test answers. I’m not too interested in the fact of the cheating, as deplorable as it is. But, it seems to me that is a somewhat predictable result of an overwhelming emphasis on shoving a prescribed body of “education” down the throats of our kids with the hope and expectation that they will cough it back up on the yearly tests.

The failure is at both ends of the ability spectrum. Neither a very smart, nor a barely able, five-year old seems to get the different educations that each needs. The very smart float through the system, unchallenged. The barely able are pushed along, not helped to do more than get through the process of getting an “education.”

I don’t know much about current curriculum; but, I do know that whatever is being taught is resulting in too many adults that don’t spell very well, can’t write very well and don’t read at all. It results in too many adults that have little or no ability to think critically. It results in an increasing number of our “hard science” professionals being foreign born.

Kids aren’t fungible, they are unique. Education isn’t one, or two or ten sizes fit all. Until we figure out how to create a system that finds out what a particular kid “is,” where the kid is on his particular path and how best to move him along that path, be it at the high, middle or low end of ability, all the money in the world won’t result in an educated society.

July 4, 1776...

gave us the Declaration of Independence.

March 4, 1789 is a more important day as the Constitution became operative having been endorsed by New Hampshire, the necessary ninth state.

December 15, 1791 is arguably even more important, the Bill of Rights was ratified.

Then too, if you aren’t Caucasian, a date in the late 1800’s during or just after the Civil War, or the day Brown v. School Board came out might be a big day for you.

Gay and living in New York?  Last week had a pretty good day for you.

Then there’s Arab Spring which is spinning into Summer.

But, live in Syria and you don’t have much to celebrate, yet.

All that in mind, maybe Monday will have just a bit of importance as the anniversary of a distillation of some ideas that informed what has come after:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security….”

In the words of a friend, have a sparkly Fourth.  But, words do matter.  I’m thinking about what we learned and applied from the paragraph above, and what it says that we forget.

Current Conditions: Partly Cloudy. Forcast: A Bad Storm A Comin'

Which doesn’t belong:

IMF, Apple, Google, the U.S. Senate, Sony, Lockheed Martin, Chase, CIA

To my knowledge, only Apple hasn’t been hacked.  I’ve written about this before; but, for the life of me, I don’t understand putting anything important in “the Cloud.”

First, there is no “cloud.”  The Cloud is a bunch of servers sitting all over the place – you send your stuff to them and they will let you retrieve it. Usually.  If all of the entities listed above can’t keep hacker’s out, why does anyone think they can protect your important stuff?

If someone wants to hack the text of my Gmail’s, fine. I never use Gmail for anything important, precisely because it’s all sitting on Google’s servers ready to be hacked.  For work, I use a domain service that deletes Emails when they are downloaded by me – it’s scary enough that I’m trusting strangers for the short time the Emails are in their servers.

The trouble with the Cloud is that it makes vandalism and theft a lot more efficient.  It used to be that bad guys had to physically break in and take or damage your stuff.  Now they can sit in a basement, drinking Mountain Dew, and wreak havoc at their leisure.

Cyber-war is a word we’re hearing more and more about.  The U.S. is thought to have screwed up Iran’s nuclear reactors by messing with the computers used to run them.  Someone in China hacked Google and Lockheed Martin.

Computers and the internet were supposed to be a boon to mankind.  We just forgot that mankind is the reason we can’t have nice stuff.

As it turns out, it turns on timing,...

the constitutionality of health care reform, that is.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on “Obamacare” yesterday. Most of the time was spent on the “individual mandate” which would make us buy insurance or pay a “fine” to be collected by the IRS. The Government argues that the requirement is constitutional under the Commerce Clause, which says “[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes….”

The question for the Court is whether people are “engaged in commerce,” which Congress can regulate, while sitting in their living rooms and refusing to buy health insurance. Paul Clement, representing states and individuals opposing the law, said they weren’t. But then he conceded that a broke and bleeding person on a hospital doorstep that didn’t have insurance could be forced to buy it before he was treated. At that point, seeking health care, he was “engaged in commerce.” By that logic, a person sitting in his living room, suffering a heart attack while doing nothing, runs afoul of Congress’ power and engages in commerce when he dials 911 for an ambulance. What if he does nothing and his neighbor makes the call for him?

This debate seems to be a matter of form over substance. No one argues that Congress could increase income tax rates by whatever percentage was necessary to pay for a national health care plan. Congress, in its wisdom or folly, decided that everyone needs to have health care. Wisely or foolishly, it devised a plan to pay for it.

This is exactly the kind of issue that judges do poorly at and are always required to deal with when politicians are divided.

Conservatives are always arguing that “the will of the people” should prevail until that will, as expressed in a law they don’t like, comes to their attention. (I’m not saying Liberals haven’t done the same thing.) Conservatives didn’t have the votes last year to stop Obamacare and don’t have them this year to repeal it.

Maybe, just maybe, if the people in Congress decided to talk to each other and stop engaging in brinksmanship they could come up with a better way to deal with everyone’s need for health care. If pigs could fly….

Which President said what, when?

One of these quotes is from GWB, one from BHO:

“As president, I can promise you your country will be with you every single step of the way.  We’re not going anywhere… We will be with you every step of the way.”

“In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force, and that all life is fragile. We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth,  who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake , who reclaimed the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s. Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew – and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature – and we will not start now.”

Were I a resident of Tuscaloosa, Joplin or Springfield, I'd be a bit worried.

Adhesion and the Internet

Over the last few months I’ve been playing with a new DSLR and Photoshop (the latter kicking my butt regularly).  When I produce something I like, I sometimes post it to my Facebook page, but not using Photoshop or iPhoto.

Why you ask?

Here’s what iPhoto wants from me in return for uploading a picture (and Photoshop is similar):

Access my basic information

Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.

Post to my Wall

iPhoto Uploader may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall

Access my profile information

Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes, About Me, Activities, Interests, Groups, Events, Notes, Birthday, Hometown, Current City, Website, Religious and Political Views, Education History, Work History and Facebook Status

Access my contact information

Online Presence

Access my family & relationships

Significant Other and Relationship Details and Family Members and Relationship Status

Access my photos and videos

Photos Uploaded by Me, Videos Uploaded by Me and Photos and Videos of Me

Access my friends' information

Birthdays, Religious and Political Views, Family Members and Relationship Statuses, Significant Others and Relationship Details, Hometowns, Current Cities, Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes, Activities, Interests, Education History, Work History, Online Presence, Websites, Groups, Events, Notes, Photos, Videos, Photos and Videos of Them, 'About Me' Details and Facebook Statuses

Why does iPhoto need info about my Facebook Friends, all of my contact information, my “relationships,” etc. to transmit a lousy picture?  A short answer, it doesn’t; but, it does want the info and forces me to give it if I want to use its services.

iPhoto, Photoshop, Android, and iPhone “permissions” are adhesion contracts.  Want a mortgage, an apartment, Windows?  Say yes to all the terms or you don’t get what you want.  Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt don’t negotiate with their customers.  Yes it’s “opt-in” which is an improvement over “opt-out,” Facebook’s infamous mode of operation.  And it’s transparent, another trendy word these days.  But is it a good idea?

Law over the centuries has evolved to protect people in circumstances where they are dealing with someone that has all the leverage.  In most states, an exculpatory agreement is invalid or limited in its scope (think the tiny print on the back of your ticket for an amusement park, a raft trip and so on).  Most states have laws about what apartment complexes can put in leases and what banks can put in mortgages.   Utility companies are regulated by states.

Not so the internet – the wild, wild west.  Maybe it’s because it came about in the Reagan Eighties, grew up in the go-go Nineties and matured with last decade’s lasseze faire government approach to business regulation.

But, I think it’s time the internet is recognized for what it has become – a utility – “a public service, as a telephone or electric-light system, a streetcar or railroad line, or the like.”  Dictionary.com.

Your electric and gas companies can’t make you give them private information (beyond credit qualifications) as a condition of providing you their products.  You don’t have to give them your address book and disclose your current significant other.

Proposing that the government step in to protect consumers doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy given its track record with regulation of cable companies and the financial industry over the past few decades; but, it running interference might slow down some of the excesses of our new tech masters just as it did with Twentieth Century industry, before it pretty much gave up the fight.

I've been busy and...

find myself not having much to say in long form lately.  It may be that I've said everything and can only repeat myself.

Then too, if you look under the blog name, it says I write about things that interest, annoy or amuse me, or something like that.  Lately, with a lot to do professionally, I'm not interested in much else and even if I am, I don't have the time and inclination to write about it.  While I'm often annoyed, I'm getting used to it.  Amusement seems to come in small bits these days.

And I have to admit, small bits of amusement, annoyance and interest are ready made for Facebook.  If you want to see them, friend me:  Evad Knat.  I do promise I will not ever, ever go to Twitter: too small, small bits. 

Facebook, okay; but, Google, I've got a problem

A week or so ago I was “playing” with Facebook trying to get it serve me ads on specific topics based on what was in a status or a comment I had written.  Facebook is kind of like your trusty dog, it doesn’t believe you would con it.  And you know you’ve betrayed a dog’s trust, throwing the ball, throwing the ball, then not throwing to the ball and laughing as your dog takes off running to catch the ball that’s still in your hand.

Likewise, Facebook takes everything you write, runs it through a few algorithms and ta da! If you are writing about Destin, Florida, quite possibly you might click on an ad for beach condos on Hilton Head Island (can’t afford them, at least during the “season).  If you use the word liquor, Facebook wants you to “Like” Jim Beam.

That’s all fine and good and actually fun, for a few minutes.  But, have you noticed that Google can give you some odd results lately?  It used to be that I’d almost always find what I was looking for in the first few results, certainly on the first page of results.

I spent most of this week in Iowa trying a lawsuit, though that’s another story.  I’d made a reservation at a Holiday Inn Express in Keokuk last weekend.  While there I did a little surfing a couple of times looking for local restaurants.  I’ve done this before while at home a search for “Midtown brunch” will give you twenty links to restaurant and ratings sites.  Not in Keokuk.  I typed in “Keokuk IA restaurants and got paid results for resorts and hotels with meta tags for the word restaurant.

I finished my trial on Friday, too late to get a flight and decided to stay the weekend in Burlington, Iowa on the Mississippi, making a reservation at a Fairfield Inn & Suites.  This morning I Googled “breakfast Burlington IA” and got a list of Bed and Breakfast place, again that used breakfast as a meta tag.

Google is getting as dumb as Facebook.  It knows I’ve made two hotel reservations in a week and thinks I’ve got some sort of lodging fetish.

Facebook and Google have “personalized” my “online experience” and I’m not at all sure I like it.  There’s of course the creepy factor and the stay out of my business factor.  But the dumb algorithm factor is troubling.

I started computer searching decades ago using Westlaw, a legal database, which required a basic understanding of Boolean logic.  With the advent of Google and its like I didn’t have to be as precise, as the algorithm “crowd sourced” the likely correct results of my search; and, with millions of users it worked really well.

This new emphasis on what I’ve done in the past having a bearing on what I want to do now doesn’t seem to me to be working well.  Maybe they’ll refine it; but, in the meantime, what results that I might well want to see is it filtering based on it’s, flawed, assumptions about me?

Newer isn’t always better.  I don’t mind Facebook’s little games, I’m confident I can outthink a 25 year old billionaire, though I sometimes resent him making me have to do it.  But, I don’t like the idea of Google skewing the results it gives me based on a poor understanding of who I am and what I want.

Are two lousy tickets too much to ask for?

Dear Ticketmaster and The Atlanta Braves,

I have an employee of a very good client who wants two tickets to a Braves Game in June; thus, his wish is my command.

No big deal you would think given the wonders of the internet and a credit card.

Not so.  Google “Atlanta Braves tickets” and see what you get.  First there’s all the paid ads for brokers, ticket exchanges and scalpers.

No “Atlantabraves.com” or anything of the sort.  There are multiple iterations of “MLB.com” all of which somewhere on a crowded, graphically challenged page have a link to Ticketmaster.com.

Click that link and you get a graphic of Turner Field and its seat sections, represented by tiny, tiny little colored rectangles with unreadable numbers in them (which a little further down, you will learn are totally irrelevant to the process of getting tickets).  The different colors represent different areas of seats with different prices.  And you can't enlarge the page.

This wasn’t a real problem as I’ve been to the Ted and knew that I wanted Terrace seats anywhere is sections 201 to 205.  Except you can’t get there from the page.  No, you have to go to a selection area of the page where you type in the number of seats you want, whether you want to “add value” (pre-buy food and drink), whether you have a coupon or promo code and then, you can’t choose where you want to go.  You have to choose “Best Available” or “Terrace.”

Best Available doesn’t get you Terrace and Terrace doesn’t let you limit your choices to the sections you want, it tries to push less desirable sections of Terrace out past the infield on you.

At one point in the odyssey, I gave in and tried to buy seats in Section 208.  I clicked “Buy” and it churned and churned and churned while I looked at the advice that it would take less than a minute and that I should not hit the back button or refresh or I’d have to start over again.

Several minutes of churning and I noticed that Firefox had blocked Ticketmaster’s attempt to redirect me to “another page.”  So I clicked “Allow.”  It seems “Allow” is the equivalent to Refresh and Back and I “had to start all over again.”  I tried several variations of this process with no success.

On to Ticketmaster’s 800 number.  The nice female computer voice directing me through phone hell understood a good 40% of what I said.  Again, you can’t pick what you want, I got the same Best Available or Terrace.   Then you had to pick a price within Terrace.  You can’t pick "any price" and you can’t pick a range of prices.  So I picked a few discrete prices,and each time my friend (I think I can call her a friend, we’d been “talking” for over ten minutes at this point) told me she didn’t have any seats for that price.

I hung up.  Some more surfing and I got the hours (8:30 to 6:00) on non-game days) for the ticket office at Turner Field figuring I’d go down at lunch time.  I did.  Guess what isn’t open at 10:45 a.m.?

If anybody at Ticketmaster or with the Braves reads this, I’ll pay, I really have to get the tickets; but, I’ll be damned if I know how to get them.

Best Regards,

Dave.

So, you want to live in the cloud?

Or, as it used to be called, on internet servers. “The Cloud” is trendy. What it is, is not quite as sexy – a bunch of buildings in a bunch of places with a bunch of servers that have data in them. Usually the data is in more than one place so a place goes down, the others pick up the slack.

Google, at least to my recollection, started the rush to the “cloud” with Google Docs, an online kind of equivalent to the programs in Microsoft Office. Why pay MS hundreds of dollars every couple of years and take up space on your hard drive with the program and the files when you can go to the cloud and use the free Docs program and store your files there?

Apple is building a 500,000 square foot building to house a new server “farm,” reportedly to house data for the rumored “iCloud” it is about to introduce to sync all your music and videos to and from all of your Apple devices.

But, as we all know, computers are finicky things. They quit doing what they are supposed to do on annoyingly frequent basis. The Blue Screen of Death. Control + Alt + Delete. Defragmenting. Viruses and worms.

And all those things happen no matter where you keep the hardware – in your home or office or in a server farm on the other end of the cloud.

Sony’s Playstation Network has been down for about a week and may be up this week after being hacked. Amazon has a very nice server business that didn’t get a lot of attention until recently when it went down and shut down a whole bunch of websites.

I’ve always been wary of the cloud for security reasons, and still am. As a lawyer I can’t see putting client information in the hands of a third party that might access it or let others. But lately, the inherent fallibility of computers (and nuclear reactors, but that’s a different post) has added a new reason for me to keep my stuff closer to home. If one of my computers goes down, the stuff in it is sitting in an external hard drive and mirrored on the other computer. I’m not dependent on whichever flavor of cloud computing company wants my business.

Maybe someday I’ll have to but not as long as I don’t absolutely have to. After all, though I bank online and use ATM’s to get money, I still have a paper check register, keep all my credit card and ATM card receipts and refuse to put money or checks into the machine in front of the bank.

Legal Warfare

I am engaged in the title’s activity.  We’ll see how this post goes as I can’t really tell you anything about the case.

Let’s say the other side is caught cold doing wrong and judicially admits it in the Answer to the Complaint (I have the distinct feeling I’m writing this for an audience of one, Curmudgeon).  For the other three or four of you, if you say something in something you file with the court, you are stuck with it – true or not – it is true.

Ah, but you get a Counterclaim filed against your client that is, charitably put, not quite based on facts or reality.  To add to the insult, the damages claimed would fund the deficit of some of our smaller distressed cities.

You figure out early on that the lawyer on the other side pretty much doesn’t have a case and wants to scare you so you will convince your client to do a walk away – each side dismisses and calls it even.  And while the lawyer is at it, said lawyer is milking his client for fees.  I really would pay for the pleasure of being in the room when the first bill is opened.

Your client understands all this and instructs you to soldier on, the right thing to do for legal and business reasons.

And I am; but, it is really depressing when I step back from it a bit.  I’m going to make a relatively nice amount of money.  My client may even come out ahead if the other side has some money to grab after a probable judgment.

And the lawyer on the other side is creative, if not quite what I consider professional, requiring me to think, something I don’t have to do very often at this stage in my career – I’m told it will stave off senility in the coming years.

But, it is all kind of distasteful.  The other lawyer is condescending and smarmy which makes me want to engage in some equally unpleasant behavior, which I’m so far resisting. 

I don’t like any of it.

Oh My! I'm on the side of the Republicans!

The title was just for shock value.  I’m actually on the side of lawyers acting like lawyers.  Stop laughing.

An Atlanta “silk stocking” law firm, King & Spalding has been under fire for a week or so as one of its partners (at the rate of $520 an hour) took on the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) for Republican House leaders when the Justice Department announced that it would not defend the law in lawsuits asserting that the law is unconstitutional.

The firm’s chairman, announcing the firm would withdraw, said “[i]n reviewing this assignment further, I determined that the process used for vetting this engagement was inadequate.”  AJC.com.  He didn’t mention that the firm was under fire from gay groups and liberal quarters, with protests planned against it later in the week.

The partner who is handling the case, Paul D. Clement, a former Solicitor General, resigned saying “’I take this step not because of strongly held views about the statute. My thoughts about the merits of DOMA are as irrelevant as my views about the dozens of federal statutes that I defended as Solicitor General.

‘‘Instead, I resign out of the firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high. Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.’

“Clement closed his letter by quoting from a … former King & Spalding partner (and former Attorney General and former federal appellate judge) Griffin Bell: ‘You are not required to take every matter that is presented to you, but having assumed a representation, it becomes your duty to finish the representation.’”  NationalReview.com.  (Emphasis added.)

Laugh if you will, lawyers have certain ethical obligations that result from the grant of the privilege to practice law. King & Spalding got lawyering exactly wrong and Mr. Clement got it exactly right.

I hope Mr. Clement with his new firm loses big time in his defense of DOMA but he should be applauded for his representation.  His old firm needs to take a remedial professionalism course.  Perhaps Mr. Clement will volunteer his services to teach it.

It's 8:20 p.m. and everything in Atlanta is quite nice

I just looked out the window and saw a guy and I assume his maybe 3 year old daughter. She had her dad's Braves cap on, which kept falling off her head and an orange plastic bat. He tossed her the plastic ball which she let land next to her (she's a lefty) and then took a great golf swing, popping it ten or so feet each time. They were always hooks or slices because she came off of the bat with her left hand. She has promise though, nice fluid swing.

Just about the end of twilight and to my mind Spring in Atlanta is quite nice.

Facebook pushes the envelope yet again

Just after lunch I went to the Huffington Post while surfing and was greeted by a popover that informed me that a Facebook friend (one of the owners of a yellow dog which pines over the other owner’s tennis shoe when he is gone) had linked her facebook account to HuffPo and invited me to do the same.

I thought I had blocked all access to my Facebook page other than to friends.  Not so grasshopper.  If your friends like a page or a website or an app, they get access to you now.

If you click through to “Account Settings” and then click this line:

“Info accessible through your friends

Control what information is available to apps and websites when your friends use them”

you will get this below.  When I did, all of the items were checked:

Use the settings below to control which of your information is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them. The more info you share, the more social the experience.

Bio	My videos
Birthday	My links
Family and relationships	My notes
Interested in	Photos and videos I'm  tagged in
Religious and political views	Hometown
My website	Current city
If I'm online	Education and work
My status updates	Activities, interests, things I like
My photos	Places I check in to

Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you've set to everyone) is available to friends' applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

I don’t remember seeing that screen before; and, even if I had, I damn well know I didn’t check the boxes.  The only thing I can think of that I’ve done is give Photoshop permission to upload pictures recently.  Maybe that reset everything.  Sorry Photoshop and HuffPo, you are now on the shit list.  And Facebook, it may be true that “[t]he more info you share, the more social the experience:” but, I like designing my own social circumstances and I’m getting real tired of you forcing me to catch you each time you decide to change the rules.

Pick a side: my friend says I'm wrong

Regular readers will know that one of my friends is a cop.  We often agree on stuff you might think would separate us.  That didn’t happen today.

I told him about sitting on an entrance ramp to the Connector (I-75 and I-85 are the same expressway through downtown Atlanta for a couple of miles, a design failure) on Saturday, on my way to play golf near the airport.  I just missed getting ahead of what I thought was a police funeral procession, being the tenth or so car not permitted to enter the expressway by the police car that blocked it.  (I had about 15 minutes while sitting to count.)

I watched police cars from a bunch of Georgia cities and counties, maybe a couple of hundred, pass me and then about a thousand, private, motorcycles, then a dozen or so more police cars, all with lights and sirens operating, before I was allowed to move.

Here’s the thing.  All the cars and bikes were in the HOV lane to the far left of the southbound, seven or eight lane expressway.  All of the remaining lanes were empty.

I was finally allowed to move and caught up to the procession in maybe a minute, just past the next entrance – no blocking, cars now were allowed to occupy the lanes next to the procession.

As it turns out, my friend the cop says it wasn’t a funeral (I wasn’t happy but I could have “lived” with fifteen minutes out of my life for a show of respect for a fallen cop).  Nope, I was stopped for no good reason (at least that I can think of or that my friend offered) for the entire connector being blocked for the annual Georgia police something or other ride for the families of slain officers.

Don’t get me wrong, I want police to be paid well.  I want them to be taken care of if they’re hurt.  I want their families taken care of if they are killed.  But I don’t think it’s a matter of respect for a few thousand people to be stopped in their tracks through downtown Atlanta while a thousand or so cops ride south in one lane with the rest empty.  Though I didn’t mention it to my friend, it seems to me to a bit arrogant on the part of the cops.

My friend the cop and I have agreed to disagree on this one.

All spending is discretionary (or, I think we are screwed)

Don’t hammer me on the absolute accuracy of the dollars in this article, though they do seem to be borne out by spending info I found at Wikipedia.

That said, we paid more than $100 billion and $50 billion for our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, in 2010.  Those numbers don’t count money spent from the $513 billion Defense Department budget.  Even if no other money had been spent (and I’m sure that isn’t true) those two wars represent about 25% of “defense” spending and just under 5% of all spending.

According to Wikipedia, the Federal government took in $2.16 trillion in taxes in Fiscal Year 2010 and spent about $3.45 trillion.  Here’s a breakdown of Federal spending for the same year:

Mandatory spending: $2.009 trillion (-20.1%)

$695 billion (+4.9%) – Social Security

$571 billion (−15.2%) – Other mandatory programs

$453 billion (+6.6%) – Medicare

$290 billion (+12.0%) – Medicaid

$164 billion (+18.0%) – Interest on National Debt

$11 billion (+275%) – Potential disaster costs

$0 billion (−100%) – Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

$0 billion (−100%) – Financial stabilization efforts

Discretionary spending: $1.368 trillion (+13.1%)

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) – Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)

$78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services

$72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation

$52.5 billion (+10.3%) – Department of Veterans Affairs

$51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs

$47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development

$46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education

$42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security

$26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy

$26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture

$23.9 billion (−6.3%) – Department of Justice

$18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

$13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury

$12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior

$10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency

$9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration

$7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation

$5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers

$5.0 billion (+100%) – National Infrastructure Bank

$1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service

$0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration

$0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration

$19.8 billion (+3.7%) – Other Agencies

$105 billion – Other

Some numbers that jump out at you:

"Mandatory" spending was down 20.1% and discretionary spending was up 13.1% over 2009. 

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending totaled $1.438 trillion, about 40% of all spending.

The Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, State and Homeland Security account for $810.6 billion or about 23% of all spending.

About 39 cents of every dollar spent was borrowed.

End spending in the seven categories just mentioned and the government is in the black.  Can’t do that?

End all the wars, all the economic aid to other countries, shut down all foreign military operations, cut off all economic aid for seniors, students, children and others who have assets or private income that they could survive on, end the Bush tax cuts, end government subsidies to businesses and you might get close to the same point. 

And you’d get a Tea Party membership card in the mail.  And a few wars that threaten our economic interests.  And some more dead or sick little kids.  An even less educated, less able next generation.  A few more seniors dead before their time.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Don't talk to the PO-lice

The title uses the Southern pronunciation.  For purposes of this post, the police are anyone in authority investigating a crime.

The grand jury exchange which the Barry Bonds jury found to be an “obstruction of Justice:

"Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't — we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want — don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.

A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that — you know, that — I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ..."

Jurors were only supposed to make their decision based on the second answer, the one beginning "That's what keeps ..." However, it seemed after the verdict on Wednesday that they looked at the whole exchange. The foreman of the jury, who said his first name was Fred, repeatedly used an expletive to describe Bonds' answer to the question from the prosecutors.

"When you're in front of a grand jury you have to answer, and he gave a b------- answer. It was a b------- answer," Fred said. "He gave a story rather than a yes or no answer."

CBSNews.com.

In January 2000, Ray Lewis, an NFL player, was in Atlanta for the Super Bowl.  He almost certainly saw, and may have participated in a murder.  There wasn’t much of a case against him.  He pled to misdemeanor obstruction for making a “misleading” statement to the police the morning after the murder.

In October 2005, Scooter Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, talked to federal investigators about their inquiry into leaks about Valarie Plame’s connections to the CIA and was later convicted on four of the five counts in an indictment (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one of the counts of making false statements) and acquitted on the second count of making false statements and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.

Wikipedia.com

None of the three is in anyway an attractive example; but, they are the examples that I’ve got.  None of them would have had any problem had they just kept their mouth shut when the police knocked at their door.

I don’t and would never do criminal defense work.  A couple of decades ago I’d have done anything I could to help a criminal investigation.  I’d have to think long and hard about having any conversation with the police these days.