(NOTE: The HP ad above was featured on the same page that contained Emily Bazelon’s Slate article below about the sexting and cyberbullying cases, and the juxtaposition struck me as…..um….amusing.)
LOOK, I TOO THINK JOHN YOO IS IN LEAGUE WITH SATAN, BUT GET A GRIP!
A group of lawyers and law students are demanding that Deputy Attorney General David Carrillo, who works in AG Jerry Brown’s office, drop his plans to teach a constitutional law class with the UC Berkeley professor John Yoo next semester.
In case you’ve dozed off on the matter, John Yoo is the guy who wrote the infamous torture memos to justify the actions of the Bush administration when he was a US Justice Department lawyer from 2001 to 2003.
The SF Chronicle has the story. Here are some clips.
By instructing a class with Mr. Yoo, you are helping to legitimize his illegal and unethical actions,” organizations led by the National Lawyers Guild said Tuesday in an open letter to Deputy Attorney General David Carrillo, a doctoral candidate and instructor at the university’s Boalt Hall law school.
They asked Carrillo either to teach the course by himself, if the school will allow it, or to leave it to Yoo. Signers included the law school’s chapter of La Raza Law Students Association and the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture.
Oh, please. I’m all for prosecuting Yoo. If someone can find a legal way to wrap the law around him and squeeze a bit, that’d be excellent. (Unfortunately, I don’t think they can.)
But, otherwise, if some nice liberal guy from the AG’s office wants to teach with him, leave them the heck alone. Good education—particularly a law school education—-thrives on differing points of view.
IN FLORIDA, CLEMENCY IS NOT DEAD
The horrible murders committed by Maurice Clemmons , and the subsequent attacks on Mike Huckabee, have not exactly encouraged the notion of clemency. Nevertheless, Wednesday a Florida woman named Jennifer Martin who was serving 16 years for manslaughter, was set free by a four person parole board that included Florida governor Charlie Crist.
ABC news has the details.
The video of Martin’s first day out is from the St. Petersburg Times.
THE 9TH CIRCUIT, THE SUPREMES & THE “PERILOUS FRONTIER OF CYBERLAW”
(I just like writing that: “….the perilous frontier of cyberlaw.“)
Anyway, regarding the two new Supreme Court cases we’ve already talked about here: the Ontario cop sexting case, and the issue with the rights of mean kids who cyberbully, Slate’s legal writer, Emily Bazelon, has written a good column that explores the two cases recently accepted by the Supremes, and notes that the California’s 9th Circuit of Appeals is smack in the middle of both of them. In each instance, the judges of the 9th came down on the side of the rights of the individual.
(In the case of the mean girls, I think they’re right. In the case of the sexting cop…. hmmmmm… maybe yes, maybe no.)
In any event, Baselon’s column engages in an informative discussion of both cases. Here’s a clip:
Before Jeff Quon got a pager from the Ontario Police Department, where he’s a sergeant, he signed a blanket statement that he had he had “no expectation of privacy or confidentiality” when using city equipment for e-mail or the Internet. But then his supervisor put in place an informal policy that undercut the official one. The supervisor told cops who had the pagers that they could send 25,000 characters worth of text messages a month and then after that, pay for the extra messages—and if they did, avoid an audit. Quon went above the character limit a few months in a row, paying each time. Then his chief started to wonder about whether Quon was wasting time on the job and asked the pager service for the texts. It turned out that lots of them were notes about sex Quon had written to his girlfriend. Quon sued, arguing that the search of his texts was a violation of his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches at work.
In June 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with him. He had a reasonable expectation of privacy, the court said, given what his supervisor told him about paying for extra messages—the department’s “operational reality.” The court also found that there were other, less intrusive ways for the police chief to figure out whether Quon was frittering away his time: Warning him ahead of time to quit sending so many messages, asking him to count the characters himself, or asking him to cross out the personal parts before the department reviewed them.This ruling, by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw for a panel of three judges, implicitly recognizes that company pagers and e-mail accounts often turn into personal ones. Sometimes, that saves employees’ time: If I’m not toggling back and forth between my Slate e-mail account and Gmail, my day is more streamlined (or so I tell myself). If your boss says you can use company technology for your own business, then you should be safe from unnecessarily intrusive searches—even if he’s contradicting some official blanket disclaimer in which you signed away your privacy rights without really paying attention.
SF SUPERVISOR CHRIS DAILY DROPS F-BOMB ON GEORGE GASCON’S HEAD
Also in the SF Chron, it seems that new San Francisco police chief, George Gascon, was roundly cussed out by Supervisor Chris Daly.
(Gascon, if you’ll remember, a longtime LAPD cop, used to be the Assistant Chief under Bill Bratton. Before he took the SF job, Gascon was rumored to be the front runner to replace Bratton as the L.A.C.O.P. So we in LA we are justified as viewing him as one of ours.)
In any case here’s a clip that explains the situation:
Supervisor Chris Daly got up from his seat, approached Gascón, cut him off to introduce himself and was heard dropping the f-bomb as he left the chambers in a huff. Gascón looked surprised, said it was nice to meet Daly and continued testifying.
[SNIP]Apparently Gascón hasn’t reached out to Daly since taking the job several months ago, despite his focus on cracking down on drug dealing in the Tenderloin, the heart of Daly’s district.
“I don’t know if it’s good politics or not, but if I was a new department head, I would certainly reach out to every decision maker,” Daly told us.
He said he appreciates the focus on the Tenderloin, but disagrees with the “nickel and diming” approach of going after low-level users which is overcrowding jails and causing the Sheriff’s Department to go over budget. He’d like to see the bigger fish nabbed instead.
We heard reports that Daly said “F- you, F-you!” as he left the chambers. So was the f-bomb directed at Gascón? “I was muttering to myself, yes,” Daly confirmed. “I think probably it was more like f-ing a-hole. It wasn’t directed at him, and you know, I’m sure very few people could hear it.”
Evidently it was more than a few.
I’m actually not big on governor’s intervening in the criminal justice system except in extreme cases – I’d rather see the system fixed so that judges work within reasonable guidelines and the clemency process strikes me as very arbitrary, especially in Huckabee’s case, who abused his powers IMHO – but the case you cite seems like an obvious one for a lesser sentence. There was recklessness involved, but nothing even close to the kind of intent or mindset of a violent criminal. I can’t imagine this would be controversial.
Chris Daly is, by the way, something of a “f***ing a**hole” himself. But why is this even in the newspaper? It reminds me of the report I, unfortunately, read of Chuck Schumer turning to his seat mate – a female Senator – and muttering that a flight attendent was a “bitch” for insisting he end a cell phone call. My guess is that if every time Chris Daly or Chuck Schumer used profanity it was reported in the papers, there wouldn’t be room for any other news. (Luckily for news consumers Rahm Emanuel can claim Executive Privilege and stonewall if asked about his use of f-bombs.)
Speaking of F-Bombs, this blog has lots of F-Bombs, courtesy of a serial posting know-it-all all potty-mouth.
SOFBS, since the site moderator deletes comments that might be considered offensive to blacks and homosexuals, it would seem reasonable to delete profanity-filled comments that are offensive to properly cultured readers.
Fuck racists, resentment-mongers and reactionary know-nothings like Woody and the club…
Oh, the irony of reg calling others reactionary.
What’s ironic about it, you little reactionary asshole ? You are a bundle of bigotry, resentments and crude disinformation – and you want to overturn the goddam New Deal, claiming FDR was some incarnation of Stalin and Mussolini.
There’s nothing ironic about a creepy little right-wing bigot who hates the government being labeled reactionary.
Maybe I am “reactionary” if that means I’m more of a fiscal conserative than Reagan, because I fault Reagan and his heirs for their total lack of fiscal responsibility, in driving an increase in deficits as % of GDP. There’s been nothing else like it in recent history. Reagan and the Bushes were the least fiscally conservative administrations of the post-war era – yet Woody subscribes to the Reagan cult of voodoo economics. Woody doesn’t know a damned thing about economics. If after two terms Obama drives the deficit up at the rate Reagan did over his two terms, we can have a discussion about budget deficits and who is running the country into the ditch. A year when failing to enact a large Keynesian stimulus would have allowed another Great Depression isn’t comparable to the Reagan record of deficit increases that didn’t end until Clinton. As it stands Woody isn’t even a conservative in any meaningful sense – just a knee-jerk reactionary, an ignoramus, a serial liar and a bigot. But worse, he’s a little man waving his arms because he craves attention.
My, this has turned into a stimulating thread.
Not as stimulanting as a wad of hundred dollar bills but good enuff.
I kind of agree with reg’s initial comment, before things veered off into the usual woody-reg-SF etc. land… that it’s hardly newsworthy that some official MAY have dropped the F-bomb under his breath to another, or that an elected official may have muttered that a flight attendant is a bitch. (Many of them ARE, and abuse their FAA powers to interpret any case of passenger questioning of their authority to be grounds to threaten to remove said passenger forcibly after an “emergency landing” staged to arrest said passenger. I’ve heard this threat made after one person in first class complained that his special dietary meal was accidentally given to someone else so he insisted the attendant rustle something up from other trays even in coach, since it was a long flight, but she wasn’t in the mood to bother and told him he should have brought a bag lunch back-up; another in peasant class was similarly threatened because someone was sitting in her reserved window seat (with an empty next to it) and wouldn’t move, while she was relegated to a 5-seat row in the middle back, between a fat person and a baby, but the attendant didn’t want to bother getting involved, even though the passenger had a stub to show the reserved seat. Now, that is reason to stand your ground = but airline attendants exert more petty power than even dictators or movie directors so muttering “bitch” under one’s breath is just plain human.
“muttering “bitch†under one’s breath is just plain human”
*********************
********** WARNING ************
Don’t try this at home with your wife, you may receive a bitch slap, and be told to shut the F***Up.
reg, you do know, don’t you, that the people who use a lot of words to say something that could be said in one sentence are women and gays. You’re not a woman, are you?
Great pardon story re: Haley Barbour…
http://www.slate.com/id/2238938/pagenum/all/#p2
it would seem reasonable to delete profanity-filled comments that are offensive to properly cultured readers.
Well as I am not offended and you don’t fall into this category, someone else will have to complain.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=170876
US drones rain down missiles in NW; 17 killed
By: Nader Buneri | Published: December 18, 2009
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PESHAWAR – At least 17 people were killed when US multiple drones rained down missiles on North Waziristan, considered a safe haven for many militants including groups determined to push the US and Nato out of Afghanistan.
In the deadliest attack on Thursday evening, at least 15 people including seven foreigners were killed and several others injured when five US drones fired ten missiles on the suspected base of Taliban militants in Ambor Shaga and Degan area of the North Waziristan Agency.
Sources said the attack was the second of its kind in a day as the morning attack had also claimed two lives.
According to details, US drones targeted houses of tribesmen and when people gathered at the site, four more drones fired nine more missiles, which resulted in huge casualties.
So far, neither the US nor Nato forces camping across the border or Pakistani authorities have issued any statement regarding missile strikes.
Total B.S., get the judge that helped you out before to sit on your jury and skate again. Jurors are idiots in so many cases.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=53730&tsp=1
But worse, he’s a little man waving his arms because he craves attention.
That’s funny comming from the guy who has posted 6 out of the 17 comments on this thread.