Posts tagged
usa (1-20
of 35)
Apparently the New York Times stringer
covering the Conrad Black Trial maynot actually be covering the Conrad Black Trial. ... he may not even be in Chicago...he may
not even be animate:
Theree is much speculation about the whereabouts of the New York Times stringer who has been filing dispatches on the
trial. His report the other day seemed (to some) to suggest he was in the courtroom, and yet nobody seems to have laid an eye
on him. Nobody is suggesting anything untoward of course. Certainly not. This is the finest newspaper in the world we’re
talking about. And, to be fair, nobody among the assembled scribes knows exactly what this fellow looks like, so it’s
possible he was among us at some point over the past few days, disguised as a lawyer perhaps. Or an empty chair.
UPDATE: NYT guy is in the building:
The Jury has asked the judge to allow them to render a partial verdict in the Corad Black Trial after informing the judge
that they could not reach a verdict on one or more counts. Of course no one has any idea what verdicts the jury has reached on
what counts, but I would suspect that in light of the two notes that the jury sent to the judge, that the jury members are
pretty far apart on some of the counts. The judge has asked the jury to sleep on it and see how they feel in the morning.... i
doubt it will change much but you never know. As such, look for verdicts tomorrow.
After following the Conrad Black trial closely, i would not want to be federally prosecuted in the USA. The
prosecution resmbles persecution. The charging of Mark Kipnis is essentially a malicious prosecution. The State essentially led
no evidence against him, rather he was lumped in because he would not cooperate...unlike numerous witnesses used by the
prosecution who had cut deals with the SEC to avoid regulatory proceedings.
Free Speech to criticize our federal politicians was removed by the Canadian Liberal Party and the Supreme Court of
Canada upheld it ... not so much in the
good old USA:
Justice Scalia began his concurrence by writing:
"A Moroccan cartoonist once defended his criticism of the Moroccan monarch (lese majesteé being a serious crime in
Morocco) as follows: ‘I'm not a revolutionary, I'm just defending freedom of speech . . . I never said we had to change the
king -- no, no, no, no! But I said that some things the king is doing, I do not like. Is that a crime?'
"Well, in the United States (making due allowance for the fact that we have elected representatives instead of a king)
it is a crime, at least if the speaker is a union or a corporation (including not-for-profit public-interest corporations)
and if the representative is identified by name within a certain period before a primary or congressional election in which
he is running."
Ouch.
I agree ... Ouch.
Of course the Supreme Court of the United States need not look so far a Moroco, Canada is right next door. We made speech by individuals
illegal for the full run of a Federal election campaign. Worse, the Supreme Court of Canada said that the law was a
necessary infringement to our freedom of expression, thus turning our freedom of expression into a privilege and not a
right. However, as with McCain Feingold in the USA, the Canadian Election Spending Legislation probably will not hold up
to judicial scrutiny once someone is actually charged under the act.
(Via Instapundit ... cross-posted
at The London Fog)
Hillary Clinton has chosen a campaign song and lost the vote of
all self-respecting males across the 50 states..
(HT. Hot Air)
...
Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics and journalists who deplore the "nativism" of
Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting and teaching are
rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers.
Few of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their
professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies and gardeners
commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well — and cheaply.
In general, such elites don't use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They
don't drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don't
struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish.
For many professors, politicians and columnists, the gangs, increased crime and crowded jails that often result from massive
illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and
unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo.
...
Read the whole thing.
Hanson's book
Mexifornia is also an excellent read on the realities of illegal immigration.
The spanking delivered
by Miller to Sen. Harry Reid is top shelf..
With so much accepted truth out there in the media and in
the legislatures of Canada, we need to look south of the border to
find a debate that would be worth watching:
The Editors’
Challenge This should be an offer that the Wall Street Journal can’t refuse — debate the
editors of National Review on the immigration bill. ...
It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t
“rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of
one of their editorial meetings last week. Click here
to watch — you have to see it to believe it. We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this
forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do. (We would challenge President Bush himself to a debate on
behalf of the conservatives he has maligned, but we fear he hasn’t read the bill.)
Where can I tune in?
This certainly goes against conventional thought and accepted truth:
CBC Reports: MPs to vote on motion to take troops
from Afghanistan by 2009
A Liberal motion that would ensure Canada end its combat operations in southern Afghanistan by February 2009 is slated
to be voted on in the House of Commons Tuesday, but it is not expected to pass.
The NDP is expected to join the Conservatives in defeating the motion, which was introduced by Liberal defence critic
Denis Coderre on April 19.
The motion calls on the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to serve notice immediately to NATO that Canada
will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in February 2009
Shame on the Liberal Party for their motion to remove Canadian troops by 2009. Playing politics in this realm is dangerous.
What will the Taliban take from the vote? If they hang on for a couple of years they will have another run at contoling the
country. My question for Dion is what information does he have that the situation will be such as to allow for the safe
withdrawl of the troops in 2009. How does he know that the allied forces will not be on the cusp of victory and that a
withdrawl will be a set back? How does he know that the troops won't be in the middle of an offensive, from one side or the
other and leaving will put our allies in greater danger. How does he know that there will be someone their to take our place (
of course the evil Americans will be there and we know that regardless of the President that they will jump in to pick up our
slack)? This cowardice for political gain is sickening.
Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit): People
don't stop killers. People with guns do
Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or
Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult.
Sometimes, it's a deadly one.
Via Volokh Conspiracy there is a good article praising defence council
in respect of the Duke Lacrosse case:
Our criminal justice system does not rely solely on the fairness of the police and prosecutors to get things right. In
every criminal case, there is a professional whose only obligation is to scrutinize what the police and prosecutor have
done. This "professional" is a lawyer. The next time you hear a lawyer joke, maybe you'll think of the lawyers who
represented these three boys and it won't seem so funny. You probably can't picture their faces and don't know their names.
(They include Joe Cheshire, Jim Cooney, Michael Cornacchia, Bill Cotter, Wade Smith and the late Kirk Osborn.) That's
because they put their zealous representation of their clients ahead of their own egos and fame. Without their lawyering
skills, we would not today be speaking so confidently of their clients' innocence.
I have long considered defence lawyers, particularly the good ones, to be the vanguard of individual liberty.
The ability to put your client ahead of yourself, to advocate for the worst our in our society and to keep the power of the
state at bay is when a lawyer and the legal profession is at its best. It is when you lose this edge, when you are more
concerned for your reputation than your client, when you have trouble advocating for an individual who really should be
behind bars that it is time to give it up. (My faithful reader may think am tooting my own horn, but I do limited criminal
work and refer the bigger cases to more experienced and committed counsel.) Over at Durham In Wonderland, we see
this about prosecutors:
In our search for justice, prosecutors are uniquely obligated to make timely disclosure of any evidence which may tend
to negate the guilt of the accused. On a daily basis, over 30,000 state and local prosecutors across the country are
responsible for evaluating evidence in cases and making difficult decisions to prosecute, not prosecute, or dismiss charges
previously filed when the interests of justice are best served. Sometimes justice is best served by declining to prosecute.
The confidence of the public and the very integrity of the criminal justice process depend on strict compliance with these
ethical standards. To the extent that any individual prosecutor violates these high ethical standards the public confidence
in our criminal justice system is undermined and the image of all prosecutors suffers.
I have long held the view that the best prosecutors are those who put forth the Crown's case in a professional
and competent manner rather than those who are interested in the wins and losses. The Crown that is over-zealous, who abuses
his position or is unreasonable in pre-trail positions wastes the resources of the State and does the administration of
justice a disservice. (CP @ the london fog)
I have been doing a fair bit or research into the law of self-defence in Canada as I am defending a young person in a
stabbing. No doubt the law is confusing, however, the facts seem to dominate the case law. The outcome of the use of force
in defence is no where near as important as the proportionality of the force. I think my guy has a good defence.
The defensive use of guns will surely be a topic in the inevitable debate on gun control in the wake of the Virginia Tech
shootings. At Virginia Tech, they had a "no gun" policy. That's fine for the law abiding, or even for those who
do not abide with the policy but aren't using their guns. However, when some nut decides he is going to shoot the place
up, that policy means squat. Reading Captain
Ed, I found this link about a school
that probably did not have such a policy:
The abrupt ending to Odighizuwa's shooting spree is attributed to two students with personal firearms who quickly took
action.
I so feel for the students and families that went through this mess at Virgina Tech. Despite the social scientists
inevitable commentary, the fact was that these kids and professors were just going about their daily business and did nothing
to deserve what happened. As I posted after
the Dawson College shootings:
....these poor kids ... did nothing to deserve this. There will be probably some talk in the not so distant
future about bullies, outcasts, American guns, violence on TV, violent video games, dungeons and dragons and the like.
However, I suspect that the shooter was just simply crazy. You have to be nuts to pull a stunt like this and chances are at
some point in his life he was going to pull a stunt like this regardless of the video games and DVDs. The talk will be idle
at best. The standard root causes crap. The kids at Dawson did not deserve this and no amount of blame on external factors
will change that. Society did not pull the trigger, the shooter did.
The magnitude of these killings ... it is hard to wrap your head around it.
Roy Cooper is the North Carolina Attorney General who took over the Duke
Lacrosse case from AG Nifong (who is currently in a whole heap of trouble with the State Bar Association and
perhaps the Criminal justice systen for misconduct in his prosecution of the case). It was easy to drop the obviously false
charges, however, it took a lot of nuts for an AG to speak so candidly. The Volokh Conspiracy reports:
I find it remarkable, then, that he went so much further, saying that the accused players were in fact innocent, that
there was no credible evidence against them, that the accuser's many different statements could not be rectified and that she
contradicted herself, etc. This was not a garden-variety statement about insufficient evidence but instead was about as
complete a vindication as the defendants could have imagined. Indeed, I think that Cooper said just about everything that the
defendants could have wanted. Cooper must have really been convinced.
(Wired via Instapundit)
AI Cited for Unlicensed Practice of Law
A web-based "expert system" that helped users prepare bankruptcy filings for a fee made too many decisions to be considered a clerical tool, an appeals court said last week, ruling that the software was effectively practicing law without a license.
As my faithful reader would know, I am opposed to capital punishment. That opposition comes with qualifications. I am opposed to capital punishment in western civilizations where we have individual rights vs. the state. In a tyranny where the tyrant is playing the real game of power politics, things are a tad different. The tyrant uses whatever means -violence, death, torture, famine -to stay in power because when he is out of power he is going to face the same thing. It is a zero sum kind of game. In power, in exile or dead. Those are the choices. Saddam got his and now crying starts for a man who was not going to cry. He knew the game and he played it well and it ended as he knew it could. Would his death have been more acceptable if he was captured and killed by a mob after the fall of Iraq? Perhaps, but the world is rid of a bad guy. If alive, there was always the possiblity of a return to power.
UPDATE: Of course Victor David Hansen has a view on this which is worth a read:
In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, a "committee of sappy women" petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe. "If he had been Satan himself,” Twain snorts, “there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks."
I thought of this passage as I read with disgust the international reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. People who shrugged at Hussein’s torture, mutilation, murder, and genocide are now shocked, shocked that his victims sent him off to Hell with a few humiliating barbs. What do you expect? These are the people whose fathers and brothers were slaughtered by Hussein and his minions. It strikes me as the epitome of restraint that they just hanged him rather than paying him back in cruel kind.
Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy
Can You "Possess" a File If You Don't Realize It Exists?: One of the interesting questions raised by the application of traditional contraband concepts to digital files is whether a suspect who views a contraband image using a web broswer but does not realize the image is stored in the browser cache "possesses" that image based only on the presence of the file in the cache. In a decision handed down today, United States v. Kuchinski, involving charges of possessing child pornography images, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the answer is "no":
Read the rest.
Via Instapundit, Beltway
Blogroll is reporting the California Supreme Court has held that Internet Service Providers are not liable for
defamatory content posted by third parties:
"plaintiffs who contend they were defamed in an Internet posting may only seek recovery from the original source of the
statement."
It will be interesting to see how the regulatory bodies will react.
UPDATE: Eugene
Volokh adds his two cents:
A long line of cases had already held that when a user posts material on a site, the operator of the site (or of the
computer), can't be held liable, even when it's notified of the potentially tortious nature of the activity. Thus, for
instance, we wouldn't be liable for libels posted in our comments. But this case, as well as Batzel and some others,
apply this principle even to immunize those who actively repost material, rather than just serve as passive conduits for
what others post. This means that if a commenter posts excerpts from others' work, even the commentator himself would be
categorically immune from liability for the contents of those excerpts, at least unless he's "active[ly] involve[d] in
the creation of [the] posting," or unless he's conspiring with the original author.
UPDATE II: One commentator at Volohk Conspiracy:
This is not a victory for free speech, which was already protected; it is a victory for the perpetrators of libel and
slander.
I'm not so sure that this is correct. The Internet provider cannot possibly screen every post for truth nor can every blogger
know what is true or false. The liability becomes too remote once you get past the person that has published the original
statement. The key for bloggers is to cite/link to give credit for the original statement.
Posts tagged
usa (1-20
of 35)
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