Law School: Help. Full Brain. Must Disgorge.

And on that note, I think I'm going to stop trying to cram things inside it. Good luck to all of my friends, and all of the other full-brained people out there taking the bar exam this week. I hope you have a clear and focused mind that instantly recalls all of the stuff BarBRI, PMBR, and whoever else crammed inside it over the past 6-8 weeks.

I look forward to celebrating personally or in spirit with all of you come Wednesday evening. For those of you with 3-day exams, good luck and I'll send you what brain power I have left come Wednesday around 5:00 p.m. Chicago time!

Politics: The news within the news on Iraq, and the U.S. position

The New York Times front page (of their Web site at least) ran an article today entitled 4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images. The article discussed noted independent photojournalist Zoriah Miller. For those who have not been following this story (and I'm among them), the Marine Corps banned Miller from his embed position with Corps units after Miller posted on his blog several images of Marines killed in a 26 June suicide attack.

The NYT reports that Major General John Kelly, Commanding General of Multi-National Force – West, made the decision to forbid Miller from working in Marine Corps-controlled areas of Iraq. After some heated discussion about what's going on there, and having re-read the article 2 or 3 times, I have to say that this is about as balanced an article as you could expect of ANY news outlet, anywhere. Major kudos go to the NYT's Michael Kamber and Tim Arango for presenting both sides of this.

I've lost the ability to create post breaks, unfortunately--sorry that this turned out to be a long analysis and sometimes-rant.

They're correctly sympathetic to Miller, though they go overboard in adopting his mantra that it was "absolute censorship:"

I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.

I can see a clearer definition of censorship. I've talked about it with Google before, as has Search Engine Watch in an even more effective demonstration. The clearest definition of censorship is this one:

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.

That's former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's definition, and still the best place to draw the line between black and not black. Zoriah Miller definitely falls into a grayer area, but he's far from experiencing actual censorship.

The authors engage in an obnoxious bit of hyperbole, too:

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists - too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts - the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

Really? What kind of searches were they doing? A simple search of "dead united states soldiers iraq" turned up over a half a million Google results. Not all of those are photos of dead soldiers, but you can find them just about anywhere at sites from WarShooter.com to Zoriah Miller's own blog.

The article ultimately summarizes this issue perfectly by reminding us it isn't black or white:

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see - in whatever medium - the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

That's nearly a perfect summation. I'll note that as much as I--like every last human being I've ever met--am 100% anti-war, I respect a policy of not putting grisly images of dead soldiers or civilians on the front page of the newspaper. I am intelligent, and freely capable of finding those images on my own if I want. That does not excuse a lack of coverage, though, and it's a very limited agreement on my part.

Ultimately, the message here is that General Kelly made an easy--and correct, under the circumstances--call. The embed program is ultimately propaganda, just as the "journalist pool" concept was in the First Gulf War and in Vietnam. Even if it granted perfect, unfettered access for journalists (which it clearly was never intended to do), it would still be subject to legitimate criticisms that the journalists were not really independent. Miller has no right to be "embedded" with the military--and frankly shouldn't want to be--so if they kicked him out, fine. If the U.S. or Iraqi military block his access to scenes, that ought to be reported. If the U.S. military steals his camera or his pictures, those responsible ought to be court-martialed. However, if they don't want him tagging along as part of their units, so what? If you start with the proposition that the goal of the "embed" program was pro-Pentagon propaganda, their decision isn't particularly noteworthy.

I have had two serious concerns that I'll address below. First, I have an issue about news coverage of this war: the coverage of the war by the major media (or, rather, lack of it) and the micromanagement of coverage by the Pentagon (with exhibit #1 being the "embed" program). Why has discussion of the Iraq war disappeared from the major news media? I'm amazed at the lack of coverage of good OR bad things being reported. Second, the idea that Zoriah Miller is somehow "censored" is laughable, and we've lost track of what our obligations and responsibilities are at a basic human level (I'll also end with a reminder that the U.S. and their in-country allies are no more 100% bad than they are 100% good).

First the bad, I'm ashamed of both Miller and the NYT for their self-centered, U.S.-only perspective. At least we know how many American soldiers have been killed in combat! If you read the NYT article, you'd think the U.S. was taking the brunt of the casualties. The front page news? We in the U.S. don't have the slightest idea how many Iraqis civilians have been killed since the start of the war. I find that fact stunning.

I'm not the only one. So do Iraqis. Take for example Fatih Abdulsalam. In an editorial published July 18 in Iraq's Azzaman (I've linked to the English translation), Abdulsalam laments that the rest of the world doesn't care about much the Iraqi's grisly tally.

Five years ago, international media weighed Iraqi blood drop by drop. Every drop that was shed was newsworthy and occupied their highlights.

That was with the start of the U.S. invasion of 2003.

.
.
.

Iraqi deaths are no longer important. Their numbers attract no more attention. If the deaths are too many, then a subtitle will do the job.

Iraqis are being killed, injured and maimed in droves on a daily basis. But still that is not enough reason for the media to care. ...

Even the U.S., the ‘beacon’ of democracy and human rights, says it keeps no records of Iraqis it kills. How cheap!

Cheap is one of the tamer words that comes to mind. Where is the coverage here? We don't keep the tally because THOSE facts, not grisly images of death, would sicken even the hardest necocon heart.

This leads me to my second point about screwed up priorities.

The attitude that I can't understand--from anywhere in the political spectrum--is the "Let someone else deal with it!" position. This is not just Iraq, either, and on this point, count me as having one of the most "liberal" positions in one respect, and a quintessential old "Blue Dog" tough-on-foreign-policy Democrat position in another.

First, we have an absolute moral responsibility to other human beings--be it in Burma, Iraq, Chechnya, Zimbabwe, China, Darfur, Somalia, or down the road in a migrant farm workers' camp where racist owners and contratistas exploit other human beings in what is quite simply a modern human slave trade. Short of aliens coming down from another planet to assist in the effort, I'm not sure who else should be doing something. I don't care if you're a crazy far right member of the Minutemen or Leon Trotsky's acolyte, you have an absolute obligation here. Period.

Now for the old-line Democrat position--like or not, folks, the United States is the country most of the world's people turn to when it hits the fan, no matter how flawed we might be (take Aceh province in Indonesia as one of thousands of examples of where a virulently anti-U.S. population begged for U.S. assistance first when they needed it). We have a greater responsibility in terms of our conduct, but also our responsibilities. The U.N. is great, except when it isn't. And when it fails, it unfortunately falls to the United States more times than not to spur action. Does that mean invading Iraq was the right thing to do? No (not that we can do anything about that decision now). Does that mean that ignoring Darfur is right? No. They're both wrongheaded decisions. But we're expected to lead, or at worst, notable in our absence. If we don't step up in Darfur, people will continue to die needlessly because we want to wait for "someone else" to do it. While I've been typing this post, experts estimate that at least 40 more people were killed or died of disease in Darfur. Don't care because it doesn't happen here? Guess what? It does. Every day, and it's been happening for years. If you're among those (regardless of political persuasion) who are completely U.S.-focused, where is your outcry about what happens here?

My first point is this: Zoriah Miller is posting publicly on a blog, is being paid to do it, and is the subject of a front page NYT story. He isn't and wasn't censored. The dead civilians in Iraq caught in the crossfire? They were. The couple dozen people in Darfur who died while I typed this? They were. The migrant farm workers in this country who get evicted, threatened, and mistreated daily, and ignored by police and legislators? They are. Let's get our priorities straight.

My second related point is this: U.S. operations in Iraq aren't all bad. They aren't all good. Like most real life issues, it's a gray area without a 2-sentence sound bite answer. To borrow a line from Forrest Gump, "I think it's both, both is happening at the same time."

Don't take my word for it, though. Listen to what the folks over at Azzaman have to say. The U.S. is doing good work along with the bad in Iraq. It's never as simple as absolute black and white, is it?

Politics: Today's not news (but still interesting)

ABC's Political Punch blog posts a conversation they captured today between Barack Obama and David Cameron, the Tory leader, in London. One thing I'm kind of sick of hearing is about how Obama has an ego or, the alternate line, that McCain is domineering, rash, and angry. These blanket overgeneralizations tend to overlook two things in my mind:

1) Obama and McCain both have egos. So do I. So do you. If they have bigger ones than you or I do, it might have to do with the nature of their positions. I expect my presidential candidates to have a little swagger. Isn't that what "acting presidential" is all about in some respects?

2) Most importantly, the pigeonholers tend to completely get it wrong. Take this part of Obama's exchange:

"We call it the dentist's waiting room," Cameron said. "You have to scrap that because you've got to have time."

"And, well, and you start making mistakes," Obama said, "or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel-- "

"Your feeling," interrupted Cameron. "And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions."

"That's exactly right," Obama said. "And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you."

Doesn't sound like the pompous, egotistical guy that shows up in national polling, does it? With apologies to John Kerry, maybe it's time for a more nuanced view of both candidates and time to examine where they stand on the actual issues (and even where YOU stand on the issues).

Law School: Adventures in Contracting -OR- When Marketing Campaigns Go Awry

Today, while surfing Breitbart's Web site to watch a news video, I saw this banner advertisement:


I guess this explains why the "e-Research Council" also resorts to spamming me to try and get me to sign up for their "offers."*

This reminds me of another silly promotion going on. Expedia and Hotels.com (different sites, same controlling shareholder) are currently running a promotion with a spam/marketing house that gives you a $25 gas card for a 2-night hotel reservation and a $50 gas card for a 3-night hotel reservation while supplies last. Early last month, I had prospectively booked a hotel just off Rush Street for the bar exam in Chicago. However, I decided to move further south to my usual haunt, the Club Quarters at Wacker and Michigan, when I found out this week I'd be taking the exam down at the Gleacher Center and not nearer to the Water Tower. The cancellation cost me $25, but I 1) got a gas card worth $50, and 2) saved $65 over and above the $25 cancellation fee by staying at the Club Quarters. So, in other words, I'm $115 to the good for my troubles.

Oh, and I booked my Club Quarters reservation at hotels.com for 3 nights, so another $50 gas card is presumably on its way to me.

The catch with the gas cards, though, is that you have to give out your name, phone number and address. They have my name, unfortunately--it's printed on the card--although that doesn't seem to matter that much, given MetaBank's terms.

Here are the terms and conditions from Expedia/Hotels.com:

Offer Terms & Conditions

1. Offer valid only for bookings of a stand-alone hotel stay of at least three (3) nights made between July 7, 2008 and September 15, 2008, with stays completed by October 5, 2008. A "booking" is a stay of consecutive nights in one room at the same property, booked at the same time on the same credit card. Package bookings are not eligible.
2. You must book and prepay on or through the . Offer is not valid for bookings made on any non-U.S. Web site.
3. Offer only applicable for those properties covered by the located here. Bookings at the following properties are not eligible: Marriott.
4. Prepaid MasterCard® will be mailed to the billing address used for the booking within 30 days of your completed stay. This card is issued by MetaBank pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. This card can be used wherever MasterCard debit cards are accepted, and use is governed by the terms in your Cardholder Agreement.
5. Prepaid MasterCard® will be mailed to US and Canadian addresses only.
6. Prepaid MasterCard® expires December 31, 2008.
7. Limit: one (1) MasterCard® per booking.
8. Not valid with any other coupon offer.
9. Not redeemable for cash.
10. Offer good while supplies last.
11. Offer may be revoked without notice at any time. Void where prohibited.

So, let's see. MetaBank has my name (they issue the card with my name on it), but doesn't have my e-mail address, phone number, or street address as part of their opt-in, and these terms and conditions don't require me to give it to them? Well, let's see what MetaBank makes me do:

Cardholder Agreement



Authorized Users

Until you sign the Card, you may present the card to another person for their use. That person will then be subject to these terms and conditions. You are wholly responsible for the use of each Card according to the terms of this Agreement.

The person who will be using the card must do the following before using it:

* Sign the card.
* Accept these Terms and Conditions.
* Keep the Card secure at all times and not allow any other person to use it.

So, their terms and conditions don't require me to give them any information either? Sweet! All I have to do is give them SOME address when I activate, and even that address doesn't have to be valid.

In the immortal words of Borat: Great success!

The ad spammers will be sending my junk mail in care of Bob Frapples, Suite 6969 at the Luxor Hotel on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Enjoy the advertising circulars, Bob!



*Read: Offers to take my personal information and sell it to all comers.

Law School: Deer Park Management n Bloomington has horrible ratings

Given the latest account from Pete, Bess Courtney and Deer Park Management here in Bloomington, Indiana are really reprehensible. The reviewers over at Apartment Ratings (even on other Deer Park managed properties, like Bart Villa) seem to agree wholeheartedly.

Go see Pete's blog for more on the never-ending saga of crappy property managers soaking their lessees. And if you came here from Google, do your homework and get everything in writing and clearly photographed if after reading all of this you still think a Deer Park Management property is for you.


Pete: Hope that helps.

Law School: Only on the Internet (but at least this could be useful)

Law school--no, life in general--has two drawbacks. First, you always have a lack of time. It's the ultimate non-renewable resource. No matter who you are and what you do, you never have enough time to do it. Somewhere around the age of 12 or 13, I lost the ability to do everything. Maybe it's just that my everything expanded as I got older.

Second, law students and people studying for the bar exam especially enjoy quiet. Part of the reason that I always enjoyed going to Brown County on vacation year after year before law school with my family and horses (or am I being redundant?) was the decided lack of cell phones, Internet, electricity, road noise, traffic, or loud drunken undergrads.

My girlfriend and I were discussing whether I'd use earplugs during the actual bar exam after I suffered through the annoyance of sitting next to someone in PMBR who underlined every line in the test booklet for 6 hours straight. I generally find earplugs somewhat pointless. They just help me get in the groove, but I get annoyed about an hour in and pull them out. The muffled sounds end up being more distracting and annoying than listening to pens scrape across the paper, flip-flops slap, and keyboards click.

Now, while I can't do it in exams, I do like to listen to music to give myself other, better noise when I'm studying or reading in the library. Unfortunately, I tend to get more interested in the music than in whatever I'm reading, and sometimes when I'm writing (though that's about a 50/50 proposition--the right classical music will often help rather than hinder). Those of you who like to drown out noise but can't handle music should check out SimplyNoise.

SimplyNoise is "The best free white noise generator on the Internet" (I couldn't actually find others, so I guess they're right). The site generates Web-based white noise for streaming or download, and customizable for various intensities. You can choose between pink noise or white noise (which I like better, and is better for cryptography, incidentally). I run mine around 5-7%, but your mileage may vary. Give it a whirl if you can't handle music and need something to force the random library noises into the background.

Politics: Wall Street drunk, Congress was bartender

Apparently, President Bush said something at a private fundraiser that has the chattering classes all atwitter. He boiled down the housing crisis to "Wall Street got drunk" and said that the country is feeling the hangover.

That's a pretty apropos analogy, if you ask me. It's just incomplete. Wall Street got drunk, but Congress (and the Fed) were bartending. In a perfect world, they'd even have dramshop liability. Unfortunately, it looks like the next drink is already poured for Wall Street. The Fed wants to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Congress would love to give them MORE power.

Sad.

Politics: Veep updates

Time reports today that former senators John Edwards and Sam Nunn are on the short list for Barack Obama's VP choice. The former disappoints me, and I hope Edwards' earlier denials hold true.

I have to say, the latter excites me (no, not that way, Chutch). As I've noted before, Sam Nunn represents the wing of the old line tough-on-foreign policy, relatively fiscally conservative, socially liberal wing of the Democrat party that has been pushed under the GOP tent.

He'd be a spectacular VP candidate. I know, I know, Obama won the Georgia primary and that state is probably solidly in play without Nunn, but Nunn's experience and appeal to conservatives of the "Blue Dog" variety like me will have a significant impact. Nunn is a former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee respected on both sides of the aisle. Any Hillary supporters worried about what Senator Obama might do if he gets that infamous 3 a.m. telephone call can take a little comfort.

Nonsense you say? Hey, it worked with Dick Cheney's "gravitas" didn't it? Here's hoping it's Obama/Nunn.


UPDATE: Ugh. This Edwards cheating story is getting ugly. It's beyond the whisper stage, even if it is the National Enquirer. I'm no longer satisfied with the "tabloid rumors are false" blanket statement. I'm starting to think it's either libelous or the proverbial smoke is coming from somewhere.

Politics: The rich now pay 97% of all income taxes, so we should...um...take...more???

In case you've forgotten what I've discussed at length in the past, I'll say it again. One of the most distorted, unfair partisan political games is the one Dems and Republicans play over taxation in this country.

The U.S. already places among the highest tax burdens on its corporate citizens among OECD countries, and our personal income tax has become increasingly progressive over the years. All this talk about the Bush tax cuts "giving back to the rich" is a bunch of crap, as the latest IRS figures point out. Obama has consistently discussed raising taxes on "the wealthy" so that they pay their "fair share" and so he can alleviate "the burden" on lower income tax payers. This continues to be one of the major points of departure I have from Barack Obama on income taxes (though not necessarily on Social Security tax ceilings--there's at least a good argument for that one).

The Wall Street Journal does a fantastic job once again today in analyzing the new 2006 IRS data released this week. Here's something you WON'T hear in the MSM: the data shows that the 2003 Bush tax cuts resulted in the largest tax increase on higher income earners in this history of the federal tax code.

As the Journal puts it: "No President has ever plied more money from the rich then Geoge W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts."

Here's a summary of the IRS data:


The IRS data shows:

• The top 1% of income earners ($388,806 or more in income) paid 40% of all income taxes (their highest share in 40 years)
• The top 10% (income > $108,904) paid 71% of all income taxes.
• Americans below the median income level paid a record low of 2.9% of all income taxes (and that doesn't tell you the whole picture when you consider how many pay NO taxes at all--a good thing, to be sure, but not indicative of the "poor" paying an "unfair burden")
  
• Americans above the median income level paid 97.1% of all income taxes
• The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income, but paid a share of taxes that is nearly double that amount.
  

So, should we go the way of California and tip the balance further toward high income brackets? Well, the WSJ answers that, too: "The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them — the Carter years — the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today. Why? Because they either worked less, earned less, or they found ways to shelter income from taxes so it was never reported to the IRS as income."

Let's have a real debate about Social Security--how about adopting the plan Senator Obama and McCain enjoy or the private accounts program in Sweden for example. I'd be perfectly willing to remove the income caps there for a viable private, guaranteed, inheritable benefit program.

As for income taxes? They're progressive enough, thanks.

Politics: Life imitates art--the silly season continues

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a political cartoon of a small McCain being crushed by a massive newspaper whose front page was covered in ridiculous blow-by-blow coverage of everything Obama did upon waking up in the morning.

Life imitates art.

Are we seriously going to make a story about how much Obama works out? Come on...