Cops generally need warrants to search your house, but courts have been very lenient — past the point of logic — in letting them search cars. The rationale has usually been that a car might be driven away, thwarting a dogged officer's quest for a search warrant. Moreover, courts have generally let cops search cars "incident to the arrest" of the driver or passenger on the thin pretext that the driver might lunge into the back seat and grab a weapon or something.

Today SCOTUS put a rational limit on such exceptions to the warrant requirement, ruling that cops cannot search a car incident to an arrest once the guy they've arrested is handcuffed and locked in the back of their cruiser and therefore unlikely to retrieve a weapon from the car. The opinion is here. Pay particular attention to Scalia's opinion, in which he is characteristically unmoved by the argument that the Court must respect wrongly decided precedent, and in which he thwarts the simplistic liberal/conservative view of Fourth Amendment interpretation by urging a result considerably more protective of privacy rights than Justice Stevens's majority opinion. Scalia also points out the perverse incentive created by the Court's ruling — cops can search a car without a warrant if they haven't arrested the driver yet, but not if they have, thus encouraging cops to leave the driver unsecured to justify a search.

Dear Norm:

Well it seems as though life has kicked you in the teeth about as hard as it's ever kicked anyone who had the privilege of being a United States Senator.  You thought you had won reelection against an opponent who, while he's a rotten snake of a man qualified for high office only by virtue of the fact that he doesn't pay his taxes, had all the advantages including a nationwide tidal wave of party momentum and a rock star at the top of his ticket.

Against that, you had a warmed-over loser who believes that defeat can be honorable, a Barbie doll who kills mooseburgers with her chrome-plated Bible, and a party that's reeling from the disgrace of the past three (or is it five? or eight?) years.  Or is it just Larry Craig?  And yet you beat the snake narrowly, by a few hundred.

At least, you thought you had, until the absentees came in and the recount began.  Then all those previously machine-counted ballots got a view by human eyes, and your few hundred turned into a few hundred for the other guy.  (And the Lizard People – it never pays to underestimate the Lizard People.)

So you filed a challenge.  By the time the recount was done, Senate inauguration had already occurred, and the people of Minnesota were without a Senator at a time when its people could assuredly have used a seat, even one occupied by a snake, at the table.  As you so often reminded them, there was a war going on, and an economic downturn that looks, one day, to be called the "Not So Great Depression," rather than the "Great Recession."  At least it seems that way here, and I can remember recessions all the way back to Jimmy Carter.  I'm younger than you, but I've always read the news.

And then you lost the challenge.  Well, you won, in that a number of previously excluded ballots (it was your position all along that the ballots should be counted) were counted.  But the snake increased his margin over you.  So I guess you did lose, though you won on principle.  And you appealed to the judges.

And you lost again.  The people of Minnesota, in the meantime, have been without a senator, which is great by the rest of us (we have more say in how their deficit dollars will be spent), but probably bad for them.  Now, I hear you want to go to the Judges one more time. And you're keeping your options open for a federal lawsuit too.  All of this could take months, or if you go federal, years.

Norm, I'm not your lawyer, but I think you've been getting bad advice from your own lawyers, or from someone anyway.  Now I hate the snake (as I posted previously, though I got my prediction wrong – many apologies to Chris H.), but perhaps, at this point, it's time to start thinking about what's good for the people of Minnesota, and what's good for Norm.  What's best for both is that you quit, while you're ahead.

That's right.  You're ahead.  You'll lose your senate seat, but it isn't "your" senate seat.  Any more than the Presidency belongs to Al Gore.  Be like Al.

Oh I don't mean be like the hyper-litigious block of wood that contested the Florida recount to the last possible moment, only to be shut out by a partisan Supreme Court decision that could have been beaten for meretriciousness and ill-founding only by the opinion that the minority would have written had they gotten Justice O'Connor's vote.  I mean the Al Gore who gave this speech:

A speech that, despite Gore's being at heart a snake, set him free, and allowed him to become his own man.  It was gracious, and generous, and it was public.  For all his serpentlike litigiousness to that day, Gore, like Pinocchio, became a real man.  He grew a beard.  He got fat.  He advocated for his passions unfettered by science, law, or politics, got rich, and today has a Nobel Prize.  He could have won the Presidency, easily, in 2008, but passed it on to Obama because, after all, who needs the inconvenience?

Certainly not Al Gore.

And that's what you can be Norm.  Not a secular saint and Oscar winner, but you'll land a good job at a law school or thinktank, and the prospect of trouncing the snake in 2014 (as Gore could have done in 2008), when the people of Minnesota realize they elected a serpent-man to the United States Senate.

Now the night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting, that's pride fuckin' wit ya. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps. Fight through that shit. 'Cause a year from now, when you're kickin' it in the Caribbean you're gonna say, "Marsellus Wallace was right."

Think about it Norm.  If you go all the way to the Supreme Court, you'll still lose, but you'll also lose what's left of your reputation.  And your dignity.

On the other hand, if you follow my advice, a year from now, when you're kickin' it the Caribbean you're gonna say, "that dude at Popehat was right."

There are two varieties of what's called "search engine optimization," white and black.  White SEO consists of employing proper keywords and a search-engine friendly title (for instance, Google doesn't recognize the title you're reading as the title to this post) to let search engines know what a webpage is about.

Black SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of sending out bots to post the same or similar messages, linking to the same page, on dozens, hundreds, or thousands of webpages that have nothing to do with the page being promoted, or using "linkfarms" to game Google, Yahoo, and the like by convincing the engines that the promoted page is important.  It's what most people refer to as "spamming."

Last week I posted about ticketvoid.com, a DUI/DWI legal referral website that appeared to be heavily engaged in the practice of Black SEO.  We received two comments in quick succession, by "users" Seostarman1 and Seostarman7, announcing:

I promised my lawyer I’d pimp his site online ( http://ticketvoid.com ) after he got me off for drinking & driving. All charges we’re dropped today! Kudos

This is classic spam.  Though we occasionally write about legal matters, this is not a site devoted to the defense of drunk driving.  And in fact, Seostarman1's lawyer didn't get Seostarman1 off for drinking and driving, because spambots cannot drink or drive.

Ticketvoid appears to be run by an attorney who until recently practiced as a real estate and water vending lawyer, fields that have little to do with criminal law, or DUI defense, which believe it or not in most states is a rather complex field.  Though it's possible the man behind ticketvoid learned a lot about drunk driving defense in the past couple of years, it seems improbable.

He certainly seems to have learned a lot about spamming in that time.

When I checked the site last week it was mentioned in only a few places.  Now it's proliferated across the web, with hundreds of mentions similar to that above on forums that have nothing to do with drunk driving, law, or anything else germane to ticketvoid's avowed purpose of introducing drunken scofflaws to attorneys eager to help them escape justice.

He's assisted in this purpose by a company known as Verifiedfile, which promotes itself as a leading SEO specialist (and no, I'm not linking to its site):

Imagine the time it would take to register unique usernames, validate registration, and post on 1 million forums.  Now imagine the market potential if you could post your message.  Yesterday's solution of "Google Ads" require you wait for somebody to click on your static text ad.

Today, we can bring your marketing message directly to your client.  We can help you hype your site, product, or services.  We create the trends.   When you see a forum an innocent forum post,  you never really know if the post is nothing other than a decoy from us to plant and integrate a "virtual user" into an online established community for the purpose of promoting our clients.  We can create a talk-back post with one username, and use another unique username to follow-up on the conversation.  The power of our services can put your company on the map.

All of that boils down to:  We help you to send spam to forums and blogs, millions of them.  While some question the competence of an attorney who would market himself in such a fashion (not high – see this followup), it's really a question of ethics.

Spamming is, in its way, every bit as wrong as drunk driving.  After all, despite what MADD would have us think, most drunk driving episodes don't end in a collision or injury.  They end with the driver getting home, in one piece, and promising himself that he won't do it again.

Not so with spammers.  Every time someone elects to send off a marketing campaign to "1 million forums" or blogs, others are inconvenienced.  And while most drunk drivers don't intend to hurt others, the spammer most certainly does.

And so, because we've since received two more spam missives from ticketvoid, I fire this shot into the web, hoping that someone, somewhere, in need of a good DUI defense lawyer will read it, consider what sort of attorney would affiliate with a spam network, and perhaps decide to pick up the Yellow Pages instead.

Last year I applauded a Third Circuit decision striking down, on First Amendment grounds, a statute banning the interstate sale of depictions of cruelty to animals. As I wrote then, the Third Circuit essentially refused to recognize a new "low-value speech" carve-out for depictions of animal cruelty. Now Jonathan Turley reports that SCOTUS has accepted the case for review. Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on the very broad reach of the statute, and about the slippery-slope implications of extending the child-pornography categorical First Amendment exception to other categories.

103 years ago tomorrow, San Francisco was shattered. The great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 left the city in shambles. The Chronicle has just unearthed some new photos of the aftermath that are stunning.

It's a chance for me to remember my two favorite parts of earthquake lore that exist to this day. The golden hydrant is in the City's Mission District. When the rest of the water system failed, this hydrant continued to pump water, which allowed the fire department to save huge chunks of the City. Each year on the anniversary, the fire chief repaints the golden hydrant to thank it for saving San Francisco.

Lotta's Fountain was the main meeting point for survivors of the earthquake, and is the site of the modern remembrance ceremony. Sadly, last year, for the first time, no survivors attended the ceremony. It is believed that there are only two survivors left alive.

April 18th serves as a reminder that we are overdue for another large earthquake, and of the incredible spirit of the City!

The Chinese know it.  The Navy knows it.  The only people who don't know it are the American taxpayers, because if you knew, you'd stop paying for aircraft carriers: since 1916, the only ship that has made military sense is the submarine.

You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.

The Pacific naval campaign in World War II was won by American submarines, not by carrier battlegroups.  In the next war, if it isn't nuclear, the aircraft carrier will be shown up as thoroughly as a mounted knight at Agincourt.

Yet the Navy, like French aristocracy, still keeps turning out and maintaining these knights of the sea, while the Chinese develop their longbows.

This afternoon I tried to bribe my eight-year-old son $6 to kiss an aging performer named Dixie. He refused, but eventually agreed to give her a hug. This was a difficult prospect in and of itself, as his arms are short, and she weighs about 500 pounds, most of it raw muscle. Dixie took the hug stoically.

I did this because I wanted pictures of my son kissing Dixie.

Dixie, by the way, is a dolphin, a resident of Discovery Cove, a small Sea-World affiliated park that lets about a thousand guests a day swim with dolphins, snorkel with fish and rays, and float on a lazy man-made river that circles the park. The dolphin-swim only takes up about a half-hour, but it's the headline attraction.

I kissed Dixie. If you are wondering, dolphin kisses — even just on the dolphin's chin — are salty. My wife also kissed Dixie. And on the first date! I feel robbed.

It was an exhausting day, but a fun one. We floated around the river, borne on its gentle currents, four times. A significant portion of it is only wading-deep, but there are stretches as deep as eight feet. It was on one of these stretches that I learned an important lesson about water safety. I've heard that one of the most dangerous things you can do in the water is try to save a drowning person, because they will pull you down with them. Also dangerous: trying to swim with small, playful children. We had just hit one of the eight-foot dropoffs when Evan and Elaina both decided to try to climb on me to help them float, and I suddenly discovered that thirty-five years of swimming and a formidable natural buoyancy did not make me as unsinkable as I had previously assumed. I surfaced, sputtering, my glasses dripping and my hat soaked, to hear one of the lifeguards posted every forty feet suggest politely that I might want to zip my swimming vest, just to keep it from falling off, you understand.

Swimmers on the river or with the dolphins were required to wear either the swim vests or actual life jackets. Eventually we put Elaina in a life jacket, making her, in effect, a noisy cork. My wife elected to go with the wetsuit, which must have been uncomfortable in the blood-warm water. I went with what seemed the path of least resistance, which was the swim vest. Regrettably, the vest is made in a cut that leaves a gap between its bottom and the belt line, creating the muffin-top effect popular with gladiators everywhere. It's really not my look. But the prospect of trying to squeeze into a wetsuit in front of an impatient line did not appeal.

The kids loved it all, and eventually found the courage to pet the dolphin and even accept a dolphin ride, which involves holding on to the dorsal fin while the dolphin pulls you rather remarkably fast across the lagoon. Dixie hauled the kids without visible effort. After hauling me, Dixie looked rather put out, as if such a task deserved something more substantial than thawed sardine. If I had a Chilean sea bass to give her in appreciation, I would have.

Rush Limbaugh is a hotlinker.

For those who don't know, hotlinking occurs when one website links directly to another website's data-intensive assets, such as images and .pdf files, on its own page, presenting the images or documents as its own.  In the blogging context, it means doing it without credit.  The hotlinker does not even provide a direct link (meaning credit, the only currency that matters to bloggers) to the website or post from which the image or other data-intensive item is stolen.  Morally, hotlinking is theft.

Hotlinking goes on all the time.  We've had images and documents hotlinked by people at this or that forum, and it's generally no big deal, because the drain on resources from this or that forum is not a problem.  But when it comes from a site with huge readership, and awesome resources, like the Excellence-In-Broadcasting-Network, it's a serious problem.  The small site slows down, and gets no appreciable increase in readers in return.

When a Rush Limbaugh hotlinks, it's the rich stealing from the poor.

It's also stupid.  We've been fortunate in that we've had only one serious hotlinking problem, in which a very large weblog devoted to the inside workings of spoiled, rich, Ivy League associates at Biglaw firms linked directly to a document (rather than the overlaid post) which we hosted at our site, without giving credit or a link to our site.  I paid money out of my own pocket to get that document, and was rather angry until the author at that site agreed that what he'd done was wrong, and sent Popehat a link.  Everyone was happy.

But if he hadn't, I might have removed the document from our site at midnight, exchanged it for a photo of "Goatse", and watched the fun in the morning.  (That Goatse link, for those who do know, is safe.)

So kudos to the Liberty Papers for taking the high road (I'd have Goatse'd Limbaugh and his audience in an instant), and shame on Limbaugh for his theft.

Thanks to Doug Mataconis for the tip.

In an effort to keep her kids off the public dole, Nadya Suleman, who last year gained worldwide shame after giving birth to octuplets while already on public assistance as the mother of six other children born through in vitro fertilization, is seeking to obtain a trademark over the term, "Octomom."

Unfortunately for Ms. Suleman, there's a rival claimant:

a Texas-based video game company called Super Happy Fun Fun, Inc. also filed a trademark application for the name. Its Web site describes a game in which players "press down on Fertyle Myrtle's swollen belly, and another adorable bundle of joy will be brought into the world."

And of course, the entire world will have a "prior use" defense in the event that the Octomom decides to sue it.

Braid, a seemingly simple 2d platformer, might be the best game I played last year (and I didn't even finish it!) My brother got it on his Xbox and I played a little and was entranced. A few days ago, I picked it up on Steam, and have been reintroduced to it's elegant gameplay & beautiful art.

The game has a unique graphic look, clear graphics that look to me like lithographs from an old Victorian novel.  The music reminds me of the mournful cello solos of Arcanum (one of the best game soundtracks). Aesthetically, the game is clean and beautiful. The surprising aspect of the game is the lovely backstory. It's not hugely complex, or epic in scale but it has depth and deals with some fairly deep thoughts. It definitely enriched the game for me.

The game plays nicely using the arrow keys for movement, space to jump and (and here's the kicker to the game) the shift key to control time. Yup, during the game you will be using time travel to solve puzzles. The key is that anything you pick up during time shifts stays with you, so jump down in that pit to grab a key, and then shift time backwards before you jumped in the pit, and you can continue on your way with the key. It leads to some incredibly complex and well designed puzzles. The last few levels (where I am currently stuck..) are brain burners in the best way, building on the various time tricks you have learned. It's like Portal, without the need for massive physical dexterity.

I cannot recommend Braid enough. You can get it on Xbox Live, Steam or several other digital download sites. It's definitely worth $15.

We've just gotten two spam comments, with the IP address 212.235.92.144, reading as this:

I promised my lawyer I’d pimp his site online ( http://ticketvoid.com ) after he got me off for drinking & driving. All charges we’re dropped today! Kudos

and

I got a DUI ticket and my lawyers ( http://ticketvoid.com ) convinced the judge that the police don’t know how to administer the drinking test.

The defendants, incidentally, are named Seostarman1 and Seostarman7.  Perhaps they could use a lawyer's help in arranging for a name change.

Ticketvoid is, according to Merchantcircle and Linkedin, run by Steven L. Hill, of the "Greater Denver Area."   According to the firm of Kamlet, Shepherd, & Reichert, LLP (and his Linkedin profile) Steven L. Hill was very recently:

an associate in the Real Estate and Project Finance group, Hill’s practice focuses on commercial real estate transactions, including leasing for office, retail and mixed-use developments. His clients include landlords and tenants. Prior to coming to Kamlet Shepherd, he worked for the largest drive-up water vending company in the United States. Hill received his juris doctor degree from the University of Colorado School of Law.

Steven L. Hill is no longer with that firm.

I would no more hire a water vending lawyer, or or a real estate lawyer, to represent me on a criminal charge of DWI or DUI, than I would hire Ronald McDonald to represent me on a charge of french fry theft.  I would not hire a spammer to represent me on a murder charge if he was Gerry Spence.

And I wouldn't pay a real estate lawyer to refer me for a DUI defense under any circumstances.  Particularly not a BLOGSPAMMER like Steven L. Hill, of the greater Denver area.

Every now and then it's useful to revisit old posts, in a "Where Are They Now?" fashion.

Many moons ago we wrote of the plight of Bradford Campeau-Laurion, who claimed he was almost forced to soil himself by the New York Yankees and the New York Police Department.  Allegedly Campeau-Laurion was prevented from visiting the Yankee Stadium bathroom during the singing of "God Bless America."  We predicted that it would be an interesting lawsuit, particularly on the issue of damages.

Now lo and behold, that lawsuit has come to pass. A commenter at the time noted that, considering how badly the Yankees played in 2008, ejecting Campeau-Laurion was more a favor than a tort.  Today the Yankees are 4-4, tied with the Devil Rays for third in the AL East.

Campeau-Laurion's damages look worse every day.

Greg Burdell, a talk radio host from Montgomery Alabama thought about what to compare today's Dick Armey run teabagging revolution to. He wanted to convey the importance of the movement. So, he compared it to the civil rights movement and Rosa Parks.

"If one woman could change the world by refusing to move to the back of the bus, we ought to be able to change it by saying we are not going to let our government throw us under the bus and our children and our grandchildren," he said.

I cannot begin to suggest how incredibly stupid and borderline offensive that statement is. I wonder if there were any African-Americans in the crowd? Just about all the pictures on the Chronicle's photo page look like about as ethnic as a Popehat bloggers dinner. Let's not forget that this "movement" is being funded by PACs and groups that a scant 50 years ago were on the wrong side of the whole Rosa Parks business.

We have a collective Twitter account, though only a couple of us use it.  While I'm not at all sold on Twitter as the replacement for blogging or other online interaction that its evangelists claim it can be, it is a nice way to obtain or share links and news on a rapidfire basis.

The people we follow, and who follow us, on Twitter tend to be of the same general makeup as this blog's readership: lawyers, geeks, and libertarians, some of them all three.  Today being April 15, the libertarians are all atwitter (I slay myself) about this newfangled "Tea Party" movement, in which people take a day off of productive labor to protest against the progressive income tax.  I'm quite skeptical of the "Tea Party" movement, just as I am of people who hold out the philosophies expressed in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a model for, well, anything.

But it has produced much unintentional comedy on Twitter:

More pics of a million tea bags

someone threw #teabags over the WH fence now parts of WH are in tmpry lockdown while Secret Service checks it out

You're going to love my teabags!

Need more teabags not more taxes!

Just stop it.  I'm sorry teabaggers, but that word has been taken from you by the internet, and you cannot take it back.

An ESPN columnist shadowed Kobe Bryant for a day, and wrote a column about it. The fact that Kobe does not (allegedly) sexually assault anyone during this time is less surprising than the fact that he says he reads Thomas Friedman.  Now, Kobe has always struck me as akin to Tom Cruise. They just try a little too hard. So, is copping to Friedman a vain attempt at liberal cred? I have no analysis of this, I'm just mildly flabbergasted by it.

Plus, how often do you get to tag a post: Kobe Bryant, Thomas Friedman?