Ted Frank at Overlawyered reports that The Grey Lady (a nickname that used to refer to a preference for text over pictures, and now refers to the ashen color of necrotic flesh) is bullying a political website adverse to the Governor of New Jersey.

The Corzine Times' use of some of the look-and-feel of the NYT, including (allegedly) the font — which is, itself, hardly unique or innovative — is patently satirical. There is no chance that anyone — not even habitual readers of the Times, not even persons who voluntarily live in New Jersey — will conclude that the web site is associated in any way with the Times.

Freaking out over satire is classic death-spiral behavior for a business.

Great news:

Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.

People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

Via.

Congratulations to the people of Greenland, whose status as one of the last European colonies ends today.

Yesterday I spoke with an ex-FBI private investigator we are using on a case with forensic accounting issues. It was the first time I had spoken with him; my partner initiated the call in order to introduce me. Knowing that he was on speaker-phone on our end with more than one person, and without being introduced to anyone or ascertaining how many people were on my end or who they were, the agent started out the conversation with two racial jokes about Obama (the aspirin one and the garden tools one).

It would be inaccurate to say I was offended. But I was definitely appalled. Our client is going to pay this guy by the hour for his good judgment? I'm going to rely on his good judgment in advising my client?

Where do they grow these people?

Considering that, oh I dunno, everyone in Outer Mongolia has seen Star Wars and its sequels, is it really wise for Pizza Hut to rebrand itself simply as "The Hut"?

Thanks to the wonderful Nancy Friedman for the tip.

Thoreau tells us that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Of course, Thoreau was a loner, and it's easier to live quietly in a shack next to a pond. If, on the other hand, you are a person of note — say, the City Attorney of Jefferson City, Kentucky — the desperation comes easy, but the quiet is a mite more challenging.

Hence Larry Wilder, who has the honor of holding that office for the moment, finds himself desperately, but not quietly, famous on the internet for being found unconscious in a neighbor's garbage can the morning after a night of drinking in celebration a friend getting his real estate license.

We embrace such occasions as life presents to us.

Via

Note that I have not used the Lawyers Behaving Badly tag because Larry Wilder is not bad. Larry Wilder is awesome.

Houston Texas Judge Woody Ray Densen denies that this hidden surveillance video depicts the judge "keying" his neighbor's Range Rover.  Judge for yourself:

A Harris County grand jury disagreed with the judge, who has been indicted for criminal mischief.

Hat tip: Defending People.

If you follow our periodic feature the Road to Popehat, you might reach the conclusion that everyone who comes here via search engine is a sub-literate perv (or, as we prefer to refer to them, "our core demographic").

In fact, that's something of an exaggeration. We get a significant chunk of our traffic from search engine hits, but a large percentage of that is benign, if somewhat surprising. When you blog, and put effort into using search engine optimization plugins, you expect the hot, controversial posts to draw the most traffic. It might work out that way for a few days after a post on a hot issue (for instance, we got mad hitz about racial-joke-liking-imprudent-emailer Sherri Goforth). For the most part, though, our search traffic is driven by recurring themes. Those things don't paint people as deranged, like the people we normally feature in the Road to Popehat, but they do demonstrate the oddity of human behavior on the internet. A few of them:

Dora the Explorer Seriously, what the hell? This is like a couple of years ago when all our search traffic was about penguins. My throwaway post about Dora's makeover got 233 search engine hits for "dora the explorer" in the last 30 days alone — even though it's down pages and pages and pages on a Google search. Does Dora, like Ron Paul, have a team of fanatical followers Googling her ever day?

please be informed Our post about this bit of legal correspondence mumbo-jumbo is the second Google hit for the phrase. That's odd enough. But why the hell are so many people searching for the phrase? 45 people came here by searching for that phrase in the last 30 days alone.

man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for [and fragments thereof]: How odd is the internet? You will never be Robert Browning. But if you misquote Browning in a blog post title (it's should exceed, dimwit), then you will get dozens of hits every month from people who misremember the quote the same way.

matt ivester Some people seek immortality through children, or Hollywood, or by having a star named after them. Other people come up with a douchey business plan and have a blog post calling them out for it forever remain the #1 Google hit for their name. Hi, Matt!

those who can't teach, teach gym A quickly forgotten and (even in the context of this blog) obscure post draws steady search engine hits because it incorporates a catchphrase.

PETA Seriously now. I know that PETA is amusing, but who is going past the 30th page of Google hits on their name to get to our blog?

Does a debt collection agency have a First Amendment right to place the acronym "WWJD" at the top of its letterhead?

Continue Reading »

We beat Oprah to Twitter, where we'd encourage you to follow us.  For a group blog of tech-illiterate lawyers who write, and tech-literate non-lawyers who don't write, I suppose that's something.

And so, bowing to the will of the technological ultimate, we have created a Facebook page.  At the moment, it isn't much.  In fact, it isn't anything.  But you can find it by searching for "Popehat".  It will have the blog's content, as well as non-blog content we find amusing or informative, and will provide an additional, perhaps easier way to access what we write.  We'll also have a direct link up on the front page, beneath our Twitter link, soon.

Soon.  So jump on the bandwagon, and impress your trendy friends that you were there first.

As a side note, when searching for Popehat on Facebook, I see that while our nascent protopage is the first thing suggested, Facebook also suggests a lovely young woman whose last name is spelled "Poophat."

Pronounced Poofat, I'm sure, and she isn't from an English-predominant country anyway.

With the possible exception of German, English is the most scatalogical of languages.  Poor Poophat.  If she'd been born when Latin was the world lingua franca, her name wouldn't rouse chortles at all.

Edit: We now have a direct link to the Popehat page on Facebook.  It's located on the right sidebar, just below the Twitter link.  Or I suppose you could click here.

Soon I tell you, we shall have Popehat pieces of flair!

We frequently make fun of the supporters of Dr. Ron Paul, but it's fun born out of love.  We appreciate their emphasis on individual liberty in an ordered society, but wish they could do it without so much goldbuggery, blimpitude, and racism.

That said, we wholeheartedly endorse the lawsuit filed by Steven Bierfeldt, a director for Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, against the Transportation Security Administration, whose agents thuggishly detained, arrested, and threatened Bierfeldt at a Saint Louis airport for the crime of … carrying a large amount of cash from a fundraiser.

Except that carrying a large amount of cash is not a crime.  It's not evidence of criminal activity, and it's certainly not capable of being used as a weapon or an explosive.  Unless one assumes Mr. Bierfeldt intended to bring down an airliner by burning money within it.

(On that note, I suspect that in today's economy a passenger pulling out a matchbook and massive pile of hundreds, twenties, tens, and fives aboard an airliner would be mobbed faster than Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, not because passengers wanted to save the plane, but to save the money.)

Key points of Mr. Bierfeldt's suit:

• The TSA is not statutorily authorized to search for evidence of any crime, only for evidence of weapons or explosives which constitute a danger to airflight;
• The TSA nevertheless routinely threatens air travelers with arrest, or actually arrests them, for allegedly suspicious activity outside its jurisdiction.  TSA is not the IRS.  It's not the DEA;
• In Bierfeldt's case, in response to being asked a few simple questions which any citizen would be very well-advised to ask on being confronted by federal agents, TSA officers threatened him with a workout from the DEA or the FBI;
• The TSA agents refused to answer Beirfeldt's questions, and told him he was under arrest;
• The TSA agents knew Bierfeldt was affiliated with a political campaign (and any idiot could have guessed that would explain the cash);
• Bierfeldt wisely recorded his entire interaction with the TSA.  While it's a wonder his phone wasn't seized, he has the entire ordeal recorded;
• Bierfeldt isn't asking for money damages.  He isn't asking for a penny.  He's asking, simply, for a declaration from the Court that the TSA's conduct was illegal, in violation of its authority of the Fourth Amendment, and for an injunction prohibiting TSA from engaging in "fishing expeditions" against passengers whose activities pose no risk of danger at all to air safety, but have been deemed suspicious by the federal equivalent of a mall cop.

We've downloaded Bierfeldt's suit, and urge you to read it, here: bierfeldt-napolitano-complaint

We salute Bierfeldt's courage, because he's going to have to fly again and again, through TSA screeners who will remember his name and may not understand it's unwise to harass people who've filed suit against their agency for illegal conduct.

But it's also worth noting that Bierfeldt is represented in this suit, pro bono, by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization which many on Bierfeldt's end of the libertarian fringe feel doesn't actually defend individual liberties.  This is a nice merger of the left and right sides of the libertarian divide.

Like peanut butter and chocolate.

Update:  See Simple Justice for another view on this suit, in particular an apparent flaw in the ACLU's legal allegations concerning the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure.  While there may be tactical reasons for the ACLU's decision to make a concession, in favor of the government, about the Fourth Amendment that it didn't have to make, it is surprising for an organization that generally takes absolutist stances on civil liberties.

Read the whole thing.

If North Korea is so insular and if they have no exports to speak of and if North Korean currency is less valuable than toilet paper because of its limited surface area and scratchy texture, where do they get any cash to spend abroad?

Apparently, massive insurance fraud.

In interviews and court documents, Western insurers, U.S. officials and defectors such as Kim said the impoverished and isolated North Korean government has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world's largest insurance companies on large and suspicious claims for transportation accidents, factory fires, flood damage and other alleged disasters. Still, recent attempts by international insurers to overturn North Korea's claims have failed in British courts.

I'd say that these companies should have had Patrick on the case but it would have fallen outside of his expertise. To wit, "the reinsurers had a weak case because they had contractually agreed to be bound by North Korean law." And since, in a case against the North Korean government, I assume that reduces to "the government wins", the insurance companies were pretty well fucked.

Congratulations, AIG, while the scale of your collapse was the largest, you are no longer in the running for the "Dumbest Insurance Policy Sold." I'm sure you'll clean up in the other categories, though.

Via The Awl

Via Consumerist

I keep thinking that Canada's champions of censorship can't get any more ludicrous and offensive. And they keep coming back and saying "Oh, Ken, ye of little faith." Well, they don't actually talk to me. Except in my head. You know, I think I'm straying from the point.

Canada's appalling Human Rights Commissions — which we have frequently criticized here for their tendency and capacity to punish unpopular speech through bureaucracy without due process or remedy — have been under heavy political fire in Canada recently, as the public starts to grasp their illiberal censorious nature and the politicians sense the way the wind is blowing. But the Human Rights Commissions and their apologists are not going down without a fight. And a new hero has emerged — Richard Warman need no longer shoulder the mantle of nanny-state wiffle-life censorship alone. No, Chief Commissioner Jennifer Lynch has stepped up.

Sort of.

Continue Reading »

Continuing a theme, it appears that certain ideologies and modern social networking technology just don't mix.  Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra, last covered in these pages in February, led us to call his judgment into question through inappropriate use of Twitter.

Today it's not his judgment that's in question.  It's his perspective.

Yesterday Hoekstra demonstrated that 140 characters are more than enough to make an ass of oneself.

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

Hoekstra refers to an incident in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi limited debate on a bill, while House Republicans bravely protested on the service.  And yes, apart from the fact that House Republicans were stymied by parliamentary manuevers rather than truncheon wielding imported goons, and were fighting on a budget bill rather than against a fraudulent election, it was just like what's going on in Iran today.

Not to be outdone, Hoekstra's Texas Republican colleague John Culberson tweeted:

Oppressed minorities includeHouseRepubs: We are using social media to expose repression such as last night's D clampdown shutting off amends

Forgive my grief, Mr. Culberson.

If you'd like to see what other Twitter users have responded to Mr. Hoekstra's plight, you can follow along at Donklephant's brand new website, Pete Hoekstra is a Meme.

I was particularly pleased with Tweets like:

@petehoekstra I didn't put milk in my coffee this morning. It was just like being held in a Vietnamese tiger cage.

Our own small effort to communicate with Hoekstra, about our own difficulties, very similar to those of the House Republicans, may be found here.

If you have a Twitter account, perhaps you have exaggerated tales of distress to share with the House Republicans.  They're your congressmen.  Let them know all about it!

Via Radley Balko.