So, the con itself started. Registration actually started 20 minutes early. I was pretty close to the front. You got some nice schwag just for showing up. A free copy of one of three Queen Games (I got Robber Knights, the least of the three) then you drew a ticket which either entered you in a drawing for some really great games, or guaranteed you a game from the free game room (full of a lot of good but not great games.) I got the free game, and wandered the room for 20 minutes trying to decide. I finally went with an expansion deck for my favorite party game Times Up. This time, all the cards are names of board games. Should be fun with my gamer friends. (Of course, part of the reason I chose it, was that it was among the smallest choices, and luggage space was at a premium.)

And so the con began in earnest.

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Thanks to Dave(ND), who comments here occasionally, for a great pointer elsewhere to News from 1930 — a blog that offers a few daily excerpts from the Wall Street Journal issue of the corresponding day in 1930. Presumably it will become "News from 1931" next year.

It's fascinating and well worth a read. One tiny snippet:

New Era Motors Co. files for voluntary bankruptcy.

Hey! They were just like us!

I'm back from vacation, and finally have a little time to throw down some notes on my trip to Boardgamegeekcon. I might also intersperse a few random observations from my ensuing family Thanksgiving in Amarillo, Texas. It was practically an anthropological outing for me! But, I digress…

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Dave Barry reveals that in the town of Crested Butte, they solve disputed votes not with litigation, but with a rousing game of Bear-Ninja-Cowboy.

Ronald Mason and Phoebe Wilson tied in votes for a city council seat. Did they bring in droves of lawyers to dispute ballots? They did not. They settled it like rational adults:

According to the witnessed affidavit submitted by Hughes, on the count of three, each candidate would turn around and assume one of the positions.
The official document describes the following:
“Round One: Mason bear; Wilson bear: outcome—tie.
“Round Two: Mason cowboy; Wilson bear: outcome—Mason wins.
“Round Three: Mason bear; Wilson ninja: outcome—Mason wins.
“Final outcome: Mason wins a four-year seat. Wilson gets a two year seat.

I would totally vote for anyone who would do that.

I'm not clear on why there is no pirate involved, though.

Not prepared to get back to work? Courtesy of (or curses to) a link from Radley Balko at the Agitator, check out what purports to be a list of the fifty most interesting articles on Wikipedia. I don't know about the fifty most interesting, but if you start clicking your morning will vanish quite quickly.

It's nearly three months after the Station Fire threatened our neighborhood. Life is slowly returning to normal. The massive mudslides that were anticipated have not yet materialized on our side of the hill, though some homes across the canyon found their yards buried in three feet of mud after the last rain. The air no longer smells like an ashtray first thing in the morning. The kids still come back into the house with pitch-black feet after playing in the yard, but their faces and hands are no longer covered in ash.

But today we're powerfully reminded of the fire again. Last night we had one of the vigorous windstorms we've grown used to here in the foothills of the Angeles National Forrest. It was strong enough to knock out power several times. This morning, I woke early for deacon duties at the first service at church. I found the foothills shrouded in a thick haze of ash, barely visible in the bright morning sun. The air is gritty, if you open your mouth, you'll be crunching particles between your teeth in a moment. Flecks blow into my eyes every few moments, and I'm blinking and eye-watering constantly. On the church's patio, thick rills of fine black ash chase each other in the gusts of wind. After only 15 minutes of welcoming in front of the church, my clothes and face were speckled with tiny dark particles.

The fire will be with us for quite a while longer, I think.

At least according to Google:

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama."

I'm about to reprint the image, below the jump.  Be warned, gentle readers, that it is very offensive.

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Miami attorney Benjamin Kuehne is no doubt thankful as well, but it's got to be a bittersweet feeling.  After all, the Justice Department has been prosecuting Kuehne for two years, on what it calls a "test case."  The subject of the test?  Reading comprehension.

I give the government a failing grade.

Federal authorities, according to a court filing Wednesday, decided to give up their test case against Ben Kuehne, who advised defense attorney Roy Black to accept $5.2 million in payments from defendant Fabio Ochoa after concluding the money was clean.

Prosecutors withdrew the indictment against Kuehne after their recent loss of a critical appeal over a money-laundering charge that was the backbone of their case.

It was a huge victory for Kuehne, 55, who was at the peak of his career when prosecutors indicted him in early 2008. He had served on the Florida Bar board of governors, as a past president of the Dade County Bar Association and as a member of Vice President Al Gore's legal team in the 2000 Florida presidential election dispute.

Despite what the press says, Kuehne has not earned a "huge victory" because the government finally decided to drop its meritless prosecution.  Kuehne never should have been charged in the first place.

The facts, as found by the trial court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, are that Kuehne was retained by famous defense attorney Roy Black to determine whether funds to be paid Black in his defense of Colombian drug smuggler Fabio Ochoa, were not themselves drug proceeds.  After a forensic accounting in conjunction with Colombian attorneys, Kuehne determined that the funds were not criminal proceeds, and transmitted them to Black as earned fees.

The government targeted Black for accepting the money.  Black's response?  "I retained counsel who advised me it was legal to accept these funds."  The feds turned on Kuehne for money-laundering, despite Kuehne's assurances from his own Colombian counsel about the money, and more importantly, despite 18 U.S.C. § 1957(f)(1), which exempts:

"any transaction necessary to preserve a person’s right to representation as guaranteed by the sixth amendment to the Constitution."

from a criminal money-laundering charge.  You can read the 11th Circuit's vindication of Kuehne here.

While the 11th Circuit chides the government in its opinion, the court didn't go far enough.  So I will.  The government's argument was that because the Supreme Court hasn't found a sixth amendment right to protect money from civil forfeiture laws, Kuehne committed a crime by accepting the funds.

Even though the law states, explicitly and on its face, that an attorney accepting money intended as fees for criminal defense is not a money launderer.  To get around the actual text of the law, the government made the breathtaking argument that the Supreme Court, in its decision on civil forfeiture, an entirely separate act of Congress, had "nullified" the criminal law.

(I made equally brilliant arguments at the age of four.  I demonstrated that cookie-eating before dinner is acceptable because mom only said I couldn't eat a chocolate chip cookie.  Mom didn't say anything at all about eating a sugar cookie.  Unfortunately my parents couldn't understand this flawless logic, damn them.)

But it gets better.  The government ignored its own past concessions, in the very civil forfeiture case on which it relied to prosecute Kuehne, that the criminal law did exempt attorney's fees.  "Yes, I know I acknowledged that I couldn't eat chocolate chip cookies when you punished me last week, but that was last week!" the children running the Justice Department argue.

And it gets still better.  As the 11th Circuit chided the government:

As the Government concedes, accepting its interpretation of § 1957(f)(1) would read all meaning out of the exemption.

In other words, the statute doesn't mean what it says.  It's just an inkblot.  "Yeah I know mom said I couldn't eat a chocolate chip cookie before dinner dad, but she didn't mean it!"

Finally, after two years of such arguments, some grown-up has put an end to it.  While Ben Kuehne has a lot to be thankful for this holiday, he must be awfully sore that clearly established law says he can't sue the government for malicious prosecution.  Still, Kuehne's a real lawyer, a grown-up.  He wouldn't waste a court's time making childish arguments that plainly written law doesn't mean what it says it means.  Unlike his fellow lawyers at the Justice Department.

Via Brian Tannebaum, through Twitter.

I've mentioned before that, Fitzgerald notwithstanding, there are second acts in American political lives. Some people do it right — they come out and say "I was full of shit on this issue before. I was wrong. Now I've seen the light, and I'm prepared to try to right my wrongs." Take Bob Barr on the War on Drugs, for instance.

Sometimes, though, I find it impossible to swallow somebody's attempt at redemption. Take Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese. He's quoted extensively in this New York Times article about how thinkers on the Left and the Right are agreeing that the creeping federalization of criminal law is a problem.

Edwin Meese III, who was known as a fervent supporter of law and order as attorney general in the Reagan administration, now spends much of his time criticizing what he calls the astounding number and vagueness of federal criminal laws.

That's swell, Ed. But every time I hear your name, I think of this:

U.S News & World Report: You criticize the Miranda ruling, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present before police questioning. Shouldn't people, who may be innocent, have such protection?

Meese: Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.

Take that, Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewell!

Or I think about the Meese Report. Or about his efforts to ramp up the great War on Drugs.

Who am I to criticize? I could accuse me of such things, etc. etc. What irritates me about Meese is that he's not, as far as I can tell, doing what Barr did: he's not owning his past. Meese can have his conversion on the road to Damascus like anyone else. But bear and mind that Paul, after his conversion, owned up to having been a vigorous persecutor of Christians.

Would it kill Ed Meese to say "this over-federalization of crime has led me to realize that I have, for years, improvidently dismissed the and even scorned the procedural rights of suspects, and other hallmarks of the rule of law that is the foundation of our society"?

Value of a rented Porsche and 90 minutes worth of gasoline at 3am?  Priceless.

Fortunately, Polanski will be wearing an electronic ankle monitor as he rots under Chalet arrest.  He'd never dare flee to France under such strict security.

Do you contribute something worthwhile to the marketplace of ideas, or are you just a noisy asshat? Here's one way to tell: how do you act when you are proven wrong about something? Do you learn from the experience and admit you were wrong — or do you double down?

These days there's an extremely irritating trend towards doubling down. Faced with the fact that they rushed to judgment, or were hoaxed, noisy asshats increasingly respond a jaw-dropping premise: "the fact that I was taken in just shows you that my point was premised on truth."

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was hoaxed — or at least pretended to be hoaxed — by a satirical report about the contents of Obama's college thesis, which purportedly called for redistribution of wealth. When the hoax was revealed, did Limbaugh own his mistake? He did not. He doubled down:

"So I shout from the mountaintops: 'It was satire!'" Limbaugh said on the program. "But we know he (Obama) thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth.

This is by no means the sole province of the right. We see that today at Pandagon, a lefty blog offering occasional islands of insight in an ocean of orthodoxy. Pandagon was faced with the news that the death of part-time census worker Bill Sparkman — found hanged with "fed" written on his chest — may have been an suicide disguised as a murder. This conflicted with Pandagon's received wisdom — common on lefty blogs — that Sparkman's death represented the clear and present danger of right-wing rhetoric. Did Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon point this out as a lesson on the dangers of rushing to judgment? She did not. Just like Rush Limbaugh, she doubled down.

But as much as the hate-mongerers will surely conclude they get 100% off the hook for this, they do not. Sparkman concluded that this was an effective disguise for his suicide because he’d been subjected to so many concerns about his safety working the Census. How realistic those concerns are is somewhat beside the point, since terrorism is about creating the perception of danger. Loud-mouthed threats aimed at government workers, right wing gun nut paranoia about “big government”, shirts with “jokes” about shooting liberals—all these add up to an atmosphere of fear that made Sparkman believe that this murder scenario was realistic. His fraud and suicide are evidence that creating a threatening, violent atmosphere is effective, and so no, the hate-mongerers are not off the hook.

Limbaugh and Marcotte both illustrate how any reversal in today's news cycle can be spun as a victory. It also illustrates the dangers of being utterly captured by partisan rhetoric. Limbaugh and Marcotte could have turned these stories into object lessons about critical thinking, reservation of judgment, and the perilous allure of believing what we want to believe. But Limbaugh and Marcotte are, to a large extend, peddlers of opinion-porn, so they don't play that. Instead, they decided to be noisy asshats.

Don't be a noisy asshat. We're all wrong sometimes. Use it productively.

Is this a story about police overreaching?  Or is it a story about the horny idiocy of young men, one in particular, who are so stupid that they can be taken in by an internet photo of a pretty girl? Could it be a story about the internet becoming a virtual Oceania, where Google and Facebook replace the Telescreen?  Or more prosaically, is it a story about the incompetence of criminal defense lawyers?  If I'd been Adam Bauer's lawyer, I'd have forced the state to try this case, though I'm not a criminal attorney.  (My trial experience comes from insurance defense, but that would be enough to get the charges against Bauer dismissed.)  Or is it a cautionary tale about the foolishness of laypeople who represent themselves in court?

Am I missing something?  Could it be all of these, and more?

Via Jacob Sullum, a great moment in Orwellian political discourse: Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, proposes an amendment to bar the proposed National Criminal Justice Commission from discussing "related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance." Called on that, he explains that he had to propose this amendment prohibiting debate in order to encourage debate:

Finally, I put forward an amendment to address the issue of decriminalization and legalization of any controlled substance. I filed this amendment in an effort to start a debate on this important issue. The members of the Judiciary Committee need to discuss the policy in the open. I continue to believe that decriminalization and legalization of dangerous drugs is not the right course. I've spoken to hundreds of Iowans who have had their families devastated by drugs. To simply allow this commission to be passed by the committee without addressing decriminalization or legalization will do nothing to tackle the issue and raise the stories of families impacted by drugs or the crime that occurs because of drug use. We need to make sure that whatever Congress decides, children and young people know that drugs are dangerous and that drug use is a serious issue.

In other words, Senator Grassley only wants "debate" that he can control, and that benefits him. Debate of the question of drug legalization by a commission of experts is unacceptable, because it ignores that DRUGS WILL KILL YOU OMG PANIC.

I really see no indication that we'll have intelligent and genuine debate of legalization within a generation.

I like to cook new things. I even like to cook, and try, new things on holidays. My dear wife does not. My dear wife likes traditional home-cooked holiday meals. My dear wife has still not forgiven me for our first Thanksgiving together 14 years ago, when we ate at the Jonathan Club because that's where my grandparents wanted to throw a dinner. (The fact that she was relentlessly interrogated by my female relatives may have something to do with it.) If an item of food is not visible in Freedom From Want, my dear wife wants no part of it.

I'm past my free will issues now and at peace with this. So I was somewhat surprised when my dear wife, inspired by an article in the Los Angeles Times, asked me to dry-brine the turkey this year.

I did it last night, using a mixture of kosher salt, diced fresh rosemary, and lemon zest. You clean the bird carefully first, dry it, then rub it vigorously with a generous sprinkling of this mixture.

Now, I really like salt. It's amazing that my blood pressure doesn't have more digits. But this seems like an awful lot of salt even to me. The experts swear that he salt will draw out all the juices and flavors without making the bird taste like the bottom of a pretzel bag. We'll see. If it doesn't work out, I will know who to blame.

Otherwise, I'm making it simpler this year. I'm passing up my mother's yam casserole, and therefore recovering roughly two months of our lives that would be spent by consuming that dish of butter and sugar. I'm going with my favorite stuffing (mushroom and carmelized onion stuffing from the Williams-Sonoma cookbook), a cheddar and chive mashed potato casserole, homemade cranberry sauce, and an cider gravy. Someone else is doing green vegetables and desert. Only 13 people. It will be practically relaxing.

Honestly, could anything be worse for America's fourth largest city than the New Jersey Nets?  According to the New York Court of Appeals, it's a positively good thing that hundreds of people will be thrown out of their homes, to make way for a basketball team that has no fans.

A group of tenants and owners claim the seizure is unconstitutional. They argue that developer Bruce Ratner's proposed $4.9 billion, 22-acre Atlantic Yards project mainly enriches private interests, while the state constitution requires public use for taking land.

"The constitution accords government broad power to take and clear substandard and insanitary areas for redevelopment," Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman wrote for the majority. "In so doing, it commensurately deprives the judiciary of grounds to interfere with the exercise."

It's worth noting that the commission charged with gifting 22 acres of prime real estate in New York City to billionaire Bruce Ratner found the area to be only "mildly blighted," and therefore proper for eminent domain.  Like a yard that hasn't been mowed in two weeks.  Or a vast vacant lot in New London Connecticut.

The Court of Appeals essentially holds that its hands are tied when some bureaucrat writes the words "blight" and "public benefit" somewhere in the same order.  New York's courts won't protect anyone from loss of property if the magic words are used.

Personally, I find the thoughts of the lone dissenting Justice, Robert Smith, more persuasive.  Justice Smith seems to think that courts should actually look at the facts and evidence before allowing the state to seize people's homes.  He seems to recognize that, shockingly enough, bureaucrats and well-connected land thieves actually read court opinions, and might know that if they want to take someone's property, all they have to do is mouth the proper formulas.

Even if what they want to do with the land will only create a larger blight.