Monthly Archives: March 2004

Feedburner Redirection Experiment In Progress

Posted on March 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

As promised, I've begun redirecting my RSS feeds to the feedburner versions. Please let me know if you experience any difficulties.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Feedburner Redirection Experiment In Progress

E-Voting and Trust in Democracy

Posted on March 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Joho the Blog: Paperless democracy's test reads Ed Cone, and gets right to the meat of the one of the key issues:

Ed Cone writes about what conclusions to draw from the fact that Maryland's use of electronic voting machines on Tuesday seemed to go well: “'Election officials will think that this validates the system, that now we can all see that it works just fine – but that's not the case,' says Michael Wertheimer, a systems-security consultant…”

My favorite bit:

A sampling of voters at Lutherville, Md., on Super Tuesday showed that the systems worked well on the surface. “The machine was easy to use,” says Charlie Mitchell, 49. “The only thing I wondered about was what I had read about these machines – were the votes getting counted or not? I don't know.”

Oh, I see. Let me paraphrase: “The system worked perfectly and I was very happy with it, except for the gnawing fear that it disenfranchised me of my most basic right as a citizen.”

Of course the other key issue is that there really are serious reasons to doubt the machines are sufficiently hard to hack…

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on E-Voting and Trust in Democracy

Scandal Fatigue?

Posted on March 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Remember how GW Bush promised to release all his military records? And then remember how that promise was inoperative the very next day? We still have not seen Bush's discharge papers. All it would take to put this to rest is a signed release by the ex-National Guardsman himself. But he hasn't done that…and people seem to have stopped demanding it. Why is that?

Lest we forget: Bush To Make Up Missed National Guard Service This Weekend

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 2 Comments

The Most Cheerful Thing I’ve Read In Weeks

Posted on March 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Call it schadenfreude if you must, but I was immensely cheered by Brian Leiter's recent post on the sloath and incompetence of the University of Texas academic bureaucracy. It is so, so nice to know that we are not the only place where this sort of thing happens all the time.

Posted in Readings | Comments Off on The Most Cheerful Thing I’ve Read In Weeks

Who Knew?

Posted on March 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It looks as if it's been going a while, since July actually, but I only just discovered Abstract Appeal, which calls itself, undoubtedly correctly, “The First Weblog Devoted to Florida Law & the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals”.

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Who Knew?

Don’t Believe the Headline: 9/11 Commission Still Spineless

Posted on March 3, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Oh, it's a nice headline in the New York Times: 9/11 Panel Rejects White House Limits on Interviews. Sure sounds like the commission found its spine at last, and won't accept the absurd one-hour limit (and chairs only, no members present, please) that Bush-Cheney invented to neuter the commission's investigation.

But read past the headline and the truth emerges. First, no Republicans are quoted; as the commission is split 50/50, that means that there isn't yet a majority to do anything forceful.

Plus, on background, the Republicans as signalling that they plan to cave in:

Commission officials said that if the White House continued to insist on limitations on the interviews with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, there might be little that the panel could do to force the issue and that the commission might have to accept the White House's terms.

And they said that despite internal conversation about the possibility of issuing a subpoena for Ms. Rice's public testimony, that move was unlikely.

Some spine, eh?

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | Comments Off on Don’t Believe the Headline: 9/11 Commission Still Spineless