A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Monthly Archives: May 2004
The Countdown
Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election
Comments Off on The Countdown
Losing the Hinterland
Stuff like this tells you something.
MADISON, Wis. – Faced with a scarcity of letters praising the president, a newspaper in a Republican-leaning district appealed for pro-Bush letters, then backed off the request Tuesday amid complaints of blatant politics.
Last week in an editorial, The Post-Crescent said most of its letters had been coming from one side and asked readers “to help us 'balance' things out.”
“We've been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him,” the editorial said. “We're not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today's increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.”
On Tuesday, the newspaper located in Appleton, Wis., with a daily circulation of just over 56,000 ran a second editorial stepping back from the appeal.
…
The newspaper is located in a congressional district that Bush won handily in 2000, beating Gore, 52 percent to 43 percent.
Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election
2 Comments
Formatting Woes (Long URLs in Comments Dept.)
Sometimes readers put URLs in their comments. That's good. Sometimes they format them as HTML URLs with short text to click on. That's even better. If we're just in the 'good' zone, then funny things can happen while a comment with a long URL is one of the five most recent comments showing in the right margin—at least in most browsers.
Apparently, if you read this blog with Firefox, it handles comments with long URLs fine. But I gather that if you use pretty much anything else, it doesn't. So when people put a long URL in plaintext into their comments, and it shows up in the right margin as one of the five most recent, it shoves that column left, making it look as if the middle column got too big.
I've fixed the problem for today by editing the comment that was causing the problem, but if there's a more general fix, I don't know what it is, since MT's parser isn't built to deal with this.
Thank you to the people who were kind enough to warn me about the problem. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Posted in Discourse.net
2 Comments
Brad DeLong Asks ‘Doesn’t Anybody Read Max Weber Anymore?’
Brad DeLong asks, 'Doesn't Anybody Read Max Weber Anymore?' by which he means many things, all interesting but not, perhaps, all equally correct.
That the crew in charge thinks history is bunk, and Weber some damforeigner is all too likely. That tangled lines of command for the military are a bad thing, we can all agree. Whether this is quite as true for civilians in all cases, I'm not as sure; sometimes having criss-crossing lines can be an efficient way to move information around an organization.
But I'm least sure that I am prepared to say that either history or present experience teaches us to adopt the Roman, or British, proconsular model. In an era of modern communications, it's not necessarily wrong to have lines of authority run to HQ, nor is it necessarily wrong not to have the military report to the local viceroy. And it would be especially wrong, I think, to decide that the proconsul must be a military officer in order to unify the commands. Weber also taught us about bureaucratic virtues and there are more to them than clear lines of command and obeying orders, and while the Army has quite a few of these virtues, some of the ones that a civilian reconstruction project ought to care about are likely to go out the window in a theater of operations.
The root problem with the CPA was not, is not, that it lacks the ability to order troops around. The problem with the CPA is its (in)competence, the lack of planning before it started operations, and the very small number of officials who speak the local language or know the local culture.
If we are going to draw lessons from the British Empire — a very very mixed model if you were to ask me, or ask any number of colonized peoples, then the example I would choose to emulate is that of the district magistrate, oxford trained, fluent in three of the local languages.
Posted in Readings
2 Comments
Odd and Amusing
Via Doc Searls, a link to this.
Posted in Completely Different
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Shorter William Safire
Shorter William Safire
Rumsfeld Should Stay: Rumsfeld should not resign because he symbolizes the Admnistration's willingness to persevere in ignorance of reality; were he to quit it would encourage people to believe that the Bush administration makes mistakes and/or admits them.
Posted in Readings
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