Snake on a phone

Down here in the provinces, I just heard about (1) the Bronx Zoo Cobra, and (2) its Twitter feed.

Donald Trump is thinking about running for president?! Don't worry, I'll handle this. Where is Trump Tower exactly?

Brother, can you spare a Rolex?

Wisconsin GOP rep Sean Duffy achieved deserved notoriety for telling his constituents what a tough time he was having, trying to make it on $174K a year.

The Wisconsin Dems, in a very un-Democrat-like move, exploited the remark beautifully:

Well, there *was* that one time he killed a million peasants ....

Jay Taylor has penned a revisionist biography of Chiang Kai-Shek, but hey, Chiang had his flaws:

Taylor points out that Chiang did many bad things, and not always for reasons that made sense. He aligned himself with Shanghai gangster boss Du Yuesheng, who brutally massacred the communists and labor activists in Shanghai. He raised funds by taxing rather than suppressing the opium trade, unleashed an enormous flood that killed millions of peasants by breaking the dikes of the Yellow River in order to slow the Japanese advance, tolerated corruption among his military officers and his wife’s relatives, oversaw assassinations and kidnappings and torture by his security people as part of a series of ruthless political wars, and intervened unwisely in the tactical operations of his generals in the field.

Uh, could we rewind to the part where Chiang "killed millions of peasants"?

Waters flooded into Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu. The floods covered and destroyed thousands of square kilometers of farmland and shifted the mouth of the Yellow River hundreds of miles to the south. Thousands of villages were inundated or destroyed and several million villagers driven from their homes and made refugees. An official Nationalist post-war commission estimated that 800,000 were drowned, which may be a low figure.

Oh, well, maybe only a million or so.

Much like the Allies' own efforts at deliberately killing thousands of civilians, the military efficacy of this 1938 Yellow River Flood has been questioned.

Our higher level of training makes our misconduct less culpable

Yesterday the SCOTUS let the Orleans Parish D.A.'s office off the hook for a $14M verdict for prosecutorial misconduct. Typical 5-4, with Thomas writing for the Court. The Times-Pic reports.

[The district court's] findings relied on an earlier Supreme Court decision that found that a police department, for example, could be found to be deliberately indifferent to needed training if it sent out officers to apprehend felons without telling them under what circumstances they can use deadly force.

But Thomas wrote that prosecutors, who must be licensed attorneys, are a different kind of public employee than police officers, who without proper training might not have any idea about the legal restrictions on use of force. Instead, lawyers are educated and are required by law to know about their ethical obligations, Thomas noted.

"We do not assume that prosecutors will always make correct Brady decisions or that guidance regarding specific Brady questions would not assist prosecutors," Thomas wrote. "But showing merely that additional training would have been helpful in making difficult decisions does not establish municipal liability."

How is turning over exculpatory evidence a "difficult decision"?

Does unemployment not matter to the Fed?

TBA reads more about unemployment and monetary policy than we report on it, but this NYT analysis is worth linking.

One group of Fed officials and watchers worries constantly about the prospect of rising inflation, no matter what the economy is doing. Some of them are haunted by the inflation of the 1970s and worry it may return at any time. Others spend much of their time with bank executives or big investors, who generally have more to lose from high inflation than from high unemployment.

There is no equivalent group — at least not one as influential — that obsesses over unemployment. Instead, the other side of the debate tends to be dominated by moderates, like Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Mr. Meyer, who sometimes worry about inflation and sometimes about unemployment.

The result is a bias that can distort the Fed’s decision-making. Just look at the last 18 months. Again and again, the inflation worriers, who are known as hawks, warned of an overheated economy. In one speech, a regional Fed president even raised the specter of Weimar Germany.

These warnings helped bring an end early last year to the Fed’s attempts to reduce long-term interest rates — even though the Fed’s own economic models said that it should be doing much more. We now know, of course, that the models were right and the hawks were wrong. Recoveries from financial crises are usually slow and uneven. Yet the hawks show no sign of grappling with their failed predictions.

A small increase in inflation would be no great penalty to pay for getting millions of Americans back to work. But the Fed simply does not care about unemployment ... unless indeed the "hawks" see unemployment as the GOP's best shot at retaking the White House in 2012.

Another win from Ogden & Kidd

We've noted before the remarkable success plaintiffs have when represented by Ashley Ogden in a tort suit presided over by the Honorable Winston Kidd. The Mississippi Jury Verdict Reporter (a most useful publication) brings news of another verdict: $3.6 million for water damage to an apartment and alleged subsequent mold injuries which however produced less than $4K of medicals. The clever theory of recovery is impressive:

Important to this case, Ohazurike is a designer of Bible-based board games. While to date, Ohazurike hasn’t generated any profits from his games, he has generated several valuable designs that were ready for the market.

His game designs were destroyed (and, evidently, not reconstructable?) So, in addition to $500,000 "suffering" per member of the family, the plaintiff took $2M for "lost profits." He'd asked $17M, so that seems only fair. The silly defendants found the lost profits "speculative," and their carping post-trial motions were denied by the honorable court.

I'd like to say with confidence that the plaintiffs would be insane not to settle this case for about 20% of the verdict before the damages can be reversed on appeal, but who knows.

Another great result from Ogden & Kidd!

Uh, sorry Rachael, I've already got supper plans

The dog looks so unsuspecting; I'm glad they didn't put her family on the cover too.

H/t Sullyblog.

Dep't of So Also Ye Did Unto Me

The death of Elizabeth Taylor leads to remembrance of her AIDS activism in the 1980s, including prodding Reagan to speak publicly on the subject:

Throughout his presidency Reagan had distanced himself from the AIDS issue. Two years earlier [i.e., in 1985] his staff prepared a briefing paper suggesting he deliver a statement expressing sympathy with parents who were worried about sending their children to school with a child who has AIDS and emphasizing there was no danger from casual or routine contact.

But John Roberts, a young White House lawyer -- and future Supreme Court chief justice -- reviewed the paper and advised: "I would not like to see the president reassuring the public on this point. ... We should assume that AIDS can be transmitted through casual or routine contact until it's demonstrated that it definitely cannot be."

Such a nice young man.

1789, 1914 ... 2011?

The NYT reports on dissensions within Germany over Merkel's abstention from Libyan intervention and retreat from nuclear power post-Fukushima:

Taken together, the actions in Berlin demonstrate anew Germany’s increasing willingness in a post-cold-war world to act like other countries, subordinating relations with allies for the sake of national interests — and even for domestic political reasons.

Mrs. Merkel’s decision to abstain from the Security Council vote was fiercely criticized by many in her own party, while Joschka Fischer, a member of the opposition Greens and a former foreign minister, wrote that ”Germany has lost its credibility in the United Nations and the Middle East” and that “German hopes for a permanent seat on the Security Council have been permanently dashed.”

Klaus Naumann, the former head of the German military, said that “even the idea of a European Union seat” on the Security Council had been damaged, adding, “Germany has turned the idea of a unified European Union foreign policy into a farce.”

In a meeting of Mrs. Merkel’s own parliamentary caucus, Ruprecht Polenz, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, called Germany’s abstention “a catastrophic signal,” according to Der Spiegel. Christian Ruck of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party, complained that “the European Union is falling apart.”

So what's the German government saying?

The German government, caught up in the political fallout from the Japanese nuclear calamity, decided to abstain at the United Nations because that was a “more honest” expression of Germany’s aversion to military action of its own in Libya, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity, following diplomatic protocol.

The official stressed, however, that the government’s attention had been focused primarily on Japan. When history is written, he said, “people will remember 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Kennedy assassinations and Fukushima.”

Uh, sorry, what? TBA's been as concerned as the next guy about Fukushima, but it ain't even up to Chernyobl standards -- hell, George Monbiot is not obviously mistaken to conclude that Fukushima proved the (relative) safety of nuclear power.

The German government sounds very, very confused, and the article suggests that Merkel's coalition may shortly be a minority government.

Or he could have cited John Lennon

Via DeLong, Jason Kuznicki is skeptical of Leo Strauss's notion that "the many" must believe in an afterlife of rewards and punishments:

. As John Stuart Mill wrote about a century earlier:

It is, in short, perfectly conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable: and it would be a proof of great prejudice in any unbeliever to deny, that there have been ages, and that there are still both nations and individuals, with regard to whom this is actually the case.

But Mill had a bit more courage than Strauss; he ends his essay in part:

History, so far as we know it, bears out the opinion, that mankind can perfectly well do without the belief in a heaven. The Greeks had anything but a tempting idea of a future state. Their Elysian fields held out very little attraction to their feelings and imagination. Achilles in the Odyssey expressed a very natural, and no doubt a very common sentiment, when he said that he would rather be on earth the serf of a needy master, than reign over the whole kingdom of the dead. And the pensive character so striking in the address of the dying emperor Hadrian to his soul, gives evidence that the popular conception had not undergone much variation during that long interval. Yet we neither find that the Greeks enjoyed life less, nor feared death more, than other people.

No existential, civilization-ending crisis of unbelief for him! Without it, no need for philosopher-kings to trick us into a belief in natural right.

The irony of refuting Strauss by reference to the Greeks is a pleasant one.

Amnesia about Palmerston

Andrew Sullivan says he wishes Obama were more like Lord Palmerston:

what Palmerston showed is that it is possible to be thrilled by and supportive of democratic movements in foreign lands, while remaining strictly uninvolved. Revolutions and rebellions are by their very nature unpredictable, fickle and confounding.

This is to misunderstand Palmerston, who acted under constraints Obama doesn't share, first and foremost a very limited military capacity for intervention. The British navy could not intervene in Hungary, or Poland.

When there was a small or weak power to be manhandled in British interests, say Greece or China, Palmerston had no inhibitions about military action. (See "Don Pacifico" or "Opium Wars.")

Obama's intervention in Libya is more Palmerstonian than Sullivan allows. Qaddafi is a relatively weak dictator in a state readily accessible to European and American military force. And intervention, at least if the U.S. does not in fact put its own boots on the ground, is relatively cheap. Nor are there any great-power allies of Libya's whom Obama need fear to offend; this is an important difference between attacking Libya versus attacking Iran, or North Korea.

Palmerston is the poster boy for liberal interventionism; claiming his mantle in opposition to Obama's liberal intervention in Libya is odd indeed.

More amnesia about Charles Clark

We commented a little while back on the passing of Charles Clark, longtime judge on the 5th Circuit, and how odd it was that his AP obituary omitted to mention that he was an attorney for the State of Mississippi in the James Meredith case.

Judge Leslie Southwick has now penned a commemoration of Judge Clark which suffers from the same amnesia: all Southwick writes about Clark's pre-bench practice is "He practiced law in Jackson until being appointed by President Nixon in 1969 as a judge on the 5th Circuit." There is literally more about his military service than about anything he might've done while being a practicing attorney.

As our first post noted, Judge Clark thought he did well to represent the State in Meredith's case, and by all accounts the Fifth Circuit's judges were generally pleased with his advocacy and professionalism. Omissions like Judge Southwick's create the impression that there is something to hide about Charles Clark -- an impression that the late judge surely would not have wished anyone to create.

(H/t to How Appealing -- I'd seen the op-ed yesterday in the dead-tree edition, but Bashman's post reminded me to blog on it.)

Where'd the water go?

Updating our Fukushima FUBAR post, the mystery of the water in Unit 4's spent-fuel pool may have an answer:

Additionally, a senior Western nuclear industry executive said that there also appeared to be damage to the floor or sides of the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, and that this was making it extremely hard to refill the pool with water. The problem was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

Engineers had said on Thursday that a rip in the stainless steel lining of the pool at Reactor No. 4 and the concrete base underneath it was possible as a result of earthquake damage. The steel gates at either end of the storage pool are also vulnerable to damage during an earthquake and could leak water if they no longer close tightly.

The senior executive, who asked not to be identified because his comments could damage business relationships, said Friday that a leak had not been located but that engineers had concluded that it must exist because water sprayed on the storage pool has been disappearing much more quickly than would be consistent with evaporation.

Units 2 and 3 also continue to deteriorate, and we are now being warned about "recriticality" when melting fuel rods clump together in a mess.

So apparently we're going to war?

Just so you know. Sullivan wonders "by what authority" can Obama commit forces on the strength of a UN resolution? Ask Harry Truman.

The standard of review: it means something, folks

Free appellate advice from Howard Bashman and the Seventh Circuit:

Judge Posner offers this practice pointer for appellate advocates:

We'll state the facts as favorably to the plaintiffs as the record permits, as we must given the procedural posture. The statements of facts in the defendants' briefs present the evidence they'd like a jury to accept, rather than just the evidence that, being unrefuted or irrefutable, provides a permissible basis for a grant of summary judgment. Such a mode of presentation is unhelpful to the court.

No doubt it pains many advocates to actually set forth the evidence in the light most favorable to the opposing party in an appellate brief, but failing to do so (when it is necessary to do so under the applicable standard of review) can inflict real harm on your own client's chances of prevailing on appeal.

Amen. You are setting yourself up to get hamstrung on the response/reply brief. If you can't win the case on the correct standard of review, then why are you appealing?