Apparently, merely washing isn't enough any more. Certainly not for the cash…
- So, after finally convicting a Daley, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois has decided to dismantle another bastion of political nepotism in Illinois politics. (Of course, if he'd been a governor/former governor it would have been much more probable.) About expletive-deleted time! Some of his neighbors don't seem to mind much.
- It's not at all limited to Chicago, or Illinois, either. Just consider that a County Councilcritter out here is the son of a Congresscritter who (a) held that office for nearly a quarter of a century and (b) did so in part via partisan gerrymandering (with the usual, expected, and still distinct odor of racism and class warfare wafting toward other districts… and neither remarked upon nor noticed within that district). To the distinct detriment of those other districts. And now he wants to move up the food chain to the US House, no doubt relying on some variety of gerrymandered bucolic plague to overwhelm the incumbent doctor he's opposing. (Hint: Consider vaccination. Perhaps he'll pass the time until Election Day by playing a little solitaire…)
Maybe this is a consequence of "All politics is local." Whether it's an unintended consequence is rather unclear.
- Which is less discouraging than certain other (not new) news coming out of politics. But he's still the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful real-estate speculator I've ever known in my life. It's pretty clear that some in his orbit played the Queen of Diamonds fourteen months ago… and virtually every day since.
- Professor Goldman holds out a lot more hope for the Copyright Claims Board than I do. Leaving aside that evading these purported limits doesn't appear to have consequences that would matter to the kind of entities and people who would be interested in evading them in the first place, Professor Goldman does note the fundamental problem with the CCB system: It depends upon accurately identifying and notifying the purported infringer… which isn't exactly a new or unforseeable problem, especially given the explosion in anonymizing services on the 'net.
Another flaw lurking beneath the limitation on the number of claims with which a given attorney can be involved in a year concerns the extraordinarily limited subset of attorneys who represent individual creators, and especially individual creators' heirs. Let's just say that there's no virtually unlimited insurance-defense fund available there in the first place and leave it there… In short, this is a perverse incentive. If there needs to be a limitation, it should be not upon claims filed but upon defaults and/or losses, something like "an attorney must refrain from further filings for one calendar year after the end of any calendar year in which that attorney's CCB filings resulted in either twenty (20) unopposed defaults in favor of that attorney's clients or eight (8) claims rejected by the CCB on the merits." That way, the specialist lawyer representing the proper users of the CCB system is not penalized for success — and neither is that lawyer's client base.