Bad news: Karl F. Thompson Jr. still has not been sentenced for beating Otto Zehm to death.
…
Question: if McIntyre is being charged with obstruction of justice, aren’t similar charges justified against the city attorney who suggested she lie under oath? Isn’t that, at the very least, subornation of perjury? And can’t you be disbarred for that, in addition to getting hard time in a federal prison?
(Hattip: the Injustice News Feed, by way of TJIC on the Twitter.)
About two months ago, a class action suit was filed against Yassine Enterprises. The company was accused of not paying wages to employees who received tips: they own a long list of clubs in downtown Austin.
Earlier today, the FBI, IRS, and TABC raided the offices of Yassine Enterprises. 11 people involved with the company have been charged with an interesting assortment of federal crimes, including money laundering, cocaine trafficking, and “transferring a firearm knowing it is to be used in a drug trafficking crime”.
To which all I can say is “Wow”. And possibly “don’t f–k with the bartender”. It’ll be interesting to watch these cases play out.
Edited to add: Second day coverage from the Statesman here.
The NYT would like to explain Wickard v. Filburn to you. If you would like to read the court’s decision for yourself, rather than trusting the NYT, you can find it here.
By way of Jimbo: Wednesday’s Denver Post has a review of a restaurant called “Roam”. “So what?” you say. “I don’t live in Denver, and neither do you.” Yes, but it isn’t very often that a newspaper runs a review of a restaurant that closed before the review ran. The section containing the review was printed Monday night; the restaurant closed on Tuesday, and, according to press reports, the closing was nearly as chaotic as the rest of the restaurant’s history.
(Holy cow, there’s a winery called “The Infinite Monkey Theorem“? I want to at least try their wine.)
…this is a bad day for the Saints.
This is going to be well covered elsewhere, short version:
I may have more thoughts on this later.
Edited to add: Now that I have a little more time to write about this:
The “This American Life” retraction episode went up Friday night. You can download it or read the transcript here.
I listened to the whole thing over the weekend, and frankly I recommend listening rather than (or in addition to) reading the transcript. The transcript does not convey just how Mike Daisey comes across in Ira Glass’s discussion with him:
The Retraction episode of This American Life contains the most excruciating dead air I’ve ever heard.
— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) March 17, 2012
One thing that bothered me about this episode, though (and both Lawrence and Matthew Baldwin have made this same point).
Ira Glass says, “At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” when they found out that Daisey couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give them contact information for his interpreter.
Glass goes on to say “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”
That’s not good enough. Someone should have been there and asked Glass: “Why didn’t you kill the story at that point? What were your reasons for going on with it? If you felt like it was an important enough story to run with, what were your reasons for going with Daisey, rather than someone like Rob Schmitz or the NYT reporters you spoke with?”
Yankees fan (well, nobody’s perfect) John Gruber has been all over the story since it broke on Friday as well. I’d suggest just going over to Daring Fireball and scrolling down from the top, clicking on whatever Daisey links interest you.
In non-Daisey related news: I gave up on Slate a few months ago. I felt like it had reached the point Salon came to quite a while back (when I gave up on them): saying outrageous and stupid things just to get page views, increasingly dumb writing (“Dear Prudence” in particular seems to have gone nucking futs), and generally not worth the time and effort involved in paying any attention to it.
However, I did see some good word of mouth on one Slate article recently, so I decided to click over. I’m happy that I did, as I can enthusiastically recommend Annie Lowrey’s “Where’s _why?”, a long article that simultaneously covers three things:
This is to note that I owe Lawrence $5 on our Gonzaga bet. (Gonzaga!)
(Actually, I would have paid him on Saturday night, but I needed to break a $10, and forgot to do so because we were all distracted by the bidets at the Turkish restaurant.)
(“distracted by the bidets at the Turkish restaurant” is not a phrase I ever thought I would write on this blog.)
Also, Lawrence has bet me $5 that the Cubs will not win the World Series this year.
I wanted to break this out into a separate piece rather than adding updates.
Marketplace’s story on the Apple/Daisey controversy is now up. Long quote follows:
“I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been…”
One great story that is just now breaking, and one sad story.
The great story: remember that “This American Life” episode about Apple’s factories in China? Aired back in January, I think? “#454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
More:
Excerpts are from the press release attached to the story on Jimbo’s website: the TAL website is currently inaccessible (it looks to me like they’re getting hammered).
Mike Daisey has a statement on his website, which is accessible:
ETA 3/16 1:53 PM: TAL website seems to be accessible now.
ETA 3/16 2:05 PM: Selected shorts:
The sad story, also by way of Jimbo: You may have seen the first part of this story earlier in the week. I didn’t cover it because it was well linked everywhere. Briefly, editorial editor Bob Caldwell of the Portland Oregonian died over the weekend. After some initial confusion, it came out that he hadn’t been found dead of a heart attack in his parked car, but had passed away while engaged in a sex act with a 23-year-old woman.
That’s sad, but not the sad part I want to talk about. The initial information (that he’d been found dead in a parked car) was provided by a friend of the family who also worked for the Oregonian. That friend has been fired.
I understand both sides here. From editor Peter Bhatia’s summary of what went wrong:
But I understand the fired editor’s position, too. In a moment of grief and weakness, she chose to try to shield the family from the pain that would be caused by the circumstances of her friend’s death becoming public. I think she was wrong. I think she shouldn’t have lied. But I also think the paper could have had some compassion and sympathy for the position their editor was placed in: a one or two week unpaid suspension seems more reasonable to me. It may be that I’m a wimp. It may be that I’m not a serious journalist. But I feel a great deal of compassion for the fired editor, even though I think she made a mistake.
Ken over at Popehat has a post up about his friend Marc Randazza. I’m not part of Ken or Marc’s group. I’m not a lawyer, I’ve never met Marc Randazza, and I wouldn’t know him if he walked up to me and punched me in the face while using the word “f–k” repeatedly.
But I wanted to pull together some thoughts on the Hon. Marc Randazaa, and why I’d like to shake his hand and buy him a beer.
I think part of the reason for that is one of the small regrets I have in my life. When I was younger, I was inspired by the work of Nat Hentoff: not as a jazz critic, but as a First Amendment activist. My school libraries had books like The First Freedom
I thought seriously about becoming a lawyer. But I didn’t want to be just any kind of lawyer: I wanted to be a First Amendment lawyer. I wanted to fight the good fight for little kids like me who were fighting high school newspaper censorship, and big newspapers and magazines who were fighting the government.
In the end, though, I gave up that idea because I didn’t think I could make any money at it. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t want to get rich, but I wanted to be able to pay off my loans for law school and buy a new car every few years. Just being a First Amendment lawyer didn’t seem like it would lead down that path.
Many years later, I became aquatinted with Mike Godwin. Yeah, that Mike Godwin. I would recognize Mike if he walked up to me and punched me in the face, though it has been about…greeez, 15 years? since I last saw him in person. (He didn’t punch me in the face then, for what that may be worth.) The thing that strikes me about him, thinking back on that time, is that he did something interesting that I didn’t have the knowledge or ability to do: Mike Godwin was one of the people – perhaps the person – who pioneered Internet law. Literally, Mike pretty much invented a whole brand new field of law from scratch as the first general counsel of EFF.
And then there’s Marc Randazza. Why do I think he belongs in the company of people who make me wish I went to law school? Why do I praise a man I’ve never met? “Because that’s just the kind of hairball you are,” say some of my friends. They’re probably right about that. But:
I’ve been thinking about this since last night, and it seems to me that Marc Randazza is a modern day exemplar of the kind of people Melville Davisson Post was talking about:
…
…
“a just man, and honorable and unafraid”. I like that phrase very much. I believe there is a shortage of people in the world about whom that could be said, but I think it fits the honorable Mr. Randazza well.
What do deep-fried Fruity Pebbles look like?
The HouChron has the answer, in yet another go around of the rodeo food (warning! Slideshow!) slideshow (warning! Slideshow!). The Fruity Pebbles photos are at the very start.
You may also have wondered what kind of person comes up with these ideas. The HouChron also has the answer at that same link, in the form of an interview with Ken Hoffman.
Not answered: how do they taste?
