A few days ago, the fine folks at Popehat explained why they want to kick a harmless German immigrant family out of the country. The Popehat guys seem like nice folks, so I assume they don't mean it the way it sounds, 'cause it sounds pretty bad.

The Romeike family didn't like the way the public schools taught their children, and so they wanted to homeschool them. Unfortunately, the Romeikes lived in Germany, which doesn't allow homeschooling. I have my doubts about the motives of a lot of homeschoolers, but the justifications coming from German officialdom are not to be taken seriously:

In Germany, mandatory school attendance dates back to 1717, when it was introduced in Prussia, and the policy has traditionally been viewed as a social good. "This law protects children," says Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers' Association.

That sounds nice, but the president of the German Teachers' Association is not exactly a disinterested party. I'm pretty sure he likes this law because it protects teacher jobs.

Homeschooling parents tend to want to shield their children from negative influences. But this quest often runs counter to the idea that schools represent society and help promote tolerance. "No parental couple can offer a breadth of education [that can] replace experienced teachers," says Kraus, of the German Teachers' Association. "Kids also lose contact with their peers."

I tend to agree that contact with ones peers is a good thing, but Kraus is glossing over the ugly way these laws can be enforced:

In 2007, Germany's Federal Supreme Court issued a ruling - which did not specifically involve the Romeikes - that parents could lose custody of their children if they continued to homeschool them.

In other words, the German government thinks the breadth of education and opportunities to socialize at school are more important than keeping families together. If losing contact with their peers is bad for kids, how much worse is it to be torn from their parents?

In any case, the Romeikes family decided to leave Germany and go someplace nicer. They came to the United States, but they did it in an unusual way: They requested political asylum. And they got it.

This outrages Ezra at Popehat for reasons that seem rather petty:

The issue here, is one of scale. How about instead of applying for political asylum you move? Home schooling is perfectly fine in neighboring Austria, and if you are (as you say) really concerned about the impact of culture on your kids Austria would be far less jarring in every way to them.

What puzzles me is that the Romeikes did exactly what Ezra suggested: They moved. Granted, they didn't move to Austria as Ezra suggested, they came here to the United States instead. Perhaps they felt our culture was better than Austria's, at least for raising their children. Ezra never explains why he thinks that moving to the United States is bad but moving to Austria is okay. Is it just that Austria is closer?

Ezra then descends into what is almost a parody of a resentful liberal:

Apparently, the Romeike's were contacted by a US home school advocacy group, and encouraged to seek asylum here. Hmm. That doesn't seem political at all. I wonder how the religious right would feel if a Salvadoran family applied for asylum under the same pretense? I guarantee you that [our] inherently racist immigration policies would make it a lot more difficult than it was for the German family. Or how about a gay man legally married in the US? Nope, but let the German family in right away.

In other words, Ezra is arguing that it's unfair to allow these people to enter the country while other people---who I presume Ezra finds more likeable---are still barred from entering.

Although I have no doubt that it's unfair, the injustice here is not that the Romeikes were allowed to enter the United States, but that all those other people were turned away. Ezra wants to champion fairness, but it sounds a lot more like envy, which is a poor basis for public policy.

The bottom line is that this is a gross misuse of the political asylum statutes.

No, the bottom line is that a family was unhappy with where they were living, so they moved to someplace they liked better, and now unkind people want to send them back. It helps to remember that homeshooling is completely legal here, but in Germany the government wants to take their children away. If that isn't grounds for asylum, what is?

They should be used for people who are in genuine danger, and who do not have the means to extricate themselves from this danger, not for a family that could easily have moved to several Euro countries that are ok with home schooling instead of engaging in political grandstanding.

What's the logic here? Once they leave Germany, what's the basis in moral theory for preferring they settle in one country over another? Is it really just the length of the trip? Arguably, it's less trouble for us if they settle elsewhere, but everyone living elsewhere can make the same argument. If they had gone to live in Austria, couldn't there be some hacked-off Austrians complaining that they should have gone to the U.S. instead?

And by the same logic---that other opportunities are available---bigots could argue that gay people don't need to marry because they have civil unions, and black people don't need to get into our favorite restaurant because there are so many other places they could go. These people want to live here. And as long as they pay their way and don't commit crimes against us, who the hell are we to tell them "no"?

I'll end with the good news that the US will likely appeal the asylum, and hopefully the family will have their asylum revoked, and be forced to return to the tyrannical regime they fled, the German school district.

Ezra's evident glee at forcing this family to relocate is disturbing, and it's not helped by the article's explanation of the asylum appeal:

The ruling is tricky politically for Washington and its allies in Europe, where several countries - including Spain and the Netherlands - allow homeschooling only under exceptional circumstances, such as when a child is extremely ill. That helps explain why in late February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally appealed the Romeike ruling, which was issued by an immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn...

"It's very unusual for people from Western countries to be granted asylum in the U.S.," says David Piver, an immigration attorney with offices in a Philadelphia suburb and Flagstaff, Ariz. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, only five Germans received asylum in the U.S. (The Justice Department declined to comment on specific cases.) Piver, who is not involved in the Romeike case, predicted the U.S. government would appeal the decision "so as not to offend a close ally."

In other words, the asshats at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are selling out this family in the interest of international politics. Yet another reason why our immigration laws deserve no respect.

The blog comments at Popehat aren't very encouraging. Patrick, another Popehat blogger, tries to come to Ezra's defense:

I don't see any inconsistency between supporting broader legal immigration (as Ezra does) and opposing a gross misuse of laws presently on the books (which I agree this is), nor with the observation that INS and ICE frequently apply the law in a racist fashion. These people should be sent back to Germany.

And Ezra again:

Again, my problem isn't with home schooling per se (although I think it's a bad idea, much like being a fan of Creed it's a personal choice..) it's with this family abusing the political asylum statutes. Political asylum is for people with no other recourse.

Again, you can't tell me that there is any reason the German family should have been let in, and the Brazilian man not let in. Other than blatant racism of course. 

I'm sure that racism was involved, but the racist discrimination here is in keeping the Brazilian man out. Letting a German family emmigrate to the United States, if they want to, is not a racist act.

What it comes down to is that a family came to the United States because they like it here. But now that they're here, some people want to kick them out of their home, uproot them from their community, and deport the from the country. And the only reasons offered for treating them so cruelly are that they didn't suffer enough back home, that they came from too far away, and that they twisted our absurd immigration laws...plus a rather unattractive bit of envy.

I don't know anything else about Jim Gray, but this is about as good an explanation as I've ever seen of how the War on Drugs fails so badly:

Well, the Academy Awards were last night, and I'm sure all the trendy ironic folks will be making the usual comments about Hollywood self-congratulation, but I mostly enjoyed it. I like movies, and I think good filmmaking deserves to be honored.

I do have one nit to pick, however, with the movie montage they showed as part of their salute to horror movies. Less than halfway through it, I noticed that they were showing a lot of scenes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And then I noticed that they kept coming back to Psycho and The Exorcist and the Elm Street series and I started wondering... Was the Academy's horror montage put together by people who didn't really know much about horror films?

I think so. I'm hardly a scholar of horror films, and I haven't gone over the montage in slow motion, so maybe a missed a few, but it seems like the anonymous editors of this montage certainly left out a lot of the horror genre.

To start with, the only zombies I saw were from maybe a one-second clip of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. There's a huge sub-genre of zombie films that they completely missed. They didn't even include Dawn of the Dead, or Return of the Living Dead or Re-Animator, let alone modern takes like 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead.

It's a little shocking. I mean, I can understand how they might leave out horror specialist films like Videodrome or  C.H.U.D., but where were Scanners and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? How about The Thing? The Howling? The Dead Zone? Altered States? Any version of The Fly?

Where were Fright Night and Arachnophobia, and the Twilight Zone movie? What about Creepshow and Pumpkinhead and Near Dark? Where were Seven, and Final Destination, and The Lost Boys? Why didn't we see any piece of the incredible Phantasm series?

It's a truism that Hollywood has always slighted horror films, but last night they managed the amazing feat of slighting horror films in the middle of a montage honoring horror films...

And for fuck's sake, how the hell do you leave out Evil Dead?

Reason awards their February Nanny of the Month award to a Kansas legislator for banning fake pot.

I guess it's change of a sort.

Obama's healtcare reform started as a beautiful vision of low-cost healthcare for everyone. I thought that was highly unrealistic, but at least it was clear and straightforward.

I guess the Democrats thought it was unrealistic too, because the Democrats soon made a series of compromises and turned it into a plan that purporte to give us all healthcare through the dubious method of requiring all of us to buy health insurance. Worse, it required us all to buy the same kind of health insurance. Those who preferred high-deductible health insurance were out of luck.

Of course, since it makes little sense to require poor people to buy health insurance they can't afford, they were to be provided with subsidies. Given the other elements of the healthcare reform bill, this was a fairly sensible thing to do. Then, for some reason---I can only guess class hatred---it was decided that people who already had very good health insurance plans were going to be taxed extra. But, in a craven political move to buy support from unions, their members were given a break on the tax for their healthcare plans.

That's about as far as it got by the end of last year, when the healthcare reform mess seemed to fall through...until now. This time, Obama's putting forward the worst idea yet: Price fixing.

Making a last-ditch effort to save his health care overhaul, President Barack Obama on Monday put forward a nearly $1 trillion, 10-year compromise that would allow the government to deny or roll back egregious insurance premium increases that infuriate consumers.

The Whitehouse website has more information at Policies to Improve Affordability and Accountability:

Both the House and Senate bills include significant reforms to make insurance fair, accessible, and affordable to all people, regardless of pre-existing conditions.  One essential policy is "rate review" meaning that health insurers must submit their proposed premium increases to the State authority or Secretary for review.  The President's Proposal strengthens this policy by ensuring that, if a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable.  A new Health Insurance Rate Authority will be created to provide needed oversight at the Federal level and help States determine how rate review will be enforced and monitor insurance market behavior.

Having to submit a pricing scheme to a government-run rate review board is an old idea that has been discredited over and over. It's pretty much the same sort of price control regime that held back the airline, trucking, and rail freight industries for decades until the deregulation of the Carter-Reagan era. I'm sure it will hold back healthcare.

Packrat explains:

There is no shortage of advice out there about what you should do when you are forced to interact with the police. Just do a search and you'll find a multitude of sites devoted to explaining what your rights are when dealing with law enforcement and how you should go about asserting those rights...

But, strangely enough, there is an absolute lack of advice available out there about what you should do once a police officer violates those rights... and there will be no shortage of questions you'll have once it happens to you.

Read the whole Police Misconduct Victim's Guide at Injustice Everywhere.

Cops.

I've always known that police officers get special treatment when accused of a crime, but I always assumed it was just a good deal that the cops gave to other cops. I never knew there was an official court ruling about it.

Radley Balko points to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the Garrity Rule:

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved it with what came to be known as the Garrity Rule. It says a public employee can be compelled by threat of discipline to admit criminal activity, but the information cannot be used for prosecution.

Wikipedia puts it a slightly different way:

The Garrity warning is an advisement of rights usually administered by US federal agents to federal employees and contractors in internal investigations. The Garrity warning advises suspects of their criminal and administrative liability for any statements they may make, but also advises suspects of their right to remain silent on any issues that tend to implicate them in a crime. It was promulgated by the US Supreme Court in Garrity v. New Jersey (1967). In that case, a police officer was compelled to make a statement or be fired, and then criminally prosecuted for his statement. The Supreme Court found that the officer had been deprived of his Fifth Amendment right to silence.

I don't understand this ruling at all.

If my boss thinks I committed a crime, he can ask me questions about it. As far as I know, if I refuse to answer, it's perfectly legal for him to terminate my employment. (There may be unemployment compensation issues.) And if I answer, he's free to take my statements to the police so I can be prosecuted. Why should any of that change if I'm working for the police department?

To put this in perspective, consider what can happen if a prosecutor charges me with a crime and gets the judge to set bail high enough that I'm stuck in jail for months. There's nothing to stop the prosecutor from offering me a deal that will get me out of jail with time served if I plead guilty.

So, to summarize:

• Threat of jail: Not a violation of the right to remain silent.
• Threat of being fired: Violation of the right to remain silent (cops only).

Am I missing some nuance, some subtle principle of law, that makes this make sense?

One more thing from Wikipedia about the Garrity Rule:

The Garrity warning helps to ensure suspects' constitutional rights, while also helping federal agents preserve the evidentiary value of statements provided by suspects in concurrent administrative and criminal investigations.

Perhap---I'm willing to listen to a good argument explaining why I'm wrong---but living in Chicago, I can tell you something else the Garrity warning helps ensure: Police department coverups. By "forcing" an officer to give a statement, the department can keep his statements from being used against him by a prosecutor, or ever reaching the media.

In the Post-Dispatch story above, the coverup is pretty clear:

In the World Series case, internal affairs assigned two detectives to concurrent investigations. One, focused on internal discipline, did the Garrity interviews and put together a file for administrative use. The other was barred from the Garrity material and assigned to see if there was enough other evidence to support criminal charges.

Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, who was highly critical of the officers who let their friends and family use the tickets, could examine only the latter file before announcing there was no evidence of a crime.

...

The St. Louis Police Department told [Circuit Judge Philip Heagney ] Feb. 8 that Garrity prevents it from fully complying with his Dec. 11 order to provide an activist with its files on officers disciplined for using 2006 World Series tickets seized from illicit scalpers.

...

Police officials claim the interviews are private, as personnel records.

So the prosecutor's office can't get all the evidence the police have gathered (which sounds like obstruction to me) and no one outside the police department ever gets to see it either.

No way that could go wrong.

Matt Brown at the Chander Criminal Defense blog had a client who was accused of hurting her child, but the prosecutor dropped the charges. Nevertheless, Arizona Child Protective Services apparently ignored all that and conducted their own investigation. Brown blogged his account of their interview with his client.

It's one of the most chilling things I've ever read.

The meeting was conducted by a woman who proclaimed herself the "facilitator." She used the term "facilitator" with the kind of frequency I commonly encounter when a person using a word doesn't quite know what it means and thinks repeating it will make him or her appear smart. She also said things like "matter-of-factly" and "irregardlessly."

My client, my client's mother, the assigned CPS caseworker, and I were all in attendance. We each filled out little name cards. The back of the cards featured a list of ground rules. The last one was "no blaming or shaming." ...

The facilitator, who at times did a fair job of pretending to be impartial, generally undertook the role of grand inquisitress with zeal that would make Mike Nifong blush. When she first started attacking my client, no one seemed to notice my comment that it sounded an awful lot to me like some prohibited "blaming or shaming" was taking place. I don't think the facilitator thought the back of the name cards applied to her.

I don't know anything about the mother, and so for all I know, the child really does need to be taken away from her. I realize that you can't always wait for a criminal conviction to protect a child. But there's a difference between a measured response to a child welfare emergency and the Stalinist show trial Brown describes:

The facilitator clearly didn't listen to anything my client said. My client said she'd do anything for her kids, and the facilitator responded with "so you're unwilling and unable to care for them?" "No," my client said, "I will do anything." The caseworker and facilitator stared at my client like she just said "take my kids, I don't care and won't do anything to help them." It was like watching two different conversations.

When it suited the facilitator's preconceptions, she mixed up the facts. She exaggerated the length of CPS's involvement, the amount of time it took my client to get services for her daughter, the number of days of notice they'd given, and the severity of the alleged conduct underlying the scratched criminal charges. She was wholly incapable of wrapping her head around the fact my client did not assault her daughter. The caseworker claimed she saw choke marks on my client's daughter, which the facilitator agreed proved my client assaulted her. I found that very strange considering that the alleged assault was supposedly just three punches.

It all ends about how you'd expect:

After what I can honestly say was the most farcical proceeding I've ever witnessed, the facilitator and caseworker decided to take both of my client's children away. In a meeting they said lawyers never attended (and which most lawyers told me they never attended), CPS decided to take not just the child involved in the criminal case, but the child who had nothing to do with anything.

Here comes that special little touch that made me think of Communist show trials:

As my client cried her eyes out, the facilitator handed her a pamphlet entitled "Icebreakers" to help her prepare for when she next gets to see her children. The facilitator described CPS's programs to my client as if she expected my client to give her a hug and thank her.

Somehow I know, just know, that at some point in Brown's client's rehabilitation or treatment or counseling, she's going to be put in a situation where the only way she can get her children back is to "take responsibility for what she did"---admit to abusing here daughter---even if she never did any such thing.

Personally, I'm still in shock. I can't believe what I saw. I can't believe CPS can take kids based on nothing, can't believe the facilitator and the caseworker could do something like that to a family, and can't believe that any human being could be so willing to make a life-changing decision so callously. It's the kind of thing I'm going to have nightmares about for years to come.

I was getting angry just reading Matt Brown's account of all this. I can't imagine what it would be like to be in the room while it was happening and not be able to do anything about it. By the time I finished reading this post, I almost expected Matt to reveal that the meeting ended when he and his client beat the facilitator to death.

A few days ago, Rachel Humphrey Fleet started a blog called The Compelling Brief Blog, which was apparently going to be all about writing legal briefs. Her first post was called "Tweeting the Judge: How Legal Writing is Like Social Media." (For the moment, it's available in the Google cache here.)

The post caught the eye of Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice, who posted a response. For reasons I don't quite understand, he wasn't real happy with some of the things Rachel said, and if you know Scott, you know he made his feelings very clear. The exchange he had with Rachel in the comments wasn't exactly a warm conversation either.

The next day, Scott wrote more about the whole situation, and in the comments, Rachel announced that she didn't have time for all this and so she had deleted her blog. That doesn't seem like an outcome that does anybody any good.

Here's some of what Scott wrote in his second post:

It's now happened a few times in the past few weeks, where I question a post from some newcomer to the blawgosphere and they get upset about it.  The problem is that my reaction to their post is less than adoring.  From their position, less than adoring means I have cruelly maligned their intellect and family.  I've hurt their feelings and they let me know it.

The way Scott sees it, all the social media marketing guru types are telling people how great blogging is and how much fun it is to blog, but they are leaving out an important aspect of the blogosphere:

The choir is busy singing the praises of blawging and social media.  Create a blawg and find happiness and success, goes the refrain.  Write well and they will come.  No one talks about the dark side.

We would have talked about the dark side.  The blawgosphere is a tough place, where your peers may read your ideas and tell you that they are ugly.  Butt ugly.  That's the way the place has operated since its doors opened, and it still functions that way today.

Write something and someone may disagree with you, and do so publicly on their blawg.  Promote yourself and someone may knock you off your marketing pedestal and make you look like a fool.  Or worse.  None of the cheerleaders mention that there is no guarantee that you will find love or adoration online.  None mention that you may well find yourself the butt of a thousand eyeballs if your well-written blawg post is not well-received.

This is a great point. Any class or seminar that purports to explain how to get involved in blogging and/or social media should explain what kinds of reactions to expect and how to deal with them. Blogging can lead to meeting interesting people and making new friends, but it can also lead to meeting scary people and making new enemies. You should plan on handling such encounters when you start to blog.

The interaction with Rachel Humphrey Fleet is not the first time Scott Greenfield's blogging style has disconcerted newcomers, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The outcome, however, was kind of depressing, because Rachel walked away discouraged.

As someone who has successfully left regular comments at Scott's blog without being told to "get off the lawn" too often, I think I can offer 8 pieces of advice to future bloggers who want to survive in the blogosphere even if Scott Greenfield says something mean about them:

(1) Scott is not the meanest guy in the blogosphere. Not by far. The early growth of blogging was fueled by major controversies---the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the government's response to the devastation in New Orleans, and the Bush presidency in general---which resulted in a combative style of discourse that remains to this day. There are people here who will swear at you, there are people here who will refute you sentence by sentence, and there are people here who will swear at you while refuting you sentence by sentence.

(And then there are the mindless partisan hacks and total crazies. In some ways they're a lot worse than folks like Scott, but in other ways they're easier to deal with. I'll explain later.)

This is a good time to make it clear that I'm just using Scott Greenfield as a stand-in for anybody in the blogosphere that posts something critical or says something unkind about you. In the criminal law field alone, you're likely to run across confrontational bloggers like Mark Bennett, Brian Tannebaum, Norm Pattis, or Jamie Spencer. Then there's the vast hoard of non-lawyer bloggers like me, the folks at Reason, Michelle Malkin, Daily Kos, and the teeming masses at the Huffington Post. What I'm saying here applies to everyone in the blogosphere who doesn't like what you have to say.

(But I'll continue to pick on Scott for a while. He can take it.)

(2) Everyone has hot button issues. They're sick and tired of hearing arguments they think are stupid, and they're not going to let it pass. Scott Greenfield's buttons are sleazy lawyer marketing, unprofessionalism, law schools, and something he calls the Slackoisie.

More to the point, this also works the other way around: Every issue you write about, no matter how straightforward and clear it seems to you, is going to be somebody's hot button issue. Blogger Pete Guither is a nice guy, but when someone writes a stupid article supporting the war on drugs, Pete brings the pain, and encourages his readers to pile on as well. When I wrote about police SWAT teams killing an unarmed mother and wounding her infant child in the process, a couple of people left rude comments defending the baby shooters. Apparently criticism of the police was their hot button issue.

If your post pushes someone's buttons, you're going to get an unfriendly response.

(3) If you want your blog to be popular, then it doesn't matter what people are saying about you, as long as they're talking about you. The currency of the blogosphere is the link, and by linking to your blog, Scott is helping to make your blog more visible to potential readers.

Scott's Simple Justice is a big name in legal blogging (Google PageRank 6), and comment spammers are always trying to get links from his blog to their websites in order to beef up their search engine rankings and attract readers. When Scott links to your blog post and calls it stupid, he'e also giving you a valuable boost to your visibility.

(4) For any given issue, many of Scott's readers will disagree with him. When he links to your page and says bad things about what you wrote, chances are he's also sending you people who disagree with him, and who will like what they find at your site. Keep writing, and people who share your values will eventually find you.

(This is also why the partisan hacks and crazies are easier to deal with. A lot of people in the blogosphere recognize them for what they are and will come to the defense of their victims.)

(5) As with everything else in the world, you can blog about it. New bloggers often have trouble coming up with ideas for posts. But when you do write something, and someone criticizes it in a comment or a post on their own blog, that's something else you can write about.

Respond to the criticism. When the badgelickers showed up in the comments to defend the shooting I mentioned above, I got two more posts out of it. When a prosecutor took me to task for defending an alleged cop killer, I posted an explanation of why he was wrong.

Carefully take apart their argument, or point out that they completely missed the point of your post, or thank them for showing you the error of your way, or tear them a new one. Whatever seems right. You've got a topic for a new post.

(6) When responding to criticism in the blogosphere, you will probably not be able to win over your opponent. Not quickly, anyway. You can try once or twice, but don't put too much time into it. It's far more productive to try to win over the reading audience. This should be obvious to lawyers: Criminal defense attorneys aren't trying to convince the prosecutor that he's wrong, they're trying to convince the jury that he's wrong.

(7) You always have the option of completely ignoring Scott. Simple Justice is just another bunch of pages on the web, and it certainly has no power over you.

Does this mean that your critics may go unanswered? Yes, but that doesn't mean you should jump every time they yell. My advice in point 5 above notwithstanding, when you respond to your critics, you are allowing them to set your blogging agenda. Wouldn't you rather set your own agenda?

(8) Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. Free speech advocates say that the best response to bad speech is good speech. If you don't like the abrasive culture of the blogosphere, then start a better culture. Keep writing your own blog and show us how it should be done.

Well, maybe not for anyone else, but it is for me.

It was 1982. the Commodore 64 was the cool new thing, Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland islands, spymaster Yuri Andropov rose to power in the Soviet Union, and Vic Morrow and two chidren died in a helicopter accident while filming Twilight Zone. Disney opened EPCOT to the public, John De Lorean got busted for coke, the Unabomber narrowly missed killing people at Vanderbilt, and Larry Walters took his famous balloon flight in a lawn chair.

Ronald Reagan was president. I didn't like him because he was a conservative, and conservative pricks like Jerry Falwell were trying to destroy rock music. Us kids thought that was a scary thing at the time, but of course he never had a chance: MTV had just launched, the Biograph theater on Lincoln was staging midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the airwaves were filled with songs like Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero", Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger", the B52s' "Rock Lobster", and Golden Earring's other hit.

(Follow the "Eye of the Tiger" link to check out what music videos used to look like. Yikes.)

There was also a hardrocking band called Axe, and they had just released their third album, Offering. The first cut on the album was "Rock 'n' Roll Party In The Streets."

It was the end of my last year in high school. The hot summer was filled with good friends, fast driving, wild parties, and rock and roll. I was at the top of my game with the whole world ahead of me, and "Rock 'n' Roll Party In The Streets" was the sound of freedom.

It's a purely personal reaction, I'm sure. I don't know anyone else who had that reaction to it. Heck, I've never even met anyone else who remembers the song. But to this day it gives me a rush like no other.

It starts with a keyboard intro that I instantly recognize, then the guitars come in with power chords to punctuate the rhythm, and then the drums and Bobby Barth's strained voice: 

You know, I know, this ain't gonna last forever
Let's take advantage while we still can
I'm sure that you'll find the days couldn't get any longer
Day after day it's gettin' old fast

Let's have a knock down, drag out rock 'n' roll party in the street
Get all the boys together have them tell everybody that they meet
Friday night at midnight we're all gonna get what we need
Let's have a knock down, drag out rock 'n' roll party in the street

You know, I know, we ain't gonna show no mercy
To anyone that tries to get in our way
I'm sure that you'll find we got to put the word out for certain
Once the party gets started we're all here to stay

Let's have a knock down, drag out rock 'n' roll party in the street
Get all the boys together have them tell everybody that they meet
Friday night at midnight we're all gonna get what we need
Let's have a knock down, drag out rock 'n' roll party in the street

Axe broke up after guitarist Michael Osborne died in a car crash. Barth worked on other projects and then in 1997 he put the band back together and they recorded new versions of many of their songs for the album Twenty Years From Home. I think this was a work-around for a sticky rights issue or two, allowing the band to finally release CD versions of the songs.

In many ways, the newer version of "Rock 'n' Roll Party in the Streets" is a better song than the old one. Barth's voice seems clearer and richer than it was in 1982, the guitar work is more crisp, and the whole thing has a more professional sound.

But the original version will always be my favorite. For most of a year, I lived my life to that song.

Axe - Rock 'n' Roll Party In The Streets - on YouTube

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'm fascinated by the idea of lock picking, but I wondered if it was actually legal to own lock picks here in Illinois. So I posted a question in Avvo Answers, an online service in which lawyers give out free advice, to see if anyone could or would tell me what the law was. I wasn't spectacularly impressed with the response.

Fortunately, I had a backup plan. In a blatant attempt to encourage more Chicago-oriented crimlaw blogging, I emailed my question to Denise Nalley, a local criminal defense lawyer whose Chicago Criminal Law Journal blog is getting off to a slow start. She was nice enough to provide an answer, which I'll repeat here in case anyone else is interested:

Regarding lock picks, it is important to note that many things can be construed as burglary tools under the statute, like screwdrivers.  Also that little stick pin that many parents have to open doors if their kids lock themselves in a room is also technically a lock pick.  So, it is not illegal to just own them, the State must also prove intent to enter AND intent to commit a theft therein.  The problem arises when what you own is a "lock bumping" device.  This refers to a device used to move the internal tumblers and I suspect is what you are interested in.  If a person is found in possession of one of these devices a Judge may infer intent and you will be screwed unless you are in a profession allowed to be possession of said device.  (See statute below)  If found guilty of Possession of Burglary Tools it is a Class 4 Felony punishable by 1-3 years in prison and it is a probation eligible crime.  I have no knowledge of any City statutes deviating from State statutes here.  I hope I answered your questioned.

Nalley also included the relevant statute:

Sec. 19 2. Possession of burglary tools.

(a) A person commits the offense of possession of burglary tools when he possesses any key, tool, instrument, device, or any explosive, suitable for use in breaking into a building, housetrailer, watercraft, aircraft, motor vehicle as defined in The Illinois Vehicle Code, railroad car, or any depository designed for the safekeeping of property, or any part thereof, with intent to enter any such place and with intent to commit therein a felony or theft. The trier of fact may infer from the possession of a key designed for lock bumping an intent to commit a felony or theft; however, this inference does not apply to any peace officer or other employee of a law enforcement agency, or to any person or agency licensed under the Private Detective, Private Alarm, Private Security, Fingerprint Vendor, and Locksmith Act of 2004. For the purposes of this Section, "lock bumping" means a lock picking technique for opening a pin tumbler lock using a specially crafted bumpkey.

(b) Sentence.

Possession of burglary tools in violation of this Section is a Class 4 felony.

(Source: P.A. 95 883, eff. 1 1 09.)

That's not quite the answer I was hoping for---when jail is a possibility, I'd prefer a somewhat brighter line---but I suspect it's the best answer I'll get for such a hypothetical situation.

By the way, just so we're all clear, I'm not a lawyer, Nalley has never even met you, and this isn't legal advice.

People I trust have been saying good things about Jeff Gamso's blog, Gamso - For the Defense, and I've been meaning to check it out for months now. I finally got around to it, and I'm glad I did, because I discovered a fascinating post called "Hobgoblins of Little Minds."

It's about what experts mean when they say a piece of evidence is "consistent":

The criminalist who did the ballistics comparison wasn't sure he had a match...The most he could say is that the gun was "consistent with" the one that fired the bullet that killed the young woman. The murder weapon.

"Consistent with." What the hell does that mean?

It means "might be." It means "maybe or maybe not." It means "sure it's possible." It means "who knows." All of which is a way of saying that it means not much of anything at all.

I have no idea what the ballistics expert means by "consistent," but if he has any scientific integrity, the word "consistent" has a slightly more precise meaning than Gamso is allowing for.

Consider Gamso's next paragraph: 

"He's not desperately poor." That's consistent with the guy who got laid off from the plant and is struggling to get by on unemployment and food stamps and also with Bill Gates and his billions. It tells you nothing.

But it does tell me something. It rules out the possibility that he's desperately poor. Assuming we have a reasonable definition for "desperately poor," it tells me he's not living in the streets, sick and starving.

"Not desperately poor" is an awkward phrase, because it's the negation of "desperately poor" rather than a positive assertion the way "consistent" is. But that leads us to a clearer understanding of what "consistent" means in ordinary usage: It means not inconsistent. That is, when the expert testifies that the gun he tested is "consistent with" the murder weapon, it means he cannot rule it out.

It sounds pretty weak, doesn't it? Saying you can't rule something out is a long, long way from saying it's true. As a matter of philosophy of science, however, this is as good as it gets. Scientific tests never really prove anything is completely true. The only possible results of any test are that it is consistent or inconsistent with the idea being tested. Our technological civilization is built on scientific theories which have never been proven true, but which have survived countless attempts to prove them false.

"Consistent" means something, and when you have enough consistent results, it comes as close to certainty as science can get.

Gamso quotes from the Federal Rules of Evidence:

Rule 401. Definition of "Relevant Evidence"

"Relevant evidence" means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.

That definition bothers me for a reason that is probably a bit pedantic. In particular, I'm botherd by the phrase "make the existence of any fact...more probable or less probable". I think I know what the rules are trying to say, but I believe it is an error in reasoning to say that a fact can be more probable or less probable.

The facts may be unclear, confusing, complex, uncertain, or unknown. But whatever the facts are, they happened. "Probable" has nothing to do with it. There's no way that evidence or testimony at a trial can somehow reach back in time and change what really happened, or change the probability that something happened. Evidence can't make reality more probable or less probable, because reality is fixed.

Evidence in science is no different when you examine it carefully. For example, a public health study might be reported in the nightly news as estimating that "10 million Americans have Greenfield's disease." A newspaper report might add that the study has an error of "plus or minus 2%." That sounds like a strict cutoff, but a scientist would explain that it's really a confidence interval. If you delve into the study, you'll probably find out that the newspaper reporter used the study's 95% confidence interval. The scientist would explain that this means there's a 95% chance that the true number of Americans with Greenfield's disease is within plus or minus 2% of 10 million.

The scientist would be wrong, however, for the same reason the rules of evidence are wrong. However many Americans have Greenfield's disease---let's say it's 9,982,458---that's how many have Greenfield's disease, and there's no chance or probability involved. What our 95% confidence interval of plus or minus 2% is really saying is that conducting this scientific study has a 95% chance of giving us a result that is within plus or minus 2% of the true number. Or, to put it another way, our result is consistent with the theory that Greenfield's disease affects about 10 million people.

Getting back to our ballistics expert, when he says the defendant's gun is consistent with the murder weapon, he's not---despite what the Rules of Evidence say---making it more likely that the gun is the murder weapon. Rather, he's saying that with some degree of scientific confidence, the prosecutor's theory that the gun us the murder weapon was not disproved by the ballistic examination.

Now let's look at a simpler example.

Suppose we suspect that a coin has been modified so that when flipped it always come up heads. We think this modification is subtle and undetectable to the naked eye (and we have no instruments available). How can we prove that the coin has been gimmicked if we can't detect the modification?

Simple: We flip the coin.

If we flip it once and it comes up heads, that proves almost nothing. The coin will do that half the time even if it's perfectly legitimate.

So we flip the coin again, and it comes up heads again. With two tests of the coin in our data set, the possibility that it's a gimmicked coin is slightly higher, because this result will happen by random chance only one time in four. Do a third test, and it's one time in eight. Four tests will come up all heads only one time in 16 with a fair coin, and so on.

If we keep flipping the coin and we keep getting heads, the possibility that this is a fair coin gets smaller and smaller. Ten heads in a row is only a 1-in-1024 possibility with a fair coin. By the time we get to 20 straight heads in a row, the odds of this being a fair coin are less than one in a million. It's safe to conclude there's something wrong with the coin.

(I've just made the same mistake the Rules of Evidence made. The coin is either gimmicked or it's not. The 1-in-a-million probability is really a statement about the accuracy of the testing method. That is, it's not really that the odds of this being a fair coin are less than 1 in a million. Rather the odds of a fair coin behaving this way are less than 1 in a million.)

The coin testing process I just described is good science for three basic reasons. First, it puts numbers to its results. Real science almost always involves some math, and real scientific studies usually state their results in form of probabilities and confidence intervals. Gamso does not report that the ballistics expert gave any probabilities with his conclusions.

Second, and more generally, our conculsion about the coin includes information about the error rate of our testing process: The chances of a coin that is not gimmicked behaving this way are less than 1 in a million. When the ballistics expert testified that the gun was consistent with the murder weapon, did he quantify or even characterize the possibility that it wasn't the murder weapon? For example, did he explain what percentage of all guns would be consistent with the murder weapon? If it's 1 in a million, that's a pretty good sign that you've got the right guy. If it's 1 in 10, the expert's conclusion is just barely relevant.

Third, our conclusion about the coin is based on a series of independent tests. Each flip of the coin is a test. The results of any single flip indicate very little, because even a fair coin will come up heads (produce a false positive) 50% of the time. However, when we conduct a series of 20 independent tests, we can reduce the false positive to one in a million. In general, the more tests we conduct, the more we can reduce the liklihood of a false positive.

This last point is crucial to reaching a conclusion because (in theory, anyway) that's logical rationale behind how the evidence in a trial builds up to a conclusion. Let me see if I can illustrate this with some data that I totally made up.

Let's pretend that the ballistic match is a very simple two-step process. First, we match the caliber of the gun, which must be one of 10 possible calibers which occur in equal numbers---i.e. for any given caliber, 10% of all guns are a match. Second, we match the land-and-groove pattern within the barrel, of which there are 10 possible patterns, all occuring in equal numbers. Since each matching step eliminates 90% of the guns, a ballistic match that passes both steps has eliminated 99% of the guns, meaning that only 1 in 100 guns will match.

In addition, we have a witness ID, which we'll assume is also 90% accurate. Combined with the gun match, this eliminates 90% of the remaining false positives, meaning that only 1 in 1000 gun owners match the criteria. We're getting somewhere.

It all goes wrong, however, if there are hidden connections between the criteria. For example, how did the police narrow down the suspect list that they presented to the witness? If they already had the ballistic report, perhaps they did a database search for people who owned guns of the same caliber as the murder weapon, and used the resulting list to build their suspect list.

If so, this means that the witness ID and part of the ballistic examination are correlated and not independent. And to the extent that they're correlated, we have to factor that out of the calculation. In this case, every suspect presented to the witness was known to have a gun that matched the caliber of the murder weapon, so the ballistic expert's discovery of this fact adds nothing new. This eliminates the 1-in-10 ratio for the caliber match, and we're back down to a 1 in 100 chance of a random person matching the known facts about the murderer.

One of the reasons DNA evidence is considered so good is that scientists have a pretty good understanding of the prevalence of various DNA markers in the human population and of the correlations between them. In fact, DNA testing is explicitly based on statistics, which is why DNA test results usually include an estimate of the chance of a false positive. With a good DNA sample, the chance of a random match is often less than 1 in a billion, and lawyers love to bring that number out in trial because it is so impressive.

By comparison, Gamso's account of fingerprint experts saying things like "There is no error rate. It's 100 percent accurate." is infuriating. Only abstractions are perfect. Everything in the real world has an error rate.

Sometimes that error rate is vanishingly small, which allows us to say that something is "error-free" when speaking informally. But if you press for a number, a real scientist should be able to find one.

Ken Lammers does a nice job of collecting up some of the shortcomings of the just-announced Apple iPad. I don't get it either. The iPad seems really limited.

My iPhone has similar limitations---no multitasking, no USB or FireWire, a closed application deployment mechanism---but it's a cell phone: Making it more flexible would come at the risk of making it less reliable. But in a general-purpose computer, I want a lot more flexibility, and I can live with the reliability problems the come with it. (Yes, I am a Windows user. How did you guess?)

If I still traveled for business, I might appreciate an iPad as an on-the-go email and surfing computer, but the touch keyboard probably isn't adequate for typing long email messages. As a photographer, I'd love to have a small computer that I could use to preview and backup my digital photos, but there's no way to attach an external camera.

I can almost hear the Apple true believers sputtering about how wrong I am: The iPad has both a keyboard and a camera connection kit available as accessories. Well, yes, but since the iPad only supports the proprietary Apple connector, you have to use Apple's keyboards. If they'd put a USB port on the iPad, it could use any of hundreds of popular keyboards.

The camera situation is no better. Instead of USB or FireWire, you have to use the iPad Camera Connection Kit, which offers you two modules for transfering images. One of them is an SD card reader, which is kind of a ripoff considering that cell phones far less powerful than the iPhone---let alone the iPad---have had built-in SD card readers for years.

The other camera connection module is even more galling: It's a USB adapter that allows you to connect the iPad to your camera's USB port. You know what else would have allowed you to connect your iPad to your camera's USB port? A USB port built into the iPad.

It seems like a really frustrating design. It might have made a nice way to accept and transport large specifications documents and image files I get when I visit clients, if only it had a filesystem to store and organize them. If I were a musician, the iPad would be an awesome tool for recording and remixing music, but there's no way to attach a digitizer or a midi keyboard. If I were a video producer, the iPad would be a nice way edit together simple videos, such as a video blog, but there's no way to pull in video from a camera.

Granted, I'm not a visionary genius like Steve Jobs, and perhaps by this time next year I'll be raving about the wonders of my cool new iPad, but I just don't see it...

I've been commenting on the President's State of the Union address on and off for a few years now. I do it for three reasons: (1) to force myself to read the actual speech so I feel more involved in the civic process, (2) to pad out the blog, and (3) because everyone else is doing it (probably for reason 2). I've never bothered to look at the opposition response before, but blogging has been kind of thin this year, and picking apart another speech seemed like an easy way to get a little more content up.

So I Googled "state of the union republican response", but all Google could find was last year's Republican response. The new one hadn't been indexed yet. Not a problem: I'll just search one of the news sites...unless...

Seriously, does anybody really pay attention to the opposition response? It's given by someone that the last election's losers are hoping we'll like better than the guy they ran for President last time, and nothing he says matters, because unlike the president, he's not in a position to do anything about it. Most people probably don't even know that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell gave the speech. I know I wouldn't if I hadn't decided to write about it.

So...when I wrote my review of the Republican response to the State of the Union, I went ahead and used last year's speech by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. So far, no one has noticed.

(Probably because no one cares, and also because no one reads my blog.)

Anyway, here's my review of the real 2010 Republican response to the State of the Union, as delivered by Governor Bob McDonnell and transcribed by CNN (as far as you know, because you really don't care enough to check. I wouldn't.):

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Good evening. I'm Bob McDonnell. Eleven days ago, I was honored to be sworn in as the 71st governor of Virginia. I'm standing in the historic House Chamber of Virginia's Capitol, a building designed by Virginia's second governor, Thomas Jefferson.

It's not easy to follow the president of the United States. And my 18-year-old twin boys have added pressure to me tonight by giving me exactly 10 minutes to finish before they leave to go watch "SportsCenter."

(LAUGHTER)

I'm joined by fellow Virginians to share a Republican perspective on how to best address the challenges facing our nation today.

We were encouraged to hear President Obama speak this evening about the need to create jobs. All Americans should have the opportunity to find and keep meaningful work, and the dignity that comes with it.

As I've said before, too much of a focus on jobs makes for bad economic policy. Jobs matter, but so do things like productivity and producing things people actually want.

(APPLAUSE)

Many -- many of us here tonight -- and many of you watching -- have family or friends who have lost their jobs. In fact, 1 in 10 Americans is unemployed. That is unacceptable.

I usually let this sort of thing pass, but just for the record, 1 in 10 Americans are not unemployed. Unemployment figures are given as a percentage of people in the labor force, which is everybody who wants to work, whether they are working or not. Since about half of all Americans are too young to work, retired, disabled, institutionalized, or just don't want to work, our current 10% unemployment rate means that about 1 in 20 Americans is unemployed.

Here in Virginia, we've faced our highest unemployment rate in more than 25 years, and bringing new jobs and more opportunities to our citizens is the top priority of my administration.

Good government policy should spur economic growth and strengthen the private sector's ability to create new jobs.

(APPLAUSE)

We must enact policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation so America can better compete with the world. What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation and litigation that kill jobs and hurt the middle class.

Man, the right wing really is obsessed with tort reform...

It was Thomas Jefferson who called for "a wise and frugal government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." He was right.

Today, the federal government is simply trying to do too much. Last year, we were told that massive new federal spending would create more jobs immediately and hold unemployment below 8 percent.

In the past year, more than 3 million people have lost their jobs, and yet the Democratic Congress continues deficit spending, adding to the bureaucracy, and increasing the national debt on our children and our grandchildren.

The amount of debt is on pace to double in five years and triple in 10. The federal debt is now over $100,000 per household. This is simply unsustainable.

The president's partial freeze announced tonight on discretionary spending is a laudable step, but a small one. The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper limited role of government at every level.

(APPLAUSE)

Without reform, the excessive growth of government threatens our very liberty and our prosperity.

In recent months, the American people have made clear that they want government leaders to listen and then act on the issues most important to them. We want results, not rhetoric. We want cooperation, not partisanship.

(APPLAUSE)

There is much common ground. All Americans agree that we need health -- health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality. But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government.

Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform health care, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes.

And we will do that by implementing common sense reforms, like letting families and businesses buy health insurance policies across state lines and ending frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals that drive up the cost of your health care.

Allowing insurance to be sold across state lines is a great idea. It's a good way to increase competition in the health insurance market, and it will cost very little to implement. Also---and this is a little unusual these days---it's completely within the enumerated powers of the federal government since it's a classic example of interstate commerce.

And our solutions aren't 1,000-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests. In fact, many of our proposals are available online at solutions.gop.gov, and we welcome your ideas on Facebook and Twitter.

And still, no one has read them...

(LAUGHTER)

All Americans agree that this nation must become more energy independent and secure.

No they don't. We don't have to be energy independent any more than we have to be automobile independent, clothing independent, or consumer electronics independent.

We are blessed here in America with vast natural resources, and we must use them all.

Why should we use our own natural resource if we can get them cheaper from somewhere else?

Advances in technology can unleash more natural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, alternative energy that will lower your utility bills.

Here in Virginia, we have the opportunity to become the first state on the East Coast to explore for and produce oil and natural gas off-shore.

(APPLAUSE)

But this administration's policies are delaying off-shore production, hindering nuclear energy expansion, and seeking to impose job-killing cap-and-trade energy taxes. Now is the time to adopt innovative energy policies that create jobs and lower energy prices.

Uh, I'm pretty sure we can't increase the number of people working on energy production without raising the costs. If energy gets cheaper, someone's going to be out of a job.

(APPLAUSE)

All Americans agree that a young person needs a world-class education to compete in the global economy. As a young kid, my dad told me, "Son, if you want a good job, you need a good education." Dad was right, and that's even more true today.

The president and I agree on expanding the number of high-quality charter schools and rewarding teachers for excellent performance. More school choices for parents and students mean more accountability and greater achievement.

Since the president opposes the charter schools in D.C., you might want to check back with him on that.

A child's educational opportunity should be determined by her intellect and work ethic, not by her ZIP Code.

(APPLAUSE)

All Americans agree that we must maintain a strong national defense. The courage and success of our armed forces is allowing us to draw down troop levels in Iraq as that government is increasingly able to step up.

My oldest daughter, Jeanine, was an Army platoon leader in Iraq, so I am personally grateful for the service and sacrifice of all our men and women in uniform, and a grateful nation thanks them.

(APPLAUSE)

We applaud President Obama's decision to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. We agree that victory there is imperative for national security.

And we'll know we're victorious how? What would achievable victory look like?

But we have serious concerns over the recent steps the administration has taken regarding suspected terrorists. Americans were shocked on Christmas Day to learn of the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit. This foreign terror suspect was given the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen and immediately stopped providing critical intelligence.

He's not getting the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen, he's getting the same legal rights we give to everyone who is accused of a crime. The only way it would make sense not to give him legal rights is if we weren't going to put him on trial. I'm not ready to live in a country that summarily imprisons people without a trial.

Look, if they start attacking us with such fury and in such numbers that our justice system can't keep up, then of course we can hold them without a trial. That's a war. But one guy trying to kill some people? That's not a war. That's Saturday night in every big city in America. We handle those cases by the tens of thousands every year. The underwear bomber is just one more attempted murderer.

Also, "critical intelligence"? The terrorist leadership trusted critical information to a guy who was willing to put a bomb in his underwear?

As Sen.-elect Scott Brown has said, we should be spending taxpayer dollars to defeat terrorists, not to protect them.

That would be those 30,000 troops you mentioned earlier.

(APPLAUSE)

Here at home, government must help foster a society in which all our people can use their God-given talents and liberty to pursue the great American dream. Republicans know that government cannot guarantee individual outcomes, but we strongly believe that it must guarantee equality of opportunity for all.

That opportunity exists best in a democracy which promotes free enterprise, economic growth, strong families, and individual achievement.

Many Americans are concerned about this administration's effort to exert greater control over car companies, banks, energy, and health care, but over-regulating employers won't create more employment, overtaxing investors won't foster more investment.

That paragraph is dead-on.

Top-down, one-size-fits-all decision-making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market, nor undermine the proper role of state and local governments in our system of federalism. As our founders clearly stated, and we governors clearly understand, government closest to the people governs best.

Correct again. Where were you during the previous administration?

(APPLAUSE)

And no government program can ever replace the actions of caring Americans freely choosing to help one another. The scriptures say, "To whom much is given, much will be required." As the most generous and prosperous nation on Earth, it is heartwarming to see Americans giving much time and money to the people of Haiti.

Thank you for your ongoing compassion.

(APPLAUSE)

Some people say they're afraid that America is no longer the great land of promise that she has always been. They should not be.

America will always blaze the trail of opportunity and prosperity. America will -- must always be a land where liberty and property are valued and respected and innocent human life is protected.

Government should have this clear goal: Where opportunity is absent, we must create it. Where opportunity is limited, we must expand it. Where opportunity is unequal, we must make it open to everyone.

(APPLAUSE)

Our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to create this great nation. Now we should pledge as Democrats, Republicans and independents -- Americans all -- to work together to leave this nation an ever better place than we found it.

As usual, I suspect that "work together" is politician-speak for "do it my way."

God bless you, and God bless this great land of America. Thank you very much.

And that's it. Next year, I won't play games with the opposition response. Probably because I will forget they even have one.

This year, I thought I'd also take a look at the Republican response to the State of the Union address. As with my post on the State of the Union, I've quoted the entire speech, so this post is pretty long.

Now here's Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, [as reported by CNN]:

Tonight, we witnessed a great moment in the history of our Republic. In the very chamber where Congress once voted to abolish slavery, our first African-American president stepped forward to address the state of our union. With his speech tonight, the president completed a redemptive journey that took our nation from Independence Hall to Gettysburg to the lunch counter and now, finally, the Oval Office.

Indeed. That we've come so far in race relations is a very cool thing, and something we should be proud of. Electing a black man to the presidency is not the end of racism, but you can see it from here.

More after the break...

I usually try to make a few comments about the State of the Union address. This time, I've decided to include the entire text of the speech---even the parts I have nothing say about---so this post is going to be very long.

Working from the official Whitehouse transcript:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
January 27, 2010

Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address

9:11 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT:  Madam Speaker, Vice President Biden, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, the President shall give to Congress information about the state of our union.  For 220 years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty. They've done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility.  And they've done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable -- that America was always destined to succeed.  But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt.  When the market crashed on Black Tuesday, and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain.  These were the times that tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of our union.  And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people.

As one nation? That never really happens. Also, did Obama just use the battle of Bull Run during the frickin' Civil War an example of moving forward as one nation? We were literally killing each other!

More, after the break...

Let me run a few legislative proposals past you:

• We should make it illegal for anybody to receive money in return for performing an abortion. This would in no way impair a woman's right to choose, because money is not choice.
• The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly reserves the right to bear arms to "the people," therefore it is not a violation of the right to bear arms to prohibit corporations from making or distributing guns.

Does either of those statements seem reasonable to you?

Then how come so many people think it makes sense to respond to the Citizens United ruling---which struck down restrictions on corporate spending for political advertising---by saying the original laws didn't violate the First Amendment because "Corporations aren't people, and money isn't speech"?

By the way, Radley Balko is not just a guy who knows how to find wacky videos. He's also one of the most interesting investigative reporters working today. His latest piece is about some of the shocking things being done in the area of civil asset forfeiture.

I've been saying for a while that asset forfeiture is theft by government employees, but what I didn't realize is that they've started to privatize the thievery:

Timothy Bookwalter, the elected chief prosecutor for Putnam County, Indiana, did not represent the county in its effort to keep Anthony Smelley's money. Nor did anyone else in his office. Instead, the case was handled by Christopher Gambill, a local attorney in private practice. Gambill manages civil forfeiture cases for several Indiana counties, and he gets to keep a portion of what he wins in court. "My contingency for my own county is a quarter; for the others it's a third," Gambill says.

Read the whole thing.

I don't know if you'll learn anything new from this, but for its format it's a pretty accurate summary of the economic debate:

(Hat tip: Radley Balko.

Scott Greenfield has a couple of interesting items up over at Simple Justice. First of all, there's the case of the Jew with suspicious objects on board a plane, as originally reported in the New York Daily News:

A US Airways crew panicked by a Jewish teen's prayer ritual aborted a flight from LaGuardia Airport on Thursday, landing in Philadelphia amid unfounded fears of a terrorist bomb.

The trouble began when the 17-year-old White Plains youth pulled out two small Scripture-filled boxes used for his morning prayers on the Louisville, Ky.-bound plane, authorities said.

The official story is kind of amusing in a we've-seen-all-this-before kind of way:

Officials with the airline, however, said crewmembers "did not receive a clear response" when they talked with the teen, according to a statement issued by Republic Airways, which owns Chautauqua.

Translation: "We didn't understand his response."

Scott sums up the problem:

Just because you don't know what something is doesn't provide justification to deem it a threat. 

There's a whole world of truth in that sentence. People with power have always felt a paranoid need to crack down on things they don't understand. From jazz to rock music, from ferets to pit bulls, from women who wear pants to men who wear droopy pants, unimaginative people have feared them all.

Anyway, when the plane landed, the kid explained what happened to the police and they let him go on his way.

In the other blog post, Scott tells us about a guy who got stopped for a traffic ticket and immediately told the officer he wanted a lawyer. This made the cop suspicious, and she promptly searched the car, finding his mother's dead body in the trunk.

The problem here is that

the invocation of a constitutional rights cannot serve to give rise to probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, nor can the defendant be questioned after invoking right to counsel.

So the officer discovered the crime during a search that apparently wasn't legal. Naturally, this will cause problems when the case goes to trial.

What I'm wondering, however, is whether the police and FBI would have let the 17-year-old Jewish kid go if he'd asked for his lawyer when they started questioning him. I mean, it must have seemed obvious to the kid that he could explain the problem and they'd understand. As it turned out, he was right.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea to explain himself. A lot of people are in jail because they explained things to understanding cops.

I really have nothing to say.

I blog about justice and economics and freedom and government perfidy, but the disaster in Haiti right now has little to do with any of those things.

I could probably find a way to link the disaster or the relief effort to one or more of my favorite topics, and soon I probably will. But for now...

For now I think we just let the governments and aid organizations do their thing.

Yesterday I started another one of my Avvo Answers experiments, in which I asked the free advice service the following question:

Is it legal to own lock picks in Illinois?

Chicago, IL

And it it's legal, are there places where you're not supposed to have them? In particular, does Chicago have different laws?

[typos in my original question]

This morning I got my first answer from Avvo Level 10 Contributor Alan James Brinkmeier:

This attorney is licensed in Illinois.

Illinois has stringent picklock laws and locales require a locksmith license to use lock-picking devices to open locks in situations where the owner needs access. Lock picks are devices used to lift the various pins found within the cylinder of a lock. These special tools are used in order to open the lock without the use of a key.

Criminal activity is one such reason for strict picklock laws.

You might find my Legal Guide helpful "Ethics: Yes I Need a Lawyer!"

http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/ethics-yes-i-need-a-lawyer

Good luck to you.

God bless.

NOTE: This answer is made available by the Illinois lawyer for educational purposes only. By using or participating in this site you understand that there is no attorney client privilege between you and the attorney responding

Brinkmeier's Avvo page describes his practice as 30% appeals, 25% state, local, and municipal law, 25% aviation, and 20% defective/dangerous products. He's apparently been practicing for 26 years.

I Googled "Alan James Brinkmeier" to see if I could find his firm's website. No luck. But I did find listings for him at Zoominfo, Superlawyers, and LawPromo. I thought I also found listings for him at the Southeast Texas Record and CASA, but it turns out those sites are just offering free legal advice services which are really just a feed from Avvo. I guess Avvo is syndicating its Avvo Answers service to other websites.

I also discovered that Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett has mentioned Brinkmeier in a post entitled "Avvo Answhores":

Brinkmeier, who has "answered" more than 8,000 questions on Avvo, "answers" questions in the area of ethics and professional responsibility, employment and labor, car and auto accidents, debt collection, lawsuits and disputes, child custody, juvenile law, wrongful termination, DUI and DWI, immigration, appeals, civil rights, and domestic violence anywhere in the U.S.

The disclaimers should say that the "answers" are for entertainment, rather than education or information.

What's the game? Why can't people like...Alan Brinkmeier, who recognize that they have no clue what they're talking about, just keep their traps shut and let the lawyers who have some chance of knowing the law answer the questions?

Brinkmeier took offense to this in the comments, and then he and Mark got in to a slightly bizarre argument about the comparative reliability of their respective phone systems.

As is my way, I took the following paragraphs from Brinkmeier's response

Illinois has stringent picklock laws and locales require a locksmith license to use lock-picking devices to open locks in situations where the owner needs access. Lock picks are devices used to lift the various pins found within the cylinder of a lock. These special tools are used in order to open the lock without the use of a key.

Criminal activity is one such reason for strict picklock laws.

and I fed them into Google, which lead me to this page at Superpages.com (which is also the second result in a Google search for the title of my question) in which the first three paragraphs contain the following sentences:

• "The states which have the most stringent laws on this matter include California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Utah, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Washington DC and Canada."
• "In some locales, those individuals not identified in the statute as legally approved to possess this type of device have to obtain a locksmith license before purchasing a lock pick."
• "But qualified locksmiths also use lock picking devices to open locks in situations where the owner needs access and, for whatever reason, can't gain it."
• "Lock picks are devices used to lift the various pins found within the cylinder of a lock in order to open the lock without the use of a key."
• "Why in the world would anyone need to have a lock pick? Criminal activity is one such reason."

(emphasis added)

I don't think the apparent similarity of certain turns of phrase is entirely in my imagination, which leads to one obvious conclusion: Not only does James Alan Brinkmeier give free advice on Avvo, he also writes for Superpages.

This post at D.A. Confidential includes a link to a list of "The 6 Most Badass Skills You Can Learn in Under a Week." Skill number 4 is lock picking, and the article refers to a Lock Picking School In A Box. which sounds like something you could make yourself by taking a lock apart.

I've always been fascinated by things like lock picking and safe cracking, and maybe some day I'll take the time to learn more about it. Of course, I'd probably have to have some lock picks to do that, which got me wondering what the laws are on possession of lock picking tools. If only I knew a lawyer I could ask...

This seemed like a good time to try another question for Avvo Answers---Avvo's forum where lawyers earn points by answering questions for free. The last time I tried this, it didn't work out too well. The first lawyer pulled an answer out of his butt, and the second lawyer---Illinois criminal defense lawyer Jeremy Richey---was able to give the answer I was looking for only after we talked about it a bit here on the blog.

Is it legal to own lock picks in Illinois?

Chicago, IL

And it it's legal, are there places where you're not supposed to have them? In particular, does Chicago have different laws?

[typos in my original question]

Now let's see if anyone provides any interesting answers.

Update: I've posted about a response.

...is still crazy:

Ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich says he's "blacker than Barack Obama" and tells Esquire magazine that he was a real person in a political arena dominated by phonies.

Blagojevich, referring to the president as "this guy," says Obama was elected based simply on hope.

"What the (expletive)? Everything he's saying's on the teleprompter," Blagojevich told the magazine for a story in its February issue, which hits newsstands Jan. 19.

"I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived," Blagojevich said. "I saw it all growing up."

The White House refused to comment.

Yeah, I'm sure they had nothing to add to that.

A little later, I read something I like:

Blagojevich continues to accuse prosecutors of persecuting him for routine political deals.

We can only hope he's right. And that it catches on.

What the fuck?

No, really, what the fuck?

I like to end each year with a review of some of the things I've been posting about. I don't know if any of you care, but it's always interesting to me to see where I've been. This year I expected the pickings to be pretty slim because of all the turmoil surrounding and following my parents' passing, but it turns out I wrote quite a bit.

In fact, here at Windypundit, 2009 was the year in which

• I asked my hosting provider to move this blog to a new server.
• I explained four ways to answer the question "Have you got something to hide?" Be sure to read the comments for Pete Guither's awesome fifth answer, and few more from Jdog.
• I explained the hedge from hell.
• I explored my love-hate relationship with 24.
• I uncovered the Shanghai Chooke domain name scam...er, well, linked to someone who uncovered it.
• I got peeved at some of the bad tech in 24.
• I started using Amazon Cloudfront to serve the blog design elements.
• I slammed a stupid anti-legalization argument.
• The Obama presidency had its high point.
• I explained how to think about the problem of innocent people in jail.
• The Nazi Zombie uprising reached Austin, Texas.
• I invited people to make my dream of being a published author come true. It didn't work.
• I explained the difference between armed robbery and civil forfeiture.
• The war on drugs reached the century mark.
• I shredded a really stupid argument about evolution.
• I explored Apple's vision of the future...from 1987.
• A cop wrote a silly blog post about Ryan Frederick's conviction.
• A prosecutor wrote a silly blog post about my response to the cop's post.
• A cop tuned up a 15-year-old girl for hitting him with a kicked-off shoe.
• I explained how to keep people from walking off with your pens.
• A minor genius took on Google and won.
• I accepted the loss of Pluto as a planet. But I will Never Forget.
• I fought with my computer.
• I tried to bring back Friday catblogging.
• I explained how The Stimulus could go wrong.
• I gave my wife some tips for a gunfight.
• I welcomed Jennifer to the blogroll.
• My mother got very sick and I moved in with my dad.
• My mother died.
• My wife posted about my mom.
• I smacked around Robert J. Samuelson for his absurd attack on Obama's cap-and-trade plan.
• I discovered that Melrose Park was not Mayberry.
• I tried another video blog. And it also sucked.
• I decided to enter the legal education market.
• My dad told us it was time to put him in a nursing home.
• I explained how much government is enough.
• I evaluated Obama at 100 days.
• The Supreme Court once again showed how much it trusted police.
• USLaw.com didn't bother me as much as it bothered Scott Greenfield, but then they turned psychotic.
• I posted some random thoughts about my mother's passing.
• I fired an open volley in my healthcare blogging, elaborated on it later, and then again some more. 
• I put my dad in a nursing home and got to go back to my home at last.
• I commented on a shocking incident of police thuggery.
• I tried to apply logic to the testimony of a gang expert.
• I discovered that Justice Thomas may be a little crazy.
• Lori Drew was acquitted...which was almost certainly a good thing.
• I finally managed to work Lincoln's 1838 address to the Young Men's Lyceum into a blog post.
• I posted some pictures of fireworks.
• I claimed the title of greatest criminal defense blogger in Chicago and no one has risen up to dispute me.
• I decided to try Chitika.
• I got the story behind a slightly controversial photo.
• I had a depressing vision of how the ubiquitous surveillance in 1984 could actually be possible.
• I speculated about crossing the border with an encrypted hard drive, and then I got a few real answers from a Customs lawyer.
• I started to explain why identity on the web is complicated, and got some puzzling responses. I'll have to finish that someday.
• I explored some of the mysteries of minimum wage.
• I learned that Avvo Answers really was as bad as everyone says it is.
• My father died.
• I explained the evil of coupon settlements.
• The Ninth Circuit tried to clean up the mess that is computer search and seizure law.
• I questioned the ethics of force catheterization, and got a less-than-awesome response from the AMA.
• Norman Borlaug died.
• I found some truth in rock and roll.
• I noticed that a lot of children are being charged as sex offenders.
• The feds came after bloggers who get free stuff.
• Photography was still treated like a crime.
• I questioned the level of happiness in the kingdom of Bhutan.
• I thought about the economics of the death penalty.
• The Minnesota Supreme Court reminded me that sometimes the law is really stupid.
• I gave the world a glimpse of the complex technology of my everyday life.
• Mary Beth Buchanen's reign of terror finally ended.
• A woman who supplied Eliot Spitzer with hookers had a few questions about his ethics.
• Meep.
• I spoke truth to zombie alarmism.
• I explained why the public option and healthcare reform are redundant.
• I complained that juries are kept in the dark.
• I was thankful for my friends.
• Muvico screwed over its customers.
• The Warlord of Maricopa took crazy just a little bit further...
• I explained why people on the internet seem so rude.

See you all in the new year!

I've decided to steal an idea from Gideon and write a quick list of things I learned in the last decade:

• I learned to ignore people who say the decade/century/millenium has one more year to go because there was no year zero.
• I learned that terrorism in the United States is a more real threat than I thought it was.
• I learned that just because the people opposing the president are idiots doesn't make them completely wrong about him.
• I learned that occupying a country to change its form of government is a very long-term project.
• I learned how to start and run a one-man corporation.
• I learned that working from home makes me gain weight.
• I learned that some take my blogging seriously and appreciate what I'm saying.
• I learned how to take a pretty good photograph.
• I learned that taking road trips with cell phones, a mapping GPS system, and wireless internet is a whole different experience from when I was a kid.
• I learned that it pays to buy an insulated delivery bag so the pizza stays hot when you bring it home.
• I learned that a DVR and multiple sources of downloadable video make television in to a completely different experience.
• I learned to program with
• The .NET Framework
• Windows Forms
• Windows Communication Foundation
• PHP
• CSS
• JavaScript
• AJAX
• YUI
• Procedural SQL
• Movable Type
• Drupal
• TikiWiki
• NUnit
• I learned the incredible value of having medical and financial powers of attorney for my parents.

Back in 2007, author Mark Helprin wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he bemoaned the lack of a permanent copyright. I responded to it, as did rather a lot of other people. In my response, I called part of his argument "pure nonsense, bordering on outright lies."

Apparently, many other people used far harsher language, because Helprin later wrote a book (Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto) in which he spent some of the second chapter complaining about the response:

It is not merely training that has unleashed this keypeck ferocity, but also changes in certain fundamental conditions. In the electronic media's dissolution of barriers---time, space, isolation---and in the vast expansion of received (or, at least, receivable) information, we have become in proportion infinitely smaller. Were you to have lived next door to Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century you would have been one of only a few hundred... You would not have felt as if you were merely one in six-and-a-half or seven billion. Now, as mere atoms amidst this mass, the damage we can do is by comparison so much less that rage counts for nothing but a cry to be heard---even if the from a protective and cowardly anonymity. Were anyone to have behaved in such a way...on the real commons of a New England village even as it existed in my youth and young-manhood, he would have been immediately brought up short, if not committed or jailed. In the new "commons," brutishness and barbarism are accepted...

More recently, Scott Greenfield writes:

I recently had an email exchange with a lawprof who felt deeply hurt by things that were written about his ideas.  He informed me that they were too harsh, too rough, too disrespectful.  Ironically, he wasn't referring to things I had written.  He was on the verge of giving up blawging, finding it too vulgar for his sensibilities.

These are not the first and second times I've heard this sort of complaint about the blogosphere. The pattern is pretty common: A person with some degree of fame or authority---an author, an politician, a movie star, or even a law professor---checks what the folks on the internet are saying about them and is shocked to discover that people are saying terrible things.

Sometimes, like Helprin, they try to come up with an explanation as to why people are being so rude. Often this is tied up in their personal agenda so, for example, some feminists conclude that the blogosphere is a boys club that resents women. Similarly, a lot of professional journalists and pundits have concluded that the blogosphere is filled with amateurs that have no standards.

I have a simple explanation of my own for the authors and politicians and pundits who are shocked by the style of the blogosphere: The people you're hearing from have always been out here, and we've always talked that way. The difference---the only difference, I think---is that now you know about it.

People have been discussing Mark Helprin's books for as long as he's been writing, but they've been discussing them in private, in coffee houses and classrooms and book clubs, so he's never heard what they sound like. They sound like the blogosphere.

The same goes for you pundits and politicians out there: Sometimes we think you're stupid, and we say so. We use harsh language and violent imagery. This is how people have always talked about you around the water cooler at work, over dinner at home, and in the barrooms afterward.

The point is, the blogosphere isn't some new rude horror. People have always been this way. All that's changed is that those of you who hold the stage can now hear the hecklers a little better. The heckling itself is no worse than before.

I saw Avatar yesterday, and it was a pretty darned good movie. If you think you might like this kind of thing, just go see it.

As with James Cameron's earlier film Titanic, the star of this film is the magnificent setting and the way it is presented. The lush world of Pandora is beautiful, the CGI that creates the aliens is every bit as good as everyone else says, and the 3D unobtrusively helps you understand the the complex action in the forest scenery.

The characters and the plot are simple and relatively straightforward. For some reason, this bothers some people. They point to the thin characterization and simple plot as if it were some kind of terrible failing, and they're proud of themselves for having seen past the special effects, which is a silly attitude. Seeing past the special effects in Avatar is like seeing past the songs in Rent.

Another thing that bothers some people about Avatar is the politics of it all. For example, here's Peter Suderman at Reason's Hit & Run blog:

And the Na'vi, the movie's marble-skinned alien natives, are easily the most convincing humanoids ever to leap forth from a Hollywood effects house's CGI server-farm -- that is, at least in terms of the way they look and move. The realism stops, however, every time they open their mouths and reveal themselves to be crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes: instinctive and animalistic purveyors of cheap mysticism and nature worship. 

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn't much a movie: Instead, Cameron's cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It's not that the film's politics make it bad, it's that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal...

Good grief. A "three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing"? There's maybe three minutes of political content scattered throughout the whole movie. Admittedly, some of it is pretty clunky---references to pre-emptive strikes, shock and awe, and fighting terror with terror---but it all goes by in a few seconds. Maybe James Cameron was trying to send me a message, but so what? I was busy enjoying the rest of the movie.

I think Suderman must have gone into this movie with an attitude, because he sure missed a lot. For one thing, the native people's connection to nature isn't just some kind of "cheap mysticism" or "quasi-mystical eco-nonsense." The Na'vi are connected to nature for a reason. Anybody who's familiar with science fiction literature will see it coming, but it's also spelled out quite clearly in the movie.

Also, Suderman and other right-wing critics seem to miss the rather important fact that the bad guys are stealing from the natives and destroying the places where they live, just like any corporation using eminent domain to take someone's land. A libertarian shouldn't have any problem with the natives trying to prevent that.

On the other hand, Roger Ebert says it has an anti-war message, apparently missing the fact that the Na'vi good guys have plenty of weapons and don't mind fighting back.

I'm not saying Avatar is pro-war and pro-property rights, but neither is it about anti-corporate mystical eco-nonsense. It's about these people on this planet, and some of them are human and some of them are alien, and...really, it's a big special effects movie. Just go see it and have fun.