Enoch

@Ari, yes, the determination of whether power is exercised by elites or by the masses is unquestionably political. And I see your point that plebiscite legislation can be seen as more legitimate than normal legislation. (Indeed, that's the whole reason why the late-19th-century Progressives pushed for them in so many states.) My point about courts and ballot initiatives is simply that the initiatives are less likely to have screened out potential constitutional problems than are pieces of law that went through the standard legislative back-and-forth process, through committees, hearings, potential executive veto, etc. In our current structure, courts don't treat plebiscite legislation any different from normal laws, but I can understand the pro-democracy logic behind that not necessarily being the best policy. @GD, On balance, probably. The increase in the expense of political campaigns, and consequently, in the power of large-money donors is certainly an anti-democratic factor, as is the federalization of lots of homeland-security-related activities in response to the 9/11/01 attacks, and the increase in conditions placed on federal grants to states and localities in things like the NCLB law. On the other hand, oligarchic tendencies have been checked by things like the federalism jurisprudence of Rehnquist Court, internet-driven increases in transparency ("media elites," at the very least, have had their power sharply curtailed), major events like the Gray Davis recall and the various gay marriage ballot initiatives, and even the growth in internet-driven Dean/Obama political fundraising as a partial alternative to big-money donors.

It's been a long time since I gave up on Jordan. But, IMO, It's a somewhat formulaic and simplistic episode, but it's well paced and satisfying. The series goes downhill from there rather rapidly, as all of the major characters have become too alien or unlikeable to generate much empathy from the reader. I'm reading the recently departed (and fantastically talented) David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which is a collection of essays that were published in major magazines.

To clarify, I intended no malice or spite. Merely pointing out that systems had evolved over the years to differentiate between the comparisons you were offering. American government has always been a balance between pure democracy and a somewhat oligarchic technocracy, and this has worked pretty well over the years. There are both good and bad consequences of nudging things one way or the other through processes like ballot initiatives.

Hehe... First time I've been called a "Larry Tribe wannabe." Good Fun, indeed. I was dredging up my ConLaw1 memories mostly in response to Aristes' post lumping all government classifications together, not to do a rigorous application of the theory to the case at hand. I'm hardly qualified to do such off the top of my head, and not particularly willing to put the research time in at the moment. (My post-1L conlaw experience is almost entirely in the separation of powers & federalism stuff.) Anyhow, Grom, thanks for the more nuanced breakdown. I knew this decision was based on Iowa law, but the comparison between EP standards was new to me. Aside: couldn't a due process argument also get some traction, given that, IIRC, Loving got heightened scrutiny on both EP (racial) and DP (marriage as fundamental right) grounds?

The Kinks -- Sunny Afternoon

George Harrison -- Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)

This was a criminal prosecution, not a civil suit for damages. And, in any case, there's a quite easy shortcut to value the damages they caused-- all of the site's revenues (or at least all of the site's revenues divided by the portion of the traffic that was drawn there by the promise free copyrighted downloads). The whole point of copyright is to make sure that the owner of a work is entitled to its economic proceeds. If the law doesn't stop others from realizing a portion of those proceeds (sans permission from the owner, of course), it becomes completely ineffective. The high fines in this type of case are necessary, otherwise potential criminals get the message that they can become millionaires at the cost of doing a year's time in prison.

Mens rea. Criminal law has always been largely about establishing what the defendant's state of mind was when the criminal act was committed. The finder of fact (i.e., the jury) has to conclude that they intended to do something that is illegal. In your examples, the business owners simply intended to run their legitimate business, selling advertising/booze. In this case, the business owners intended to facilitate the violation of copyright laws.

I'd guess that a large part of that fine is a confiscation of the revenues that their illegal activity gained them, rather than a fine with punitive intent. I don't know anything about Swedish law, I'd bet that the 'seriousness' of a crime doesn't matter-- if someone somehow made millions via jaywalking, a court could confiscate it. The whole point is to make sure that "crime doesn't pay." Also, the accessory liability stuff isn't uncommon. At common law in Anglo-American jurisprudence, all accessories were exactly as liable as the person committing the crime. With an economic crime like an intellectual property violation, I think there's a pretty good logical case for arguing that someone who profits by making it possible/easier for others to commit a criminal act should be just as liable as those others. The whole point of the IP statutes is to prevent people who aren't the owners of the copyrights from profiting off of the products-- whether a particular person happens to be the end user or not doesn't really matter under that logic. It's a weak analogy. Running a nightclub is a completely legitimate business plan, even absent any illegal activity by patrons/employees. If the defendants here were running a website with an arguably legal purpose, where users just happened to be referring others to means to violate the law, it might work. But the site is called "The Pirate Bay," ferchrissakes! To make the analogy work, you'd have to name the club "The Drugs Place" and have the bouncer at the door referring people to the correct table to get the particular fix they want.

A few months back, I caught part of a game from about two decades ago being replayed on the NFL Network with Madden in the booth. He was fantastic back then. The schtick has slowly taken over from the interesting analysis, but, IMO, he's still better than probably 60% of the color commentators doing pro games now. (It's a low bar, but it's the only one we've got.) He still can add useful information to the broadcast, while the majority of guys in the booth do nothing but stick to their script of hyping the star players (often regardless of how they're actually performing in the game).

John Madden has retired from broadcasting. He'll be missed, but it's good to see him go out on his own terms. @taks, I'd consider giving the Rams a look or three this season. They may not win many games, but they have a new coaching staff and some promising young players to watch develop. I think they'll be an interesting squad to watch, if you're at all interested in the strategic and technique-based intricacies of the game.

Yeah, whoever is responsible for that particular report was incredibly tone-deaf on public relations issues. It's news to nobody that DHS would be monitoring potentially violent domestic extremist groups-- they damn well better be! It's also hardly surprising that, of extremist groups, the ones who are most likely to be violent are overwhelmingly on the rightward end of the political spectrum. (I guess you could cite some remnants of the Black Panthers and a few hard-line anarchists on the left, but people who are packing a real arsenal ain't eatin' granola.) But why on earth would you refer to it as "Rightwing Extremism" in the title of the report??! Wouldn't "Violent Extremism" or "Anti-Government Extremism" be just as descriptive and far far less provocative? And mentioning the word "veterans" at all is just flat-out stupid. They should know that any amount of qualification or hedging is not going to be sufficient-- right leaning blogs and publications (like the Moonies' paper GD linked) are just going to cut all that out and say you hate veterans. Seriously stupid stuff that is going to do nothing but further convince the whack jobs that you want to take all their guns and force them to marry homosexuals.

I don't watch much baseball, but seeing a good knuckleball pitcher from the TV-standard over-the-shoulder viewpoint is hypnotic to me. If I flip by a game with Wakefield on the mound, I pretty much have to keep watching.

The cynic in me says that media-company-run award shows are a useful way for the media companies to kiss the asses of potential advertisers. (Or worse, to reward those advertisers who bought lots of time on their network.)

I can't wait to see that scoreboard display how badly the home team was be beaten in their first game in said stadium.

The 2009 Regular Season Schedule came out yesterday.

Not a game I would ever be likely to try, but I'll keep that in mind. Other first-person game have bothered me, too, but this can usually resolved by turning off the option that makes your view bob up and down as your character walks.

If you're getting it that cheap, why does it matter if you have to ask permission if you want to install it more than 3 times? Buy it, install it once, play it, and forget about it.

I'll echo Hurlshot-- I was glad that Portal was easy enough to get through without too much experimentation and frustration, largely because it gave me motion sickness. All those momentary feelings of "which way is up?" threw my stomach for loops whenever I played for more than an hour or so. Fortunately, it was clever enough to be worthwhile in spite of this (and short enough to finish in a series of small doses). I'm officially curious about Braid. I might download it if I get particularly bored later in the week.

Got nowhere close to Learned Hand.

Yeah, it's pretty much a requirement that piracy be more organized in an age when it required warships with cannons and sizeable crews, as opposed to the present standard of a handful of half-starved fishermen with a few small arms, one RPG, and a small fishing vessel. Although organization, of course, would make the pirates more vulnerable to the bread-and-butter of modern American power-- airstrikes. As soon as you have leadership and organizational structure, you have targets we can knock down with a smart bomb from a Predator.

I'm sure they would do this, if they had a stable method of policing themselves internally. But there's no Don running all of the pirates-- anyone with a dingy, an RPG, and a couple friends with assault rifles can go out and hijack a ship. It would take a pretty strong organization to keep all these independent operators in line, as well as to discourage newcomers to the business from hitting ships that have already paid the protection money.

The hubris and condescension in this statement is delicious. @Aristes, I don't have numbers on this, but my guess is that laws that come from ballot initiatives are far more prone to violating constitutional principles than are laws passed through the normal legislative process. One of the major goals behind the federal Constitution (which was mirrored by most state constitutions, prior to the Progressive movement) was to restrain the knee-jerk impulses of the hooting masses-- if anything, initiative-created legislation should get more scrutiny, rather than less. Also, quick-and-dirty Equal Protection lesson: Over the years, courts have worked out ways to think about different ways in which the government does and can discriminate. In US Constitutional law, 3 types of Equal Protection analysis: Strict Scrutiny, Intermediate Scrutiny, and Rational Basis Review. When government classifies people based on lines that courts view as historically "suspect," such as those involving "discrete and insular minorities" with a history of being crapped on by the culture at large (race and ancestry are the prototypical examples), it needs a really really good reason for doing so, and has to be tailored as narrowly as possible to achieve that goal. Intermediate Scrutiny is something of a compromise to cover Gender discrimination, with somewhat weaker justification requirements than SS (it's basically a way for pragmatist "swing" Justices to provide some protection to women who have been discriminated against without royally pissing too many people off by doing things like declaring the male-only draft registration statute unconstitutional). Rational Basis Review applies to all other types of classification (e.g., economic classifications based on income, grants given to dairy farmers but not to soy farmers, etc.). There, the government just needs a rational basis for believing that the classification will accomplish some goal that isn't otherwise illegal. So, yeah, the government classifies people a lot, but that doesn't mean that all the classifications are comparable with one another.

Navy SEALs kick ass.

Waiting to see who opens fire first? It makes sense-- time is on the Navy's side here. Give the pirates a day or two in an extremely hot, poorly ventilated, cramped lifeboat with no toilet and nothing but hardtack and water that's been in ziploc bags for 5 years. Compound that with their total lack of a feasible plan to walk away from this thing alive and free, and their willingness to trade the hostage for their lives will rise with each passing hour.