Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Santorum!

What a day for the guy!  I can't believe what still exists as the #1 hit on Google for his name.  Shouldn't these results trump?

Other news:

1.  In dissent, the 10th Circuit makes fun of the sentencing guidelines by starting the opinion this way:
In the richness of the English language, few things can create as much mischief as
piling prepositional phrase upon prepositional phrase. The child says, “I saw the man on
the hill with the telescope.” Did the child use the telescope to see the man on the hill? Or
did the child see a man — or even a hill — bearing a telescope? A newspaper headline
heralds, “Brothers Reunited after 20 Years on a Roller Coaster.” Did the brothers
recently bump into each other at an amusement park? Or were they the long suffering
experimental subjects of some evil genius?

2.  While the 9th Circuit is deciding Prop 8, the 11th Circuit has this opinion as described by the AP:
The federal appeals court in Atlanta has rejected claims by a former counselor for the CDC who said she was was fired for refusing to advise employees in same-sex relationships because of her religious beliefs.

The court said it accepted Marcia Walden's sincerity that her devout Christian beliefs prohibited her from counseling clients in same-sex relationships. But it found Walden was laid off because her superiors disapproved of the way she referred a lesbian client to another counselor and were concerned how she would handle future referrals.


3.   The FBI isn't going to use GPS devices as much now, but they aren't happy about it or that pesky 4th Amendment:
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said GPS surveillance is the subject of legal analysis within the intelligence community.
"We are now examining … the potential implications for intelligence, foreign or domestic," he told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.
"That reading is of great interest to us. In all of this, we will — we have and will — continue to abide by the Fourth Amendment."
Ray Mey, a former FBI counterterrorism official, said the bureau's decision to limit GPS use, if only temporarily, poses potential risks and staffing problems.
4.  If a judge orders you to disclose a password and you forget, what happens?

A Colorado woman ordered to decrypt her laptop so prosecutors may use the files against her in a criminal case might have forgotten the password, the defendant’s attorney said Monday.
The authorities seized the Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating alleged mortgage fraud. Ruling that the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against compelled self-incrimination would not be breached, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop.
“It’s very possible to forget passwords,” the woman’s attorney, Philip Dubois, said in a telephone interview. “It’s not clear to me she was the one who set up the encryption on this drive. I don’t know if she will be able to decrypt it.”
The decryption case is a complicated one, even if solely analyzed on the underlying Fifth Amendment issue. Such decryption orders are rare, and they have never squarely been addressed by the Supreme Court.

A similar issue was addressed by Judge Cohn, but he determined that the government could not force a suspect to disclose the password. This issue seems likely to go up to the Supremes...





3 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:32 AM

    According a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, a 20 percent plurality of us thought that "Mitt" was his real name and not a glove-like nickname. 18 percent said "Mitchell"; 8 percent, Milton; and only 6 percent correctly said "Willard."

    But the most important stat from the survey is that somehow, in some way, 2 percent of real-life adult voting Americans believe that his name is "Mittens."

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  2. Anonymous4:55 PM

    Yes. Hard to believe but Santorum came from behind.

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  3. Anonymous9:11 AM

    4:55: HA!!!!

    Regarding the Google search results, the more the guy wins, the more those results deserve to remain at the top. He gets a pass when he retires from public life.

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