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February 27, 2007

Feel free to comment on this post

A federal court has upheld the immunity of "bloggers and message board operators" from lawsuits brought against commenters. From ACSBlog:

In Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, a company who had allegedly been victimized by defamatory statements on a message board regarding the value of its stock sued Lycos, which operated the board. The message board allowed users to post comments with minimal moderation, and no one from Lycos was responsible for the allegedly defamatory statements.

Examining the impact of Sec. 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] on this case, the court noted that "Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board," adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an "obvious chilling effect" on speech. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint against Lycos.

I can't imagine that this lawsuit would ever have been successful. However, I was curious about this issue because someone recently e-mailed me claiming he had Googled his own name and came across comments on this blog that were attributed to him. He suggested that he was willing to file a lawsuit "if amends are not made."

I've been inundated with comment spam recently, deleting over 20,000 comments in the last couple of days, so I'm assuming one of the spammers used this guys name. I never found his name in the comments section, so he may have been a con artist himself, hoping that by threatening me with a lawsuit he could convince me to cough up a little money. Either way, it's good to know nothing could come of a lawsuit.

Here's a link to the decision (PDF).

Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 26, 2007

Obama on Iraq, pre-invasion

Both Edwards and Clinton are faced with the difficult task of reconciling their current positions on Iraq with their 2002 votes authorizing the President to go to war. Clinton stands by her vote, Edwards apologizes, but neither was astute enough at the time to foresee the current mess or stand up to political pressures to appear patriotic and tough on national security issues.

How would Obama have voted? Would he have caved to political pressure, like most Democrats, and voted to give Bush the power to invade? Watch the video below for your answer. He understands the importance of aggressively containing Saddam but predicts the current Sunni-Shia conflict and warns against giving the president a carte blanch for preemptive invasion.

Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari at 9:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2007

Thursday numbers

Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari at 9:22 AM | TrackBack

February 21, 2007

Wednesday numbers

Of all the official statistics on terror-related investigations that have been thrown around since 9/11, only 2 out of 26 sets of department data were accurate, according to a Justice Department audit. The rest of the data? It included immigration violations, marriage fraud, and drug trafficking cases merged in with terror data. Some of the cases under the anti-terrorism umbrella included:


Auditors were concerned about the inaccurate numbers because this data helps, in part, to shape the Justice Department's budget. And obviously more terror cases equals more money. Similar problems are being seen in the Department of Homeland Security, which has become a new and effective vehicle for securing pork.

For example, a small town in Washington received a $52,800 grant from Homeland Security to buy 3,200 devices that allow conventional porch lights to flash so the house is easier for emergency personnel to find. That's $52,800 that could be spent in high-risk areas. It could be used to hire more emergency responders in New York, or to aid security efforts in Washington DC. It would even be put to better use helping Boston deal with fanatical Mooninites.

Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari at 9:11 AM | TrackBack

February 1, 2007

Obama, 1995

The following quote is from Barack Obama, not as he makes a run for the Presidency, but from a 1995 profile in the Chicago Reader:


It's time for politicians and other leaders to take the next step and to see voters, residents, or citizens as producers of this change. The thrust of our organizing must be on how to make them productive, how to make them employable, how to build our human capital, how to create businesses, institutions, banks, safe public spaces--the whole agenda of creating productive communities.

The right wing talks about this but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods, that's what has always happened. Our goal must be to help people get a sense of building something larger.

As Mark Schmitt at Tapped notes, the 1995 Obama doesn't sound much different than he does today. Watch his announcement to form a presidential exploratory committee and you'll notice similar themes of grassroots advocacy. At his core, that's what Obama is, a community organizer. He gave up a well-paying job as a financial writer to move to Chicago and work as a community organizer for $1,000 a month. After law school he sacrificed an almost certain Supreme Court clerkship to return to Chicago and organize at the grassroots level.

So how would this translate into an Obama presidency? It's hard to say if his grassroots mindset will translate into feasible policy on a much grander, federal level. Certainly his experience with the federal government in the Senate will help him merge the two worlds. The question remains, is only four years of experience enough time to prepare him for this?

The 1995 article gives a brief glimpse of how a President Obama views the duties of an elected official:

What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.

Will voters buy the idea of a president as an organizer, teacher, and advocate? Or will they prefer to elect another "Decider?"

Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari at 9:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack