The Daily Parker

First, on the 45th anniversary of President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law, Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Second, John Hughes died this afternoon. He was 59.

Third, Britain has had unusually squishy summer, which only matters because I'm spending the entire last half of August there. Oh, it also matters to anyone trying to fly out of the U.K.

Leave it to Krugman:

The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.

...[W]hat it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.

That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying that he doesn’t want to understand it.

The article he's reacting to is also worth reading.

The Freakonomics blog interviews author Christopher Steiner about his book $20 Per Gallon:

[At $8 per gallon, predicted in 2019,] our restaurant world won't be terribly different from what we’re used to now. We'll always have Chinese food — or at least the Americanized version of it (batter it, fry it, smother it in sweet and tangy sauce). The tricky part of the question concerns foods like sushi. When gas is $8 per gallon, sushi will still be hanging around. Things get interesting, however, at $18 per gallon.

By the time gas has reached $18 [predicted in 2029-2039], most people will live in places where density dictates that schools be grouped closer together, putting them within an easy walk or a brief bike ride.

Q: What are some things you suggest people enjoy now before they’re gone?

A: Eat sushi. Drive the trans-Canadian highway (in summer). Go to Australia. Go see Tokyo and take notes — life will be more like that and less like, say, Omaha, in the future.

I wish I had time to read this book. Maybe if I get all my Duke reading done before next week. As if.

When Chicago-based Horizon Realty sued a former tenant for defamation because of a Twitter tweet, did anyone tell them how badly this could go for them? Seriously, that's some atrocious lawyering:

"Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay," Amanda Bonnen apparently wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m.

Horizon Group Management, which leased Bonnen's Uptown apartment, wasn't pleased.

Last week the company filed suit against Bonnen in Cook County Circuit Court, claiming Bonnen "maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory Tweet."

...

Regardless of the legal merits of the case, Horizon is "inviting a PR nightmare" and drawing scrutiny well beyond the 17 followers Bonnen's Twitter feed had before it was closed, said Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizen Media Law Project.

(Emphasis mine.)

OK, I think we can draw two important lessons from this:

First, Twitter feeds are public, and anything you tweet (or post on Facebook or on a blog or...you get it) is most likely "publishing" for the purposes of libel and defamation law. Further, if you actually libel or defame someone on a public website, you may be exposing yourself to suit not only where you live and where they live, but in any jurisdiction with a long-arm statute where people can access the Internet. (Lawyers: New York State is one, right?)

Worse, not every jurisdiction in the world follows the U.S. rule that it's up to the person claiming libel to prove both malice and dishonesty. In the U.K., for instance, because they have a "loser-pays" system, it puts the burden of showing that the alleged libel was actually true on the defendant. I commend to your attention the destruction of Oscar Wilde, who lost his libel suit and went to jail.

But that's not the main point. Libel in the U.S. is very hard to prove. Incompetence, however, is quite easy to prove, as when a company sues someone because they think the person made them look bad. The lawsuit makes them look positively reprehensible. Any lawyer who advises a client to proceed with this case is not helping her client. Any client who doesn't listen to his lawyer in this case is plain stupid. Look, the woman had 17 followers before last week; how many people are aware of the case now? 17,000? 17 million? What do you suppose Horizon's reputation looks like now?

More reasonably, it looks like they're suing this woman to punish her, knowing they have no hope of winning. I would not be surprised, if that's the case, if she counter-sues and wins on a claim of abusing the judicial process.

The bottom line: get over it.

Ah. It all makes sense now (via the Daily Dish):

Wasn't yesterday Sarah Palin's last day as a public nuisance official?

Did anyone outside Alaska even notice?

Lots to do for the next, oh, 17 months, so I thought I'd get started. My first Duke box arrived today, containing 6 kg of books, course packets, handouts, and more books, all of which have to be read by August 15th. Fortunately I have a few extra hours each day to do all this (I use them to sleep right now, so they're kind of wasted).

Just a couple news stories of note today:

• President Obama gave an hour-long press conference yesterday in which he spent 50 minutes discussing the single most important domestic-policy issue in the U.S. right now, health care. Since health care policy is complex, full of compromises, difficult to understand, and absolutely imperative to fix, the network talking heads spent all their time today discussing a stupid Cambridge, Mass., police officer who made an ill-advised arrest Monday. This, in turn, is why network talking heads are useless. I can't wait to see Jon Stewart's take.
• Mark Buehrle, who plays for the other Chicago baseball team, threw a perfect game this afternoon, the 2nd club history and only the 16th time ever in the major leagues. (A perfect game is one in which none of the offensive players gets on base by any means.)
• Finally, Gidget the Chihuahua, aka the Taco Bell dog, died yesterday at 15.

Back to work...

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th.

Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky., Paterson, N.J., and Pine Bluff, Ark.

Yesterday I pondered Amazon's deletion of works by Orwell, and asked for confirmation that they had deleted unauthorized (i.e., stolen) copies of the copyrighted material. Amazon last night confirmed this is, in fact, what happened:

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers," he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances," Mr. Herdener said.

Now, I am not one who believes in perpetual copyright. I hate with a passion the Sonny Bono Mickey-Mouse Protection Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, passed (seriously, I am not making this up) in part to protect the Disney rodent for another 20 years on the eve of its lapse into public domain. I think it's unconstitutional, making a mockery of the "limited terms" clause, and on top of that I think it's a shining example of the pernicious effects of money on politics.

However, it's a pretty clear law, and in the U.S. the coypright in Orwell's work will not expire until at least 2021, 70 years after his death. Think about that. If I live another 21 years, which I will do even if it kills me, this blog entry will be protected by copyright until the 22nd century—unless the U.S. Congress comes to its senses and returns us to a copyright law that comports with international standards. Orwell's copyrights have expired in other countries, including Canada, but that introduces a web of competing claims that Amazon doesn't want to touch.

In sum: Amazon deleting books off users' Kindles was stupid, but probably within the terms of service and copyright law. However, had the users backed up the affected devices, and if they'd downloaded copies from Canada, they'd still have the book—a loophole in the TOS that, I'm sure, Amazon's partners will want closed very soon.

A few things of note happened while I was en route to San Francisco yesterday:

• The Cubs continued winning, taking their second in a row after the All-Star break and moving up to second place, though only because they've beaten up the hapless (25-63) Nationals to do it.
• Wisconsin officials announced a deal to buy new 320 km/h train sets for the Chicago to Milwaukee route. Initially plans call for allowing the trains to run at 176 km/h (40% faster than today) while a new, dedicated high-speed line is studied.
• In San Francisco, BART, the light-rail agency, averted a strike that could cripple the area's transportation system. The agency's employees unanimously rejected management's last contract offer and walked away from negotiations, but the two sides have since resumed talks.
• Finally, Walter Cronkite died last night at 92.

And that's the way it is.

Update: One more from my dad: a big weenie drove into a house in Wisconsin yesterday, no doubt because the driver was in mourning.