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Monthly Archives: December 2011

Clashes in Egypt Erupt Again

A year after a street vendor set himself on fire, kicking off the Arab Spring, Egypt and many middle eastern countries see violence.

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Saudi Prince Drops $300 Million in Twitter

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his Kingdom Holding Co. have announced the purchase of a $300 million stake in microblogging company Twitter. The investment “reaffirms our ability to identify opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses,” Prince Alwaleed said in a statement on Monday. The prince, rated by Arabian Business magazine as the Arab world’s richest man, recently said he intended to launch his privately owned Alarab news channel.

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Commentary: An Ancient Snobbery Towards Commerce Remains

(via The Economist)

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ON CHRISTMAS DAY, millions of Britons will gather around the television to watch “Downton Abbey”, a nostalgic soap opera set in the days of country houses and dignified butlers. Back then, gentlemen cultivated the land (and occasionally went to war); they did not run a business, a task far beneath their station. In living memory, some middle-class Britons would not allow delivery boys to come to their front door; the tradesmen’s entrance was at the side.

This sniffy attitude towards commerce was not confined to Britain, nor did it die out with liveried footmen and debutante balls. Aristocrats across Europe were equally suspicious of the nouveaux riches. And their modern descendants, the middle-class intelligentsia who populate the continent’s universities and staff its public sector, have a tendency to despise the businesspeople who generate the wealth needed to fund their way of living. There is great distaste at the idea that political choices should be dictated by “the markets”; investors should just hand over their money and not ask whether it will be paid back.

French politicians will defend to the death the agricultural subsidies granted to their farmers. After all, the farmers comprise la France profonde, the heartland of villages and vineyards. But the same politicians are withering about the idea that David Cameron, the British prime minister, might relegate Britain to the fringes of Europe in order to protect the country’s financial-services industry.

One can see a similar attitude in the debate about Germany’s role in creating the current euro-mess. Who are these Germans, with their work ethic, their competitive industrial sector and their success in exporting to Asia? Other Europeans may regard Germany with grudging admiration, but they see it less as an example to be copied than as a tiresome nag, forever blathering about fiscal probity. Let the Germans soil their hands with trade while the rest of us live off the prosperity it brings.

Perhaps these attitudes go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Their elites had slaves to attend to their needs. Their lives were not idle, but the path to respectability was through military service or farming, rather than trade. However, it was the merchants bringing the grain from north Africa to Rome who kept the empire fed.

These attitudes persisted through the Middle Ages, when moneylending was a despised activity to be left to minorities like the Jews; sovereign risk in those days was the danger that the king would imprison or execute his creditors to avoid repayment. When mankind began to escape the Malthusian trap of subsistence living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the attitude towards the new industries was one of disgust for the “dark, Satanic mills”.

Admittedly, manufacturing is now seen in a rather more positive light. A far smaller part of the economy, it is bathed in nostalgia: real men making real things. Once a job on a production line was a soul-destroying drudge; nowadays that label has fallen on service-sector jobs in call centres and fast-food restaurants.

Apart from technology, the three most successful industries of the past 50 years have been finance, pharmaceuticals and energy. Look at the way those sectors are portrayed in films and in TV dramas and the same attitudes prevail. Financiers are unthinking brutes, whose obsession with numbers is a form of autism. Multinational drug companies are vast conspiracies selling products with fat margins and hiding their deadly side-effects. Energy companies are despoiling the planet.

All these industries are, of course, legitimate subjects for criticism. But such lofty attitudes towards commerce are easy to adopt in a relatively rich society, in which few have to worry where the next meal is coming from. Europeans have had a pretty privileged existence over the past half-century or so, riding on the back of America’s global dominance. But the economic power is shifting towards Asia, a region where many people are prepared to work hard to get ahead and business isn’t always a dirty word.

Eventually, the great estates like Downton Abbey fell into decay. The cost of maintenance soared while death duties depleted the owners’ capital; the servants found better-paying jobs in manufacturing. The aristocrats were forced to discover a head for business, turning their estates into safari parks and their conservatories into tea shops. As their populations age and their relative economic weight declines, Europeans may need a similar change in attitude towards the sordid business of earning a national living.

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Did the Obama Administration Scrub ‘Natural Born’ from Supreme Court Citations?

JustiaGate: ‘Natural Born’ Supreme Court Citations Disappear

By Dianna C. Cotter with L. Donofrio Esq.

Did Justia.com deliberately aid Barack Obama in 2008 by helping to hide the one legal case that might prevent him from legally qualifying for the presidency?

On October 20, 2011, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio accused online legal research behemoth Justia.com of surgically redacting important information from their publication of 25 U.S. Supreme Court opinions which cite Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 decision which arguably contains language that appears to disqualify anyone from presidential eligibility who wasn’t born in the country to parents who were citizens.  According to the decision in Happersett:

At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.  (Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167 [1874])

Justia is a Google Mini-powered website which has singled itself out as one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-search legal sites on the internet.  Other legal resources such as Lexis can cost as much as $5,000 a month for a subscription, and it’s impossible to hyperlink to cases which include copyrighted headnotes and analysis.  This is why powerful law firms such as Perkins Coie (where former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer practices law) have cited Justia’s pages.

The Wayback Machine, run by InternetArchive.Org, is the means by which the changes made at Justia were documented over time.  Among the first responses from Justia regarding this controversy was to block its Supreme Court Server from being viewed by the Wayback Machine.

Click the following link for an image documenting the pattern of changes made to one of those 25 cases, Luria v. U.S., 231 U.S. 9 (1913).  Notice that the case name “Minor v. Happersett” has been removed, minimizing the case searchability.

The cover-up simply reeks.  While Justia owner Tim Stanley told CNET that there were more cases which had also been “mangled,” there is no way to identify how much bogus law was published by Justia over the three-year period in question.  Minor v. Happersett simply disappeared from cases which cited it, minimizing its footprint on the internet at a critical juncture in history — the election of 2008.

Read the rest here.

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