Futures and Options

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in the case of Doe No. 1, et al., v. Reed, et al. In what is something of a rare position for me, I come into this hoping that the Court will affirm the Ninth Circuit’s decision.  While I am often not a particular fan of the Ninth Circuit, and while I tend to agree with Mr. Volokh’s opinion that the Ninth Circuit made the right decision for not entirely the right reasons, in this particular case I can see legitimate rationale behind the decision.  The Ninth Circuit seems to believe that the anonymity of petition signers is at least potentially mandated by the First Amendment in certain circumstances but in the case of the WA State petition the state has sufficiently compelling reasons to limit the supposed First Amendment right to anonymity.

My own interpretation mirrors Mr. Volokh’s; I do not believe that there is any situation in which the First Amendment protects the anonymity of petition signers.  It is my hope that the Supreme Court with affirm the Ninth Circuit’s decision with clarification on the reasoning.  Even if there is no clarification of reasoning, however, a simple affirmation would still be a defensible position in my mind.

Told you I’d continue it someday.

This is not so much a “thing” in the sense of a named event or entity, but it’s still a situation that baffles me:

For the past several years, I have been receiving E-mails intended for someone else due to a similarity in our addresses.  Mildly annoying because the majority of these misdirected E-mails have been the result of this other person mis-typing her own E-mail into form subscriptions or contact lists, so it’s not like strangers are making the typos; she should know her own E-mail address.  Yesterday she enrolled in online banking through Wachovia.  Using my E-mail address.  Ponder the consequences of that for a moment.

All of that, however, is mere background to the upcoming absolutely stunningly illogical event that is about to occur.

Being a (relatively) nice guy, I forward the welcome message to Wachovia’s customer service department notifying them that I did not have an account with their company and that I should not be receiving information about someone else’s bank accounts.  (It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing for strangers to receive each other’s banking information.)  I received the following response from Wachovia:

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

That’s right.  Because I was not a customer, they refused to stop sending me E-mails containing someone else’s account information.

In the meantime, while waiting for their reply, I received a “daily balance notification” letting me know how much money was in an account that didn’t belong to me.

I notified Wachovia again.  Same response.

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

After receiving several more E-mails from Wachovia containing information about an account that did not belong to me (and notifying Wachovia each time), I finally received a reply from a higher-level customer service manager.

I have contacted the customer who had your e-mail address on file. I have found that there was a typo in the e-mail address. I have taken care of this issue.

A few minutes later, I received an E-mail from Wachovia’s automated online banking system:

Our records indicate that you recently added or made a change to one of your email address(es). This notification is to confirm that you initiated this change.

All it took was repeated pushing on my end to get them to correct the issue.  If I had given up after the first response, I would still be receiving information about an account which I do not own.

It should not take repeated notifications on my part for a bank to stop sending me the account information for a stranger.  They should have suspended the account’s automated E-mails immediately after my initial notification to them and then contacted the account holder about the mix-up rather than doing nothing until I harassed them enough to get it kicked up to an upper-level representative.

Wachovia, I have a suggestion for a new slogan:

Online banking security; we’re doing it wrong.

Haven’t had a chance to read through the full ruling yet, but so far this one looks like a win for rationality.  If you’re not familiar with the case, George Will provided an excellent summary about two months ago.

I started keeping track of the raw numerical data for my travels and so far this year in numbers is either impressive or depressing depending on how one looks at it.  Numbers are slightly projected through the end of this month to capture the entire first 6 months of 2009:

• Days in year to date:  181
• Days on the road:  97 (53.59%)
• Airline Miles Earned:  76,932
• Expenses (incl. hotel/airfare):  $20,488.83
• Projects worked on:  3

H/T to Consultant Ninja for giving me the idea to track this.

H/T to Discriminations for bringing this to my attention.

I already explored some reasons for criticizing Sotomayor in a previous post, but it looks like we have a couple more gems from from someone who is nominated for one of the most mentally-demanding positions in the world.  In describing her experiences in college, Sotomayor said in a 1996 speech at Princeton:

When my first mid-term paper came back to me my first semester, I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish, we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition, a cotton shirt in Spanish is a shirt of cotton, una camisa de agodon [sic], no agondon [sic] camisa.

Now, I’ll admit to not knowing enough Spanish to even ask where the bathroom is, but I still know enough to understand that even when the construction is, “a shirt of cotton”, the word “cotton” remains an adjective, whether in English or in Spanish.  To be sure, the point which Sotomayor is attempting to make, that differences in standard grammatical construction between two languages represent additional challenges beyond mere vocabulary for people who learn a second language, remains reasonably valid.  However, Sotomayor’s method of expressing this point can only be described, charitably, as “inartful”.

In a delightful case of sabotaging her own point, Sotomayor had earlier said:

Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Personally, I bristle when someone mangles a common idiom.  Furthermore, style guides frequently caution against being excessively prescriptive with regard to split infinitives as there are often cases where a split infinitive is superior, both in clarity and grace, to it’s ostensibly grammatical counterpart.  As if that weren’t enough, her distaste for the passive voice is likewise misplaced; in legal or technical writing it is often desirable, if not strictly “necessary”, to omit reference to an agent that is performing the described action.

As before, the point which Sotomayor was attempting to make stands reasonably valid.  Clear and concise writing (which is generally achieved through mindful consideration of proper grammatical style) is vitally important to effective communication.  However, we once again see an example of how Sotomayor’s own writing falls short of being clear and effective.

I recognize that grammatical errors are part and parcel to the human condition and I do not expect that anyone will always be completely without error in his or her speech; however, the examples above are such as should have been well proofed and I do not believe it to be at all unreasonable to expect that Sotomayor would understand that Spanish does indeed have adjectives and that the proper English idiom is “bristle”, not “blister”.  A person who is being considered for a seat on the US Supreme Court simply should not produce writing that suffers from such elemental flaws.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!

Jolted by cost estimates as high as $1.6 trillion, Senate Democrats agreed Tuesday to scale back planned subsidies for the uninsured and sought concessions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars from private industry to defray the cost of sweeping health care legislation.

Apparently Senate Democrats have forgotten that goods and services actually have to be paid for.  They must have also missed the fact that the country is already bleeding money with record deficits.

Then again, given the ratio of what is paid for to what is going to be financed through deficit spending, maybe they’ve simply decided to exercise the same level of fiscal restraint as their constituents did before this whole mess started.

Several officials said the Congressional Budget Office had issued a cost estimate of $1.6 trillion, with only about $560 billion paid for.

Just put that $1.1 trillion on the credit card and worry about it later.  What’s the worst that could happen?

Judge Sotomayor has adequate credentials to be a Supreme Court justice. What saddens me about her nomination – even more than the impending retrenchment of liberal, living constitutionalist philosophy, which was fully expected – is that it confirms that blatant identity politics are still alive and well. The only reason she was considered for the job (and the real reason she will be confirmed) is because she is a Hispanic woman. Obama said as much when he introduced her as his nominee. Having a Hispanic woman on the court is all well and good, but I cannot abide placing ethnic identity above pure legal ability when filling a position of this importance.  And there were two other potential nominees, Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, who possess legal minds that are arguably brilliant (even if they are a little too liberal for my taste).   It is a shame that such extraordinarily qualified legal thinkers would lose out to a competent but average judge because of ethnicity.

You know, I can understand wanting to have legislatures that are reasonably representative of the ethnic makeup of the populations they represent. Legislatures are supposed to be in touch with and reflect the views of the people they represent. But judges are not. Judges should, indeed must be blind to the race and gender and background and wealth of the litigants before them. And of course a judge’s own race, gender, background, and wealth, should have no bearing on her approach to a case, an apparently inarguable proposition that neither Obama nor Sotomayor seems to endorse.

Just in case the mortgage bailouts haven’t effectively taught the lesson that a person’s right to have luxuries is in no way connected to his or her ability to pay for those luxuries, Phizer has announced a program that will allow people who lose their jobs to continue receiving Viagra for no charge.

Monique Stuart says it best:

What a treat for the wives! Because there’s nothing more sexy than an unemployed husband who has been lounging on the couch all day.

Think that you actually own the property you have a title to?  Well, think again.  The National Parks Service has just announced that they will begin condemning land surrounding the Flight 93 crash site in order to meet their “need” for a 2,200 acre memorial site.  2,200 acres.  For a single memorial.  As a comparison, the National Mall covers less than 310 acres, and contains the following:

• The Washington Monument
• The National Museum of American History
• The National Museum of Natural History
• The National Museum of Art Sculpture Gallery
• The National Gallery of Art
• The United States Capitol Building
• The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial
• The National Botanic Garden
• The National Museum of the American Indian
• The National Air and Space Museum
• The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• The Arts and Industries Building
• The Smithsonian Institution Building
• The Freer Gallery of Art
• The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
• The National Museum of African Art
• The National World War II Memorial
• The Lincoln Memorial

Mount Rushmore, gigantic faces carved into the side of a mountain, covers less than 1,280 acres.  But the National Parks Service has determined that the Flight 93 memorial requires 2,200 acres or roughly the same total amount of land as the city in which I grew up; a city of nearly 5,000 people.  I understand the desire to have a memorial at the Flight 93 crash site.  I even think that it’s a good idea.  But 2,200 acres is clearly ridiculous.

Even ignoring the acreage excess, the fact that the National Parks Service is reneging on earlier promises not to use eminent domain is unconscionable.  This is land that people have had in their families for generations.  Land whose confiscation would require, in some cases, the current owner to relocate his business, at great expense.  All because the National Parks Service cannot be satisfied with “only” 1,700 acres (more acreage already than the National Mall and Mount Rushmore combined).

We can all agree that the passengers on Flight 93 were indeed heroes, but these passengers were acting to defend the individual freedom for which this country stands.  Using the government to forcibly confiscate individual property is no way to honor the sacrifice that they made.

Maine’s governor has signed a bill legalizing homosexual marriage.  Notably, the bill includes language that explicitly protects the rights of religious institutions to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples:

3.  Affirmation of religious freedom.   This Part does not authorize any court or other state or local governmental body, entity, agency or commission to compel, prevent or interfere in any way with any religious institution’s religious doctrine, policy, teaching or solemnization of marriage within that particular religious faith’s tradition as guaranteed by the Maine Constitution, Article 1, Section 3 or the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. A person authorized to join persons in marriage and who fails or refuses to join persons in marriage is not subject to any fine or other penalty for such failure or refusal.

This is an excellent compromise as it grants homosexuals full access to the secular institution of marriage (with all applicable rights and responsibilities) while simultaneously protecting the freedom of religious groups to administer (or refuse to administer) the sacraments as they see fit.

People, this is how it should work.  No court-forced decisions.  Protection of religious freedom included with a change in secular policy.  If only the remainder of the states were this intelligent.

(In case anyone wants to see the text of the bill, it is available here.)