SIVACRACY.NET

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 7:33 PM | Comments (0)

Read Tomasky.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:09 PM | Comments (0)

Mike Madison has the details.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 6:51 PM | Comments (0)

Michael Madison passes on some great news:

Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new Director of the Harvard Law Library (the appointment is actually “Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources“).

Congrats to John for this position!

Michael asks whether this means that other folks without formal library training should be considered for such positions. He writes:

I’m guessing that John Palfrey persuaded Elena Kagan, the HLS Dean, that the substantive and methodological challenges that librarians confront these days are not significantly different than the substantive and methodological challenges that any manager of a complex information environment confronts. Not anyone can manage the Harvard Law Library, but there may no longer be anything distinctively “library-ish” about the position.

Frankly, almost all jobs in a university library demand the skills, knowledge, and networks that a good library school provides.

But director or dean may be the most obvious exception. Harvard University recently appointed historian Bob Darnton as its library dean. And Michigan has former provost Paul Courant -- an economist -- as its library dean. By all accounts both of them have leveraged their vast experience working with and in libraries to improve those already excellent systems. Of course, much of what they have to do is raise money. But they also have to set agendas, make policy, and lobby the administration for resources.

So being a trained librarian is nice, but not necessary.

I would, however, argue that only the exceptional non-librarian should do such a job. Loving libraries and valuing the professional skills of the staff is just as important as any status or knowledge one brings to such a position.

In the case of John Palfrey's new job, he is exceptional. So it's a great move. John has been in the trenches of the open-access movement as much as anyone. He provides energy, knowledge, experience, and contacts that few others could offer.

To turn the question around: Should law schools consider hiring librarians or other non-lawyer academics to be their deans, even if they lack the three-year degree? After all, it's just the management of a complex information and labor environment, right? :)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

Info/Law has the scoop. Here's an excerpt:

I’ve been sitting on this post for what seems like an eternity, but the news embargo has been lifted, and we’re all free to share the fantastic news from Harvard Law School, where the faculty voted unanimously to provide open access to faculty scholarship in an online repository. This makes Harvard the nation’s first law school to make a public commitment to principles of open access (although such policies are well known in the scientific and engineering communities, where they have been driven by astronomical [and still rising] journal subscription fees).

“Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.”

This is great news for anyone with Internet access and a thirst for legal erudition. I hope many law schools follow suit.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:03 PM | Comments (0)

Law Prof John Duffy says so, in this article. For an overview, check out Jim Chen's post at Jurisdynamics.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

EFF reports:

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.

The NSL was served on the Archive -- a digital library recognized by the state of California -- and its attorneys in November of 2007. The letter asked for personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. Kahle, who is also a member of EFF's Board of Directors, decided to fight the NSL because it exceeded the FBI's limited authority to issue such demands to libraries.

Deven Desai has some relevant obseravtions here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)

Those of us who prefer Obama but still like Clinton (or vice versa, hi Catherine!) can take heart from posts like this one from Obama supporter Jason Chervokas and Clinton blogger Tom Watson.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:39 PM | Comments (0)

Anyone know? Some information is here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:13 PM | Comments (0)

It's fun.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:01 PM | Comments (0)

Talking Points Memo:

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)

Humanities Events Institute, Humanities Center, WCAS, Northwestern University:

Date: May 15, 2008
Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: 1881 Sheridan Rd, Harris 107
See the Evanston Campus Map

Title: Social Networks and the Good Society with Cass Sunstein, Siva Vaidhyanathan, & Eszter Hargittai
Description: New forms of web-based communications--most notably social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook--have the potential to transform the sorts of communities we join and how we interact within them. For centuries, people in diverse cultures have debated the type of institutional arrangements most conducive to the "good society" as they have understood this ideal. How are these new virtual communities simultaneously reshaping and challenging our sense of collective identity--both as national and as global citizens? Have they spurred new kinds of democratic debates or have they isolated like-minded individuals from those of different views? Do they give voice to those previously silenced or foster new forms of inequality? Join us as our panelists consider what this debate says about our own ideals of the good society. Cass Sunstein School of Law, University of Chicago, author of Infotopia (2005), Republic.com 2.0 (2007), and Nudge (2008) Siva Vaidhyanathan Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs (2001), The Anarchist in the Library (2004), and Rewiring the Nation (2007) Moderator: Eszter Hargittai School of Communication, Northwestern University, director of the Web Use Project

Contact: Elizabeth Foster
847-491-7946
Audience: Public
Group: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:41 PM | Comments (1)

Crooked Timber:The collapsing American middle class:

Oh, sorry. I did not mean to show respect for academic experts.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)

Sivacracy friend Tim Wu wrote this article in The New Yorker this week about Harry Potter fan culture. Check it out.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

Talking Points Memo:

And today, as Clinton leaves the reality-based community:

On top of all of this, Clinton said she would break up OPEC. Huh? She and what army?

She has definitely lost all credibility.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:08 PM | Comments (0)

AP:

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.

"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,'" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."

Amazing. What has become of my country?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

Clinton Camp Expands Strategic Umbrella Of Stupidity In Their Global War On Economists:

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)

Arianna Huffington: :

Update: Through a spokesperson with the colorful name Tucker Bounds, McCain has denied telling me he didn't vote for Bush in 2000. "It's not true," Bounds told the Washington Post, "and I ask you to consider the source."

My sentiments exactly -- because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true.

He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry's '04 running mate -- then later admitted he had, insisting: "Everybody knows that I had a conversation."

He denied admitting that he didn't know much about economics, even though he'd said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun.

He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record.

He denied that he'd ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He's also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, "consider the source."

Original Post: At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. "I didn't vote for George Bush" the man confessed. "I didn't either," his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush -- both literally and metaphorically -- he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000.

McCain's fall has been Shakespearean -- and really hard to watch for those, like myself, who so admired and even loved him. His nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition.

But a large portion of the electorate hasn't noticed the Shakespearean fall. How else to explain The 28/48 Disconnect -- wherein only a die-hard 28 percent of voters still approve of Bush, but 48 percent say they'd vote for McCain, who is running on the "more of the same" platform?

The thing is, these voters clearly still think of McCain as the maverick of 2000, a straight shooter who would never seek the embrace of a man he couldn't bring himself to vote for, nor accept the regular counsel of Karl Rove, the man behind the vile, race-baiting attacks on him during the 2000 campaign.

And the main reason for The 28/48 Disconnect is the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society. They too continue to party -- and report on McCain -- like it's 1999.

Look at the slack they cut him after his infamous stroll through a Baghdad market was revealed as an utter sham. James Frey was eviscerated for far less. Or the slack they cut him after his repeated confusion of Sunni and Shia. Or the slack they cut him when his promise to run a "respectful" campaign ran aground on his sleazy attempt to connect Barack Obama and Hamas.

Every time McCain screws up, the media jump all over themselves to make it better, as if grandpa had said something embarrassing at the dinner table and it needed to be smoothed over as quickly as possible.

The latest example came late last week when the Straight Talk Express hit an oil slick and skidded off the road. Click here for the blow by blow, but, in short, McCain implied that Iraq is essentially a war for oil, then tried to take it back, explaining that he was actually talking about the first Gulf War, then, when pressed, denied that he was actually talking about the first Gulf War.

And, by and large, the media gave him a pass. Chris Matthews called the original war for oil comment "an astounding development," but most everyone else was too busy picking over the bones of the Wright/Obama carcass to give it much play.

Interestingly, McCain's mental meltdown over the reason we invaded Iraq was prompted by a comment from a McCain supporter who said he hoped a group called "Swift Boats for McCain" would be formed to help McCain in the campaign.

The gentleman needn't worry. The group already exists. It's called "the media." And they are very well-funded, and highly motivated. The Swift Boat Media for McCain are, for instance, going to make sure that we hear a lot more about the nuances of Obama's decision to not wear a flag pin on his lapel than about McCain's ideas on a little thing like the Iraq war.

Witness the reaction to McCain's repeated declarations that he thinks we should be in Iraq for "100 years." The DNC had the gall to use McCain's own words in an ad, causing McCain to flip out: "My friends, it's a direct falsification," he said, "and I'm sorry that political campaigns have to deteriorate in this fashion."

So, to review: using a candidate's own words against him is off limits, but making disgraceful insinuations about Hamas and Obama isn't.

But instead of nailing McCain on the "deterioration" of his ethics -- to say nothing of his logic and reasoning -- the Swift Boat Media dutifully repeated his talking points, as in this AP lede claiming, without reservation, that the DNC ad "falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq."

McCain tries to wriggle away from his "100 year" comment by saying that he wasn't talking about a hundred year war, but a very long term commitment of U.S. troops, like we have in Germany or South Korea. Maybe so, but the last time I looked no one was blowing up American soldiers in Wiesbaden.

The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg, a writer who hasn't drunk the It's Still 2000 Kool-Aid, sums up McCain's Strangelovian "vision": "McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal -- that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay."

The John McCain the media fell in love with in 2000 isn't on the ballot in 2008. And the proof has all but jumped up and grabbed the media by the throat: the ring-kiss of "agents of intolerance" Falwell and Robertson; the decision to make permanent tax cuts he twice voted against, saying he could not "in good conscience support" them; the campaign finance reformer replaced with a candidate whose campaign is run by lobbyists and fueled by loophole rides on his wife's jet; the hard-line stance against torture replaced by a vote allowing waterboarding; the guarded-by-a-battalion stroll through the "safe" neighborhoods of Baghdad; the use of Karl Rove as an advisor... and the embracing of the disastrous policies of a man he so abhorred he would not vote for him.

What will it take for the Swift Boat Media to realize that John McCain jumped the shark a long, long time ago?

Posted by Ted Striphas at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)

Well, I really blew it on Super Tuesday. In a post on February 5th, 2008 over at my blog Differences & Repetitions, I wrote:

Today, one of my students asked me where he could vote in Indiana's Super Tuesday primary. He was despondent when I told him that Indiana doesn't vote until May--about a week before Guam, and long after the Presidential nominations probably will be sewn up.

Who would have predicted back then that the primary season would still be going strong (for Democrats, anyway) come May? I hadn't, clearly, and I pretty much had resigned myself to having essentially no say in who the Democratic nominee will be. I'm thrilled, therefore, about this Tuesday's Indiana primary. I hear it's the first time in 40 years that the state will play a meaningful role in the Presidential nominating process. It'll truly be an historic day.

It's interesting to have experienced two significant Presidential primaries now--one at the front end of the process, the other, at the back end. In 1992, I was living in New Hampshire, home of the nation's first primary. The Democratic field was wide-open, and the state was abuzz with a dozen or so candidates. The late Paul Tsongas was the front-runner at the time, and I saw him deliver a speech at the UNH Memorial Union Building. The smallish room, where I often heard local bands play, was drab and poorly lit. Tsongas looked fine, but he was neither especially well-appointed nor particularly well-groomed. There was a decent turnout for the event, which was simple and straight-forward: he showed up, we clapped, he spoke, we clapped again, and we all went our separate ways. I vaguely recall that Tsongas seemed to have lacked energy. I'm sure there must have been some media presence, but no doubt the reporters were spread thin, given the size of the field that year.

Fast-forward to 2008.

Last Wednesday, I attended a rally for Barack Obama at Indiana University's Assembly Hall. This is the IU basketball stadium. If you know anything about basketball in the state of Indiana, you should have some sense of the size of the event. The venue wasn't exactly filled to capacity, but it was close. Pretty much the only empty seats were in the nosebleed section. The floor was so densely packed that EMTs carted off three or four Obama supporters who, needing fresh air and a reprieve from the heat, had fainted. (In a particularly kind-hearted gesture, Obama tossed his own water bottle into the crowd, to help keep others from passing out.) The whole event was carefully choreographed, all the way down to the homemade looking signs that Obama's campaign staff had provided to the group selected to sit behind him on stage. There were also a capella groups, who entertained us during the two-and-a-half hour lead up to the event, and inflatable beach balls, which the audience knocked around as if were were at an arena rock concert. Oh--and did I mention that among the throng of reporters, there even was a correspondent from The Daily Show? He stood out because of the glittery blue cape he wore over his suit jacket.

As for Obama, he didn't look like someone who's been campaigning for 18 months, that's for sure. He showed up in his shirt-sleeves, and though his appearance may have seemed somewhat relaxed, it nonetheless didn't appear too casual. That is, to me he still read, "politician," and commanded just that sort of attention. His speech may have begun at 9:00 p.m., yet he seemed as fresh and as energetic as if he'd begun speaking at 9:00 a.m. The rally concluded not only with resounding applause, big smiles, and lots of audience glad-handing, but also with Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" blaring over the stadium PA.

It would be easy enough to wax cynical about how spectacular last week's Obama event was, compared to the Tsongas rally I attended 16 years ago. But what, after all, would be the point of that? Indeed, what's remarkable to me is how much more audience minded Presidential campaigns have become over the last two decades. Sure, a lot of it may be gimmicky, but I'm nonetheless stuck by how invested people seem to be in this particular Presidential election. To put it simply, I don't recall people being as interested in a Presidential nomination--or politics writ large--in my entire adult life. This is a welcome breakthrough indeed.

Surely this resurgent interest in politics has everything to do with the many serious issues facing not only the United States but also the world today. But those issues can easily seem abstract absent certain techniques to get folks riled up about them. Though I've not had the good fortune of attending a Clinton rally, that's definitely what I saw at Obama's.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:10 PM | Comments (15)

From a letter from a Democratic fundraiser to Talking Points Memo :

... I agree with your posts from about a month ago about how irrational it is for a Democratic voter supporting the losing primary candidate to defect to McCain in November, since Clinton and Obama are so close on the issues compared to McCain. But I have to say, as someone who was marching in New Hampshire in 1991 for Bill Clinton, who ran the campus Democrats for his '92 campaign, who interned in his White House, who argued against impeachment at every turn, who even defended the pardons, who has been an enormous and unwavering admirer, and who has been disgusted with his own parents for their seemingly irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton, there is something about the way she has run this campaign. From having people on her campaign raise Obama's drug use, to her jumping on the bandwagon for every right-wing cheap shot, to her new populist, "got no truck with economists" stance, its been craven. More craven than I could possibly imagine.

If somehow against all odds she got nominated, I'd vote for her, but I'd do so utterly unconvinced that the quality of her leadership wouldn't bring about disastrous results no less than the disastrous results that McCain's wrongheaded policies and own cravenness would bring about. Yes, her policy positions would be much better than McCain's. But if she's this divisive, this self-preserving, this craven, I think the results can still be horrible, even with policy positions that are much closer to mine. At this point I feel like it would be the hardest vote for a Democrat I'd ever cast.

Now, I'm a Democratic fundraiser. And as detailed above, a very long time Clinton supporter. If I'm this repulsed, if it seems this craven to me, and I'm this pessimistic about her leadership, can I be alone? That doesn't even factor in the breach with younger voters, netroots activists, and African-American voters a Clinton nomination would bring about at this point.

Had to get that off my chest.

I could not agree more. As angry as I have been about Sen. Clinton's Republican tactics of late, I found myself even more disgusted Sunday when she dismissed the judgment of almost every decent economist in the world by sticking with her profoundly cheap gas tax holiday plan.

Clinton no longer believes in facts, expertise, or empiricism? Could she BE more Republican?

Catherine and Ann have written in the comments to previous posts that Obama and perhaps other Democrats have also adopted Karl Rove's playbook this year and in the past. But they offered no examples.

I honestly cannot remember another national Democrat left-baiting and lying like this in the past 20 years. I remember some conservative Democrats doing stuff like this to liberals back when there were conservative Democrats. But that's been a long time. It's 2008. Sen. Clinton spent her life dodging the worst possible lies generated by the right-wing hate machine. And now she is recycling what they come up with to attack Obama. This isn't new? This isn't significant? This isn't disgusting?

Can anyone name one example of Rovian tactics administered by the Obama campaign? Has he linked her to radicals? Has he refused to quash rumors that she is a Muslim? Has he called her an elitist? Has he adopted a profoundly stupid tax cut for the sake of a cheap primary victory and then used it to bludgeon his opponent for not caring about working people?

How about by the Kerry, Edwards, Gore, Bradley, Clinton, Tsongas, Gebhardt, Dukakis, Jackson, Hart, or Mondale campaigns? Did they do anything like this? I can't remember anything like this from any of them. And I have never seen a Democratic primary battle in which so many good Democrats grew so disgusted with a major figure in the party, someone we all respected so much for so long.

Have I missed something?

A year ago I stood ready to defend Sen. Clinton against all critics, as I have since 1992. As late as 2006 I wrote glowing accounts of her service in the Senate and her abilities to stand up to the Republican hate machine with strengths that Gore and Kerry could only dream of. When friends tried to raise tired arguments with me about how she was hated and would be divisive, I punctured those attacks with accounts of her abilities to reach out to all New Yorkers. She showed the best of her talents and judgments in New York while running for Senate and serving with distinction.

She worried me when she voted for the Iraq war. But so did Kerry and Edwards. So I could not really dismiss her because of that (even though the others were wise enough to apologize).

Now she has disappointed me like no other politician has. I take that back. Bill Clinton disappointed me more. But that was another story.

There are plenty of good reasons to support Sen. Clinton for president. And there are plenty of good reasons to question Sen. Obama's policies and preparedness. But she has abandoned all the good reasons and sunk to the lowest depths of political cynicism.

This country deserves so much better than Sen. Clinton is willing to offer.