I did a podcast for the Federalist Society on the Exxon v. Baker oral argument. I was also quoted in Wednesday's Christian Science Monitor about the case.

Juan Cole: "Hussein ... is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name."

However, Cole also says that mentioning Barack Obama's middle name is "race baiting." So he has his bases covered.

No comment from the candidates of 20 years ago whose middle names I regularly heard from Democrats, George Herbert Walker Bush and J. Danforth Quayle.

Barack H. Obama has the same middle initial as Jesus H. Christ. Coincidence? Not according to Tom Toles, whose cartoon complains that the media is too hard on BHO.

No, my Wikipedia page doesn't know something you don't. It's just wrong.

The original post is up to 585 comments (an Above the Law record, I'm told), and a new post with a more sophisticated spreadsheet that permits non-New Yorkers to figure out the impact of the Obama tax hikes is now up at Above the Law with 162+ comments.

Esquiver tells me I got a link from Andrew Sullivan as well, which explains the new deluge of comments at ATL. Also Flopping Aces, MD Daily Record, Turkewitz.

Still in development: software tricking your iPhone's vibrator to give tactile feedback while you type.

When I was at I&M, one of the things I did as head of the Associates Committee was generate spreadsheets to help associates predict tax liability and avoid tax penalties from what was then an arcane and convoluted profit-sharing salary structure where about half our compensation was dumped into our laps at the end of the fourth quarter without good knowledge of how much it was going to be.

This came in handy as I tested, out of curiosity, a spreadsheet on the tax consequences of the Obama tax plan on Slim's wages. And once I had solved that problem (answer: huge), how could I resist sharing it with the latest heir to the old Greedy Associates boards, Above the Law? The difference is, of course, that David Lat's blog gets a lot more traffic than GA boards ever did, so it not only generated a firestorm there, but got picked up by Instapundit, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Say Anything, Modulator, and and many others, including, of course, the previous heir to GA, XOXOHTH.

I expected negative reaction (lawyers are overwhelmingly liberal, and overwhelmingly Obama supporters), so I made clear that this was just one dimension of a larger electoral question. And I expected people to argue that it was worth tens of thousands of dollars a year to have Obama as president. What I didn't expect were so many people claiming that Obama wasn't actually going to raise taxes, when he plainly said he would. While Obama has since muddied the water as to specifics (sometimes saying he would "consider" a doughnut-hole), he has refused to rule out the drastic plan he originally suggested. It would be really easy for Obama to promise to include a "doughnut hole" or to not eliminate the SS-tax cap. He certainly hasn't been afraid to promise drastically expensive programs of new spending or even tax giveaways to large swaths of the population who aren't paying much tax now. But when it comes to this, he's suddenly vague. And the only reason a politician acts that way is because he supports the more drastic, politically unpopular plan but doesn't want to get tagged with it before the election, and will say after the election "I only said I would 'consider' a doughnut-hole."

Via the other Craig Newmark:

• The price of your airline ticket already reflects the expected cost of government regulation Rule 240, so you might as well learn how to take advantage of it.



• TripIt is indeed pretty damn awesome. Just forward your travel confirmation emails, and its AI automatically generates itineraries for you, no questions asked.



• And via Slim: Everyone already knows about Kayak, right? Better for cars and flights (and domestic ones) than hotels.

Lori Gottlieb takes out one of the shoddier Huffington Post critiques, though she probably should have read Fussell on responding to critics first. No response to Jezebel as yet.

...and Slim can verify, that the minute the word "Atonement" was out of Jon Stewart's mouth, I turned to her and said "Here comes the Yom Kippur joke."

My brother is liveblogging, with all the obscure Red Buttons and Bruce Vilanch jokes you could ever want.

Do not puke in the cab of the "Mad DC Cabbie." (link contains raw language)

Only five out of 43 presidents have brown eyes. (via KN)

I'm very glad I started watching House this season, and then caught up through the DVDs; if I had started any other time, I would have been utterly fed up with the low quality of the episodes in the middle of Season 3, but knowing how good the Season 4 stuff is, I'm sticking with it.

"Control Tower" column in The Stranger (Seattle):

Marriage-wise, [Lori] Gottlieb has shot herself in the foot with this piece. No one is going to marry her after reading her litany of bitterness and desperation. How could you possibly feel loved by her? And besides, even if she convinced you—somehow—that she truly loved you, everyone at your wedding would be thinking, "So, this is the loser she settled for, huh?"

I'm not sure that's right; certainly Gottlieb has closed the door for herself with a large number of men, but, if Gottlieb is sincere in her new utility curve, there's a different set of men who would find the businesslike approach Gottlieb suggests attractive. Of course, the premise is questionable; this is a pessimistic woman for whom the grass is always greener on the other side, and once she finds her Mr. Good-Enough, I strongly suspect we'll be seeing a mea culpa essay in the February 2014 Atlantic about Gottlieb's divorce from him.

Update: I don't think "sincere" is the right word above, because I think Gottlieb is at least superficially sincere and certainly not deliberately lying about her preferences. The proper phrase is perhaps "accurately self-aware," as I suspect she is confusing her preferences with her meta-preferences, i.e., her preferences about preferences.

Writing about John Edwards's trial record.

Erin Brockovich, the real-life character who brings fictional lawsuits, thinks my criticism of her trolling for clients in Avandia lawsuits is "shameful". She should know from shameless.

I was very amused by Brockovich's remark "It is no coincidence that thousands on Avandia now have heart attacks." Really? Thousands of people who saw Erin Brockovich in the theaters have had heart attacks, and many others have had strokes. Some even contracted cancer! Coincidence, or has Ms. Brockovich put movie royalties ahead of safety? (x-posted from Overlawyered)

Though I am on the FTC "Do Not Call" list, this group called me at 6:06 PM on February 18 offering to "lower my interest rate" on my credit cards. But they didn't know my name, so they're clearly just autodialing everyone without regard.

The people who have acutally purchased something from PDM don't seem too happy, either. The problem with consumer class action law, however, is that it is used to blackmail legitimate businesses with deep pockets, rather than protect consumers from these sort of illegitimate businesses.

The call I got was from 231-224-2058, which leads to a recording.

The caller said he was in Bedford, Texas, which would correspond to the Google address for the place:

3307 Huntington Dr
Colleyville, TX 76034
(817) 354-5478

Web research shows a number of 888-288-8013 if you wish to complain with calling long-distance.

Any Virginia attorneys out there who want to bring an action on my behalf for $1500 plus attorneys' fees under the Virginia Telephone Privacy Protection Act, drop me a note.

In the American:

Neumann and Kenny came up with a strategy to capture the value in this pattern. Consider the day on which [Jim] Cramer recommends Stock A (Wednesday in the example above) as Day 0. The authors say you should sell Stock A short when it opens on Day 1 and cover your short at the closing bell on Day 1. [...]

Following such a strategy for 127 recommendations studied between July 27, 2005, and September 9, 2005, would have produced a profit of $861.32 on an investment of $10,000. That’s an 8.6 percent gain in just six weeks, which, when annualized, comes to about 70 percent. The gain does not include trans­action costs.

Yeah, not including transactions costs makes a big difference. Add in $10/trade for 254 trades, and that is a $1700 loss on an investment of $10,000. And that is before one accounts for the bid-ask spread.

Better answer: if Jim Cramer recommends a stock you want to buy, wait until Day 2 to buy it so the market shakes off the artificial boost he gives it at the beginning of Day 1. No promises that is a winning strategy either.

Via RL on Facebook, a 21st-century version of Duck Amuck.

Via MM, another complaint about King of Kong's Moore-esque editing.

I'm indirectly quoted in the Politico today, at the cost of a pronoun reference error; the original quote is in Mother Jones, and the other half of it can be found at Point of Law.

"The ancient Illuminati built a pillar where the circumference divided by the diameter correctly predicted pi out to three or four digits. This is a clear sine of alien intelligence."

-- me, April 1, 1994

Huckabee on yesterday's results: "While people in Washington and insiders continue to maybe gravitate to the senator's campaign, people across America are gravitating to our campaign and realizing there is a choice."

This surprised me: I didn't think that Huckabee believed in gravity, since it is just a theory that should only be taught in conjunction with intelligent falling so students can decide for themselves.

Whenever I see a post like this, it's a sign that we're about to get rid of six shelf-feet of books.

LOLCat translation of the Bible, e.g., Job 1:7-8:

Ceiling Cat axt Saitin, "Wher wuz u?" Saitin saied "Oh, hai. I'z wuz in ur earth, wawking up and down uponz it." Teh Ceiling Cat sayd "Has u seen mai servnt Job? He can has cheezburger cuz he laiks me."

Songerize will search the web for any song and play it. Not 100% perfect (for example, it often plucks bootlegged live versions of poor quality, and a misspelling will often prevent the song from being found), but interesting.

You can no longer shake it like a Polaroid picture.

Interesting that Lori Gottlieb has effectively adopted the Tyler Cowen position, a huge shift from where she was ten years ago. (Update: Jonathan Last and Jezebel are not impressed.)

"The woman told police she met Goldstein after posting a classified ad selling a baby stroller on a Web site." The alleged victim comments and gets into a spat with other commenters on the Times-Picayune website, and I hope that link remains live for the remainder of the history of the Internet. A shanda; a shanda.

As much as 75% off, sez a blog.

An ancient Usenet lightbulb joke about how much irrational hatred I inspired for debunking Internet conspiracy-theorists of the early 1990s has generated a zoominfo page about a "Ted Frank, member, CFR." (See #3 for the fullest punchline.) Hee. (Elsewhere on Zoominfo, I get a roman numeral for some reason.)

Isn't it remarkable how Michael Kamen's remix of "Brazil" is still used in several movie ads every year more than twenty years since he composed the score? It's a shame, because it turns that spectacular Terry Gilliam tracking shot in the Ministry of Information (okay, not really a tracking shot, because there are two or three cuts in there to hide how small the set was) into a cliche because we're so sick of the music.

I thought they stopped making videos this elaborate back when MTV stopped showing music videos, but who am I to complain?

Once upon a time, there was a court jester who dabbled in logic.

The jester presented the king with two boxes. Upon the first box was inscribed:

"Either this box contains an angry frog, or the box with a false inscription contains an angry frog, but not both."

On the second box was inscribed:

"Either this box contains gold and the box with a false inscription contains an angry frog, or this box contains an angry frog and the box with a true inscription contains gold."

And the jester said to the king: "One box contains an angry frog, the other box gold; and one, and only one, of the inscriptions is true."

The king opened the wrong box, and was savaged by an angry frog.

"You see," the jester said, "let us hypothesize that the first inscription is the true one. Then suppose the first box contains gold. Then the other box would have an angry frog, while the box with a true inscription would contain gold, which would make the second statement true as well. Now hypothesize that the first inscription is false, and that the first box contains gold. Then the second inscription would be -"

The king ordered the jester thrown in the dungeons.

A day later, the jester was brought before the king in chains, and shown two boxes.

"One box contains a key," said the king, "to unlock your chains; and if you find the key you are free. But the other box contains a dagger for your heart, if you fail."

And the first box was inscribed:

"Either both inscriptions are true, or both inscriptions are false."

And the second box was inscribed:

"This box contains the key."

The jester reasoned thusly: "Suppose the first inscription is true. Then the second inscription must also be true. Now suppose the first inscription is false. Then again the second inscription must be true. So the second box must contain the key, if the first inscription is true, and also if the first inscription is false. Therefore, the second box must logically contain the key."

The jester opened the second box, and found a dagger.

"How?!" cried the jester in horror, as he was dragged away. "It's logically impossible!"

"It is entirely possible," replied the king. "I merely wrote those inscriptions on two boxes, and then I put the dagger in the second one."

(Stolen from)

I don't know about the perjury charges, but I'd be all for impeaching a mayor that uses "LOL" three times in a single text message.

(In the last 60 days, anyway.)