Category: Outside the Beltway

Do They Still Teach Presumption Of Innocence In Law Schools, @DMataconis?

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by Smitty

Ol’ Doug:

More importantly, though, I think it’s a mistake to say that the protections of the 5th Amendment, or to broaden the argument any of the protections granted to actual and potential criminal defendants under the 4th, 6th, and 7th Amendments as well, were primarily designed to protect the innocent.

I realize that I’m unfit to question your JD-ness, but didn’t Presumption of Innocence kind of inform Law as we (at least once) knew it?

On a superficial level, that simply isn’t supported by the text of the Amendments themselves, which apply to everyone in all situations.

So, the lack of enumeration of every contextual assertion informing the Bill of Rights supports pretending that the first 10 Amendments lack any? I forget where in Amar’s book, but he mentions the sequence of the Amendments, itself, as significant. They are all addenda to specific articles in the Constitution proper, and could have been physically interwoven with the document, just as they are logically. In summary, the Bill of Rights is a gripe list about what happens when power is concentrated excessively. Not dissimilar from our current situation.

Indeed, the 5th Amendment’s right against self-incrimination doesn’t require that there actually be a pending criminal case or investigation, or that the testimony in question take place in a court proceeding connected with criminal charges. As long as their is a possibility that what someone says in a public forum, be it a criminal investigation or a deposition during the course of a civil trial, could potentially used to bring charges against them and prosecute them for a crime then the person being questioned has the right to invoke their rights under the Amendment. It’s not a question of being “guilty” or “innocent,” it’s that the Amendment exists to protect individuals from the state compelling them to testify in any situation, including a Congressional Committee hearing.

OK, so “the government can’t beat it out of you” has evolved into “you don’t have to play”. Right.

I guess that’s the point of a jury of the peers, then: to listen to all of the back-and-forth and render a conclusion. Pleading the 5th on a seemingly trivial issue is going to come across as: “Guilty”.

One can be an IRS apologist to the extent that they have a task that is impossible to accomplish defect-free at the outset, and then point out that there has never been a reasonable reform mechanism.

I understand Lois has pled the Fifth. I even believe she believes she’s innocent, as much as #OccupyResoluteDesk believes he’s Christian. Once accepts these assertions at face value.

The danger to the Fifth Amendment and its protections is a lack of fundamental reform. Lois, herself, is a footnote, and resisting the urge to personalize all this, tempting though it be, is paramount. Alinskyism is false.

‘You Pretty Much Call People on the Phone When You Don’t Understand Their E-Mail’

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The quote is from a New York Times story about the decreasing use of the telephone for, y’know, talking:

“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.” . . .
When Matthew Ballast, an executive director for publicity at Grand Central Publishing, began working in book publicity 12 years ago, he would go down his list of people to cold call, then follow up two or three times, also by phone. “I remember five years ago, I had a pad with a list of calls I had to return,” he said. Now, he talks by phone two or three times a day. ”You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” he said. . . .

As James Joyner says, “Even though everyone above the age of 6 seems to carry a phone around with them experts say that the phone call is a relic of the past.”

This is especially true for younger people (who constantly text, rather than talk) and people with 4G devices who use their Blackberry or iPhone to check e-mail from the time they wake up in the morning until they fall asleep at night. You see these people all the time in Washington: Dinners and receptions are less social because everybody is habitually checking messages.

Adler’s comment about his mother’s “chitty-chat” phone calls is on-point: Retirees have more time for talking on the phone, and women in general seem to enjoy talking on the phone than do men. (My wife has lonnnggg conversations with her sister, etc.) But the phone call as a means of business communication seems to be lapsing into disuse.

That people now view e-mail as the essential mode of communication is disturbing to me because I sometimes go an entire day without checking my e-mail. One of Jerry Wilson’s rules at Goldfish & Clowns is “Answer your e-mail every time all the time.”

But I usually get hundreds of e-mails a day. If I attempted to answer every one, I’d spend all day answering e-mail.

In an age of digital information overload, we are losing the human touch — and even, now, the human voice.

Has Alex Knapp Proven Anything?

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“Contrary to my colleague Doug’s description of the Federal government as existing primarily to redistribute wealth, there is actually very little wealth re-distribution in the United States.”
— Alex Knapp, Outside the Beltway

It is not my habit to defend Doug Mataconis, as he and I very often disagree about politics. But Doug’s post, “The U.S. Government Exists Primarily To Write Checks And Redistribute Wealth,” based on an analysis of Office of Management and Budget data by John Merline, was perfectly reasonable. And so the response by his Outside the Beltway colleague Alex Knapp drew my attention.

Knapp employs a chart based on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office:

What this shows is that the fifth quintile (top 20%) of income-earners pay nearly 70% of federal taxes, while earning about 55% of all pre-tax income. Because they also earn about 51% of after-tax income — a relatively small differential between their pre- and post-tax incomes — Knapp says, “See? No redistribution!”

Knapp’s rather limited “proof,” however, overlooks many possible objections. What is a minor cost to a wealthy person, for example, may be a bonanza for a poor person. Bill Gates’s fortune has been recently estimated at $54 billion. If I could get my hands on just one-tenth of one percent of that sum, I’d be a multimillionaire.

Thus, the 4 percent net loss of income share experienced by the top quintile (as estimated by the CBO) due to federal taxation may seem a minor redistribution to them, or to Knapp, and yet it would be a substantial gift if it were lavished directly on those in the bottom quintile — but it most certainly is not. Continue reading Has Alex Knapp Proven Anything? →

Stupid Google Tricks

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“Being ranked in the top 5 for something on Google and being ranked 25th or 125th can be the difference between selling your crappy website to AOL for $315 million and going out of business.”
— James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

The fact that a major corporation like J.C. Penney was willing to pay money for Web geeks to make sure they were the top Google result for phrases like “grommet top curtains” ought to tell you how important the Internet has become to commerce. Reverse-engineering the Google algorithm is the sort of knowledge-is-power formula that any student of human nature might have predicted would swiftly be hijacked to serve selfish and/or malevolent purposes.

The whole point of “How to Get a Million Hits” was to demonstrate that blogging isn’t rocket science, and to share a few simple ideas from my Underpants Gnome Theory of how it works.

That’s why, as Rule 3, I recommended Memeorandum as a source for political blog fodder. (Which is where I found Joyner’s post.) Memeorandum is an exceptional tool if the question you’re trying to answer is, “What are other bloggers are blogging about?”

They’ve got an algorithm over there, and one of the ways you make it onto the Memeorandum aggregation is by acknowledging them as a source. Because their choices are determined by an algorithm, you’re not at the mercy of some human “decided” who might play favorites.

You can use Memeorandum as a guide to where the blog conversation is heading, and also to find other bloggers you might want to link and quote. A relatively small group of bloggers who are (a) all getting blog fodder from a common source, (b) frequently linking to each other, and (c) collectively directing a fair amount of traffic to Memeorandum, can thereby become a sort of “center of gravity” in the blogosphere.

Jimmie Bise once dubbed this concept The Million Hit Squad. It is sort of a “gaming the algorithm” trick, except that it isn’t a secret and is intended to produce a kind of win-win result: Memeorandum gets more traffic, and the bloggers who use The Rules get more linkage, because they are engaged in mutually aggregating each other’s commentary. If enough bloggers follow that method, it would also give conservative sites more weight in the Memeorandum algorithm which currently tends to show more Left-leaning blogs (and their pet topics), for reasons that need not be discussed here.

Of course, to succeed with that concept, you still have to bring some element of skill and knowledge to the ‘sphere, and be able to contribute new information to the conversation. Here I would recommend a simple idea: Use Google News searches to expand your aggregation.

For example, I used Google News to find this relevant New York Times story from last week:

[A]n art and science at which The Huffington Post excels [is] search engine optimization, or S.E.O. The term covers a wide range of behind-the-scenes tactics for getting search engine users to visit a Web site, like choosing story topics based on popular searches.
Because Google is many Internet users’ front door to the Web, S.E.O. has become an obsession for many Web publishers, and successful ones use the strategies to varying degrees. But as newspapers, magazines, blogs and online-only news sites increasingly compete for readers, they are making it more of a priority than ever and adopting new techniques, like trying to maximize pass-alongs on social networks.

That article offers a revealing insight into how people who are in the business of generating page-views — whose jobs are dependent on success in that endeavor — do what they do. Even if you’re a dinky new blogger nobody ever heard of, you can adapt such advanced methods to a small scale.

Note that I have now, in a single post, combined multiple elements:

  1. James Joyner’s quote.
  2. Link to the article Joyner was commenting on.
  3. Link to Memeorandum.
  4. Link to a related news article.
  5. My own original contributions to the conversation.

It’s the value-added concept of customer service, applied to New Media. And it’s not rocket science. You can become your own traffic-enhancement expert.