Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.

Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws.

the fact that he was wrong doesn't make his conduct lawful. Ignorance of the law is no defense.

I don't think the intent is to make the promise binding on this case. I think the intent is to make Obama look like a hypocrite in front of the whole world. The problem isn't with this judge, it's with the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the wholesale criminality of their predecessors. People can try to change that policy by winning lawsuits, or they can try to change it by shaming Obama into actually sacking up and doing something about it. This case just presents a nice opportunity to do both at the same time.

Since I wrote the summary, the EFF has a new page up with some analysis and commentary.

the IG report does confirm that the warrantless surveillance involved "unprecedented collection activities," beyond the surveillance program of Al-Qaeda touted by President Bush. The report described the scope of the additional spying only as "Other Intelligence Activities." Collectively, the so-called terrorist surveillance program and the Other Intelligence Activities were referred to as the "President's Surveillance Program." The report does not use the program's code name, Stellar Wind, which remains classified. Given the scope of the Nixon Administration's illegal spying (which led to FISA in the first place), it is sobering to consider that the Other Intelligence Activities were unprecedented.
[...]

The report damns the effectiveness of the program with faint praise. [...]

The IG report provided a dramatic summary of the dispute in March 2004, when dozens of Bush Administration officials nearly resigned in protest over the Other Intelligence Activities. The Department of Justice could find no legal support for these activities, and found that the factual basis for prior legal opinions was substantially incorrect. [emphasis mine]

that last bit is referring to some of John Yoo's embarrassingly shoddy 'legal' work, which (now 9th Circuit Judge-for-life) Jay Bybee signed off on.

It does kinda seem like the people running the show picked the fall guy in advance. Emptywheel's thread does point out one interesting detail - After Comey refused to sign off, George W. Bush personally called Ashcroft at the hospital, to try to hide what was going on just one more time.

The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.

Everyone is already required to pay a sales tax on the items they buy out of state anyway.

Not true. I live in Oregon. We don't have sales tax. While you are free to question the wisdom of that approach (and our public school teachers and administrators would surely agree with any criticisms you have to offer), I don't pay sales tax to (e.g.) California when I buy something online there, and I am not legally required to pay use tax to Oregon for purchases made out of state.

mod parent up. The way urban growth boundaries in Oregon work is that subdivision of parcels of land below some arbitrarily large size (I think it's 80 acres) is simply not allowed outside of the UGB.* The reasoning was that the UGB would allow farmers in the Willamette valley to continue their modest agricultural lifestyles without fighting against property speculators hoping to turn all of I-5 between Portland and Eugene into a soul-destroying chain of strip malls and burbclaves. And so far it's worked pretty well to achieve that purpose- while Eugene/Springfield is reasonably dense, there is literally NOTHING but sheep farms and hops vines in the 60 miles or so between Salem and Eugene.

The land speculation game is confined to the outskirts of existing cities- speculators can buy a big, relatively cheap parcel just outside the current UGB and hope that in 20 years, the city grows enough that at least some of their property will be pulled in, so they can break it into smaller lots and sell it. What the UGB has done is make it practically impossible for a speculator to buy a farm out in the middle of nowhere, bulldoze it flat, and build 100 houses on it... and that's just fine with most of the folks who live here.

Anyone who cares can read more here (html thanks to google)

*Local jurisdictions are allowed to make exceptions for various reasons, but "multi-unit housing development" isn't one of the allowed reasons. And of course all of the existing lots and structures were grandfathered in - the statewide UGB law was passed only about 30 years ago- much of the privately-owned land in particularly desirable locations (e.g. along the banks of the McKenzie River) was subdivided and developed long before the UGB took effect.

this analysis misses the point. If Turnitin wasn't allowed to just copy the works without permission, they would have to pay students for a license. The unlicensed use is in direct economic competition with the potential sale of legitimate licenses. This is exactly the kind of taking that copyright is supposed to prevent.

wait a sec. Obviously the student's works have economic value- to TurnItIn! If they weren't scraping work from ten thousand high schools, they wouldn't have a database of work to do their comparisons against. The court's fair-use analysis is nonsense. In an honest evaluation, all four factors weigh against the company:

• 1. purpose and character of the use: commercial- for the students.
• 2. nature of the work: individual creative writing- for the students.
• 3. portion of the work taken: all of it- for the students.
• 4. effect on the market- the company depends entirely on the student works, and is using those works without paying for them or obtaining a bargained-for license. This company's infringement entirely destroys any hope for a fair market in student works, whether for a similar purpose or for any other. This factor weighs overwhelmingly for the students.

These judges should be ashamed.

This is object lesson #1 why a JD should be a precondition for national public office. Some lawyers may be evil and mendacious, but even the worst lawyers understand that all of the law is a game. Many lawmakers seem to be simply missing out on this feature of national government.

You're doing your constituents a disservice if you don't even realize there is a game on, let alone how that game is played.

sorry. I submitted a lousy summary because I rushed the read on my RSS feed- and it got posted. Such is life. I'd edit the summary if I could.

OK, maybe I'm not an idiot, but my post was certainly careless. And I really do wish i could edit it now.