So, I guess I'm back...kinda?

A long rambly multi-topic catchup post wherein I pretend all 3 of my remaining readers still care...

Last night I scrolled through my first two pages of posts and realized that was all I had so far for 2010, and it's nearly freakin August. This made me feel terrible about my chronic blog neglect. Luckily several massive projects completed either last week or Monday of this week, and so while I am certainly still swamped I no longer feel like I am swimming for the surface but just don't know if I will make it before I drown. Living in that feeling for the last 3 months, and in other spurts for most of the last 10 months, has really sucked. And I'm sure it will suck again soon.
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So, like I said in the infusions post, I had 2 parties in June and July. It wasn't really the greatest idea I've ever had, but it's done now and it was for the most part fun. Also, crazy expensive. Also, this post from my dear friend Susan is like the greatest thing ever. Read it, learn it, live it.

I made so many different dishes it is hard to pick just one or two to share recipes for, but one is something I sort of invented based upon a suggestion from a friend, and it was delicious, and easy:

Feta-Stuffed Mini Peppers

2 packages of miniature red, yellow and orange peppers, tops removed, cleaned, split down one side
1 package of good feta cheese
olive oil, ideally infused with some herbs, garlic or red pepper for extra flavor
balsamic vinegar
8 leaves fresh basil (if oil is not infused)
salt and pepper

If using basil, cut into a chiffonade and place a pinch of the basil into each pepper. Stuff each pepper with feta, packing tightly. Drizzle liberally with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and any remaining basil. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour to allow flavors to meld. Skewer each pepper and either place on top rack of a grill away from direct flame, with uncut sides of peppers down, or place on a rimmed baking sheet and broil in a hot oven until the cheese browns and the peppers have just started to soften. Be careful when removing the peppers from the grill or oven, as the filling will want to fall out. (If it does, just discreetly stuff it back in. Nobody will notice.) Serve warm.

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I've decided that when I get my bonus in December, I need to do something big with it. Option #1 is a major trip somewhere outside the U.S. where I can get away from it all for awhile. Suggestions on locale are welcome...right now, I am considering exotic places like Italy, France, New Zealand, Tahiti, Barbados, etc. Ideally it should be somewhere that the weather will be lovely in January or February when I can afford to go. Honestly, my biggest concern is that none of my friends will be willing to go with me because of either financial restraints, lack of interest in traveling to where I want to go, or fear of flying. I've been trying to explain to people recently that traveling alone as a single girl is just way dicier than as a guy. My friend who went to France last year by herself and got mugged 3 times in the span of a two week trip, including having her wallet stolen on the very first day she arrived in Paris, is a classic example. She hung in there, got money wired by her parents, and made the best of it, but I would probably be so dejected at that point that I'd just want to turn around and come home. I travel alone all the time for work, but that's different--I never GO anywhere or see anything, I just go from airport to hotel to deposition back to airport. But if I'm traveling abroad, I really don't want to be alone. There should be a place where you can find travel partners for things like this who aren't shady or annoying. (Feel free to also volunteer to be my travel partner in the comments, although I won't be fronting your costs if you do...)

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On the mini-vacation front, I need to go visit a friend in New Orleans for some weekend in August, and I am also probably going back to Biloxi for the poker tournament around Labor Day. This was a total bust last year, but a friend is also going that same week for other reasons and asked me to join her, plus they have lowered the buy-ins considerably from last year. I wonder if that's the effect of the economy? At any rate, I never have the time or desire to play poker in my Thursday night game anymore, so in order to get some practice with live play I am probably going to have to start playing bar tourneys a few times a week. Suggestions for good places in Atlanta with bar tourneys that start at 9pm (not 8, which I can never make it to) are welcome. I used to play at the Brewhouse but apparently new folks are running it so it may suck now.

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Local politics is depressing the hell out of me. I seriously don't like any of the candidates on either side of the aisle who ran for Governor of Georgia, and I will probably write in my friend Page in November. (It's a thing, we write in Page when we don't know who to vote for.) I waver between resolving not to give a shit because it's too upsetting to pay attention to, and resolving to make my own change by working to revamp the Democratic party in this state into something effective and inspiring again. Y'know, with all that free time I have.

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So it's late July, and I resolved in March to maybe run a half marathon this year, and yet I haven't even been able to string together 13 miles on the treadmill across one whole week since that promise, let alone actually starting to train for it. I keep waiting for things at work to get less hectic so I can get home at a normal hour and have the energy and time to recommit, but it just hasn't happened. I wish I didn't have to choose between getting in shape physically and getting my career in order. But doing both at the same time has proven nearly impossible.

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I'm getting ridiculously excited about FSU football this year, even though Vegas has apparently only pegged us to win 8 games. Still, this is one of those years that has the potential to be really special--not national championship special (despite what Tim Brando apparently predicted), but a better year than we have seen in recent memory. I think we could conceivably run the table in the ACC, which would be great if we didn't also have the incredibly difficult non-conference schedule of Oklahoma, BYU and Florida to deal with. Still, the most frustrating thing about FSU's decline this decade has been our tendency to let mediocre ACC teams beat us, and the first step to returning to former glory is to stop letting that happen and start kicking conference asses again.

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I think that's all I got for now. Whew, I was storing up a lot of random junk!

A Threat or a Promise? McBerry's Libel Claims

Recently the word "libel" has been thrown around a lot in the Georgia blogosophere in connection with one fringe gubernatorial candidate who allegedly had a past predilection for the young ladies. Very young ladies.

Ray McBerry was a teacher in the late 1990's when he got to know a student at his school fairly well. She moved on to a different high school, and to hear her and her parents tell it, she began a romantic relationship with McBerry that led to him leaving teaching and having a judge order him to stay away from the girl. To hear him tell it, he was just counseling the girl after her parents made her end an interracial relationship, and her parents got the wrong idea and now they are all defaming* him all over Georgia.

Meanwhile, a few weeks before the girl and her parents' story hit the pages of "respectable" media, the SWGA Politics blog threw its skirt over its head and called McBerry a child molester. When informed that the law in Georgia does not apply to victims over the age of 16, and that this girl was 16 when the alleged sexual contact began, the blogger in question basically said he didn't care because McBerry was a teacher and teacher-student sex is still some form of crime, even if not meeting the legal elements of child molestation. (Side note: it's unclear whether this is even accurate, since the girl claimed the sexual contact only occurred once McBerry was no longer her teacher, as she had moved to a different school.)

McBerry threw a hissy fit of his own the other day, and started making threats of litigation against online outlets and individuals. Some wondered if one target for a libel suit might be SWGA Politics itself. But despite all his bluster, I would bet a cool Benjamin that McBerry never files any sort of defamation lawsuit against anyone. Why?

1) Defamation suits are expensive, time-consuming, and generally not taken on contingency by the attorneys who file them. This means McBerry would probably have to pay a lawyer by the hour to file the lawsuit, unless he intended to proceed pro se (in which case he might as well not even bother). McBerry hasn't exactly been lighting up the fundraising in his gubernatorial race, and I don't think he's rolling in the dough personally either. Even litigating on the cheap is likely to cost upwards of $25K to take such a case to trial, which brings us to the next problem...

2) The targets of such a suit, for the most part, are judgment-proof or close to it. What assets do either the girl and her family, or the proprietors of SWGA Politics, really have to satisfy any judgment rendered against them? Lawyers are especially wary of taking such cases on contingency when they strongly suspect at most their clients will obtain a moral victory, but no real cash. Why spend $25K to win an apology and a judgment that allows you to garnish someone's wages until the end of time? Now, any media outlets that report the allegedly defamatory statements could also be sued, and would not be judgment proof by any means, but the standards for a libel suit against a newspaper are higher and they have more defenses. They also have more and better lawyers who have defended cases like this before. Does McBerry want to take on the AJC and the big firms that represent it? I doubt it.

3) Truth is a defense in defamation cases. I make no allegations about McBerry's veracity or the propriety of his past behavior. (See, I know how to stay on the good side of the defamation line!) But if the girl and her family have evidence to support their allegations, which it sounds like they might based upon the apology letter they have already produced, then they could defeat any defamation action simply by showing that McBerry really did the things they claimed he did. Even if they don't have evidence, if a jury were to determine that the girl and her parents were telling the truth, McBerry would lose. And on the way to presenting evidence of truth or falsity to a jury, the parties would have to engage in embarassing discovery in the form of depositions of those McBerry or the girl talked to about their relationship, people who may have found them in compromising positions, etc. Not exactly the sort of character evidence an aspiring politician wants to see put down on the public record, even if he did eventually prevail at trial.

4) Potentially, McBerry would have to show "actual malice"--knowledge the story is false, or reckless disregard for its truth or falsity--in order to prevail. There is little law out there on the question of whether blogs enjoy the same first amendment protections as "traditional press" like newspapers in defamation cases, so this one is sort of a guess. The Supreme Court famously ruled in New York Times v. Sullivan that in order for a newspaper to have libeled a public figure, it must have shown actual malice--meaning either the newspaper knew a published statement was untrue or showed a reckless disregard for its truth or falsity. McBerry is arguably a public figure by virtue of qualifying as a candidate for Governor. The question is whether the blogs that published this story showed reckless disregard for the truth of the story or knew it was false. Now, as discussed briefly above, if the story is true then McBerry has no case. And if the bloggers who published the allegedly defamatory statements are protected by Sullivan to the same extent the AJC and other traditional media outlets are protected, then McBerry would need to prove that they showed a willful disregard for the truth of this story, which is a high burden and highly subjective because it relies upon the knowledge and intentions of the publisher of the libel.

I could write an entire series of posts on whether Sullivan applies to bloggers, and whether it should, but that is a post for another day when I have more free time. For now, if we assume it applies, then it makes a tough case to prove nearly impossible.

And that, my 3 readers, is why Ray McBerry's threats to sue will never be more than threats.

* I prefer to use the term "defamation" to cover both libel and slander, because people often erroneously use the two terms interchangeably and having one term that covers both is less confusing. Generally speaking, libel is written while slander is spoken, though the expanding definition of publication has led to libel also governing internet postings and TV/radio broadcasts. In the instant situation, the news stories containing the statements of the girl and parents about McBerry would be governed by libel laws, while the girl and her parents' actual spoken statements about McBerry would be governed by slander laws. However, because this gets confusing in a situation where slander is published in a potentially libelous news story, I'll just use defamation for both. The only real differences are that libel requires "publication" of the defamatory statement, slander requires actual damage to reputation through the spoken defamation, and there are some libel protections for press reports involving public figures as described above.

NY, NY a wonderful town

I'm leaving tonight for three days in New York for a conference, and it couldn't come at a better time. Just yesterday I was lamenting on the phone to someone that I really didn't want to go, because I hate the networkingfest that these conferences inevitably turn into. We spend all day in presentations that we don't pay attention to, and then all night drinking and eating with potential clients. I come home more exhausted than when I left, with fewer billable hours and a few extra pounds.

BUT, since others have chosen today as a good day to blow up the Georgia GOP, and since I have serious reservations about the methodology being utilized, I'm quite happy to have an excuse to be off the grid until this mess blows over. Why do I have reservations, you ask? Because I have always been bothered by the media utilizing the reporting of rumors on blogs or the internet as sufficient basis to run with a story they otherwise couldn't run with because they lack sufficient independent verification and sourcing. No sooner did Erick Erickson put up his post telling all the tales that everyone wanted to hear about various Georgia Republican lawmakers, and he was saying on Twitter that a reporter told him that was giving the media the cover to run with the stories they'd been holding back. I'm willing to bet a shiny nickle those stories won't be about the underlying allegations themselves but will instead be couched in terms of "there are rumors on the internets that..." This sort of backdooring of otherwise unpublishable rumors without independent verification makes me sick. It's not even the story itself that bothers me, it's the way in which it is being brought to light suddenly now, after months of people holding back because nobody could nail down first-hand verification.

But, I have already lost the battle on that one, so I might as well head out of town for a few days to let the brouhaha blow over. Since my friend Samantha has brought me back burritos from Anna's Taqueria that I will get from her when I see her tonight, I can't complain too much. That is already guaranteed to make for a wonderful week. Maybe it will even snow a little, just so I can really get into the Christmas spirit. A girl can hope.

Dear Georgia Democrats,

You have just been handed a massive hammer. Use it.

If you cannot and do not capitalize on the coming Georgia Republican ethicinfidelapocalypse, then there is no hope for the state party. Three of the five Republicans who are or were running for Governor have somehow been swirled up in this mess of ethical breaches and banging of women other than their spouses. (The lone girl in the field will now benefit from the prevailing myth that women don't cheat on their spouses and can therefore be presumed above the fray and untainted.) Other powerful Republican members of the Legislature are in serious danger of being pulled into the drain swirl any minute now.

So, Georgia Democrats, you have 3 tasks:

1. Make sure every single member of the Democratic caucus is clean as a whistle on professional ethics and keeping it in your pants. NO SLIP UPS, and if they do happen, punish swiftly from within. Set the example.

2. Bang the drum of the dirty cadre of Republicans running this state constantly, loudly, and brutally, for the next year. I want to hear it in every debate, I want to see it in TV commercials and in the paper. I want you to force every candidate to take a stand on whether what these guys have done is wrong, and if they waffle then I want you to use that to make them look weak in the face of clear wrongdoing. You have been handed a massive gift--USE IT.

3. Remember, it's not the boinking of a woman other than their wives that is the problem, it's when that woman is a lobbyist pushing legislation at the same time. It's not the cheating on his wife, it's making criminal threats against her after she leaves him. It's not the blowjobs from women he isn't married to, it's the fact that they work for him and could constitute sexual harassment. FOCUS ON THE DIRTY PART, NOT THE SEXY PART. That is what ties it all together and makes it politically relevant, even if the other stuff is what makes people watch the TV and read the news. And one of the huge benefits of being out of power is that you have no real power to abuse--so emphasize that dramatic difference between Rs and Ds to your advantage.

I'm warning you guys now, if you don't come away with more seats in 2010 and at least one new statewide office, then you're more inept than I thought and I will not be giving the party another red cent of my money to waste wandering in the wilderness. Opportunities like this don't come along very often.

My un-recipe for perfect peach pie

For Labor Day weekend, I traveled to Biloxi to play some poker. (I haven't been able to bring myself to write about the trip yet, and maybe never will. It wasn't bad at all, but stuck alone with my thoughts for the weekend and the long drive back, I feel like I have already done more than enough self-analysis about the trip.) When I returned, I discovered four huge, perfect Georgia peaches sitting in my refrigerator just begging to be eaten or cooked. I decided that since it was Labor Day, and I was in Georgia after all, the only answer was to make peach pie.

I didn't really have a recipe, but I was undeterred. First, I decided to try peeling the peaches with a carrot peeler rather than using the traditional boil then plunge into ice water method of peeling. This worked beautifully! I will always peel peaches this way from now on, and they are much easier to slice when still firm and cold. I peeled, pitted and sliced the four peaches and added them to a bowl. In with the peaches went the juice of one lemon, an eyeball approximation of roughly 3/4 a cup of brown sugar, a splash of almond extract, a healthy dose of cinnamon, 4 heaping spoonfuls of flour, and what was left of a stick of butter. (I think it was about 5 tablespoons' worth, softened.) I mixed all of this with a spatula until the peaches were completely coated, and let it sit for a few minutes.

I had a Pillsbury pie crust in the fridge, so I cheated on this part rather than making my own. I rolled out the bottom crust and pressed into a pie plate. Then I re-mixed the peaches mixture one more time, and poured it into the pie plate while making sure the peaches were as level as possible. I rolled out the top crust and put it over the peaches, carefully pressing the sides and fluting the edges. I cut four small vents in the crust, and placed into a 425 degree oven for 30 minutes. After that, I turned the oven down to 350 and baked for another 45 minutes, until the pie was just golden brown.

This was the end result:



I was a bit nervous about how well the pie turned out, given that I had completely made up the recipe for the filling from nothing. When I finally tried it...holy jeebus this was good. I warmed a slice in the microwave with a scoop of ice cream and then tried not to die from the deliciousness of it all. Seriously, if every food this tasty were this easy to make, I would weigh 300 pounds.

So now, you too can make perfect peach pie before the peaches go out of season!

What's the Matter with Georgia?

Despite the creeping approach of legalized gambling along Georgia's borders with North Carolina, Alabama and Florida, our state continues to steadfastly oppose legalized gambling initiatives. The closest we have come to anything approximating a casino in Georgia is the proposed revamping of Underground Atlanta into an awful place filled with "video lottery terminals" that vaguely resemble slot machines, but even that half ass idea has failed to make any progress (thankfully, because it would have been a disaster).

Meanwhile, the state so controlled by religious conservatives that it was the subject of a nonfiction bestseller about everything that's wrong with it is preparing to open state-owned casinos to bring in new revenues. Kansas, the home of Operation Rescue, the state that voted evolution out of the educational curriculum, the state that only legalized drinking in the last 50 years, is getting into the casino business.

Admittedly, Kansas conservatives' opposition likely softened a great deal due to the arrival in the 90's of casinos owned by federally-recognized Indian tribes. It was probably tough for state politicians and residents to watch those tribes rake in bajillions of dollars over the last 15 years without virtually any of it going to the state, so it is only natural that they eventually came to crave their share for state coffers. In contrast, Georgia has no federally-recognized Indian tribes who could legally open a casino here, and thus the only way that any casino is coming to this state is through either a statewide ballot initiative (virtually impossible) or legislation redefining the lottery's authority to regulate gambling. This is ultimately the approach that Kansas utilized to legalize state-owned casinos through a narrow vote of the legislature in 2007.

Realistically, given the annual defeat of local control of alcohol sales on Sundays, it's probably unlikely that Georgia will seriously consider allowing REAL gambling anytime soon. But if Kansas' powerful and vocal religious conservatives couldn't prevent the passage of laws expanding revenues by opening state-owned casinos, why should we preemptively assume that Georgia's conservative base can kill this idea before it even gets serious consideration by the legislature, particularly in a year of state budget deficits, hiring freezes, furloughs, falling revenues, and no real end in sight?

It's something that smart politicians should consider embracing and taking the lead on pushing for serious consideration in the legislature. If it worked in Kansas, it can work anywhere.

(Update: As Richard noted in the comments, the Georgia constitution contains a prohibition on casino gambling that Kansas does not have. This probably raises a bigger legal/constitutional hurdle to expanding lottery powers to include running casinos than what Kansas faced.)

Legal Bullshit

Given my chosen profession, I have a natural fundamental respect for the rule of law. I believe that it must be adhered to unless adherence is either impossible or unconstitutional. But sometimes, law creates impossible situations, little cracks where a few unlucky citizens can fall in and become trapped. At those moments I feel some personal responsibility for being part of a profession that tries to improve lives but often ends up being the source of so much strife.

Wendy Whitaker is the latest victim of well-meaning but bad law. She made the mistake of performing oral sex on a 15 year old boy when she was 17 years old. She was convicted under a sodomy law later ruled unconstitutional, and now she must follow the many onerous regulations and rules for sex offenders for the rest of her life while in Georgia.

Whitaker has been lead plaintiff in a suit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia's sex offender laws that prohibit her from living near virtually any place that a child might occasionally inhabit, which has left her with only tiny pockets of the state that are not off-limits. While that suit has been creeping through the courts for the past 3 years, she has been trying to comply with the laws as best she can (with help of a temporary injunction), but she was just rearrested for failure to register a new address. She remains in jail, with bail set at $10,000. This is an outrage.

While I know many people will make the argument that Whitaker should just keep her nose clean while her case is pending and make sure all laws are complied with, this is a law that Whitaker should never have been forced to operate under. On the flip side, I could easily argue that it borders on malicious prosecution to rearrest someone for failing to comply with a law to which they have made a pending constitutional challenge. To throw her in jail for non-compliance while she is challenging a law that shouldn't apply to her amounts to some very dirty pool.

The Southern Center for Human Rights has been handling Whitaker's constitutional challenge for the past three years, but I'm not sure if they have a mechanism or the funding to pay for bail money for Whitaker. I hope someone will create a way for people like me who agree this case is bullshit to donate to a legal defense fund to pay Whitaker's bail and her defense costs in the new criminal case. I have little doubt that the eventual outcome of Whitaker's pending case will be a vindication of her constitutional right to live wherever she chooses, but that may take more than a decade to accomplish. In the meantime, she needs our help to keep her out of jail for something that should never have been imposed upon her.

If you have any details about a legal defense fund, please post in the comments. If I learn anything about such a fund, I will pass it on. And I will donate.

Supreme Court orders a hearing for Troy Davis

(Cross-posted from Blog for Democracy)

Today the Supreme Court shocked nearly everyone by granting relief on a direct habeas corpus petition for the first time in 50 years. The Court ordered that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia hold an evidentiary hearing on Troy Davis' claim that he is actually innocent of the murder for which he was convicted and sentenced to death. This means that for the first time a trial court will actually be able to hear the live testimony of those seven recanting witnesses, rather than trying to decide their credibility based solely upon affidavits. For the last three years, all that I and the others fighting for Davis have asked for is that the evidence of his innocence be reviewed in open court. It will finally happen.

Justice Stevens' concurrence explaining the rationale for the decision is here, while Justice Scalia's somewhat nasty dissent is here. But the two competing opinions essentially boil down to this: Stevens and those who voted to order the evidentiary hearing believe it is essential to prevent a potentially innocent man from being executed. Scalia thinks execution of an innocent man is not a constitutional problem, as long as he got a trial and appeal. I suspect that fundamental ideological dispute will eventually have to be resolved by the SCOTUS in a future appeal of this case, but for now Davis will get his day in court and his execution by the State of Georgia will be stayed indefinitely. It is a good day.

Update: SCOTUSBlog has a comprehensive writeup about the decision that includes the interesting news that 5 justices had to vote to issue this Order. Generally 5 votes are needed for a decision but only 4 are needed to grant Certiorari to hear a case, so I had been wondering if this Order required 4 or 5 votes. Given that Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer concurred while Scalia and Thomas dissented, with Sotomayor not taking part in the vote, that means that 2 out of the 3 silent justices (Kennedy, Roberts and Alito) must have supported granting the evidentiary hearing. Kennedy would not be a surprise, but both Roberts and Alito have been fairly tough law and order types during their tenures on the bench, so neither one seems an obvious choice to grant such extraordinary relief. However, if I had to guess I would say Alito was the fifth vote. He probably felt that there was no harm to letting a Court actually examine the evidence, particularly if there's a good chance that the evidentiary hearing still will not end with Davis being set free.

Disgusting

This will be the last and only time this blog links to Peach Pundit.

This is simply disgusting. I refuse to associate myself in any fashion with a race-baiting crazy person or any site that he runs.

It would be nice if the Republican party had the same no-tolerance policy for hateful crazy, but the sad events of the past few weeks have proven otherwise. Given that 28% of them also believe the complete whackjob nonsense about Obama being born outside the U.S., they deserve all the decades of wandering in the wilderness and being forced to pander to a lunatic fringe base that they're about to get.

Anyone who makes excuses for or is willing to tolerate the insanely offensive shit spewed at Peach Pundit today is also on my ignore list. I'm done with you folks.

The interminable saga of Troy Davis continues

If it seems like I've been talking about the Troy Davis case for years, it's because I have. Apparently, I will be talking about it for a few more months at least. Today the Supreme Court adjourned for the summer without deciding whether to grant or deny Davis' habeas corpus petition.

After the Eleventh Circuit denied Davis' most recent appeal, his attorneys took the rare step of filing a habeas corpus petition directly with the Supreme Court. So, SCOTUS now has the option of either granting it (which hasn't been done since 1925), remanding for an evidentiary hearing to the district court (which is occasionally granted) or denying it outright. I found the last option the most likely, but was surprised to see that Davis' petition was not included in the final list of orders issued today before the Court adjourned until September.

The no-decision today essentially means that Davis' petition will not be acted upon until this fall when the court reconvenes. Davis will get a few more months on this earth, at least. I still have very little faith that Court intervention will occur at this point, with nearly all of his legal options rejected or exhausted. But I am very open to the universe surprising cynical ol' me just this once.

Protests at Shopping Malls

Protest minded right wingers in the Atlanta area were displeased yesterday when Simon Malls, owner of the Gwinnett Place mall, refused to allow a July 4th "Tea Party" to occur on its property. Immediately the right wingers assumed that the company and its owner wanted to support a Democratic agenda, but the real reason behind the company's objection is probably far simpler: they have a legal interest in not allowing protests on their property.

There is a long and storied line of case law establishing when private landowners that open their property to the public must allow members of the public to petition or protest on their property, and when they can remove such individuals. Generally speaking, private landowners are not bound by the First Amendment's rights to speech or assembly. However, many litigants have attempted to expand the First Amendment's requirements to private property that is opened to the general public. From hare krishnas in airports to union picketers at shopping centers, the last fifty years of Supreme Court jurisprudence is littered with cases defining the parameters for the owners of these "quasi-public spaces," such as shopping malls.

The essential rule after years of legal battles by owners of shopping centers and malls is this: as long as the owner of the mall has not dedicated their private property to "public use," they can legally exclude individuals who intend to conduct non-business activities on the property. This includes protesting, petitioning, gathering, and picketing. However, where a landowner has in the past allowed the property to be used much like a town square, such prior use of the property could be used as a bar by a court to prevent that landowner from arguing that his property should now be treated like any other private property (on which there is no right to free speech or assembly.)

So, Simon Malls could have faced future difficulty excluding other groups from protesting, petitioning, gathering or picketing on their property if they had allowed the Tea Party to occur there. I suspect that someone on their legal team finally told them that it was a bad idea from a legal standpoint to allow this protest to occur. It probably had very little to do with politics or PR, and everything to do with avoiding opening the floodgates to every crazy group that might want to congregate in the mall in the future. And it seems like a smart move.

Check it out

The fine folks over at Blog for Democracy asked me to join their team writing for their /law blog, and today I finally made my first post. (I've had a sick cat for the past week and have been way to stressed out to write much, so I took my sweet time in getting the lay of the land and figuring out how to use Movable Type.) Go check it out.

Like a Kid Again

Yesterday was my 34th birthday, and to celebrate I am going with a group of friends to Six Flags today. I haven't been to the park since I was 13, so I remember almost nothing about it. But something about acting like a kid again appealed to me as I got another year older. Hopefully I won't be as terrified on the rides as this girl:



Update: We got rained out. Suck.

Quick Hits

I haven't felt the urge to blog much this week (as you might have noticed), but here's a few quick and dirty things on my mind today:

* Troy Anthony Davis lost his appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday. The Court ruled in a 2-1 decision that Davis had not met the high threshhold necessary to establish an actual innocence claim. I'm so angry and demoralized by this development that I don't even have the heart to analyze the decision. The important point is that he lost.

Davis essentially has two options right now: he can petition the entire 11th circuit to rehear the case en banc (which is discretionary, and rarely granted) in the hopes that he can get a different ruling from the entire panel, and he can petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari on his appeal. Chances are good that he will do both, and be denied both. The 11th circuit's stay of execution last 30 more days while he works out his appellate options, and then we will see an execution date if none of these legal maneuvers work out. I wonder if Thurbert Baker's decision to run for governor might influence his decision to take action or not take action in connection with this case...

* Starwood Hotels is suing Hilton Hotels in a very interesting corporate espionage case. It's not interesting merely because it alleges corporate espionage, but because of how Starwood learned of the espionage. Apparently some well-meaning Hilton lawyers found some Starwood documents in boxes while reviewing Hilton records in a completely unconnected case, and returned them to Starwood in an "abundance of caution." Turns out those Starwood documents were stolen from Starwood, and the best of intentions led to a lawsuit. I suspect we will see a legal malpractice lawsuit against Hilton's attorneys as well.

This makes me wonder what I would do if, while reviewing a client's documents for potentially discoverable material, I came across stolen documents from another company. Would I report it? Woudl I tell the client they had to report it or return them? Would I insist that I couldn't work for the client anymore? Would I pretend I had never seen them and hope nobody else ever noticed? It would present a huge ethical dilemma. This makes me wonder if maybe those Hilton lawyers chose the faux-mistaken return route as the best way to save their own asses while upholding their ethical obligations.

* By now you have heard of Susan Boyle, unless you have been living under a rock for the last week. For you rock-dwellers, or for those who want to relive the amazing moment when this dowdy strange woman shocked the world...here it is. And here is Susan singing Ella Fitzgerald's "Cry Me a River" for a charity CD in 1999. What a voice. What a story! I love it when people make us all challenge our preconceived biases and assumptions.

* Last night I ate at Alfredo's for the first time, and it was delicious. The restaurant's decor is straight out of "Goodfellas" but the food and service were both excellent. (Except for the waiter who asked everyone in the restaurant at least twice if they were driving a certain Toyota outside...that was annoying.)

* And finally, congratulations are in order for local blogger Garrett Vonk and his wife Heather, who are currently in the midst of having their first baby. No word yet on whether sympathetic lactation has occurred, but we all wait on pins and needles to hear both the official birth announcement and word about the state of Garrett's breasts.

Predicting the spread of equality

I am fascinated by this map from the Map Scroll, created using Nate Silver's regression analysis data to predict when each state is likely to legalize gay marriage. Actually, what Silver looked at was how likely each state was to vote down a ban on gay marriage, but presumably if a state does that, legalization is not too far behind.

Georgia, not surprisingly, is projected to be in the second to last group of states to embrace equality.

Legislative Rollercoaster

If you've been following my back and forth about Senate Bill 169, aka the "embryo bill," you probably are seriously nauseous from all the twists and turns this thing has taken. First it was just a bill about fertility treatments, then it added personhood for embryos and prohibited their destruction, then it was tabled in the Senate after an impassioned debate about infertility issues and the difficult decisions they engender, and then it was brought off the table and passed. We knew there had been two amendments but nobody knew what they said, and so confusion and loathing ruled the land.

The amended legislation is now online, and you will be relieved to know that at least for now all the icky stuff has been stripped out of the bill. There is no personhood for embryos, no prohibition on their destruction. There is no prohibition on stem cell research. As written now, the legislation simply prohibits methods of creating embryos other than the ole sperm + egg = baby method, and also prohibits creation of embryos for purposes other than to induce a pregnancy. So, it does not prohibit stem cell research itself, but only prohibits creation of embryos for such research. As I read it, the legislation no longer prevents the owners or "parents" of frozen embryos from donating them to research once it is determined that they will not be used to get pregnant.

The short version: as of right now, the poison pill portions are gone. Who knows if they will be added back in by the House or a conference committee...but right now, this legislation isn't the ick that it previously was. I'll let you know if that changes.

And Back to Bleh

While I've been slaving over an emergency motion, the Georgia Senate invalidated my brief glimmer of non-hatred by taking back up the embryo bill and passing it.

I hate them all.

Un-Bleh

In a fitting bit of political theater, the embryo bill I wrote about on Monday was just tabled by the Georgia Senate. It wasn't passed, it wasn't rejected, it just...stayed frozen. Sort of like an embryo that will never be called up for active duty. It will not be taken up by the Georgia House because it needed to pass the Senate by the end of the day today in order to make it to the other chamber.

To my great surprise, the arguments against this bill were not of the fervent pro-choice variety, but were out of sympathy for the millions of American couples who have struggled with infertility. These people have to make decisions that are both scientifically complex and amazingly difficult, because in vitro fertilization is still a far from exact science. You implant a woman with four embryos hoping just one will attach, and sometimes you get nothing. Sometimes all four attach and then split and she ends up with octuplets. Sometimes a woman ends up pregnant with so many embryos that there is no way she could safely deliver them all, and no way that all of the babies would survive or be born without serious medical problems even if she did carry them successfully. So many people who have tried fertility treatments have had to make the difficult decision to terminate some embryos in order to save the rest, or to give up on expensive and unsuccessful IVF forever and discard their embryos. Would you want to tell them what they should do?

The difficulty in these decisions is already so multi-faceted and anguishing for the parents trying to get pregnant that lawmakers seeking to inject themselves into those quandaries really have no business being there. And that is what members of the Georgia legislature essentially argued today. Pro-choice or pro-life, how can you tell someone who longs for a baby that they are not allowed to follow the advice of their doctor, because they live in Georgia? How are you going to tell them that they better not create any extra embryos because they will never be able to do anything with them but donate them to be born to someone else?

Ultimately, the legislature got skittish about the implications of wading into such an emotionally-charged and personal issue, and decided not to make a choice. In so doing, they made my unyielding hate wane ever so slightly.

Update: Griftdrift says in the comments that a modified version was later passed by the Senate. I'm looking for details but can't find any. Help a sister out!

Bleh

For weeks now I have been writing and then euthanizing blog posts on a variety of topics, mostly political, that turn me on about as much as a sex scene on primetime network television. I get it half written but I just can't seem to muster the enthusiasm to care enough to edit the thing, let alone linking to the source and all the other stuff that I feel like I need to do to make a post publish-worthy. So, my blogger control panel is littered with half-written morsels that will never see the light of day, while the front page languishes with maybe one actual post per week. I am a bad blog mommy.

Today's partially digested post was about the Georgia Senate's decision to add a little poison pill to the so-called "Octomom" legislation intended to limit the number of embryos implanted during in vitro fertilization procedures. Today, the Senate amended the legislation to include a provision declaring an embryo to be a human being from the moment of fertilization (not even implantation into the uterus), and prohibiting the destruction of such embryos even upon the request of the would-be parents. Despite the obvious ramifications of forbidding the people who created the embryos to decide whether they will be destroyed, donated to stem cell research, or frozen in perpetuity, the real kicker here (as is usually the case when you see legislation that contains the word embryo) is as it pertains to abortion. While the bill purports to not affect existing laws in Georgia on abortion, were it to pass and become law the groundwork would be laid for certain legal challenges to anything that risks the harm or destruction of embryos, including procedures intended to expel or remove embryos from a host uterus. Goodbye, morning after pill. Goodbye, chemical or surgical abortion. Hello, test case to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Anyhow, I wrote this long angry screed about our dumb and duplicitous legislature that is still clearly controlled by the backwards ways of the Georgia Christian Coalition. But my heart wasn't in it, perhaps because I know that this bill will probably pass and there's not much I can do about it. The Democratic opposition is a toothless plaything to the Republican leadership right now, and the people of Georgia simply don't get fired up when it comes to preventing eradication of the right to choose. If we couldn't get constitutents to speak out against a Georgia Power bill that will significantly impact our wallets, how can we get them to speak out about this complicated and tricky issue? If people DID speak out about wanting Sunday sales pretty overwhelmingly, but the legislature still killed the bill with little if any repurcussions, why wouldn't they vote the Christian Coalition's way on this bill too? It is all very frustrating and demoralizing.

There are smart people with great ideas working to advance progressive and moderate principles in Georgia, but they are not the people in the legislature right now...or if they are, then they are being ignored. Unless and until the Georgia Democratic party can get its shit together, we will see more and more bad law come about while good people continue to do nothing. And that is depressing as hell.

So, if you really REALLY care about protecting the right of individuals to decide what happens with their embryos, and you don't mind pissing into the wind, give your legislator a call and ask them to defeat this bill. But if you can't muster the enthusiasm to follow through on the fight, I for one certainly am in no position to blame you.

Um, no.

You are not putting 28 miles of tunnels underneath my 'hood. Sorry.

Need I remind you that the last major tunnel-under-a-big-city project KILLED SOMEONE?

Why is it always the guy from some two stoplight town I've never heard of (in this case Pine Mountain, GA) who proposes to dig up the city of Atlanta to build these deathtrap tunnels?

Update: Rusty has also written about the rampant stupidity of this idea here.