Thursday, August 17, 2006

This will be reversed by the Sixth Circuit

ACSBlog links here to a district court ruling from Michigan that the President's warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional.

The district judge is a graduate of an Ivy League law school, a woman appointed by President Carter.

The ACLU lost badly in its last big Sixth Circuit case, I would expect the same in this case.

Collections via Poe or Stevenson

In the manner of The Gold Bug, or Treasure Island, this story:

" Armed with a court order, America Online was preparing to dig up the Massachusetts' yard of the parents of a man it sued for sending millions of unsolicited commercial spam e-mails to AOL users.

Meanwhile, the owners of the yard were preparing Wednesday to go to another court to block the excavation.

The alleged buried gold and platinum bars are suspected of being buried in a two-acre yard in Medfield. But Peggy Greenbaum, the mother of the spammer known as Davis Wolfgang Hawke, told the Associated Press that the family doesn't believe any such gold or platinum bars are buried in the yard.

'I don't care of they dig up the entire yard,' she told the AP. 'They're just going to make fools of themselves. We certainly wouldn't allow him to put any gold on our property.'

Hawke, who has used different names in the past, lost a court case to AOL, which won a $12.8 million judgment. Law enforcement authorities say they have not been able to contact him recently and that he missed a court date.

In its case before the U.S. District Court in Virginia last year, AOL produced receipts traced to Hawke for large purchases of gold and platinum. He made a fortune marketing penis enlargement pills and other e-mail spam over the Internet."

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Not much blogging going on

I've been working too much and spending too much time taking care of the invalid dog, who sure is bundle of energy for such a lame beast. She will pace around the house, falling down here and there, for an hour or two, until it is time for her breakfast at 4 am, after which she (and I) go back to sleep.

She gets a lot of dog cookies. We might be on our last box of them, but I've thought that for the last 15 or 20 boxes. She can't do it like Waldo's dog, but she will go after a cookie at top speed, such as it is. She can mostly see where the cookies go, but I wouldn't hold my thumb out too close to her when she is thinking there still might be a cookie around some where.