Raymond M. Reskusich

U.S. Shifting Prison Focus to Re-entry Into Society

It is a big relief to see that you can get a bipartisan coalition around one of the U.S.'s "worst in the world" issues.

The current saga of Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace has been reminding me of another politician who found himself is a very similar situation: Jerry Springer. This is one of the more memorable episodes of This American Life that I've heard:

Episode 258 - Leaving the Fold

The first act tells the unlikely story of Jerry Springer's career as a much-beloved politician in Cincinnati, many years before he achieved his current infamy as a talk-show host.

I should probably be careful what I wish for. It looks like I will be caucusing this year.

The Democratic Party does have a primary in Washington, as is actually mandated by state law. State law does not, however, require the parties to actually do anything with the primary results like, say, select delegates to the national convention. So the Democrats choose not to. They use the caucuses, which start ten days earlier, to choose all the delegates. The primary serves no purpose except possibly to convince the unwary that they actually participated in the nominating process.

Thanks to darthparadox for tipping me off to this.

Today, I envy the Iowans. And not just because Washington's primary is well on the other side of Super Tuesday, where the odds of it affecting anything are pretty damn slim. No, I just want to take part in those crazy Iowa caucuses. They may be time-consuming, arcane, and somewhat disenfranchising to many Iowans, but I think they sound like a hell of a lot of fun. The whole idea of building persuasion and consensus-building into the candidate selection process is just charming, even if it doesn't scale up enough for everyone to do it.

I have recently been considering teaching myself some Spanish, if only to make my trip to Mexico in February a little more entertaining. It occurred to me that I have some pretty useful resources on hand for this undertaking: hundreds of DVDs featuring Spanish-language audio tracks. The ideal thing for me would be to select some films that I know well in English and place their Spanish-language audio tracks on my MP3 player. This would allow me to listen to this audio throughout the day to "train my ear" for the language. This idea set me off searching the web, trying to determine what the current legal status of DVD audio extraction is. What I propose seems like fair use, but that does nothing for Digital Millennium Copyright Act issues.

Unfortunately, most of what I found on the net was incomplete and outdated. I did come across one surprisingly helpful resource that I would like to share:

The Internet Law Treatise at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

This site provides what appears to be fairly up-to-date and coherent analysis of a variety of internet and intellectual property legal issues. Even better, the Treatise provides references to the key decisions in each area, allowing the reader to come to his own conclusions.