Incaution rewarded: "Never say or do anything that you wouldn't want to read about in the Washington Post," goes rule number one of Washington -- and that's what Jerry Thacker did. Now he's bowed out of the running, leaving the Administration with one less P.R. headache.

Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part 3,645: I'm just waiting for someone to create "stopthewar.mil." Just a matter of time.

 
Ricardo's Revenge: Another Japanese company has admitted to relabeling imported meat as domestic, in a scandal reminiscent of last year's Snow Brand beef controversy. The large-scale corruption in Japanese business is somewhat startling; what is not surprising, unfortunately, is that Japan is not taking these scandals as prima facie evidence that their protectionism is a failed policy.

 
Catching up: Now that I'm starting to read my e-mail again, here's a follow-up link from the Rittenhouse Review: an panegyric in praise of a late friend of his.

Before and After: Given the political persecutions visited upon Charles Pickering, it may be in bad taste to pile upon yet another Bush nominee. But, unlike Pickering, the nomination of marketing consultant (and HIV patient) Jerry Thacker to the advisory commission on HIV and AIDS is ill-advised, at best, especially given Thacker's connections with political kryptonite Bob Jones University. There's certainly nothing wrong with Thacker's abstinence message -- though perhaps not as effective as the Administration might wish -- but the messenger is likely to sow division.

Some of the more questionable terms have disappeared, post-nomination, from Thacker's website, but you can view both the current and archived versions of the "presentations" page (current vs. Oct 24, 2001) and the "about the founder" page (current vs. Oct 24, 2001) to decide for yourself if he's a bull in a china shop or the controversy is a tempest in a teacup.

 
Klagen Macht Nicht Frei: The 9th Court of Appeals ruled today that California cannot pursue its own foreign policy impacting the conduct of war (in this case, World War Two) in the consolidated appeal of Deutsch v. Turner and In re World War II Era Japanese Forced Labor Litigation. (Decision here.) Howard Bashman notes that a California appellate court found otherwise in a recent opinion ruling that there was no express preemption of state action in this area.

 
Out of the Box: In opposition to the success of government litigators in the Hamdi ruling, the judge in the Padilla case seems to be running out of patience with Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement, who recently filed a motion for reconsideration that really wasn't a motion for reconsideration, or any other recognizable request that Clement could identify. Calling Clement's arguments "absurd," the judge showed signs of a fraying temper, suggesting that he might have to take further action to force the government into compliance with his order.

 
Another Mickey Mouse case: Opposing views on last week's Eldred decision can be found at Volokh and Bashman.

The facts in Eldred are fairly simple: in 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA, or "Sonny Bono Act"), which increased the length of copyrights by 20 years, for works currently covered as well as all future works. Petitioners filed suit, alleging that the extension of copyright for works already covered was an unconstitutional exercise of power. The majority, noting (inter alia) that every copyright act until 1976 was explicitly applied to existing as well as future works, found that argument unpersuasive.

Larry Lessig is far more intelligent and educated than I, so I'm sure that there are a host of subtle arguments in his brief that elude me, but it's hard to evade the conclusion that Eldred was damaged goods from the beginning. In the end, the petitioners had to convince a majority of justices that a limited time was not a limited time. Lessig presented a host of valid, and overwhelmingly convincing, policy arguments showing that in an economic sense twenty years was an effective eternity, but he's about thirty years too late to successfully argue a legal realist premise in front of the Supreme Court.

As sympathetic as I am to the Eldred petitioners, I don't think that any amount of appellate argument or number of amicus briefs could have convinced the Court that invalidating the CTEA would have been anything less than an intrusion upon nonjusticiable policymaking. Bad laws, sad to say, don't necessarily make for bad law.