Saturday, August 21, 2004

Swift Boat Lawyers for Agitprop Tinseltown lawyer Steve Smith reviews the Swift Boat Veterans controversy as it has been played out in the blogosphere and tries to put the matter in proper perspective: For practicing lawyers, the tricks memories play on witnesses, especially after the passage ot time, is a matter that comes up again and again in court. [snip] Contemporaneous accounts and documentation are almost always more reliable, and tell a more accurate story, than the memories of witnesses years after the fact. Thus, the fact that so many of the bloggers who hyped these accounts are attorneys, quite frankly, is an embarrassment to my profession. [snip] And in my opinion, the lawyers who have blogged this story, and who have made the most extreme charges against Kerry, are, ethically speaking, somewhere beneath your run-of-the-mill ambulance chaser. Indeed. 8:29:04 PM    comment [] Krugman's Odds on Electoral Fraud Near the end of his August 11th interview on Forum with Michael Krazny, Paul Krugman responds to a caller's question on the voting machine issue (starting at 47.45): We now have a number of people, computer scientists who have managed to get a hold of the codes for these machines that they tried to conceal, and the basic verdict is they're junk. Security is terrible. It's quite easy to hack, to distort the election. So to believe, to feel safe you have to say, well, they wouldn't do that. But then you look at all the other voting antics in Florida, the felon lists, the pre-Republicanized registration forms handed out to new citizens, and so on, and you say, I have no reason to trust these people's intention either. So I am terrified. I think there's about a one in four chance that we'll have an election that's widely seen as having been stolen. Wow, that's shrill man. [Check the Paul Krugman Archive's video section.] 12:09:17 AM    comment []

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