- Radley Balko on a roll with harrowing, Louisiana-focused piece on misbehaving prosecutors and the system that protects them [HuffPo] “Former Cops Speak Out About Police Militarization” And a BBC interview (auto-plays video);
- Judge Alsup: pay-to-play allegations against Democratic Attorneys General Association, Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood, MSPERS won’t derail class action [Courthouse News]
- “Smoker’s Son Recovers $12.8M for Loss of Consortium” [NLJ]
- How easy is it to get a free federal cellphone (or two or three) without actually qualifying? [Jillian Kay Melchior, NR]
- “‘Total’ly Milking the FCPA Cash Cow?” [Koehler, FCPA Professor]
- “The unfair attack on arbitration” [Hans von Spakovsky]
- How public interest litigators got 501(c)(3) charitable status [Scott Walter, Philanthropy Daily; related earlier]
4 Comments
The New Jersey anti-smoking verdict spun my head. What is going on?
“?How easy is it to get a free federal cellphone ….”
I think Jillian meant “that darned Kenyan, not a US citizen, communist, 666, socialist, military hating, liberal, infesting the white house obama”phone. You know, the program that started with the 1985 bill when ol’ whats-his-name was president.
I agree that the term “Obamaphone” overplays Obama’s role. The fateful expansion of the Lifeline program a few years back was pushed by many different political forces, including crucially the companies that stood to profit from it, not just the White House. At the same time, we should not minimize the extent to which the extension of the program from landlines to cells made for a difference in kind, not just degree. Quoting the Baltimore Sun (h/t reader M.S.): “The Lifeline program, created in 1984 to soften the impact of telephone deregulation on low-income families, had nearly 509,000 subscribers in [Maryland] last year, up from 5,821 in 2008.”
Incidentally, Bloomberg reports that the biggest single beneficiary of the LifeLine program’s expansion is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, billed as the “world’s richest man,” whose business dealings tend to get little scrutiny in much of the American press, perhaps not entirely unrelated to his large shareholding in the New York Times (more).