three cheers

[jfb]

Here's to Judge R. A. Randall, who not only upheld a ruling against Minnesota's so-called concealed-carry gun law, but slammed a phrase from which the Right has bludgeoned all meaning:

At the oral argument on this case, appellant referred, at times, to not wanting “liberal” or “activist” judges to overstep the will of the Minnesota legislature. Simply put, the term “liberal/activist judge” is, in reality, a “non-term.” Both parties to this debate recognize the truth. What one calls “a well-reasoned conservative judicial opinion by a son or daughter of the founding fathers” means only that the judge ruled in your favor! When the judge rules against you and in favor of your opponent, on the identical facts and argument, you will now turn to the banal cliché that the judge “is too activist” for me. The term is meaningless, self-defeating, and, worse, it actually weakens appellant’s position.

Here's to the IRS's Free File program. After calculating my taxes by hand, I ended up, with some privacy risk but for no money, having H&R Block's computers calculate my taxes, finding a few hundred dollars I'd missed. It almost makes up for last year, when I bought H&R Block's software, which was shoddy and then failed, and I had to do it by hand. And yes, artname, I agree, I should have gone to your tax guy.

And here's to CDBaby, through whose good graces my CD is available not only in last-millennium physical form, but also, I discovered today, through the iTunes Music Store. ITMS has yet to appeal to me as a consumer, but it's still kind of cool. Also I've received $0.008 for songs streamed on MusicNet... SO FAR.

Comments

Re: Digital Distribution

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah! It's not like I'm unfamiliar with the Internet's ability to connect distant geographies, but still, when I got my first CD sale from Portugal, my world got a little bigger.