John Snyder's Errant Thoughts

Another Article on Securities Law

Here's another article that I helped write. This one deals with an odd case in Chicago. Download NYLJ_08082007.pdf

Hating on Nikolai Bonds

There is always the debate over what a fan should do when he catches a historic home run. Should he sell it? Should he hand it back to the player? Should he give it to the Hall of Fame? Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman said that he hoped the ball would land in the bullpen so that he could sell the ball and give the money to his bullpen catcher, who is apparently battling cancer.

Well, so Barry Bonds hit his 755th career home run, tying Hank Aaron. Commissioner Bud Selig was on hand, did not applaud, and when the ball sailed out, the TV cut to Bud, who looked like he had just witnessed an execution.

So after the home run, which was caught by a fan, ESPN was in the stands. They reported that Barry's son Nikolai, who is 17 years old and apparently Russian, approached the ESPN reporter and asked what ESPN knew about the guy who caught the ball. The reporter knew nothing.

"Because," Nikolai said, "we hope the guy who caught it just gives it to us, so we can sell it and give the money to Trevor Hoffman's bullpen catcher."

I'm sure the guy who actually caught the ball is having a great laugh at that one.

First of all, yuck that Barry sent Nikolai to make that request. Barry has a history of hiding behind his kid. Second, if Barry wants to help the bullpen catcher, he should just open his wallet and give some of the $100 million that he already has. What does he need to sell a baseball for? Third, do you believe for a minute that he wouldn't actually take the ball, sell it to himself for like $50,000, give that to the bullpen catcher, and in true Bonds fashion screw not only a loyal baseball fan but also a cancer patient?

Sorry, but there isn't a single person in the world who would be more satisfying to jam for money than Barry Bonds, a truly miserable, dishonest character.

Good luck getting that ball back, Barroid.

RIP Glasgow Bomber

The Glasgow car bomber has died. You remember this guy.

I will have more to say about this, because I just finished reading "Mugged By Reality" by the partially reformed Neo-Con John Agresto, an account of Agresto's experience in Iraq as the senior advisor in charge of re-establishing Iraqi higher education. More on that later. Suffice it to say that Agresto has stopped believing -- if he ever did -- that liberal democratic ideals are easy to establish or can be quickly put into place anywhere in the world. His thesis is that in order for enlightened liberalism to take hold, a lot of complex and unusual social conditions must be present.

Against that background, I was taken by this story. They spent nearly a quarter million dollars in medical care on an essentially hopeless case, an individual whose injuries were self-inflicted and aimed at causing death to others.

I don't want to get into all of the terrible problems the U.S. has with its irrational health care system, or the illiberal and unenlightened and medieval policies of the current horrendous American president. Instead, let's focus on the following.

Kafeel had received extensive treatment at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Surgeons grafted on substitute skin made of shark cartilage and cow tendons. It was a system developed to treat the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

Medical staff dealing with the case privately said that there was little chance of recovery. Ahmed had been in a coma and there were signs of kidney and liver failure. There had also been some criticism of the money spent on the suspected terrorist. The "shark skin" treatment - called Integra Dermal Regeneration Template - alone came to over £20,000, and the total cost of security and medical care is estimated to have been more than £100,000.

Kafeel's parents, Moqbool and Zakia Ahmed, who live in the Indian city of Bangalore, had also pressed for doctors to switch off his life support machine, at one stage saying they would take legal action to enforce this if necessary. Some Muslim groups had claimed that the prisoner was being deliberately kept alive "for medical experiments".

Yesterday a spokesman for the Scottish Executive said: "It was perfectly right that he should have received the appropriate treatment our health service could offer as this reflects the value our society places on human life."

What I find interesting is not that this happened, but that we generally do not find this to be particularly unusual or surprising. Can anyone imagine that sort of treatment being extended by Sunnis to a failed Shiite bomber, or vice versa, in Baghdad? Look at the picture. The guy with the hose is a person that the burning man had moments earlier been trying to kill. In Baghdad, they would have tied the guy's smoldering body to the back of a truck and dragged it through the streets. I know this is going to sound chauvanistic and ethnocentric, but there really is a different core set of values at work here.

SEC Remedies

Here's an article on SEC enforcement remedies that I wrote -- er, assisted in the preparation of -- last fall. It's an absolute page-turner. John Grisham is shaking in his boots! Download sec_remedies.pdf

More U.S. Attorney Firing Emails

The sleazy spectacle of the U.S. Attorney firings continues. Another few pages of emails were released yesterday (Friday, naturally). As noted on White Collar Crime Prof Blog, the most interesting email concerns a statement by Kyle Sampson regarding Carol Lam's replacement. "For obvious reasons, [redacted] would be best."

This email was from January 14. Why wasn't it produced before? Don't tell me that things happen when massive amounts of documents are involved. Right now we're talking about 2,000 pages of documents. That's nothing. I'm actually very surprised that so few documents have been produced about this. Most of the produced documents are forwards of news articles. I'm skeptical that anything approaching full disclosure has been made.

But more to the point, Senator Leahy needs to call Kyle Sampson back and ask him one simple question: what were the "obvious reasons" for wanting a particular person (or kind of person) for Carol Lam's job. This goes to the very heart of the case.

Sexy News

Hot sexy news! Some fila brasileiro mastiffs apparently killed someone at Ving Rhames' house. I know because according to Google Trends, today everyone is searching for "fila brasileiro mastiffs." Down boy! Down!

I also am aware that a faulty cruise control switch caused a "Ford recall," which everyone is searching on Google. What a shame. Things were going so well for Ford.

Kimberly Pressler is big on Google Trends today. Not sure why. Maybe she was arrested or found in a terrorist training camp. I don't really care, except that it would be sad to see her in a burqa.

What I do care about is seeing if referencing these suddenly popular items will make the hits on this site go up. I would be very curious. Not that I'm going to make a habit of this, because it doesn't matter to me. Purely an experiment to see if a single post referencing popular things will lead to an appreciable increase in traffic. So what the hell.

Paris Hilton Nude!!!

Jake Brown -- Total Man!

Nothing to say other than check out this video [Damn!  Dead link] on YouTube. That has got to be the most amazing fall, and incredibly, the guy walked away. If you don't think it's much of a drop, watch what happens to his shoes when when lands.

Jake: not sure how many of your 9 lives you have left, but yesterday you burned through about five of them.

By the way, what is up with the commentator who sees him slam to the ground, 90% chance he's dead, and can only remark, "can't believe he made the 720!" Dude! A little perspective?

Update: He's supposed to get out of the hospital tomorrow. Jake, bro, that was absolutely incredible.

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Lefty Land)

Here's a real man of the people. According to this article from Politico, Senator Larry Craig from Idaho (what is it about Idaho that is inherently funny?) expresses his outrage over the Ted Stevens bribery scandal.

Well, not so much about the bribery. Apparently that's as American as apple pie. But the FBI raid?

"I think some people say, 'Ah, but for the grace of God go I.' Especially when you have the allegatiatons, you have the judicial segment of our government, the executive branch, out raiding the homes of senators, that is a very frightening propostion. It is a bit Gestapo-like in its style and tactics," Craig said on Wednesday.

"When the FBI was offered a key and invited into the home, they chose publicize it to make sure the media was there first, and they broke in. That is gamesmanship. That makes senators very, very angry when they attempt to cooperate when for reason they are caught in these webs and yet they are denied that for the sake of the juduciary’s publicity. That is wrong.’’

First of all, can we have a federal law making it a jailable offense to compare anything to Hitler, Nazis, or the Gestapo unless it is at least within the 1,000 miles of being comparable? I'm not one of these people who say you can never make the comparison, but not everything you dislike is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler. Really.

More to the point, though, Senator Craig is right that the FBI is prone to being heavy handed, and if you believe only a tenth of what you read, it's gotten very bad in the last decade. What is interesting here is that Senator Craig only now get peeved about it...when it happens to a fellow Senator. Where was the concern when it was only happening to the regular people?

Not that this sense of Senatorial entitlement is anything new or remotely surprising. What is surprising is that a member of the world's most exclusive club would actually say what he is thinking.

The other part of this that is interesting to me is the tendency, particularly among Republicans, of being hard line uncompromising rock-ribbed conservatives when it comes to you, but sappy lefties when the given matter, whatever it is, affects them or their friends or family personally. Nancy Reagan suddenly supports stem cell research when it could help Ronnie. Darth Cheney eases up on the lesbians when his daughter turns out to be a lesbian. All of the neo-Cons suddenly wake up to the harshness of the federal sentencing guidelines when Scooter gets a sentence that is right in line with said guidelines. Now Larry Craig becomes a one-day-only card-carrying ACLU member when the FBI does to a friend of his what they do to lots of Americans every single day.

My Poor Blog

I would like to apologize to my four loyal readers whose lives have been empty of meaning in the absence of my incoherent ramblings. No good excuse. I haven't been too busy. I haven't been doing anything better. I haven't been without things to talk about. In fact, several times, I was pontificating about something and my wife remarked, eyes glazed, "you haven't posted on your blog for a while, have you?"

I don't want to read too much into that comment, but it sounded like a hint.

No, my only excuse is that I've been spending far too much time playing MLB 2007, The Show on my PS3. I set up "season mode," but then I realized -- well, I knew this before, but didn't fully appreciate -- that a season is 162 games. Each game takes about 1 hour to play. That means to complete a full season, you would have to put in enough time to actually write your first novel.

Not that this dissuaded me. I dutifully played the entire month of April. Everything was wonderful. My beloved Red Sox were 14-10. But then I looked at the compiled stats for my pretend baseball season, and I realized that Manny Ramirez was batting .235 and Doug Mirabelli was leading the league in RBIs and batting over .500. I immedately took a real baseball bat, smashed my PS3 to smithereens, and got back to something useful....

Writing on my blog.

Adios!