A federal judge has declined to order mortgage watchdog website Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter to remove allegedly defamatory reporting about “the Grant America Program, a seller-financed down payment assistance program for low- to moderate-income homebuyers”. Sam Bayard at Citizen Media Law Blog has the details (Nov. 11).

• Beck & Herrmann skewer Waxman report on drug tort pre-emption [Drug & Device Law h/t Ted; much more at PoL] #
• Good news, Fed Circuit in Bilski case limits business method patents [AP, Patently-O, Parloff] #
• “Silicon Valley Stands United Against Prop. 8″ [TechCrunch] # Not too late to donate against the proposition whether or not you live in California [before you forget] #
• Crash-faking ring in Queens targeted Asian drivers [NY Times] #
• Community Reinvestment Act: bogeyman in housing mess, or unrelated red herring? Truth somewhere in between [Husock, City Journal] #
• “Dopeler Effect” = tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly [@legalblogger] #
• Going to go as Wall Street and terrify everyone: Happy Hallowe’en. #

• Foolish use of social media: Dan Schwartz feels like a broken record (= “corrupted music file”) warning about it [Connecticut Employment Law Blog] #
• “Hundreds face charges for having nude photo that girl circulated” [Obscure Store, Michigan; Radley Balko at Reason "Hit and Run" has a separate Ohio case] #
• “I Am the Beast Six Six Six vs. Michigan State Police”: crazy case names [Lowering the Bar via Legal Antics] #
• Potential uses for lawyers of those new Google late-night “Email Goggles” [Lowering the Bar] #
• Freddie Mac paid lobbyists $2 million in 2005 in stealth effort to undermine GOP-backed reform measure [AP; and N.B. Public Citizen still going out on a limb for Fannie & Fred] #
• John Steele Gordon on mortgages, banks, bubbles and irresponsible politicians through U.S. history [Commentary] #
• Can’t type “publ int” as shorthand for public interest without Word autocorrecting it to “pub lint”. #

• Hey, James Surowiecki has started blogging [New Yorker] #
• Why Canada’s bank and mortgage system isn’t broken [John Carney] #
• “Went to my ATM and it asked to borrow a twenty till the weekend”: jokes from the credit crisis [MargRev] #

• Anyone suing over anything dept.: Kansas City attorney Mary Kay Green sues McCain, Palin, for supposed hate speech against Obama [KC Star, Feral Child, Above the Law; related, my article the other day for City Journal]
• Got $331K from victim fund claiming severe injuries from Pentagon 9/11 attack, yet “kept playing basketball and lacrosse and ran [NYC] marathon in under four hours two months after the attacks” [Maryland Daily Record]
• Krugman claims Fannie/Freddie not big culprits in mortgage meltdown, but Calomiris and Wallison show him wrong [Stuart Taylor, Jr., National Journal; also note this Goldstein/Hall unlabeled opinion piece from McClatchy pushing the Krugman line]
• Government bailout of newspapers? Who’s trying to float this idea, anyway? [Bercovici/Portfolio via Romenesko] Update: maybe this?
• Colluded with chiropractor to generate bills for imaginary treatment, then pocketed clients’ insurance settlements without telling them [Quincy, Mass., Patriot-Ledger; Bruce Namenson sentenced to 5 years and "cannot practice law for at least 10 years after he gets out of jail"]
• Ontario: “Killer awarded $6K over wrong shoes in prison” [National Post]
• “Is there any doubt that Lucy grew up to be a lawyer?” [Above the Law on Doyle Reports, Judge Robertson ruling in patent case]
• Jury hits Jersey City, N.J. rheumatologist with $400K verdict (including $200K punitives) for not hiring sign language interpreter at his own expense for deaf patient [NJLJ, Krauss @ PoL]

• Housing collapse: when are you safer, at the top of the cliff or after falling off? [Calculated Risk] #
• New American Spectator piece quotes Ted and me on demonization of deregulation [Point of Law] #
• Ted is eeeevil … so sez Daily Kos-ite on finding his name among signers of Palin trooper amicus [Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis] More: Aviva Cuyler, JD Supra. #
• Tried snipping the depressing bits out of the paper but all that was left was half the gardening column and a recipe #
• It’s my counterparty and I’ll cry if I want to [Naked Capitalism]

• “Just once I’d like to see a candidate respond: ‘Sorry but that’s not a legitimate function of the federal govt.’” [@radleybalko] #
• Pete Warden on reasons to be cheerful [PeteSearch] #
• Ribstein: Where was SOx in all this? [Ideoblog] #
• Top banks in Russia already govt-owned, hasn’t spared them in crisis [Pierre Briançon, Breaking Views] #
• Ed Glaeser: don’t try to prop up housing prices [NYT "Economix"; related, Salmon] #
• Yes, co-blogger Ted is now on Twitter and I think he needs more followers [@tedfrank] #

• All politics aside, Soros’s views on boom-bust cycles deserve attention [Naked Capitalism] #
• Sebastian Mallaby on misplacing blame for crisis [Washington Post; but see] #
• Warren Buffett on subject of Fannie-Freddie oversight [MargRev] # Others (h/t @srcleere) say regulators did warn of Fannie/Freddie, but Congress protected them #
• Back from NYC meetup with Kevin O’Keefe and Matt Homann, learned huge amount from them about using Twitter #
• Nocera: Waxman hearing was point-scoring political theater [NY Times] #
• Hank Greenberg on AIG collapse [NY Times DealBook] #

• Are Citi-Wachovia-Wells Fargo doomed to relive Texaco-Getty-Pennzoil in court? [Ethan Leib, Prawfsblawg; more here, here] #
• GOP petrified at prospect of filibuster-proof Democratic Senate [Politico] #
• Iceland’s once high-flying banks: will bailout needs overwhelm small nation’s govt? [Salmon] #
• Splog rips off Blawg Review #175 in its entirety from rightful author J. Spencer. Will Blogspot do anything? [don't give 'em a direct link] #
• A peek at a revamped Amazon Kindle due out for Xmas? [Carnoy, CNet "Crave"] #
• Courtesy Kevin O’Keefe, “Beer for Bloggers” event in Manhattan Monday evening [see you there?] #
• Good article on pressures on Fannie Mae to plunge into risky lending 2005-08 [Kudos to NYT] #

• Game-geek nostalgia: the “Play Generated Map and Document Archive” [Feral Child] #
• “A lawyer charging extra for stamps and copies is like a car wash charging extra for water.” [Matt Homann, The (Non)-Billable Hour] #
• Aside to attorney Stephen Otto, who asked about a mail- and copy-intensive bankruptcy case: I guess that might be the exception, like the desert car wash that you can understand might for water use by the gallon #
• Some reasons why Washington Mutual failure and rescue was a big deal [Kevin LaCroix, D&O Diary] #
• Analysis of bailout’s “excessive executive compensation” provisions [Hodak Value] #
• Roundup of credit crisis links [Point of Law] #

• Good bank/bad bank snipouts preferable to having taxpayers overpay for junky assets [John Hussman] #
• AEI’s Peter Wallison: don’t blame deregulation for credit crisis [Bloomberg.com] #
• Paulson’s been driving hard bargains, not bailouts, in rescues so far, sez Kevin Drum [MotherJones.com (!)] #
• More on Fannie and Freddie’s very special relationship to Congress [Wallison/Calomiris, AEI Financial Services Outlook]
• Gorgeous photos of “most alien-looking place on earth”, Yemen’s Socotra Island [Dark Roasted Blend]

• Kodachrome photos from New Deal era [via Susan Cartier Liebel] #
• “Bailout Watch” site [CEI] #
• Be very alarmed on credit panic [Nouriel Roubini] #
• Knew there was trouble when the toaster salesman offered a free bank. #
• Word of the day, “bageling”: when a stock goes to zero, i.e. “O” [ClusterStock] #
• “The GOP’s Wall Street friends”? Think again [David Frum] (& followups here and here) #

I’ve renamed these telegraphic roundups “microblog” which seems more approachable than “Twitter”. Better name suggestions are welcome.
• Many countries had booms in housing finance, why was our meltdown worst? EconBrowser #
• Hail of dead cats from blogosphere for Paulson bailout plan PoL #
• Stunningly bad McCain idea: have Andrew Cuomo run SEC Mickey Kaus #
• Business historian John Steele Gordon on origins of mortgage meltdown NYT Freakonomics guest post #
• Going after lawyers in mortgage mess? New York Law Journal #
• Obama to pick centrists for high court? Not if advisers Minow and Tribe can help it Kerr @ Volokh #

Here are the ones I’m reading.

The Andrew Cuomo (as HUD secretary) connection (Wayne Barrett, “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie”, Village Voice, Aug. 5)(via Bader, who has much more). I have more on the credit crisis here, here, and here at Point of Law.

Related: Jack Shafer has a bipartisan list of Fannie Mae friends.

Attorneys Thomas R. Bender, Richard O. Faulk, and John S. Gray analyze the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling in the lead paint case, detailing the history of the case and note the implications for other public-nuisance suits in the global warming and mortgage foreclosure fields.

It wasn’t exactly a failure of unregulated business, even if many of the lawsuits are going to push that theme (Carol D. Leonnig, “How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis”, Washington Post, Jun. 10)(via Hans Bader).

If the feds are really in search of types of jobholders with a high risk of scandal and defalcation, we could probably come up with some other nominees for them. (John Berlau, CEI “Open Market”, May 23). New York apparently has such a system already (North Country Gazette); see also Reason comments (employees of SEC-regulated financial institutions).