1) Email to me and to this site has been hit with big delays and disruptions today and is still not working well. If you sent me something important, consider re-sending it.

2) One effect of the disruptions is that the “microblog” (Twitter) plugin has stopped working, hence no scroll of new Twitter posts in the right column. I’ll try to restore it, and in the mean time may try a “homemade” microblog post of highlights.

When your litigation opponent subpoenas your Facebook, Amazon, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn and (locked) Twitter pages (& Likelihood of Confusion).

• Christopher Hitchens: once utopian electoral buzz wears off, nation’ll face pretty much same set of problems as before [Slate] #
• Business preparing to play defense in D.C. on 3 big battlefronts: labor/empt law, arbitration, preemption [NLJ] #
• Pretty neat, Google Reader now translates foreign-language blogs for you [SearchEngineLand h/t @mike_elgan] #
• @gideonstrumpet it’s one of the “laws” of blogging — very hard to predict beforehand which posts’ll draw the biggest traffic #
• “Lawyer Hausfeld Learned of Firing as Chairman From Note on Seat” [Securities Docket] #
• If transcript “is held face down and shaken, thousands of confusion flakes will drift to the ground like snowflakes” [Lowering the Bar] #
• Jamie Gorelick, mentioned as possible AG pick, would bring baggage [Althouse] #
• GM-Chrysler merger = idea that pair of boozers can fix drinking problem by getting married to each other [McArdle] #

• Could AIG really have been THAT stupid in risk analysis? [Carney, more, Salmon] #
• Unexpected: NY Gov. Paterson appears before Congress and quotes Ayn Rand [Damon Root, Reason "Hit and Run"] #
• “I don’t know what Prop 3 is, but I’m voting against it because there were kids in that ad.” [@daveweigel quoting another] #
• Operatic: Terry Teachout and Leontyne Price among the Supreme Court justices [About Last Night] #
• Already a good blog out there on your topic? Don’t let that stop you [O'Keefe] #
• Obama Warns He May Cease To Exist Unless America Believes In Him [The Onion] #
• “The majesty of our jury system: remember, she made it past 2 sides’ voir dire” [@tedfrank on Anchorage Daily News coverage of Stevens trial juror] #

If you’re not visiting my other site — or subscribing to it in your RSS reader, or following its Twitter feed — here’s some of what you may have missed lately:

• Sen. Obama’s “I voted for tort reform” talk: maybe not so serious;
• Assaults on arbitration and pre-emption are just the start of the Litigation Lobby’s big plans for next year;
• A new featured column by Richard Epstein on the peculiarly named Employee Free Choice Act;
• Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers, Inc. project is out with a new report on West Virginia;
• U.S. Department of Commerce: foreign investors fear our litigation climate;
• Albany plaintiff’s firm Powers & Santola ladles out campaign money to judges it practices before;
• Through the wringer? Judge Posner is quite severe on a clothes-dryer class action.

• 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. #

• ‘98 master tobacco settlement: not just bootleggers and Baptists, but also “televangelists.” [Morriss, Regulation, h/t Ted] #
• Slants and biases in Associated Press reporting aren’t new, but they’ve become impossible to ignore [WaPo] #
• Unplanned result of bailout: lenders back off from deals to sell distressed real estate at cut price [Coyote] #
• GM needs to tear up contracts with its unions, retirees, and dealers, which means it needs bankruptcy [Bainbridge] #
• No kidding: gorgeous photography of slime molds [English Russia] #
• Blog primer on credit default swaps and other financial derivatives [Derivative Dribble] #
• Wouldn’t it be more helpful to save the epithet “socialist” for times when it’s really, you know, accurate? [Ron Coleman] #
• State of New York staring into fiscal chasm, years of $10 billion+ deficits [NYPost] #

• “Energy independence is no more desirable than coffee independence, banana independence, or car independence.” [David Henderson, EconLog] #
• L.I.R.R.: a disability certification outfit disguised as a railroad [Bogdanich, N.Y. Times] #
• Even post-scandal, private attorneys for towns can still collar lucrative NY state pensions [Peddie, Newsday] #
• Lining up for bailout bucks: automakers and even mass transit [Carney] #
• Poll of worst law firm names (”Low, Ball & Lynch”) [Greatest American Lawyer; h/t @SCartierLiebel] #
• List of legal newsfeeds on Twitter, now updated [JD Scoop] #

• Did the Feds err in letting Lehman fail? [Salmon vs. Carney] #
• Oh, spare us, Newt: Gingrich says some of SNL’s Palin skits “were slander and were worthy of a lawsuit” [Van Susteren] #
• Signs of much economic distress in ocean shipping trade [Naked Capitalism] #
• Seattle municipal archives, tons of cool historical photos [Flickr] #
• “Journalism is not brain surgery; it’s more difficult than that,” sez (did you guess?) a journalism professor [Happy Hospitalist] #

• McCain hoist on his own campaign regulation petard [WSJ edit] #
• Conservatives should hold a retreat to talk about why they’re being sent to the wilderness [Friedersdorf/Culture11] #
• Disability activism and “anti-national sexual positions”: just another day in postmodern academia [Massie] #
• Unionism on steroids: Employee Free Choice Act would be Thatcherism in reverse [Claire Berlinski, City Journal] #
• Here’s a twist: a politician walking over his ambition to reach his grandmother #

• Parents press states for autism insurance laws [AP] #
• Steve Chapman on right and wrong ways to legalize gay marriage [Reason] #
• Unsolicited “StoneZone” mailings say they’re from veteran GOP operative Roger Stone — and when you try to unsubscribe? [Greenfield] #
• “Lawyer Called ‘Poster Boy for Capital Litigation Abuse’ Appointed to New Case” [ABA Journal] #
• Before fingering credit default swaps (CDSs) as culprit in the crisis, better read this [Salmon; more, John Carney] #
• Twitter cookbook all recipes 140 chars. or less h/t VBalasubramani #
• Reminder: you can follow Twitter feeds of both Overlawyered and Point of Law #

• 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] #

• Anonymous but mostly plausible Q & A of what went wrong on Wall Street [Rowley/Yahoo Finance] #
• Most PR people still approach bloggers in clueless way [Kevin O'Keefe; more background, PoL; also see Greenfield] #
• Glitnir and Kaupthing sound like Wagnerian trolls, but went on a scarier rampage as Icelandic banks [UK Independent] #
• Not a misprint & no zeros missing: median price of house or condo sold last month in Detroit was $9,250 [Detroit Free Press] #

• Don’t kvetch about Krugman Nobel, it’s for his work in economics not his politics [Cowen, MargRev] #
• “Law Grad Cited for Frivolous Suits is Source of Obama Muslim Rumors” [ABA Journal] #
• Garrison Keillor reads a poem on product warnings [Point of Law] #
• Last will and testament, handwritten on a shopping list [Giacalone] #
• Fast, fast relief from troublesome teens, just drop ‘em in Nebraska [Houston Chronicle] #
• Michael Arrington: “suing someone to get them to return your calls is not exactly a sign of brilliance” [TechCrunch via Blawg Review #181 at Mediation Channel] #

• The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog [via Radley Balko] #
• Still undecided on Calif.’s anti-gay Prop 8? Here’s why every paper of note in the state advises voting no [Box Turtle Bulletin] # Also radio’s John & Ken [same] #
• Ben Stein 2007, meet Ben Stein 2008 [Felix Salmon] #
• Everyone was glad to see Anchorage, Alaska restored as a salmon habitat but then… [Anchorage Daily News via Ted] #

• Would single-payer fix malpractice woes? Not likely given trial bar political clout [KevinMD] #
• Prosecuting candidates for crowd-inciting campaign speeches? Now there’s a truly bad idea [Point of Law] #
• Her busy docket: “For people like Oprah, lawsuits are a part of life” [Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times] #
• Nebraska hospital sues patient for refusing to leave [Happy Hospitalist; related earlier] #
• Community covenant craziness: “Dad’s in prison because we can’t afford to sod the lawn” [St. Petersburg Times] #

• “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] #