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Crime and Consequences Has Moved

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Effective New Year's Day 2020, the Crime and Consequences Blog has moved to https://www.crimeandconsequences.blog.

The old blog will be left in place at this address as an archive of posts from the blog's inception in 2006 through the end of 2019.

Commenting Turned Off Temporarily

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Comments and registration for commenting have been turned off for the time being while we address a security issue.

Update (11/14): Comments have been turned back on.

We're Back

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C&C has been off the air since Tuesday morning. Our web host, Bluehost, migrated our site to a new server. However, they botched the move, failed to get the internet pointers pointing to the new location correctly, failed to fix the problem in a timely manner, and failed to effectively communicate with us regarding the outage, its cause, and its duration. Needless to say, we will be looking for a new host before the end of our present term.

Commenter Registration

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We are having technical difficulties with the Yahoo method of logging in to comment. I have opened the native Movable Type system to registration.

C&C Moving

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Crime and Consequences will be moving to a new platform shortly.  We have a few more bugs to work out first.  A notice and forwarding address will be posted here when the move is completed, and this will become an archive blog.

Maintenance

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C&C Blog may be down for brief intervals this week as we upgrade our system.

Commenter Registration

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The commenter registration system has been turned off for the time being.  Our creaky old blog software is causing problems, and I do not presently have time to implement the replacement system.

I can register commenters manually, when I have time.  Requests may be emailed using the link on our contact page.

C&C Gets Around

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Two weeks ago, I wrote in this space that Special Counsel Bob Mueller has a conflict of interest (his long friendship with a major witness and possible investigative subject, Jim Comey) that requires his recusal.  I thought the topic sufficiently important that I submitted my entry in slightly revised form to USA Today, which printed it

A colleague of mine at Georgetown Law tells me that it was mentioned in a Washington Post story the next day.  The mention was hardly prominent, coming six paragraphs from the end of a somewhat long article, but it did get my attention.

The person the Post reported was reading and tweeting about the argument first outlined on C&C has the initials DJT.

Possible Brief Outages This Week

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C&C's host is moving us to a new server, which should result in better performance.  They have advised us to expect periods of downtime of 15-20 minutes this week as they make the transition.  These outages should occur after 4:00 p.m. EST.

Back from AGACL

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Some readers may have noticed I have not blogged much in the last week.  I was in New Orleans at the annual convention of the Association of Government Attorneys in Capital Litigation.  (I am not, of course, a government attorney, but they tolerate me there anyway.)  I will have more to say on this conference later in the week.

Commenter Registration Reopened

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I have reopened the facility for commenters to register with the blog and establish a username and password.  The usual email confirmation process applies.

I encourage frequent commenters to use this method of signing in rather than Yahoo so that comments will be identified with a recognizable handle instead of the string of garbage that Yahoo incomprehensibly assigns.

To register, go to the comments on any post, press "Sign in," then "Sign up" and the bottom of the sign-in page.

Hopefully the gremlins that have caused software glitches in the commenting system will remain dormant until we replace the blog software altogether.

Comment Glitch

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We have discovered that a glitch in the blog software has resulted in post authors not being informed of new comments to their posts.  For that reason, some valid comments by commenters who have not been designated "trusted" and thus requiring approval for publication have not been published. 

I just published a bunch of them.  We will work on either fixing the problem or finding a workaround.
David Lat of Above the Law explains in the WaPo why his blog has dropped comments.  The subhead is "I used to rely on Above the Law commenters for tips. Now they just spew bile."

Over the years, however, our comments changed. They had always been edgy, but the ratio of offensive to substantive shifted in favor of the offensive. Inside information about law firms and schools gave way to inside jokes among the "commentariat," relevant knowledge got supplanted by non sequiturs, and basic civility (with a touch of political incorrectness) succumbed to abuse and insult.
Lat notes that comments became increasingly racist and sexist insults.  Equally offensive, I should note here, is the comment that accuses someone else of racism, etc., with no rational basis for doing so.  ("You support Policy X, and Policy X has a disparate impact.  Therefore you are a racist," and drivel such as that.)  He also notes that the administrative burden of actively policing the comments is just not worth it.  Comment degeneration not only diminishes the blog and the post to which the comment is made, but gutter comments drive away commenters who actually do want to discuss ideas in a civil manner, creating a downward spiral.

We have no plans to drop comments here at C&C.  Our commenters on the whole remain multiple levels above the degeneracy seen elsewhere.  The comments section adds valuable perspective and spices up the blog.

So let's keep it clean, folks, and keep the focus on facts and ideas, not name-calling.  Our policies on comments are noted in this post as updated in this post.

C&C Reloaded

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The blog is back up following an outage caused by technical difficulties at our host.  Comments submitted Friday afternoon or evening may have been lost.  Our apologies for any inconvenience.

A Note on Stale Comment Threads

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I am getting an increasing number of comments, nearly all of them critical, posted to old comment threads where there has not been any activity for a while.  For critical comments on active threads, I usually don't need to respond because the regular commenters here will point out where the criticism goes awry (if it does, and it usually does).  For an old thread, though, the regulars will not see it, but it is there on our blog and needs to be addressed, taking up time.

If the blog software had the capability, I would close threads to comments automatically after a week of inactivity. Since it does not, I will generally close a stale thread to further comments after answering (or sometimes not publishing) such a comment.

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