It's got to be rough to be John Kerry:

A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum. ...

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., is heard to say, "That's alright, let me answer his question." ...

As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student's "very important question," Meyer struggles on the ground and yells at the officers to release him, crying out, "Don't Tase me, bro," just before he is Tasered.

At least Al Franken wasn't involved.

UPDATE I've heard some people faulting John Kerry for this. Just to be clear; I don't think Kerry could have done anything. He was pretty helpless in this situation. I think this is more a question of the police officers making a serious mistake, and I expect the university to throw a lot of money to fix the problem.

UPDATE I still haven't seen the video (it's really not high on my list of things to do); but I'm no longer sure that the police overreacted. Turns out Tasers have more than one setting, and Meyer was hit with a lower setting than I believed originally. This lower setting sounds like it's kin to Mace, pepper spray, pressure points, or any number of other tactics I think would have been acceptable in this situation (of course Mace and pepper spray run the risk of affecting bystanders).

I've been thinking about buying Greenspan's new book. Greenspan makes me laugh. I watched him give speeches that were so difficult to understand that the networks always put some form of "translation subtitles" on the screen whenever he was talking. On the other hand, I watched him talking to Congress off the cuff, and I couldn't help but think (1) the guy has a great sense of humor, and (2) He really can explain himself well when he wants to.

On the way to school today, I heard a claim that his new book says that the Iraq war "was for the oil." This is odd, because Greenspan has a reputation for thinking things out before opening his mouth (unlike, say, Barack Obama), and most conspiracy claims about the Iraq war are notoriously underbaked. If the war's "about the money" who's getting the money? If it's Cheney, through Halliburton, then somebody ought to tell Cheney. If it's about the oil, then who's getting the oil? The US military isn't in the business of running oil fields.

Luckily, Greenspan has thought a little bit about this:

"Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy," he writes. ...

Greenspan clarified his remarks in an interview with the Washington Post, telling the newspaper that although securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with a case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said. ... He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, "I have never heard them basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive."

Sounds a little different from what the "Surrender at any cost" group has been saying, doesn't it?

Tax reform is always a one-way street.

I've been following a couple of lawsuits between the company that used to be named Caldera (now called SCO) and a whole list of other companies: IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone, and DaimlerChysler. Last Friday -- after the court refused to give SCO special permission to immediately appeal a ruling (instead of appealing at the end of the trial) -- SCO filed for bankruptcy.

SCO has sworn for years that if it can only get its case in front of a jury, it will prove that Linux infringes SCO's UNIX copyrights. The ruling that SCO wanted to appeal stated that SCO has very few UNIX copyrights, and apparently limited those copyrights enough that SCO realized Linux could not be considered to infringe on them in any way. A related ruling said that SCO's case had shrunk enough (due to summary judgements and voluntary dismissals) that SCO no longer had a right to a jury trial -- a judge would handle the trial instead.

A lot of things about this bankruptcy smell fishy. By filing for bankruptcy, SCO gets an automatic delay in the other trials that it started. It also throws the pretrial decisions into a legal limbo; the bankruptcy judge isn't required to follow them. One lawyer thinks its possible for SCO to get some money back from the lawyers it's paid. However, SCO has asked that its current lawyers be allowed to run the company for the time being.

Overall, I think that the bankruptcy is meant to pressure IBM, Red Hat and Novell into settling. SCO has $10 million in the bank. Novell was on track to get something around $30 million from its trial. Now everybody who SCO owes money to realizes that every dollar Novell gets is a dollar they don't get. The same goes for IBM and Red Hat's lawsuits. The negotiating table just got a lot larger.

The SCO-Novell lawsuit was over an agreement where SCO collected UNIX royalties and handed 95% of the money over to Novell. SCO stopped handing that money over a few years ago. I don't know what Novell will do next, but I do know if I were involved in the negotiations, I wouldn't accept any settlement where SCO continued to collect the royalties. However, by canceling that agreement, and by SCO's actions with regards to Linux, SCO would be left out in the cold without a software product to work on.