Chocolate News

Video Savant has sent in the news that St. Louis Cardinals' manager Tony La Russa is suing Twitter, claiming that the company is guilty of trademark infringement, cybersquatting and misappropriation of likeness and name, because someone set up a fake Tony La Russa profile. He claims that he tried to contact the service and was unable to get them to take down the fake profile (which seems odd, since the company has apparently been pretty good about taking down fake accounts upon request). However, when he was unable to do that, he filed the lawsuit. Either way, it's difficult to see the lawsuit going very far. While (tragically) there is no section 230 or DMCA-type safe harbors for trademark, common sense should make it clear that it's not Twitter that's the liable party here (if there's any liability), but whoever created the account. Even then, it's difficult to see this getting very far. The use wasn't "in commerce" which should preclude most trademark claims, and the nature of the fake La Russa tweets suggests that anyone who read them would likely realize that it was a parody of the real La Russa. Still, there was a similar issue recently with Kanye West getting angry over fake users on Twitter -- but it hardly seems like something worth suing about. If the person is so famous, then it's not hard for them to (as West did) point out that the profile is fake, and it shouldn't much matter any more.

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Earlier today, when I read that President Barack Obama had, in typical visiting-U.S.-leader fashion, said "thank you" in the local language while visiting Saudi Arabia ("Shukran"), I jokingly tweeted my impression of a hysterical media response -- "OMFG Obama said "thanks" in Arabic to King Abdullah -- HE IS A MUSLIM! What if he bows?"

Of course, as Spencer catches, the media did take it up (and I haven't even seen the cable shows yet). Jake Tapper's take on the new emphasis on the president's Muslim heritage reflects the ambiguity about this issue that I criticized during the campaign. On one hand, it's hard to blame Obama for wanting his religion to be correctly identified (yup, he's a Christian) and there were and continue to be bigoted attacks against him based on this false perception. On the other hand, though, by continually emphasizing that Obama was not a Muslim, it almost created the impression that maybe there is something wrong with that.

With the campaign over and his heritage now valuable on the world stage, I'm happy to see the president reclaiming his cosmopolitan background to help protect America's interests abroad and recall that American Muslims are real Americans, too. But I hope this new understanding doesn't drift away in the face of electoral battles to come in 2010 or 2012.

-- Tim Fernholz

Photo of Obama visiting the Blue Mosque in Turkey, courtesy the White House

Update: Hadn't seen Adam's post below and thus missed out on Michael Goldfarb's ridiculous insinuations. Classy!

... and today's comes from The New York Times, which describes why you should not take financial advice from The New York Times. Our heroine is 63-year-old laid-off office assistant Eileen Ulery, who demands in the name of all that's sacred that her mortgage lenders (Bank of American by way of Countrywide) haircut the $143,000 she owes them.

What supposedly makes Ulery the "face of the latest wave of troubled American homeowners" is that she wasn't just some arrogant house-flipper. The Times goes to great lengths to establish her Yankee frugality. (Do they have Yankee frugality in Arizona?) She visits yard sales. She has a "round face" and "staccato laugh." She drinks $6 screwtop merlot -- a mark of thrift in the eyes of the apparently Fred Franzia-hating Paper of Record. She "tracks her monthly expenses on a color-coded spreadsheet." (Does she dot the i in "debit" with a frowny face?). And the clean living doesn't end there:

Far from being one of those who used easy-money loans to speculate on homes proliferating across the desert soil of greater Phoenix, she has lived in the same modest, stucco-sided condo in suburban Mesa for a dozen years. She bought the two-bedroom home in 1997 for $77,500.

But somehow she now owes $143,000 on the dump, which after ballooning above $200,000, now assesses around $122,000. Where did the money go?

Like tens of millions of other American homeowners, she added to her mortgage balance as the value of her condo swelled, at one point exceeding $200,000. She refinanced to pay off some credit cards and settle into a 30-year, fixed-rate loan. Later, she took out a home equity line of credit to buy a new Hyundai. She refinanced again in 2007, borrowing $20,000, mostly for a new roof.

I think we need to see one of those color-coded spread sheets. Subtracting the current $143,000 mortgage from the closing price of $77,500, I get $65,000. According to HyundaiUSA.com, the MSRP for the most expensive Hyundai in the lot, the four-door Genesis, is a cool $32,250. Even if we assume the humble-as-Uriah Heep Ms. Ulery bought that top-line model, and we add that to the cost of the roof, there's still $13,250 unaccounted for. And I say it all went right up Ulery's nose!

I hope Ulery gets out of her predicament, but it is offensive to the proud tradition of true cheapskate-hood to see Times reporter Peter S. Goodman build this person up as a model of thrift who became a victim of circumstance. (Or not even that: Thanks to the inevitable "stress-related illness," Ulery has chosen not to "pursue another paycheck.") This is a protagonist who, after all her bargain-hunting and spreasheeting, looks in the mirror and realizes the true villain is the bank that lent her all that money when she asked for it:

As she sees it, the same banks that generated the mortgage crisis are now getting public money to fix it, while doing little more than seeking new fees.

"I don't think the government gets it," she said. "These are the same people you couldn't trust before."

Well, she's right about that last part; just not in the way she thinks.

I know there's nothing as inescapable as blogs that are indefatigably called "indispensable," but this link is courtesy of the truly indispensable Calculated Risk, which nicely explains the madness of leveraging your most valuable asset to pay your most insignificant debts -- which of course is the real story the Grey Lady buried here.