Not surprisingly, Jefferson maintains his innocence and claims that a precedent-setting raid of his Capitol Hill office was unconstitutional because it trampled on congressional independence and violated the constitutionally established separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

A federal judge authorized last year’s 18-hour FBI search—the first ever at a Capitol Hill office–which led to the seizure of records, equipment and other incriminating evidence. Last month Jefferson argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the raid was unconstitutional.

Judicial Watch filed an amicus brief stating that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from “intimidation by the executive and accountability before a possible hostile judiciary,” does not make the search of Jefferson’s office unconstitutional. The Speech or Debate Clause, the brief states, only protects members of Congress conducting legislative actions.

This does raise an interesting constitutional issue. Personally, I don’t want to see the FBI tromping all over Capitol Hill. But by the same token, Eliot Ness should not be completely forbidden to act. If only Alberto Gonzales was Eliot Ness…

Technorati Tags: FBI, Speech or Debate Clause, William Jefferson, Eliot Ness
LibraryThing

AREs are a tricky business. It’s hard to get them into the hands of the right people, and harder to make those hands open them. Most are simple wasted. And they’re not cheap. Although usually pretty flimsy, they’re made in small batches, so they generally cost more to produce than the final hardcover.

LibraryThing Early Reviews solves this problem. Books aren’t distributed randomly, but to the right people. The algorithm we’re using has a bunch of factors, including plain luck. The core, however, is what LibraryThing knows that nobody else knows—the books in people’s libraries.

To kick things off, Random House gave us a list of “similar books” for each title. We then washed these through a new recommendations algorithm, “sorting” the LibraryThing library according to their statistical proximity to these titles. We ended up with a 200 “similars” for each book. All things being equal, the more of these you have—and the higher on the list—the better your chances of getting a book.*

It turns out, this is a pretty powerful thing to do. Some reviewers pop right out—the ones reading lots of similar books. They’re not guaranteed to like the book—nothing ever could—but they’re the right people to review it.

This is absolutely brilliant, and should revolutionize the imprecise black art of sending out review copies.