H/t Spencer Ackerman.
Year: 2010
Unsurprising News of the Day
4 out of 9 Supreme Court justices believe that there is a constitutional right to discrimination:
An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won’t let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group’s ”discriminatory practices.”
The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards ”unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle” as being inconsistent with that faith.
But Hastings, which is in San Francisco, said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.
The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college’s nondiscrimination policy.
I guess we can call them the hate caucus.
On Robert Byrd Passing
I have remarkably little to say.
He is from a generation of politicos who are 3 (perhaps 4) generations removed, and to the degree that he impinged on my consciousness, it appeared that most of his speeches were lamentations regarding an idealized past that probably never existed.
Then again, I am sure that I have a much more jaundiced view of Congress in general, and the Senate in particular than the distinguished gentleman from West Virginia.
In any case, my condolences to his family.
I Agree
This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.
For those of you whodon’t know, the preceedings was written by Dave Weigel on the private (and now shuttered) JournOlist listserv, and was subsequently leaked to right wing bloggers, leading to his resignation from his position at the Washington Post as their blogger covering the right wing movement.
It should be noted that a number of prominent conservatives have come to his defense.
I cannot speak to the ethics of leaking information from a private listserv, after all we see a lot of leaked private emails when the media covers other industries, but I think that whoever did this was a dick, though they might be an ethical dick.*
Needless to say, it all that the Washington, DC professional blogosphere is talking about right now, to which my response is to go back to covering the damn news.
BTW, if you read the Washington Post Ombudsman’s article on this, which is basically a plea to conservatives to like them, you will understand why you should not subscribe to the paper.
*Come to think of it, “Ethical Dick” is a should be a synonym for “good reporter.”
Found on the Internet
I do not know who came up with this, but they are a genius:
Weak Tea
My assesment of the financial reform bill that recently was released by the conference committee.
It’s better than I had hoped when the Senate first got its hands on it, but it is dangerously weak.
And here’s a surprise, it doesn’t have Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives restrictions, which is not surprising, that entire proposal was part of the incumbent protection in the US Congress, and with Lincoln having won the primary, it gets deep sixed.
Brian Buetler looks at and calls it a draw between liberals and the corruption caucus, but that’s only if you ignore the fact that the liberals had already ceded meaningful reform to the corruption caucus (and the WH, but I am repeating myself) early in this process.
Busy Day Today
My wife’s 1994 Honda Odyssey died 2 weeks ago, with 280,000 miles on it, and we have been looking for a replacment.
Well, we settled on a 2009 Mazda5 mini-minivan with about 36K miles on it. It seats 6, but is a somewhat smaller than our old Odyssey, and much smaller than what the Odyssey has grown into since.
It has a rather un-minivan-ish feel to it, and it drives nicely.
My wife is now pondering a name for it.
My though is that it’s an inanimate object, so just call it a car.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
- Peninsula Bank, Englewood, FL
- First National Bank, Savannah, GA
- High Desert State Bank, Albuquerque, NM,
Back up to multiple bank closures, 3 this week.
So, here is the graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only):
I Wish I Knew the Back Story
No picture, but we were on I-695, just east of I-83, driving through an area of construction, and in the median strip, surrounded by Jersey barriers, was a guy firing up, or at least setting up, a gas barbecue grill.
So, he was setting out to grill Italian sausage, or maybe, they were workers heat treating something on site, I don’t know, but I will always wonder.
I was driving, so I could not take any pics, sorry.
Jon Stewart Nails the Press … Again
The Best Journalist in America
This time, he’s angry at the press, Fox, or rather the idiotic Gretchen Carlson, in particular, but the press as a whole, over their coverage of the McChrystal affair.
He notices that everyone in the MSM is stunned and amazed that Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings was willing to piss off someone by doing his job, and thus not have him as a source again.
You see, a lot of bad reporting is driven by the fact that reporters have their tongues so far up well connected sources asses that they can taste tonsil, and it makes the mainstream media resemble a protection racket.
H/t the inner walls, aka my hairy barbarian elder brother, who dryly observes, “What a concept, doing the job comes first, careerism later.”
Back Home Now
I am working a 4 ten hour days, so I get 3 days at home.
Still trying to get my head around all this and figuring out how to balance blogging with all this.
Needless to say, this blog is not at the top of my work/family priorities, but I’ll try to stay on top of this.
Viacom Case Against Google Thrown Out
The judge said that the safe harbor provision of the DMCA indemnifies Google, and granted Google’s motion for summary judgement, and dismissed Viacom’s lawsuit against Google/Youtube.
My guess is the fact that Viacom was itself posting illegal material to Youtube as a pretext for the lawsuit had a lot to do with this.
I will note that the author, Greg Sandoval quoted an “expert” from the libertarian group the PFF saying that it would be overturned without noting that both litigants funded the organization.
That’s just sloppy.
Torturing Duncan Black
Mr. Black, better known by his nom de blog Atrios, coined the term, “Friedman Unit ,” to describeThomas “The Mustache of Pablum” Friedman’s penchant for saying that the whichever war we are involved in will be won in the next 6 months.
A few months later Friedman would say that the next 6 months were “crucial.”
Rinse…lather…repeat…
Well, now Michael O’Hanlon is torturing the young lad:
At this moment, as we enter into perhaps the most crucial six months of the entire war, I hope and pray that President Obama will decide we cannot afford to be without the leadership of such an amazing American.
(emphasis mine)
Mr. Black wants someone to, “Make it stop.”
Your mouth to God’s ear, Mr. Black.
Economics Update
The lede has to be the the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) statement.
While the rates remained the same, no surprise, you cannot drop rates below 0%, and rates won’t go up until the Fed sends a few months of signals, what is surprising is that the statement is more pessimistic than May’s statement:
The Federal Reserve acknowledged a faltering pace of U.S. economic recovery on Wednesday as it renewed its vow to hold benchmark interest rates exceptionally low for an extended period.
In a statement at the end of a two-day meeting, the Fed scaled back its assessment of the pace of recovery, taking note of pockets of weakness, and also issued a cautionary note about volatile financial markets in light of Europe’s debt woes.
Of course, it’s more than just unemployment and consumer spending, real estate appears poised to had back down the drain, with the AIA’s Architecture Billings Index declining last month, and mortgage purchase applications fell again this week.
But the real news in real estate is the continuing collapse in home sales, and we now know that new home sales have fallen to the lowest recorded number ever, a 300,000 annual rate, and records on this have been kept since 1963. (!)
The two bright sides here are that the numbers are seasonally adjusted, and that the monthly number is volatile, and was likely impacted by the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, but it is still grim.
An Outbreak of Journalism
When U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a Reagan appointee, struck down the Obama administration 6-month moratorium on deep water drilling, I kind of figured that I would hear stories about appeals.
It turns out that the story about his decision is all about the judges investments in a number of energy companies, including Transocean, operator of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig:
U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a 1983 appointee of President Ronald Reagan, reported owning less than $15,000 in stock in 2008 in Transocean, the company that owned the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
………
Feldman’s 2008 financial disclosure report — the most recent available — also showed investments in Ocean Energy, a Houston-based company, as well as Quicksilver Resources, Prospect Energy, Peabody Energy, Halliburton, Pengrowth Energy Trust, Atlas Energy Resources, Parker Drilling and others. Halliburton was also involved in the doomed Deepwater Horizon project.
I am stunned.
Not by a judge ruling in a case where the appearance of a conflict of interest is clear, after all, the moratorium might expose both Halliburton and Transocean but rather that someone in the mainstream media actually checked out his disclosure forms, and that it actually is now all over the place.
Props to the MSM.
Normally, I Don’t Buy the Obama and the Eleventy Dimensional Chess, But………
It is clear to me that Obama’s decision to fire Stanley McCrystal is the right thing on many levels, both on a political and a policy leve, and not just because this action is essential to the maintenance of good order and discipline in the military.
It is clear that anything else would have undercut both Obama’s credibility and the idea of civilian control of the military.
That being said, it was a lot more, it:
- Got rid of a corrupt and political officer with a long history of being a Bush admin butt boy (Tillman, torture at the Camp Nama prison camp, his earlier insubordination, etc.)
- He put someone in charge whom the Republicans are TREMENDOUSLY invested in (Petraeus), and so inoculated himself somewhat from any potential downsides.
- He has given some ownership of the Afghanistan war to another corrupt and political officer with a long history of being a Bush admin butt boy, and if Davey (Petraeus) is kept busy, he won’t be leaking stories to undermine the timeline.
- It is clear that this is a temporary appointment, so Obama can replace Petraeus at any time because it’s clear that being head of CENTCOM and Afghanistan is too much
- At that time, he can appoint someone who won’t lobby to undermine the time-line.
- Petraeus will be too busy to engage in political machinations over the next few months.
All in all, I give this an 8 out of 10. It works on just about every level, except, of course, for the fact that we remain in the “Graveyard of Empires.”
Fun With Craigslist
Dick Jockey/Karaoke Host (Pittsburgh and surronding areas)
H/t Willowgirl at the Shortskoolbus BBS.
When We Line Up People Against the Wall………
They don’t care, they’reThe Phone Company
We need to include Verizon Wireless execs, who have issued orders to fire customer service representatives who tell customers that they can turn off web access for their phone.
Not Long Enough
Shalom Rubashkin, the former owner of the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse, has received a 27-year sentence.
There are a lot of people who will consider the sentence excessive; it is more that people like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling got, but Lay and Skilling, while crooks, never put children to work on the line of a meat packing plant, and Mr. Rubashkin did.
I Hope That This is True
Josh Marshall is reporting that Florida Republicans are accusing Florida Democrats of sponsoring the Florida Tea Party, which is actually an officially registered party in Florida:
Now, as Christina explained today, Republicans are claiming that the whole Florida Tea Party (FTP) operation is actually a plot by Democrats to field a lot of potemkin candidates who show up on the ballot with the “Tea Party” label so that right-wing Republicans split their votes (between the GOP candidate and the ‘Tea Party’ candidate) and thus make it possible for a lot of vulnerable Democrats to slip through.
Now, the Republicans who are complaining about this don’t have the goods. Not enough to prove it at least. But there’s enough there to arouse suspicion. A lot of the candidates signed up at the last moment, many are young and have little if any political or even voting history and a number have past ties to the Democratic party. Republicans frequently help Green Party candidates get on the ballot. And if the shoe were on the other foot I think Dems would be suspicious too.
Republicans have been bankrolling the Green Party in various forms for decades, contributing not only money, but signatures for ballot access.
I hope that this is true and I hope that it continues.