Year: 2010

Terrorist Gets Life in Prison

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Scott Roeder has been sentenced to life in prison for the assassination of doctor George Tiller:

Scott Roeder, the antiabortion extremist who murdered George Tiller, one of a handful of American physicians who performed late-term abortions, was sentenced to life in prison in a Wichita, Kan., courtroom Thursday and will not be eligible for parole for more than 50 years.

Here is hoping that he has a truly awful time in prison.

He will be 102 before he is eligible for parole.

Runners Up in the 2010 April Fools Competition

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Nate Silver Can be Annoying,* But

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He knows his math, as shown by his take-down of the study by Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University and the National Review† claiming to show that stimulus went disproportionately to Democratic districts.

You see, much of the aid under the stimulus package was direct aid to the states, which, of course, was sent to state capitals, like Sacramento, and Albany, and then disbursed from there to the rest of the state.

It turns out that state capitals, with their generally urban character, and having a large, and usually significantly unionized workforce, tend to be more liberal than the state as a whole, but what is more significant, is that the money that goes to these state capitals does not generally end up there; it is allocated by the governors or legislatures all over the states:

That de Rugy has testified before Congress on the basis of her evidence, and never paused to consider why the top five congressional districts on her list overlap with Sacramento, Albany, Austin, Tallahassee and Harrisburg, is mind-boggling. The presence of a state capital is the overwhelmingly dominant factor it predicting the dispensation of stimulus funds. This could have been discerned in literally five minutes if she had bothered to look at the apparent outliers in her dataset and considered whether they had anything in common — a practice that should be among the first things that any researcher does when evaluating any dataset.

Once you read his analysis, it’s pretty simple to see the flaw, but it is one that is hard to spot in the first place.

Basically, if you make any sorts of block grants to the states, they go to the capitals, and are then disbursed all around the states, so if you only go 1 or 2 levels down, you make it look like the stimulus program is a Democratic pork project.

The reality is far different.

*I tend to find his political analysis largely directed at either cock-punching DFH’s,‡ or mindlessly contrarian, kind like a mini-Michael Kinsley.
†2 strikes against her credibility there to start.
‡Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

I Call Best April Fools of the Season

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Gotta love the Grauniad*

Well, we now have a report that Labor is going to campaign on reports that Gordon Brown is violent and abusive with people:

In an audacious new election strategy, Labour is set to embrace Gordon Brown’s reputation for anger and physical aggression, presenting the prime minister as a hard man, unafraid of confrontation, who is willing to take on David Cameron in “a bare-knuckle fistfight for the future of Britain”, the Guardian has learned.

Following months of allegations about Brown’s explosive outbursts and bullying, Downing Street will seize the initiative this week with a national billboard campaign portraying him as “a sort of Dirty Harry figure”, in the words of a senior aide. One poster shows a glowering Brown alongside the caption “Step outside, posh boy,” while another asks “Do you want some of this?”

Brown aides had worried that his reputation for volatility might torpedo Labour’s hopes of re-election, but recent internal polls suggest that, on the contrary, stories of Brown’s testosterone-fuelled eruptions have been almost entirely responsible for a recent recovery in the party’s popularity. As a result, the aide said, Labour was “going all in”, staking the election on the hope that voters will be drawn to an alpha-male personality who “is prepared to pummel, punch or even headbutt the British economy into a new era of jobs and prosperity”.

………

It’s not real, but it should be, and Barack Obama might want to consider a similar course of action.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

Court Rules Gene Patents Illegal

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It is generally true that bad people push the law until it breaks, and the folks at Myriad Genetics are a truly nasty bit of work.

Basically, they discovered the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which predispose one to breast cancer, and had received a patent on the genes, and offered a not particularly good and very expensive test for the genes, and using their government granted monopoly, they were prohibiting any and all competing tests or research on better tests for these genes.

The judge has now ruled that the genes are a discovery, and not an invention, which makes them non-patentable, except, perhaps in Germany.*

The VC’s are wringing their hands, because patent protection helps with their pump and dump schemes, but development has been continuing apace on genes that are not covered by these patents:

Some biotechnology investors and executives say that lack of patent protection for DNA could diminish investment and remove incentives to develop tests. That could slow the move toward so-called personalized medicine, in which genetic tests are used to determine which drugs are best for which patients.

James P. Evans, a professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina, said that would not necessarily be the case. There is thriving competition in areas like testing for mutations that cause cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease, even though no company has exclusivity.

“It’s quite demonstrable that in the diagnostic area, one does not need gene patents in order to see robust development of these tests,” he said.

Note that this does not prohibit patenting the tests, it just prohibits patenting the genes.

This is a good ruling: the patenting of genes, or for that matter the patents of hedging techniques, as is the case in Bilski, which the Supreme Court will heard arguments for in November.

IP law is, at its core, public interest law (it’s in the constitution), and patents on business methods, species, and genes, do not serve the public interest

Earlier posts on the subject.

*This is what got us that Mercedes ad where they say that they have a patent on crumple zones, but “Never enforced the Patent”. They never enforced the patent, because it is not recognized anywhere else in the world.†
†I believe Germany changed their patent laws at some point in the 1970s.‡
‡I offer the caveat that these comments in the footnotes regarding the Mercedes patent are recollections of a conversation over a decade ago vague 20+ year old memories though, so YMMV, though a Google search does have people who recall the ad.

Obama Says, “Drill, Baby, Drill”

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The Audacity of D’oh!

Once again, Barack Obama decides to cock-punch the base, and he announces a massive expansion of offshore drilling that largely echos those of George W. Bush, with the protection of Bristol Bay being the only major change.

He did this with nuclear power a 1½ months ago, so I guess that this is not a surprise, particularly given his lip service to the fraud that is “clean coal.”

It appears that part of his goal is to get some Republican support for his climate change bill, but, as was shown in healthcare reform, the Republicans are not good faith actors.

Better to use the recent EPA declaration about C02 emissions as a harmful emissions as a club, and keep this in your back pocket, because giving away the store upfront results in really bad policy.

Someone Explain This To Me

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The Supreme Court just handed down a decision in Jones v. Harris, where investors sued brokers for excessive fees.

CNN has an article titled, “Mutual fund investors win Supreme Court victory,” and Reuters has an article titled, “Supreme Court hands victory to mutual fund industry.”

It appears that the court rejected the lower court ruling that, “That the competition that has developed among mutual funds in recent years is sufficient protection for mutual fund investors,” which would be construed as a win for investors, but retained the standard of, “fees are excessive only when they are so high they could not be the result of arm’s-length bargaining and bear no reasonable relationship to the services provided.“

It sounds to me like they split the baby, which seems to be the SCOTUSblog’s take on this too, which would imply to me that we will see this back before the court in the next decade or so.

Shocker of the Day: Global Warming Deniers Funded by Oil Company

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

It turns out that Koch Industries has funneled millions of dollars to a veritable alphabet soup of anti-global warming front groups.

I’ve been aware of this for a while, it just pops up every now and again that the Koch family is seriously right wing (see their backing of the teabaggers), but Greenpeace has connected the dots:

A Greenpeace investigation has identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming sceptics in the US and Europe.

The environmental campaign group accuses Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries and operates oil pipelines, of funding 35 conservative and libertarian groups, as well as more than 20 congressmen and senators. Between them, Greenpeace says, these groups and individuals have spread misinformation about climate science and led a sustained assault on climate scientists and green alternatives to fossil fuels.

Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.

I put this down as a “Captain Renault” moment. It’s been clear for a very long time that the global warming skeptics are a “rent a crowd.”

Court Finds NSA Guilty of Illegal Wiretapping

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This was the lawsuit against the NSA for their warrantless wiretapping of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, and their discussions with their lawyers, and Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has granted a summary judgment against the government, basically saying that the Foundation had good evidence of wiretapping, and if the US government was unwilling to provide exculpatory evidence, it was making a broad claims of the state secrets privilege.

Basically, he said that the government refused to defend themselves, and that the state secrets privilege is trumped by FISA. so they lose the case.

As Emptywheel notes:

Walker is basically saying, “Well, government, if you won’t give us any evidence to prove you legally wiretapped al-Haramain, and given all the evidence they’ve presented proving they were wiretapped, then they win!”

Here’s his argument. The government had a way to defend against al-Haramain’s case directly, in camera, but they refused to avail themselves of it.

Unfortunately, this may not mean much, because they actually had proof of wiretapping, because the prosecution accidentally delivered logs of the wiretaps to them during discovery.

This is unlikely to be repeated.

Needless to say, I am sick and tired of the Obama administrations full throated defense of executive branch overreach and secrecy, as well as their attempts to further the coverup of Bush administration law breaking under the guise of “looking ahead.”

I am very happy that they lost today.

Economics Update

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Philly Fed 1st Q: 25 states down, 18 up, 7 unchanged

The official non-farm payroll (NFP) number comes out on Friday, but today we have the private report from ADP, which shows a loss of 23,000 jobs, but the payroll withholding taxes numbers imply an increase in total jobs of something in the 300,000 range.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Bank of the Federal Reserve has released its State Coincident Indexes, which show that half of the states contracted over the past 3 months, and 23 decreased in the past month.

It’s better than it was a year ago, but it’s still not good.

In the consumer sector, consumer spending rose in February, and the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose in March.

On the production side, factory orders rose for the 6th month, though the data was not good in the Midwest, with the, with the Chicago purchasing managers index falling.

In real estate, mortgage application, including purchases, rose last week, and Fannie Mae has reported that mortgage delinquencies rose to 5.52% in January.

Note that because of the different times covered, these numbers may be consistent.

Across the ponds, Euro zone inflation rose to 1.5% year over year, and unemployment broke 10%, while in China, manufacturing grew faster than forecast in March.

Meanwhile, for reasons that I do not understand, oil rose, though the Chinese manufacturing data might have led to concerns over additional demand, and both the dollar and the Yen fell on reduced demand for safe havens.

Moron

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California Republican Senate Candidate, Carly Fiorina, who appears to intend to do to the Golden State what she did to Hewlett Packard,*, has now Jewish voters to “break bread” over Passover:

This week, as we break bread and spend time with our families and friends, I hope we also take a moment to say a word of thanks for our freedom and for those who have given their lives in freedom’s name. Let us also look ahead with hope to the opportunities to come.

(emphasis mine)

For those of you who don’t get it, Jews are not supposed to eat bread during Passover. What we eat is Matzoh, which is an unleavened biscuit which has more in common with the box that it comes in than it does with a loaf of bread.

This is really, really stupid, and statement from her PR flak, that, “We meant all bread, leavened and unleavened, and matzo is just unleavened bread so that’s what we meant by that,” is just plain lame.

Matzoh is not bread, as any of the millions of Jews who are Jonesing for a piece of bread right now can tell you, and the idea of describing a Passover Seder (ritual festival meal) as “breaking bread” is wrong on so many levels.

The stupid, it burns us!

*When she was fired employees sprang into spontaneous song, singing, “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead!”

Full letter follows

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Carly Fiorina
Date: Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:09 PM
Subject: Best wishes for a safe and happy Passover

Carly for California

Passover is a time of remembrance and thanks. This festival provides us all — Jewish, Christian and all faiths — an opportunity to reflect on the challenges we have faced and the triumphs we have achieved together. It is also a reminder of the resilient spirit that has carried people through trials of every kind through every generation.

This week, as we break bread and spend time with our families and friends, I hope we also take a moment to say a word of thanks for our freedom and for those who have given their lives in freedom’s name. Let us also look ahead with hope to the opportunities to come.

Best wishes for a safe and happy holiday.

Sincerely,

Carly Fiorina

contact@carlyforca.com
www.CarlyForCalifornia.com

915 L Street, Suite C-378
Sacramento, CA 95814
877-664-6676

Paid for by Carly for California

We Now Have a Video of a Teabagger Spitting on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.)

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People Who Don’t Read the Constitution

So much for all the Teabaggers, as well as Sean Hannity, denying that it ever happened.

Someone does not understand congressional immunity:

…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same, and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

(emphasis mine)

A congressman in that position could have pulled out a gun and shot the protesters dead,* and shot them dead, because they are immune from almost all prosecution.

Doubtless any member of the House or Senate who did this would be expelled in short order, but prosecution would be complex, to say the least.

*Take my legal advice with a grain of salt, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!†
†I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!