Saturday

SCOTUSblog

SCOTUSblog: "in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking."

Sunday

The Washington Independent » Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal

The Washington Independent » Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal: "partisan politics takes a backseat to regional interests, and the influence of the energy lobby is king. Indeed, the concessions from Waxman and Markey to this point have been made to satisfy Democrats representing regions heavy with coal, oil and automaker interests."

Thursday

"Omnivore's Dilemma" Author Michael Pollan's New Advice on Buying Food: "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised"

"Omnivore's Dilemma" Author Michael Pollan's New Advice on Buying Food: "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised"

The List : CJR

The List : CJR: "a comprehensive catalog of relevant stories produced by major business-news outlets on the lending industry and Wall Street during the run-up to the mortgage crisis."

Power Problem : CJR

Power Problem : CJR
"We citizens, like it or not, rely on journalists to provide word of rampant wrongdoing, and now we find ourselves well beyond the worst of all worst-case scenarios, caused, by general consensus, to an overwhelming degree by this most central of business-press beats: finance."

Saturday

Who Will Be at the Table? : CJR

Who Will Be at the Table? : CJR: "Baucus evicts single-payer advocates from his hearing"

Saturday

Sunday

Apparatchiks - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Apparatchiks - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "We wonder how someone as hapless as John Boehner could be minority leader, why one Congressman after another abjectly apologizes to Rush Limbaugh, and so on; the answer is that they’re hollow men, careerists who thought they had a safe ride."

Tuesday

SCOTUSblog

SCOTUSblog: Scalia: "the “charade of officer safety” ... should be abandoned in favor of the rule that the majority ultimately adopts in its opinion."

Think Progress » Harman: ‘I’m Just Very Disappointed’ NSA Wiretapped Me, After I Voted To Allow Them To

Think Progress » Harman: ‘I’m Just Very Disappointed’ NSA Wiretapped Me, After I Voted To Allow Them To: "This legislation arms our intelligence professionals with the ability to listen to foreign targets -- without a warrant -- to uncover plots that threaten US national security."

Monday

The Columbus Dispatch : Work on I-71 runs into dead end

The Columbus Dispatch : Work on I-71 runs into dead end: "So weighty was the decision to widen the highway that a train was once approved to ferry passengers daily between Columbus and Cleveland to help relieve traffic during the construction. After cost projections for the train service increased, ODOT dropped funding for it in 2000."
If only they dropped funding for the road and kept the train.

CQ Politics | Sources: Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC

CQ Politics | Sources: Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC

Saturday

Despite economy, developers want to build on Florida land - St. Petersburg Times

Despite economy, developers want to build on Florida land - St. Petersburg Times 630,000 new homes planned for 410,000 acres, landowners fear Hometown Democracy amendment will pass in 2010.

Thursday

The People's Bank of China--Speeches

The People's Bank of China--Speeches: "The outbreak of the crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflect the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system." Who could have seen this coming?

Should Obama Apologize to G20 for America?: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance

Should Obama Apologize to G20 for America?: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance April fools!
DiD US Presidential Election 2008 バラク・オバマ Obama action figure doll.

Wednesday

The Sentencing Project - News Details

The Sentencing Project - News Details: "The U.S. prison and jail population has reached a record high exceeding 2.3 million people"

Saturday

The Atlantic Online | May 2009 | The Quiet Coup | Simon Johnson

The Atlantic Online | May 2009 | The Quiet Coup | Simon Johnson: "In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington."

Wednesday

Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws - The Daily Beast

Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws - The Daily Beast
Big Pharma bulks up with Merck-Schering deal - Los Angeles Times: "The pending deals are expected to result in at least 35,000 job losses, mostly in the U.S. -- helped in part by the government's bailout efforts....
The deals would be virtually impossible to complete if the banks had not received money from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program."

Tuesday

1 in 31 U.S. Adults are Behind Bars, on Parole or Probation

1 in 31 U.S. Adults are Behind Bars, on Parole or Probation

Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: Dmitry Orlov

Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: Dmitry Orlov "So that's what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting "Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!" Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won't be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don't recommend passively standing around and watching the show ¬ unless you happen to have a death wish."

Friday

Barack Obama is @#$% tired of this @#$%!: "(Or, a NSFW plan to ram the stimulus bill home, told via downloadable mp3 ring tones.) You ain't my b****, n****, buy your own d*** fries."

Wednesday

Wednesday

The Journal Goes Frontline : CJR

The Journal Goes Frontline : CJR: "the big problem, which goes unmentioned here, is wage stagnation for everybody but the top one or two percent. I’m not denying that lots of us have overspent, but real wages have gone nowhere over the last four decades, and declined over the last several years."

Tuesday

Wind Energy Industry Applauds U.S. Senate Passage of Renewable Energy Credits

Wind Energy Industry Applauds U.S. Senate Passage of Renewable Energy Credits: "the wind industry is on its way to charting another record-shattering year of growth. That 21,000 MW of capacity will generate over 60 billion kWh of electricity in 2009, enough to serve over 5.5 million American homes and eliminating the burning of
30.4 million short tons of coal (enough to fill two 1,000-mile-long coal trains),
91 million barrels of oil per year, or
560 Bcf of natural gas (about 9% of the natural gas used for electricity generation)."

Inhabitat

Inhabitat

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com: "we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.”"

Technology Review: The Year in Robotics

Technology Review: The Year in Robotics

UPDATE: Attack on Gaza -- Self-Defense or Mass Murder?

UPDATE: Attack on Gaza -- Self-Defense or Mass Murder?: "In the usual process, the U.S. government -- and media here -- are playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and even Haaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts."

Wednesday

Irregularity Is Uncovered at IndyMac Bank - NYTimes.com

Irregularity Is Uncovered at IndyMac Bank - NYTimes.com: "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One"

Winners & Sinners : CJR:

Winners & Sinners : CJR:: "Cheney’s favorite day was the one when thousands of innocent Americans were murdered by terrorists—because it made it possible for him and his henchmen to wiretap innumerable Americans without obtaining warrants, commit war crimes, and destroy America’s reputation in every corner of the world.
Happy Holidays."

Tuesday

Regulator Let IndyMac Bank Falsify Report - washingtonpost.com

Regulator Let IndyMac Bank Falsify Report - washingtonpost.com: "It is the second time Dochow has been removed from a position as a senior thrift regulator. He was demoted in the early 1990s after federal investigators found that he had delayed and impeded proper regulation of Charles Keating's failed Lincoln Savings and Loan."

Saturday

YouTube - Willie Nelson on A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All DVD
People who wield power may lack compassion | Booster Shots | Los Angeles Times
The Associated Press: Conservatives win court case in Va. church dispute Although African-Americans were widely blamed for the success of California Prop. 8 and similar measures, at least one writer argues convincingly that African-American churches are no more homophobic than white churches (and the Episcopal schism is the most public evidence of that). Still, it's instructive to see yet another law originally intended to preserve institutional racism being applied in service of the gay-hating community.

Friday

Bloomberg.com: News

Bloomberg.com: News Shoe Hurled at Bush Flies Off Turkish Maker’s Shelves

Bloomberg.com: News

Bloomberg.com: News: "Bernanke is basing hundreds of billions in emergency lending on credit ratings from companies that gave AAA grades to toxic securities."

Thursday

UAW busting, Southern style - Los Angeles Times

UAW busting, Southern style - Los Angeles Times: "When one compares how the auto industry and the financial sector are being treated by Congress, the double standard is staggering. In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car."

Friday

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism: "offer a working model of immateriality via the implementation of a vast material cascade of affordances"

Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks bankrupt | U.S. | Reuters

Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks bankrupt | U.S. | Reuters: "government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded"

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: Comments for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: Comments for Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP): "As nuclear terrorism remains one of the gravest threat to U.S. security, the United States should pursue policies that will reduce the stocks of plutonium, rather than produce additional plutonium"

Wonk Room » Kashkari ‘Not In A Position To Opine’ On Whether $30 Million Is Inappropriate Executive Compensation

Wonk Room » Kashkari ‘Not In A Position To Opine’ On Whether $30 Million Is Inappropriate Executive Compensation

Talking Points Memo | What Happened

Talking Points Memo | What Happened: "Democrats gave up efficiency and emissions standards."

State Dept: Crisis in the “Foreign Relations” Series | Secrecy News

State Dept: Crisis in the “Foreign Relations” Series | Secrecy News

Thursday

UnitedHealth to Insure the Right to Insurance - NYTimes.com

UnitedHealth to Insure the Right to Insurance - NYTimes.com Since innovative derivatives of other types of financial instruments are working so well.

Sunday

What Obama Has to Look Forward To

What Obama Has to Look Forward To and the Bush regime still has a month to go.