Taking a bit of a break

...be back soon.

Thanks for reading!

PS - I'm proud of Obama's decisions his first 100 hours in office. His edict to the EPA directing a review of the Clean Air act was in the Obama "hope and change" tradition.

Want to see "unthinking followers?"

If this doesn't bring you to tears, go find your heart

That Pete gets to see this blessed day is a joy unto my heart. That Pete sang the WHOLE song is a sweetness unto my ears. That America is able to enjoy this day of hope is a light unto my life.

UPDATE: Never mind. HBO in its infinite wisdom took the clip down - claiming copyright infringement. I get that there are rights involved in "owning" the Obama inauguration footage, but for crap's sake, HBO, take a freakin' chill pill. This isn't your normal concert footage. This is PETE SEEGER singing at a historic pre-inauguration celebration for the nation's first mixed race president and singing about ignoring signs of trespass. Lighten the hell up and pretend this moment is about something other than profits. Just for a few days. I promise, it won't break you.

Voting for the King County Elections Head

From Fuse Washington:

What happens when you put a highly partisan and unqualified person in charge of counting votes? Does Florida, the 2000 elections fraud, and 8 years of George Bush come to mind?


Ballots have been mailed out for a special election to elect the King County Elections Director. Two of the top three candidates are highly partisan and completely unqualified for the job.


There is a broad consensus among progressive organizations that Sherril Huff is the candidate who deserves your vote. Not voting, or voting for anyone else, could have very negative consequences.

The Progressive Voters Guide

Please vote. Never give up. Never get complacent. America must be brought to her greatness one vote and one election at a time.

How's your cupboard?

Why we covet the "shiny stones"

Very Evolved:

Why do we feel strong emotional attachments to inanimate objects? Simple, you can blame your biology. But by understanding the way the brain works, can this help us get what we want?
Some of you looking at the Lotus Elise (pictured above) will see something ugly and wildly impractical. But that’s not what I see. This car makes me smile just thinking about it, it brings warm emotions to the surface and strong sense of desire bubbling up in such a primal way that I feel a connection to this thing, like it was alive.

This isn’t unique phenomenon by any means, but for you it might not be this Lotus or a car at all, it can be iPods, expensive shoes, that big glossy TV or a shiny piece of jewelry. Whatever thing it is that stirs your feelings, at some time during your life there’s been some inanimate object out there that you’ve formed a strong emotional bond to. But why on earth does our brain work like this? Forming an emotional connection to other people is understandable, but why a hunk of metal and plastic?

I’ve mentioned in several articles now that we’re still walking around with the same brain that evolved during the Stone Age, so the question becomes even more bizarre: why would a cave man fall in love with a shiny new toy like the Lotus Elise?

It's a shame we have to live in a 21st century world with an iron age (at best) brain to guide us. How great it would be if our brains were evolving as quickly as our iphones. But alas, we have the same primordial fears, hungers, distrust, covetousness and other non-healthy coping mechanisms as we've had since our biggest threats were the saber-toothed. As Bill Maher point out in "Religulous", it's a scary scary world when our ability to develop annihilation technology leaps far beyond our primitive superstitions about whose sky daddy is the coolest.

We have to start taking this schism seriously and begin to prepare ourselves and our children for our real world, and not the one from which we've come.

Start here.

Still Delusional After All These Years

...that's Arianna's take on Bush's farewell speech (I get happy every time I hear those two words).

Here is a take from David Corn:

Ernest Hemingway, I believe, once observed that what one doesn't put on the page is as important as what one does. And what Bush did not discuss in his farewell address also defines his presidency. Here is a partial list:

* Climate change
* China
* Russia
* North Korea
* Iran
* Pakistan
* Osama bin Laden
* Nuclear weapons
* Poverty
* Health insurance
* Foreclosures
* Housing
* Guantanamo
* National debt
* Budget deficit
* Trade deficit
* Wall Street
* Financial regulation
* Dow Jones
* Retirement security
* Social Security
* Medicaid
* Energy
* Immigration
* Automobile industry
* Housing
* Subprime credit
* Wages
* Jobs
* FEMA

What else is there to say? In the end, after eight long and traumatic years, Bush did not have much to tell us. Who wouldn't rather watch a miracle airplane landing than a failure saying goodbye?

PS, David, it wasn't a "miracle". It was superior training, amazing scientific engineering and 40 long years of experience as a pilot that saved the plane. Miracles need not apply.

But back to Bush. As the airline flight attendants would say:

BUH-BYE

Questionable outcomes from questionable "justice"

ScienceBlogs

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a landmark case over whether state judges must recuse themselves from cases involving those who have made large contributions to their campaigns. A group of 27 former chief justices and justices of state supreme courts is urging the high court to rule that judges must recuse themselves in such cases.

The case involves a lawsuit in West Virginia, where a large energy company lost a $50 million fraud judgment. After the verdict was handed down but before the appeals court could hear the case, the owner of the energy company donated $3 million to the campaign of a candidate for the same court that heard the appeal. The judge refused to recuse himself from the case and he cast the deciding vote as the appeals court reversed the jury award from the lower court.

More details:

The Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution requires elected state judges to recuse themselves if a case involves the financial interests of a major campaign donor.

Don Blankenship, CEO and president of A.T. Massey Coal Co., spent more than $3 million supporting the 2004 campaign of Judge Brent Benjamin for a seat on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. Blankenship backed Benjamin’s campaign while Massey was preparing to appeal a $50 million fraud verdict to the court. After Justice Benjamin won the election and took his seat on that court, Harman Mining Co. requested that Justice Benjamin recuse himself from Massey’s appeal but the judge refused and then twice voted with the court’s majority to overturn the verdict in favor of Harman Mining by a 3-2 vote.

Justice Benjamin did not respond to a request for comment. In a long opinion issued in July explaining his decision not to disqualify himself, he said he had judged the case on the merits and that only proof of a judge’s actual bias, as opposed to the appearance of a conflict, requires recusal.

Massey has filed a brief urging the Supreme Court not to hear the case, calling the matter “a grand conspiracy theory.” The Massey brief said the Supreme Court “has never adopted a ‘looks bad’ due process test.”

Now what could possibly be slimy about accepting $3 million dollars from a donor and then ruling on that donor's behalf? Naw. Smells like a daisy. One thing's for sure: this is the kind of news that never makes it to the news. Let's spend a few new cycles discussing Jett Travolta's death, but let's not pay any attention to the hands on the levers of power and the interconnections between those hands and the hands of the donors stuffing money into their pockets.

I am disappointed in Obama

There, I said it. I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt for two months, but now I'm getting really discouraged:

Rick Warren

Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General

40% of the stimulus to insignificant (individually) tax cuts to "assuage" the "assuages" who got us into this mess in the first place

Joe Lieberman

Leaning on Reid to seat Burris

WTF? Where's the sense of conviction. Where's the ability to stand firm and do the right thing? Why all the kow-towing to the right? The economy is going down the crapper and this ain't no time for pussyfooting or "assuaging" people. China is slowing down on buying our debt. What happens if we have no Chinese money to buy Saudi Arabia's oil anymore?

C'mon Barack. Get to business. Do it with firmness and intelligence and stop trying to get everyone on the bus. The repubs aren't getting on and all your concessions just make you look less the leader than you looked on November 3rd.

Liar's Poker author excoriates the "regulators"

NY Times

... Consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud....

The American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Electric and the municipal bond guarantors Ambac Financial and MBIA all had triple-A ratings. (G.E. still does!) Large investment banks like Lehman and Merrill Lynch all had solid investment grade ratings. It’s almost as if the higher the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

Smoke a joint? End up in the joint for months or years. Bring down a financial system, gut credit and trust, reward your friends, punish your enemies, skim the cream off the top, sock your money in the Caymans? Get off scot-freakin'-free.