GUILTY PLEA: “A Somali immigrant the government says plotted to blow up an Ohio shopping mall pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.”
Archive for July, 2007
July 31, 2007
MOOSE LAWYERS: A moose represented my sister once. Mind you, moose lawsuits can be pretty nasty.
DAVID LAT LOOKS AT Big Law and Big Politics.
NERD-ON-NERD VIOLENCE: With lightsabers. There’s video.
FRED BROWN points out some heroes.
A TAX REVOLT in Indiana.
FREE SPEECH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Crop prices are high, driven in part by a huge demand for corn to make ethanol, which squeezes the land available for other crops and raises their prices as well. Democrats took over Congress last year, vowing to show they’re the financially responsible stewards their Republican predecessors were not. And President Bush asked Congress to direct the subsidies to the smaller, family farmers that politicians love to claim they support.
So, given this confluence of events, what did House Democrats do? Not much. Last week, under heavy pressure from farm organizations and fearing for the survival of Democratic freshmen from rural districts, they pushed through a business-as-usual farm bill that largely extends the current subsidy system for five more years. . . .
Most of the big money goes to just five crops: corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans and rice. The usual justification for the largesse is that farmers would go out of business without it. If that’s so, how do you explain that many other crops do quite well with little or none of the government help that goes to the favored five?
In addition to boosting just a few crops, the subsidies also favor a tiny sliver of the largest farms and agribusinesses: The top 10% of recipients get nearly three-fourths of subsidy payments, while the bottom 80% of recipients divide up a scant 12%.
Like the song says: “Welfare for white folks.” Make that rich white folks, mostly.
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE HITS six-year high. I guess that’s good news.
IN EXPERIMENTATION, A NEGATIVE RESULT IS NOT A FAILURE:
We must report a sad failure; the egg did not fry on the sidewalk, which means that the video evidence of this deadly heatwave will not be posted tonight.
But it doesn’t make for good video.
ARE DEMOCRATS BEING SHORT-SIGHTED ON JUDGES? Jonathan Adler and Stuart Taylor weigh in.
TREATING CHE GUEVARA LIKE DAVID DUKE. Though that comparison is probably unfair to David Duke.
QUITE SOME TIME AGO, I WROTE about signing up for “Amazon Prime” and how the free shipping changed my online shopping habits. (More here). Now this piece from USA Today suggests that I’m not the only one:
Investors saw the launch of Amazon Prime as the latest manifestation of Bezos’ fixation on free shipping, a profit drainer. They hammered Amazon (AMZN) shares down to $30 two years ago after the Seattle company began offering the unlimited free two-day shipping service for a $79 yearly fee.
“Wall Street hates it when we lower prices, give away free shipping, and offer Amazon Prime,” Bezos said in an e-mail interview. “But we know in our bones that siding with the customer pays off for everyone in the end.”
Now, Prime is starting to look like a linchpin to Amazon’s remarkable run of increases in quarterly sales — and investors no longer appear kerfuffled. After the online retailing giant last week reported a singularly sharp rise in sales for its second quarter, its shares shot up 25%, topping $86 — a seven-year high.
Plus, encouraging people to shop online is environmentally friendly!
MORE PROBLEMS WITH SPACE DEBRIS:
Traffic in space is getting so congested that flight controllers in the past few weeks have had to nudge three spacecraft out of harm’s way, in one case to prevent the craft from colliding with its own trash. . . .
Officials and private space experts say episodes like these illustrate the danger of a drastic rise in satellites and space debris in Earth’s orbit. Early this year, after decades of growth, the federal catalog of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) orbiting Earth reached 10,000, including dead satellites, old rocket engines and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and weapon tests.
Now, that number has jumped to 12,000. China’s test of an antisatellite weapon in January and four spacecraft breakups in February, one of them mysterious, have contributed to the buildup of debris. Space officials worry that a speeding bit of space junk could shatter an object into dozens or hundreds of fragments, starting a chain reaction of destruction.
Experts said that moving spacecraft out of the way to avoid collisions, once a rare way of dealing with potential threats, is becoming increasingly common.
Read the whole thing.
SO I’M AT THE SOUTHEASTERN ASSOCIATION OF LAW SCHOOLS CONFERENCE, and there seem to be a lot more bloggers than in the past: I had barely arrived when I got into the elevator with Paul Secunda of the Workplace Law Prof blog. But then, there are a lot more law professor bloggers in general than there used to be.
DUCT-TAPE METHODS TO SAVE THE EARTH:
Re-salting arctic waters with massive salty ice cubes? Stopping glaciers from thawing by wrapping them in insulating blankets? While these methods of preventing further environmental destruction may seem like schemes straight from the Wile E. Coyote handbook, many serious scientists are pursuing last-ditch contingency plans such as these for dealing with the effects of adverse climate change.
I’m glad people are looking at this stuff, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
WOULDN’T A PURSE-SHAPED MACHINEGUN be more useful?
REBECCA MACKINNON HAS MORE on the Yahoo! / China affair. “More documents have surfaced showing that Yahoo! employees knew that they were handling political cases when they received information requests from Chinese authorities on at least two people now doing serious jailtime. This is contrary to previous claims by Yahoo!”
YEAH, THIS IS GOING TO HURT FRED THOMPSON: Richard Cohen complaining that he’s too pro-gun.
UPDATE: Reader Jorge del Rio notes a contradiction in Cohen’s piece: “Basically, Cohen says that it’s ridiculous to think that if students were allowed to carry firearms on campus that any of them could have done something to prevent the Virginia Tech massacre. However, just two paragraphs later he says how he wished he had had a gun when his house was burglarized ‘merely to protect his life.’ I guess he knows better, since he’s not one of those young drunks filled to the brim with hormonal urges like most gun owners.”
This is a time-honored bit of hypocrisy at the Post, going back at least to Carl Rowan.
SPINNING THE SURGE.
UPDATE: Joe Lieberman criticizes war critics. “There is a very strong group within the party that I think doesn’t take the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously enough.â€
IN THE MAIL: John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11.
THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE REELECTED WE’D SEE A resurgence of anti-blasphemy laws. And they were right!
JOHN TIERNEY EXAMINES REASONS FOR HAVING SEX.
WHAT WOMEN WANT: And more, at the latest Ask Dr. Helen column!