"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them."No offense intended to capitalists, or to Obama.
The final components of Gov. Mitch Daniels’ education reform package – a massive new voucher program and charter school expansion – cleared the Indiana House on Wednesday and could be law within days with just the stroke of a pen.
Two other bills affecting Indiana education have already passed – one reducing collective bargaining rights for teachers and another tying teacher pay to student performance.
US meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.Here is a chart of tornado history in the U.S. (via Watts Up With That), showing that even with better detection and tracking, the number of strong tornadoes is not really increasing:
"If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it's agreed upon by the tornado community that it's not a real increase," said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University.
"It's having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we're seeing them more often," Dixon said.
But he said it would be "a terrible mistake" to relate the up-tick to climate change.
We seek to do business exclusively with law firms that do more than merely aim to perform the bottom of the barrel ethical obligations and do just enough on behalf of their clients to avoid trouble for themselves. We seek law firms that will actively protect our interests, even when that may be uncomfortable for their firms.
Virginia does not shy away from hiring outside counsel because they may have ongoing professional relationships with people or entities, or on behalf of causes, that I, or my office, or
Virginia as a whole, may not support. But, it is crucial for us to be able to trust and rely on the fact that our outside counsel will not desert Virginia due to pressure by an outside group or groups.
Virginia seeks firms of commitment, courage, strength and toughness, and unfortunately, what the world has learned of King & Spalding, is that your firm utterly lacks those qualities. As the official in Virginia responsible for ensuring that the legal needs of Virginia's agencies are well met, I cannot leave UV AMC in the hands of a law firm of such weakness.King & Spalding, like many seemingly powerful large law firms, actually is extremely vulnerable once it becomes known that it will give in to political pressure. What if pro-DOMA groups sought to bring political pressure to bear?
By way of example and explanation, King & Spalding's role in representing terrorists is not objectionable to Virginia, because we understand the value of legal counsel, even for persons who hate this country and desire to do America and Americans harm. However, King & Spalding's willingness to abandon a client, the United States House of Representatives, in connection with the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA"), was such an obsequious act of weakness, that I feel compelled to end your legal association with Virginia so that there is no chance that one of my legal clients might be put in the embarrassing and difficult situation like the client you walked away from, the House of Representatives.
The failure of King & Spalding to maintain the kinds of minimum standards that Virginia would expect as a client of your firm is perhaps best demonstrated by the stunning dichotomy in the maintenance (or lack thereof) of its clients in my examples: it is acceptable to maintain client relationships with clients associated with terrorism, but not clients associated with marriage. And when it comes to dropping a client, it is a dichotomy that should not exist at any quality law firm.
Virginia simply cannot abide placing any reliance whatsoever on a law firm that makes decisions and acts in the manner of King & Spalding, and so we must terminate our relationship at this time. For future reference, your firm is not welcome to re-apply for special counsel status at any time as long as I am the Attorney General of Virginia.
King & Spalding has been nationally recognized in the field of public finance for close to 70 years. As the first firm in the southeastern United States to be listed in The Bond Buyer’s Municipal Marketplace as approved bond counsel, we have maintained a prominent position in the southeast and expanded our Public Finance Group to act as bond counsel throughout most of the U.S....
King & Spalding has represented issuers as bond counsel in thousands of public finance transactions throughout the country. As the oldest bond counsel firm in the State of Georgia, King & Spalding has been involved in borrowings by virtually every city and county in the state and consistently ranks first among the State’s top bond counsel. Nationally, we rank 25th among the top 100 bond counsel. Having acted as bond counsel in over 40 states, we have worked on a wide variety of financings for governmental projects as well as conduit issues for manufacturing facilities, airports, docks, ports, multi-family housing projects, sports facilities, hospitals, convention facilities and utility facilities.It just so happens that almost every state in the country has either DOMA constitutional amendments or DOMA legislation, including Georgia. Here is a map:
Our practice also includes serving as underwriters’ counsel on tax-exempt borrowings. Our innovative strategies have attracted both regional and national underwriting firms and have made King & Spalding the top ranked underwriters’ firm in Georgia and one of the highest ranked firms in the southeast....
"Attorneys who live in glass houses shouldn't throw clients."--------------------------------------------
"The reason we're calling is there were reports from people in the community that out of state paid circulators were misleading people about what they were being asked to sign and we have reports of them tricking voters into thinking they were signing a petition, say at a nearby shopping mall, or providing them with misleading information, so all we were calling was to find out is if you did intend to sign the petition to remove Democratic Senator Wirch from office."Before the audio started, the caller did identify herself as calling from the Democratic Party. According to the person who provided me with the audio, the number which showed up on the caller i.d. was the number used by the group fighting the recall on behalf of Wirch.
Kathleen
Jeffrey Tucker nails the hype over Bernanke this week so well:
...it's absurd that the entire world is hanging on the words of Ben Bernanke. He has been wrong at literally every major point in the housing bubble and then crisis. So why should we care about his predictions concerning the economy or his recommendations for how to end the slump?
The answer, of course, is that the Federal Reserve has the power to destroy the world economy. People look for meaning in each of Bernanke's semicolons because they might give a clue to the Fed's next policy move. The awesome power of the Fed has made the rest of us behave like the terrified family living with that creepy kid from the Twilight Zone.
"It is important to maintain a belief in final victory. Morale is everything."Read the rest.
In the week ending April 23, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 429,000, an increase of 25,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 404,000. The 4-week moving average was 408,500, an increase of 9,250 from the previous week's revised average of 399,250.And here's how the MSM is headlining it, via Reuters: Jobless claims jump in latest week.
Economic growth slowed to a crawl in the first three months of the year as a spike in gasoline, higher overall inflation and continued weakness in the housing market all took a toll on the recovery.Obama no longer has that "silly" distraction to wave around anymore.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economic health, rose at an annual rate of 1.8%, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That's a significant slowdown from the 3.1% growth rate in the final quarter of 2010.
This is rank bigotry on the part of Judge Ware, and can only be justified by the federal court system’s consideration of gay people as second-class citizens. It is shameless prejudice. No heterosexual judge would be held to any similar standard regarding her own long-term, committed relationship. No plaintiff would dare question the bona fides of a straight judge.The comments to Partridge's post are even more hyperventilated.
Gays are second-class in federal court and in America; Judge James Ware just proved the entire point of Perry.
And no chief judge would consider such a motion about a heterosexual judge, nor would he grant a hearing and request briefs on the topic. It is absurd on its face and should be rejected by the federal court system. Judge Ware should be sanctioned for allowing such rank bigotry a place in his courtroom.
He should certainly remove himself from any further deliberations regarding the Perry case, as he’s shown himself to hold bigotry in high enough esteem to hear its arguments about a colleague.
It’s shameful and it shouldn’t be tolerated.
There’s too much going on in the poor guy’s head.... “What distinguishes Obama particularly is the depth and carefulness of his thinking, which renders him somewhat unfit for politics,” said Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. “He is a brilliant social and political analyst, which makes it harder for him to play hardball or to bluff.”
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses come from his high degree of “integrative complexity” — his ability to keep multiple variables and trade-offs in mind simultaneously. The integratively simple thinker — say, George W. Bush — has one universal organizing principle that dominates all others, while the integratively complex thinker — Obama — balances many competing goals.
Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, found that politicians on the center-left (where Obama dwells) tend to have the highest degree of integrative complexity, followed by politicians on the center-right. Politicians on the far left and far right are the most simple.
The state Supreme Court recount got off to a wobbly start here Wednesday.
After more than a half-hour of meticulous instructions and ground rules relayed by Waukesha County's chief canvasser, retired Judge Robert G. Mawdsley, questions were raised about the very first bag of ballots to be counted, from the Town of Brookfield.
As canvassers and tabulators compared a numbered seal on a bag with the number recorded for that bag by a town election inspector who prepared the paperwork on election night, the numbers didn't match.
"What a great way to start," one official tabulator said.
Observers from the campaigns of Justice David Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg both agreed, however, that the error seemed to be in the inspector's use of a "2" instead of a "3." Numbers on the sealing tag and on the bag did match. Both sides and the Board of Canvassers agreed that the bag should be opened and the votes counted.I hope the Republicans in Wisconsin are not taking anything for granted. Check every car trunk before the vehicle gets within 400 feet of a recount location.
The document goes a long way, if not completely, towards quieting the issue. But the ease with which Obama was able to get the document leads one to wonder why he resisted so long. It was only when the Obama campaign saw the issue developing into a strategic nightmare that Obama took the simple and easy step of releasing an original document.--------------------------------------------
This also raises issues as to why the media repeatedly has told us that Obama was not able to obtain original documentation when clearly he was able to do so.
While the Obama campaign certainly will spin this as some sort of victory, it came at a high price to Obama in the polls.
