Later On

Wonderfully fragrant shave today, beginning with the Wild Orange shave stick from QED, which, with the Simpsons Duke 3 Best, produced a fine lather. The Mekur Slant bar, with a used Feather blade, delivered a good shave, but the Feather was on its last legs, and the Feather (at least for me) delivers tiny nicks as it dies—inexplicable nicks, in a flat expanse of skin. Nothing serious and easily stopped with My Nik Is Sealed, but still… One of the reasons I’m no longer so fond of the Feather as I once was. Royall Mandarin was a fine orange-scented aftershave.

I’ve read that there’s no word in English to rhyme with “orange,” but I knew a poet at the Writers Workshop at the U of Iowa who thought that “door hinge” would serve as a rhyme.

I seem to have taken a day off from blogging.

I just cooked up a big batch of chili—Safeway in the bargain bin had some very good looking beef stew meat and a small package of boneless short ribs, so I cut them all up small and now 5 1/2 qts of chili are simmering on the stove: 2 enormous onions, the leftover barley from making the lemon barley water (which was pretty good), 1/4 c olive oil to sauté the aforementioned, the meat, 1/2 cup red wine to deglaze the pan after browning the meat, a pound of black beans, soaked yesterday and cooked this morning, 42 oz of tomatoes (one big can plus one 14 oz can), 28 oz of Hatch green chiles, chopped, several chipotles in adobo, Mexican oregano, some Aleppo pepper, dash of Worcestershire sauce, dash of liquid smoke (big dashes of both, befitting the size of the batch of chili), ground cumin, two dried ancho chiles, good dash of my own pepper sauce, salt, and pepper.

I finished The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox. Couldn’t put it down. Fascinating. I sent back to the library several books that were of insufficient interest once I started reading them.

Now I’m reading The Authoritarians (PDF) on my Kindle DX while the chili simmers.

UPDATE: The chili was delicious: excellent solid spiciness without actual pain. Assertive and definitely makes a statement. Today I’ll buy some shredded cheese so I can have it avec fromage.

The Younger Grandson, playing chess with The Eldest, captures a Bishop and crows, "Who’s got the hot sauce now?!"

Glenn Greenwald has an exchange with John Harris (formerly of the Washington Post and now at Politico).

Yesterday, after I read the news, I immediately sent an email to the "tips" address at the Washington Independent, recommending that they immediately hire Froomkin. The reply I got said that I was the third person to make the recommendation.

Christian Miller of ProPublica writes:

Rey Torres dreamed of a better life for his wife and five children when he left a neighborhood of wooden shacks and burning trash piles to drive a bus on a U.S. military base near Baghdad.

He hoped to send his children to college and build a new home with the $16,000 a year he earned in Iraq — four times what he could make in the Philippines.

Then, in April 2005, Torres, 31, was killed in an ambush by Iraqi insurgents. His widow and children were supposed to be protected by a war zone insurance system overseen by the U.S. government. They were eligible for about $300,000 in compensation.

But Gorgonia Torres knew nothing about the death benefit and did not apply. When she did learn about the insurance, two years later, it was from a reporter. She has since turned down an insurance company’s $22,000 settlement offer. Her only hope of receiving full compensation is a legal fight that could drag on for years.

"He knew it was dangerous…. He had second thoughts all the time," she said of her husband. "But he’d say, ‘If I don’t go, there’s no way we’ll be able to survive.’"

Torres was among tens of thousands of civilian contract workers from poverty-stricken countries hired to support the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. In case of injury or death, they are supposed to be covered by workers’ compensation insurance financed by American taxpayers. But the program has failed to deliver medical care and other benefits to many foreign workers and their survivors, a Los Angeles Times-ProPublica investigation found.

Previous articles by the Times [1] and ProPublica [2] described how American civilians injured in Iraq have had to battle insurers for medical care, artificial limbs, and other services.

An examination of what happened to foreign nationals has uncovered an even more dismal record. Injured workers have gone without medical treatment and compensation because they were never informed of their right to the benefits. Widows and children have not received death payments for the same reason.

The system relies on companies to make employees aware of insurance coverage and to report deaths and injuries to insurers and the federal government. But some employers have shirked those obligations, and the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the program, has done little to ensure compliance, punish violators or reach out to injured foreigners or their survivors.

An analysis of Pentagon and Labor Department records …

Continue reading.

Glenn Greenwald:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), ruled that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access the state’s evidence in order to subject it to DNA tests which could prove their innocence.  Two lower courts, a district court and the Ninth Circuit, had ruled there was such a right.  In reversing those rulings, the Court’s majority was composed of its conservative Justices (Roberts (who wrote the opinion), Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy).

Numerous liberal commentators are, rightfully, infuriated by the decision, but have been notably incomplete in their critiques.  Matt Yglesias describes the ruling as “Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent” and argues that ruling in favor of the state over defendants, the executive over the legislature, and the corporation over the individual is “conservative jurisprudence in a nutshell.”   Think Progress’ Ian Millhiser also blames conservatives for this perverse outcome.  Scott Lemieux, in making excellent arguments against the Court’s reasoning, similarly writes that “this is your court on conservatives” and concludes that it gives the lie to the John-Roberts-claim that judges are mere neutral “umpires.”  Several other liberal commentators exclusively blame conservatives for this decision.

There’s one important fact missing from all of that analysis:  namely, this was yet another case where the Obama DOJ sided with the Bush administration and advocated the position that the conservative justices adopted.  The Obama DOJ aggressively argued before the Court that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access evidence for DNA analysis.  Indeed, its decision to embrace this extreme Bush position caused much controversy and anger back in February.  Law Professor Darren Hutchinson wrote back then:

The Office of the Solicitor General has adhered to Bush’s position that the inmate does not have a constitutional right to re-test the DNA evidence, even though doing so could establish his innocence and despite the fact that his attorney will pay for the new scientific analysis of the evidence. . . .

As a state senator, Obama sponsored and lobbied for legislation that gave all inmates a post-conviction right to DNA evidence — the same right that Osborne asserts in this case. . . . The Bush administration was not required to take a position in this case. Although the Bush administration decided to submit a brief in the case, the Obama administration could have refused to defend it, withdrawn it, or even switched position.

Indeed, the Obama DOJ rejected explicit requests from defendants rights advocates to repudiate the Bush position.  Instead, the Obama DOJ announced that Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal would make his debut appearance before the Supreme Court in that capacity advocating the Bush position (and that’s what then happened): …

Continue reading. What the HELL is going on in Obama’s DoJ? Greenwald concludes with this observation:

In general, how much one criticizes Obama is largely a function of the areas on which one tends to focus.  If I had spent the week writing about Iran, I would be largely defending — and praising — Obama’s very wise restraint, even in the face of bipartisan political pressure, when it comes to interfering in Iran’s internal political disputes.  His private and public refusal to cheer on all of Israel’s policies is also commendable.  Conversely, those who focus on gay issues have been understandably furious with the administration, and in the areas of civil liberties, secrecy, and his Justice Department generally, the administration has been nothing short of abysmal.  Criticizing the Right for its support of these positions is understandable, but in our modern political culture, the President is, far and away, the driving force, and those who supported him can have far more of an impact pointing out, rather than ignoring, the role he is playing in advancing these policies.

Froomkin is at the Washington Post for the rest of this month, and this morning he has an excellent column on how Obama is clinging to Bush’s secrecy apparatus. (BTW, Krugman has a good comment on Froomkin’s firing.) Froomkin writes:

The Obama Justice Department yesterday put forth an new legal argument, one that even the Bush team might not have had the gall to employ. Call it the Daily Show disclosure exclusion.

Yes, a Justice Department lawyer actually argued to a federal district court judge that there should be an exemption from Freedom of Information Act disclosure rules for documents that would subject senior administration officials to embarrassment — as in on late-night television.

This is not just wrong, it’s perversely wrong. By contrast, a good rule of thumb would be: The more embarrassing, the more we need to know. The Justice Department and the White House should be forced to renounce this assertion immediately.

And if this wasn’t bizarre enough, consider the irony that in the case at hand, the Obama Justice Department is fighting the release of a transcript of former vice president Dick Cheney’s testimony to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about his role in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

And guess what else? The Obama team relied extensively on a legal opinion (via Emptywheel) authored by Stephen Bradbury, the utterly discredited head of the Office of Legal Counsel whose other writings included memos outrageously asserting that torture was legal — and that Karl Rove had absolute immunity from congressional oversight.

In his memo, Bradbury described the information in question: …

Continue reading.

Esmeralda Bermudez in the LA Times:

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.

She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another’s hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.

Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.

"No wonder you’re going to Harvard," a girl teased her.

Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.

What students don’t know is that she is also a homeless girl.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn’t smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep — survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret — not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, ‘You got the easy way out because you’re homeless,’ " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."…

Continue reading.

I’m reading a fascinating book: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, by Justin Fox. Highly readable, it shows a history of economic and financial thought, fascinating in itself, and fascinating in the context of today’s economy. Highly recommended.

Yet another incredibly smooth and close trouble-free shave. The lather from Floris Elite, created by the Plisson Chinese Grey, was superb, and the Gillette Fat Boy, still using the Swedish Gillette of several shaves, did a great job. The blade seems as sharp as ever. Very, very smooth shave. And I liked June Clover so much yesterday that I had to go with it again.

Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:

Well, this should come as no surprise: Financial industry groups already are gearing up to fend off a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would regulate mortgages, credit cards, and other kinds of consumer lending. The idea was a key part of the financial system overhaul that President Obama outlined on Wednesday.

Although Obama called for all kinds of sweeping changes in the nation’s regulatory system, it’s the Consumer Finance Protection Agency that’s drawing the most fire, The Washington Post reports.

Opposition is piling up with particular speed against the idea of a new agency with broad powers to protect borrowers and other customers of financial firms, setting up a high-stakes contest between the industry and the White House for the loyalty of a few moderate senators who increasingly hold the balance of power.

Yep, those Blue Dog Democrats again. As predatory lending expert Alan White told TWI recently, the Blue Dogs have been strong advocates for the banking industry, frustrating the efforts of more consumer-minded Democrats. It’s looking more like they’ll hold sway over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, as well.

The Post reports that the American Bankers Association, in particular, has come out strongly against the consumer agency. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) also came out swinging, telling “Good Morning America” that the government will end up regulating the interest rates on credit cards and other financial products, and already has “too big a foot” in the struggling financial industry.

Could we stop for a moment of reality here? …

Continue reading.

Roughly speaking, it was something like this recipe by Mark Bittman:

Bean Salad

Yield 6 to 8 servings

Time 30 minutes to 2 hours

Edamame and limas are lightning fast to prepare, as are frozen black and white beans. Fresh beans, like cranberries, cook quickly as well. And if it’s speed you’re after, head straight for lentils or split peas. For beans like black, white, red and kidney and the more exotic varieties like gigante and flageolets, start with dried. To reduce the cooking time, soak them for a few hours or boil them for a minute or two and then soak for an hour or two. If time is a consideration, cook the beans the day before you assemble the salad. (Canned beans are usually too salty and often taste tinny.)

• 2 cups dried beans, split peas or lentils, sorted
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar or lemon juice, more to taste
• 2 to 4 tablespoons minced red onion or shallot
• Salt and ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped parsley

1. Rinse beans, then place in a pot with water to cover by a couple of inches; bring to a boil, partly cover and simmer until tender, from 30 minutes (lentils) to as long as 2 hours or more (chickpeas and larger beans). While beans cook, stir red wine vinegar and onion together in a large bowl. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil.

2. Cook beans until just tender, before their skins split. Drain. While still hot, add them to bowl with dressing. Toss gently until coated.

3. Let cool to room temperature (or refrigerate), stirring once or twice. Stir in parsley just before serving. Adjust seasoning if necessary.

Variations

• Italian Style: Use cannellini or cranberry beans. Season vinegar with 1 tablespoon minced garlic and 1 teaspoon minced rosemary in addition to onions. For a milder taste, use white wine vinegar. If you have basil and you will serve salad right away, use 1/4 cup in place of rosemary.
• French Style: Use Le Puy lentils or flageolet beans. Use sherry vinegar instead of red wine vinegar. Replace red onion with thinly sliced shallots. Instead of parsley, stir in 2 tablespoons minced tarragon before serving.
• Greek Style: Use dried fava or gigante beans. Use fresh lemon juice, not vinegar. Add 1 tablespoon minced garlic, along with onions. Instead of parsley, finish with 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint.
• Japanese Style: Use edamame or adzuki beans. Substitute rice wine vinegar for red wine vinegar and grapeseed or corn oil for olive oil. Instead of parsley, finish with 1 sheet nori, toasted and crumbled.
• Indian Style: Use chickpeas. Use rice wine vinegar and 2 to 4 tablespoons minced or grated fresh ginger instead of red onion or shallot. Instead of olive oil, use 2 tablespoons peanut oil and 2 tablespoons coconut milk. Use cilantro instead of parsley.
• Texas Caviar: Use black-eyed peas. Use lime juice instead of red wine vinegar. When adding onions, add 1 clove minced garlic, 1/4 cup minced red bell pepper and minced jalapeño chili to taste. Use cilantro instead of parsley.

Very interesting book review by Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker, which begins:

In 1974, Robert Pirsig—a Korean War veteran, a philosopher, a former writing instructor, a survivor of shock treatment, and, by all accounts, a talented author of technical manuals—published “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.” It is a novel, but only barely (Pirsig didn’t bother to change the names of his friends), and it follows the narrator as he rides West with his young son, from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Readers hoping for advice about motorcycles, or about meditation, found something else entirely: picturesque anecdotes and ominous reveries, interrupted by dense seminars on the “self-defeating” nature of technophobia, the malignance of inferior workmanship, the “ugliness” of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, and the importance of a quality called Quality. The book, gnomic but good-natured, eventually sold about five million copies, spurred on by some extraordinarily positive reviews. (Writing in this magazine, George Steiner compared it to “Moby-Dick.”) Pirsig attracted a cult of seekers eager to get past what he called “the primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars,” eager to explore the country’s back roads and byways—and eager to read his next book. They had a long wait, made longer, perhaps, by the murder, in 1979, of his son, Chris, the young rider from “Zen.” When “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” finally arrived, in 1991, it didn’t have nearly the same impact: it was more abstruse, it wasn’t a sequel, and it wasn’t even tangentially about motorcycles.

Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of “primary America.” Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig’s narrator. He’s never happier than when he’s rebuilding a master cylinder or dislodging a stuck oil seal, and his descriptions of the open road can seem slightly anticlimactic. For him, the journey is just the journey; the garage is the destination. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond. His book is called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” (Penguin; $25.95), and it’s intended as a challenge, a declaration of gearhead pride in an ever more gearless world.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always liked the sound of chilled barley water as a summertime drink, so I’m going to try this recipe:

Lemon barley water

Cooking Time 10 minutes
Makes 5 cups (1.25 litres)

* 1/3 cup (65g) pearl barley
* Finely grated rind and juice of 2 lemons
* 1/2 cup (110g) castor sugar [fine sugar, not powdered. I'll use agave syrup. – LG]

1. Place barley in a sieve. Rinse under running water until water runs clear then place in a saucepan with lemon rind and 6 cups of water. Bring to the boil over medium heat. Simmer for 10 minutes then strain mixture into a heatproof bowl, discarding barley.

2. Add sugar to bowl. Stir to dissolve then stir in lemon juice. Pour into bottles and refrigerate until chilled.

This recipe can easily be doubled. Store in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Dan Colman writes in Open Culture:

Throughout this year, my program at Stanford has been celebrating its 20th anniversary, and we’ve put together some special courses for the occasion. This spring, we offered a class featuring some of the finest American historians in the country, and together, they looked back at “The American Founders and Their World.” (Get it free on iTunes here; sorry that it’s not also available via other means.) Directed by Jack Rakove (the Stanford historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Original Meanings), this short course brought to campus Gordon Wood (who received the Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution); Annette Gordon-Reed (who won the National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello); and Alan Taylor, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning William Cooper’s Town.

You can find this course listed in our large collection of Free University Courses, and below I have included a fuller course description that ran in our catalogues. Enjoy learning more about Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, the Federalists, anti-Federalists and the rest:

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Nocera has a good article in the NY Times:

Three quarters of a century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt earned the undying enmity of Wall Street when he used his enormous popularity to push through a series of radical regulatory reforms that completely changed the norms of the financial industry.

Wall Street hated the reforms, of course, but Roosevelt didn’t care. Wall Street and the financial industry had engaged in practices they shouldn’t have, and had helped lead the country into the Great Depression. Those practices had to be stopped. To the president, that’s all that mattered.

On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled what he described as “a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.”

In terms of the sheer number of proposals, outlined in an 88-page document the administration released on Tuesday, that is undoubtedly true. But in terms of the scope and breadth of the Obama plan — and more important, in terms of its overall effect on Wall Street’s modus operandi — it’s not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression.

Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.

On the surface, there was no area of the financial industry the plan didn’t touch. “I was impressed by the real estate it covered,” said Daniel Alpert, the managing partner of Westwood Capital. The president’s proposal addresses derivatives, mortgages, capital, and even, in the wake of the American International Group fiasco, insurance companies. Among other things, it would give new regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve, create a new agency to help protect consumers of financial products, and make derivative-trading more transparent. It would give the government the power to take over large bank holding companies or troubled investment banks — powers it doesn’t have now — and would force banks to hold onto some of the mortgage-backed securities they create and sell to investors.

But it’s what the plan doesn’t do that is most notable.

Read the rest of this entry »

This sounds intriguing:

Border Songs
by Jim Lynch

A review by Ron Charles

Terrorists and tourists beware: "The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative" sounds like an official vacation plan, but in typical congressional doublespeak it’s designed to slow you down. Starting this month, guards along the U.S.-Canadian border have begun requiring everyone traveling into the United States to show a passport or other "compliant documents." This thickening of the world’s longest, once-undefended border is the latest sad, largely ineffectual annoyance spawned by our fear of drugs and foreigners. For small towns along the ambiguous, 5,500-mile line that separates these two countries, a quiet way of life has been snuffed out under the chilling eye of surveillance cameras, remote sensors, unmanned drones, checkpoints and police dogs.

The anxiety that powers these security efforts provides the backdrop for Jim Lynch‘s wonderful new novel, Border Songs. As a reporter in Washington state after Sept. 11, 2001, Lynch saw the United States triple its border patrol even while drug money fueled a spectacular building boom in once sleepy Canadian towns. The broad outline of the story he tells corresponds with reports in the news about human trafficking, a cascade of marijuana imports, the apprehension of Islamic terror suspects and even the construction of a tunnel from British Columbia to Washington. But while all these alarms sound, Border Songs stays tightly focused on the ordinary people who live along both sides of a drainage ditch that runs through dairy farms and raspberry patches. Here, independent-minded neighbors stroll back and forth between the United States and Canada by just crossing the street. Until now.

Literarily looming large among these characters is the irresistibly odd Brandon Vanderkool, a 6-foot-8, 232-pound naif who’s recently joined the U.S. Border Patrol. Looking like "an unfinished sculpture," he seems an unlikely protector against Islamo-fascists or drug kingpins. At 23 he has rarely ventured outside the farmlands of northwest Washington. His dyslexia is so severe that he can barely read, and when he’s nervous, he shouts at a suspect, "Let your hands see me." But away from the confusion of people, Brandon communicates lucidly with the natural world, particularly with birds, which soar over political borders and through some of this novel’s most beautiful passages. He’s a terrible student who pays almost no attention to his supervisor, but to everyone’s surprise, Brandon’s ability to read the signs and sounds of the forest makes him a crackerjack agent. Again and again, during his reveries in the woods, he spots the subtle clues left by drug runners and human smugglers. Almost accidentally, he nabs a series of high-value suspects, which throws the United States into "paranoid mode."

Lynch portrays Brandon with such tenderness and humor that you can’t help but fall in love with him…

Continue reading.

This decision is hard (in my mind) to justify. Daphne Eviatar:

In yet another 5-4 ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court denied a man imprisoned for a rape and attempted murder he says he didn’t commit the right to the DNA evidence that would prove his guilt or innocence.

Concluding that this is a matter for state legislatures, not the federal courts, to decide, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne that the Supreme Court is “reluctant to enlist the Federal Judiciary in creating a new constitutional code of rules for handling DNA.”

Even as the majority acknowledged the critical new role that DNA evidence can play in the criminal justice system — the test “has exonerated wrongly convicted people, and has confirmed the convictions of many others” — the court ruled that it’s still not, as the imprisoned defendant had claimed, a matter of due process rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, but rather a procedural matter for states to decide how they want to handle the evidence and interpret their statutes regarding post-conviction relief.

In a scathing dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens — joined (again) by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter (in part) — wrote that the majority had misinterpreted both the facts and the law.

The “most elemental” of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause is “the interest in being free from physical detention by one’s own government,” Stevens wrote. Noting that “nearly all the States have now recognized some postconviction right to DNA evidence,” and that prosecutors are required to turn over exculpatory evidence, it is “appropriate to recognize a limited federal right to such evidence in cases where litigants are unfairly barred from obtaining relief in state court.” Given that the evidence would absolutely prove Osborne’s guilt or innocence, Stevens wrote, Alaska’s refusal to provide it was “arbitrary” and a denial of the federal constitutional right of due process.

Because the Supreme Court had long similarly refused to acknowledge a right to counsel for the indigent in criminal cases by saying it was a matter of state procedure rather than due process, the dissenting justices argued that it was time to recognize a limited right to DNA evidence.

“Osborne has demonstrated a constitutionally protected right to due process which the State of Alaska thus far has not vindicated and which this Court is both empowered and obliged to safeguard. On the record before us, there is no reason to deny access to the evidence and there are many reasons to provide it, not least of which is a fundamental concern in ensuring that justice has been done in this case.”

From Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

Yet Congress has all but ditched the government option in order to protect insurance companies’ profits—one of the things that makes US healthcare so expensive. And, of course, taking this step ensures that the public will continue to fight insurance companies in order to get coverage. Every claim the insurance companies deny, and every dropped patient with costly care, will increase their profits, and that’s their only goal.

Maybe politicians will listen to the public and actually address the public good. I’m doubtful, however.

From the Center for American Progress:

In a briefing to reporters yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the efforts in Congress to restore funding for the F-22 fighter jet "a big problem," and labeled the argument that the elimination of the program will threaten national security as "nonsense." Gates’s statement came after the House Armed Services Committee approved $396 million to continue the production of the F-22 on Wednesday, over the Defense Department’s objections. Gates originally proposed ceasing production of the F-22s at the current 187 planes, but Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), among other conservatives, argued that the elimination of the planes would cause the loss of thousands of jobs. However, this is unlikely; the F-22 is just one of many projects that thousands of defense industry employees work on. The Republicans’ demand for the planes is also hypocritical, as Paul Krugman noted, because "the very same Republican congressmen who were denouncing the stimulus, saying government spending never creates jobs" are now saying that "cutting defense spending costs jobs." Conservatives also argue that de-funding the F-22 would weaken national security.Yet, not a single mission flown in Iraq or Afghanistan has used the F-22 and the planes have become increasingly costly to operate.