Later On

The financial industry has simply given too much money to Senators, Representatives, and the Obama campaign, so the nation is powerless to regulate them effectively. Simon Johnson:

The House-Senate reconciliation process is still underway and some details will still change. But the broad contours of “financial reform” are already completely clear; there are no last minute miracles at this level of politics.  The new consumer protection agency for financial products is a good idea and worth supporting – assuming someone sensible is appointed by the president to run it.  Yet, at the end of the day, essentially nothing in the entire legislation will reduce the potential for massive system risk as we head into the next credit cycle.

Go, for example, through the summary of “comprehensive financial regulatory reform bills” in President Obama’s letter to the G20 last week.

The president argues for more capital in banking – and this is a fine goal, particularly as the Europeans continue to drag their feet on this issue.  But how much capital does his Treasury team think is “enough”?  Most indications are that they will seek tier one capital requirements in the range of 10-12 percent – which is what Lehman had right before it failed.  How would that help?

“Stronger oversight of derivatives” is also on the president’s international agenda but this cannot be taken seriously, given how little Treasury and the White House have pushed for tighter control of derivatives in the US legislation.  If Senator Lincoln has made any progress at all – and we shall see where her initiative ends up – it has been without the full cooperation of the administration.  (The WSJ today has a more positive interpretation, but even in this narrative you have to ask – where was the administration on this issue in the nine months of intense debate and hard work prior to April?  Have they really woken up so recently to the dangers here?)

“More transparency and disclosure” sounds fine but this is just empty rhetoric.  Where is the application – or strengthening if necessary – of anti-trust tools so that concentrated market share in over-the-counter derivatives can be confronted.  The White House is making something of a show from Jamie Dimon falling out of favor, but all the points of substance that matter, Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase has won.  The Securities and Exchange Commission is beginning to push in the right direction, but the reconciliation conference looks likely to deny them the self-funding – CFTC and FDIC, for example, collect fees from the industry – that could help build as a regulator.  At the same time, the conference legislation would send a large number of important questions to the SEC “for further study”.  None of this makes any sense – unless the goal is to block real reform.

The president also asks for a “more effective framework for winding down large global firms” but his experts know this is politically impossible.  The G20 (and other) countries will not agree to such a cross-border resolution mechanism – and this was an important reason why Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman argued so strongly that big banks had to become smaller (and be limited in how much they could borrow).  Now administration officials brag to the press, on the record, about how they killed the Brown-Kaufman amendment.  These people – in the White House and around the Treasury – simply cannot be taken seriously.

And as for “principles for the financial sector to make a fair and substantial contribution towards paying for any burdens”, this is a sad joke.  This is not an oil spill, Mr. President.  This is the worst recession since World War II, a 40 percentage points increase in government debt (attempting to prevent a Second Great Depression), loss of at least 8 million jobs in the United States, and a painfully slow recovery (in terms of unemployment) – not to mention all the collateral damage in so many parts of the world, including Europe.  Could someone in the White House at least come to terms with this issue and provide the president with a sensible and clear text?  Honestly, as staff work, this is embarrassing.

There is great deference to power in the United States, and perhaps that is appropriate.  But those now calling the shots should remember that they will not be in power for ever and – at some point in the not too distant future – there will be a more balanced assessment of their legacies.

Simply claiming that the president is “tough” on big banks simply will not wash.  There are too many facts, too much accumulated evidence, pointing exactly the other way.  The president signed off on …

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NY Times editorial:

It was bad enough when the Senate left town for a long Memorial Day break without passing a bill to extend expiring unemployment benefits. It’s worse now.

Back in session for nearly three weeks, the Senate still has not acted. That means that 900,000 jobless workers have already lost their benefits, a number that will swell to an estimated 1.6 million people if an extension is not passed by the July Fourth holiday. Lost benefits — the average check is $309 a week — deprives struggling Americans of cash they need for buying food, paying the rent or mortgage and other essentials.

All indications are that when the Senate finally does pass a bill, it will be stingy and cynical — hacking away at jobless benefits and fiscal aid to cash-strapped states, while preserving tax breaks for the wealthy and other well-connected political donors.

The problem, as always, is getting 60 votes to overcome hurdles imposed by the Republican minority. But Republicans aren’t the only culprits here.

Passage was delayed last week as several Democratic senators — including John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mark Warner of Virginia and Maria Cantwell of Washington — worked to water down a provision in the bill that would have largely closed an unfair loophole that benefits rich fund managers in investment partnerships. Unfortunately, the senators seem to have won that fight.

This has led to even more maneuvering. Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican of Maine, is now trying to eliminate another tax provision in the bill. The provision, which would raise roughly $9 billion over 10 years, would stop owners of some small corporations from overpaying themselves in profits and underpaying themselves in salary to lessen their payroll taxes.

At the same time, many lawmakers — mostly Republicans, but not all — are claiming that extending jobless benefits and aid to states is simply too costly. That may sound like good politics, but it is very bad economics. If the government fails to keep spending when the economy is weak, especially on core safety-net issues, it will only worsen unemployment and impede the chances of recovery.

Neither basic economics nor basic decency seems to matter. To win votes for passage, the Democratic leadership has agreed to drop the extra $25 a week that was added to unemployment benefits last year as part of the stimulus package. That would cut $6 billion from the roughly $40 billion it would cost to extend benefits through November. Senate leaders also are considering sizable cuts to the bill’s proposed $24 billion aid package for the states.

It’s unclear if even those cutbacks will be enough to win passage. What is clear is that unemployment is high, the safety net is frayed and the Senate has other priorities than helping struggling Americans.

Diet coming along. I get 2 tsp of cooking oil plus (if I want) 2 tsp of flax oil, and I’ve been skipping the flax oil—but then I thought, "Why not use it?" It will be nice to have it on the salad, and that will free up 2 tsp of olive oil for cooking and the like.

I did my little workout using actual weights:

Two times, all with the 1-pood kettlebell:

• Halo, 10 times each direction
• Passing kettlebell around my body, arms hanging down: 10 times in each direction
• Deadlift, 10 times

Then two times, with weight indicated:

• Row from lunge position, 10 times each side: 35lb kb
• Press, 10 times each side: 20lb kb
• Turkish Get-Up, from floor to elbow, 10 times each side: 10lb kb

I noticed the effort. Still clumsy with form. But I did it.

A late start, though I did indeed shave some hours ago. The Truefitt & Hill Rose is a very nice shaving cream—fragrant, loads of lather, and doesn’t have the day-glo pink color of some of the others. A good lather from the Plisson HMW 12, then three passes with the Pils, a splash of TOBS St. James, and I was good to go.

Not much blogging. I picked up the latest novel by Lee Child, 61 Hours, and am lost in the story.

Fascinating speculation:

Why did Gen. Stanley McChrystal give his full cooperation to a freelance reporter writing for Rolling Stone, exactly? He’s not particularly "media savvy," we are told, but "media savvy" is not actually what stops most generals from openly insulting the White House. What stops them is "common sense" and "the Uniform Code of Military Justice."

Marc Ambinder says McChrystal just wanted to get his side of what he already saw as a media war out there.

Support for the Afghanistan war is dropping, both in the public and in the political elite, and support for an expansion would probably be nonexistent. A lot of soldiers don’t entirely understand or agree with McChrystal’s low-civilian-casualty counterinsurgency strategy. McChrystal apparently thought he was just getting a platform to make the case for his strategy, and to push the message that with more time (and maybe more resources) he’d succeed in his mission.

Robert Haddick at Small Wars Journal explains McChrystal’s motivation:

Finally, how did this fiasco with Rolling Stone magazine happen? Field commanders and their staff officers talk to the media in order to get their stories out. In the case of McChrystal and the Afghanistan campaign, the need to do so has lately been even more urgent than usual. McChrystal and his staff were seeking to "add time to the Washington clock." They hoped to get their message out to media audience segments that would soon be putting the most pressure on the Obama administration to terminate the campaign. The theory was that delivering their message — through a channel like Rolling Stone — would short-circuit, at least for a time, growing political pressure against the war.

But instead he just opened up to an antiwar reporter who actually printed all the incredibly stupid things McChrystal and his asshole aides said about their bosses.

The civilian Pentagon consultant responsible for setting up the interview has already resigned. Because, as Politico notes, it’s weird that this interview was ever set up to begin with:

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

(That’s right — you can trust beat reporters to not report things their highly placed sources tell them. That’s today’s lesson in How Things Work.)

Is McChrystal justified in his dissatisfaction? Was he right to attempt to open up a front in the media war over the real war?

Considering that …

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But those are being curtailed, just in case. In fact, the terrorists are happy to tell us why they hate us, and so far our freedoms have not made the list:

American discussions about what causes Terrorists to do what they do are typically conducted by ignoring the Terrorist’s explanation for why he does what he does.  Yesterday, Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, and this Pakistani-American Muslim explained why he transformed from a financial analyst living a law-abiding, middle-class American life into a Terrorist:

If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, "we will be attacking U.S.," adding that Americans "only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die" . . . .

As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.

"One of the first things he said was, ‘How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan’," said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are not public. "In the first two hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow against the United States for the cause." 

When the federal Judge presiding over his case asked him why he would be willing to kill civilians who have nothing to do with those actions, he replied:  "Well, the people select the government. We consider them all the same" (the same rationale used to justify the punishment of the people of Gaza for electing Hamas).  When the Judge interrupted him to ask whether that includes children who might have been killed by the bomb he planted and whether he first looked around to see if there were children nearby, Shahzad replied:

Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims. . . .

I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people.  And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack.  Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.

Those statements are consistent with a decade’s worth of emails and other private communications from Shahzad, as he railed with increasing fury against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked:  "Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?"

This proves only what it proves.  The issue here is causation, not justification.   The great contradiction of American foreign policy is that the very actions endlessly rationalized as necessary for combating Terrorism — invading, occupying and bombing other countries, limitless interference in the Muslim world, unconditional support for Israeli aggression, vast civil liberties abridgments such as torture, renditions, due-process-free imprisonments — are the very actions that fuel the anti-American hatred which, as the U.S. Government itself has long recognized, is what causes, fuels and exacerbates the Terrorism we’re ostensibly attempting to address. 

It’s really quite simple:  if we …

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This post (and its comments) discuss the idea of cooking a big batch of steel-cut oats and then freezing it in individual portions, which can then be microwaved to heat. Since steel-cut oats take a while to cook, this is a great idea if your morning routine is time-limited. Even better, in my opinion, would be to cook whole-grain oats (not cut)—known as oat groats and sold in bulk at healthfood stores—and freeze that. Oat groats taste even better than steel-cut oats, which in turn taste better than rolled oats, which taste better than instant oatmeal.

Note also the idea of getting the steel-cut oats ready, but just letting them soak in the water overnight, which shortens the cooking time. Or parboiling them and letting them sit in the hot water, covered, overnight: in the morning they just require heating. (All from the comment thread.)

I slept like a log and today feel some muscle-awareness (not soreness) from yesterday’s exercise. I did not get the 1-pood kettlebell in time to include it in the exercise, so I’m especially looking forward to tomorrow.

I’m now making a big batch of what anyone who’s been on Weight Watchers will know: the famous Garden Vegetable soup (zero points). I do need to pick up a couple of carrots, and since I forgot the ginger yesterday I’ll pick that up as well to make the ginger-scallion sauce.

UPDATE: I now have one gallon of Garden Vegetable soup, spicy variation.

Interesting observation from Andrew Sullivan:

It’s a shock, isn’t it? Obama essentially gave McChrystal everything he asked for, and backed the full counter-insurgency strategy. He has, in my view, foolishly thrown more resources and more ambition at this hopeless task than his predecessor ever did. And yet, McChrystal and his flunkies still feel the need to bad-mouth and mock those who lost the argument. This is news, no? It’s important news. It reflects on the character and integrity of the man tasked to lead America’s longest ever war. So why, one wonders, have we not heard a peep of this from all the official MSM Pentagon reporters and analysts with their deep sources and long experience? Politico explains:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department.

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

The better their sources, the less we know. Take it away, Greenwald!

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Next week, as the Senate begins hearings to confirm his successor, Justice John Paul Stevens will take his seat at the Supreme Court’s bench for the last time. He will leave a Court that has shifted far to the right since he joined 35 years ago. Since Stevens joined the Court, virtually every subsequent appointee has been more conservative than the justice they replaced — resulting in a conservative bloc of justices who consistently place powerful interests before the law, and a smaller, more moderate bloc that struggles to ensure that the law still applies equally to powerful and powerless alike. Both visions of the Court’s role will be on display tonight at a debate between former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger and former Bush assistant attorney general Rachel Brand. The event at George Washington University will be hosted by the Center for American Progress, the conservative American Action Forum, and Politico. Where are the courts headed? Today’s Progress Report offers a few answers.

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Dan Gillmor at Salon.com:

I’m not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period.

This is why, for more than a decade, I’ve been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple’s personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today.

So why am I about to migrate to Linux (aka GNU/Linux)? Because Apple is pushing me away, and because I value some principles, perhaps almost religiously, that affect other decisions.

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells — and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

I realize that I won’t persuade the many people who prefer to live in gated communities, believing they can leave any time they wish. But switching costs will only get higher over time for those who choose to live in the Apple ecosystem.

As noted, I’ve been happy in the relatively free Mac world. But given the slowing pace of Mac OS development, there’s reason to believe Apple is mostly milking Mac OS users. Will it phase out serious PC development? Or will it eventually move its command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac? Apple says it’s committed to the Mac’s future. I’m not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player. (I’m a believer in tablets, and am planning to put my money there on the Android OS when tablet manufacturers adopt it in tablet-sized formats.)

So I’m looking for options in the personal-computing part of my life. Windows is one, of course, and Windows 7 is a truly fine piece of work by Microsoft’s recent operating-system standards, leagues better than Vista. But it’s impossible to fully trust Microsoft given its own history, not least its long and ever-deepening alliance with the control freaks of the Copyright Cartel, the commercial music, video, software and publishing industries.

That leaves, for practical purposes, Linux, which is freely available and not controlled by any one company. Volunteers around the world, who value freedom of choice and the ability to modify what they use, have created an ecosystem of their own — software based on the concept that you, not Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, should have control over what you own.

Linux is anything but a walled garden. It’s almost nothing but choice, with all the good and bad that comes with it…

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Greenwald describes objectively  and in detail an example of authoritarian excess coming directly from Obama’s office and administration:

Even in the context of America’s wretched civil liberties abuses over the last decade, the case of Mohamed Hassan Odaini stands out.  He was 17 years old in 2001 when his father sent him from Yemen to study at a religious university in Raiwand, Pakistan, and when a campus house in which he was staying there was raided by Pakistani authorities in early 2002, he was turned over to the U.S. and shipped to Guantanamo, where he has remained without charges for the last eight years (he’s now 26).  A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence “overwhelmingly supports Odaini’s contention that he is unlawfully detained.”  Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years — beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 — when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court’s description of that history).

Despite that, the Obama administration has refused to release him for the past 16 months, and fought vehemently in this habeas proceeding to keep him imprisoned.  As the court put it, the Obama DOJ argued “vehemently” that there was evidence that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda.  In fact, the Obama administration knew this was false.  This Washington Post article this weekend quotes an “administration official” as saying:  “The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid.”  But after Obama decreed in January that no Yemeni detainees would be released — even completely innocent ones, and even though the Yemeni government wants their innocent prisoners returned — Obama DOJ lawyers basically lied to the court by claiming there was substantial evidence to prove that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda even though they know that is false.  In other words, the Obama administration is knowingly imprisoning a completely innocent human being who has been kept in a cage in an island prison, thousands of miles from his home, for the last 8 years, since he’s 18 years old, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.

It really is hard to imagine many things worse, more criminal, than imprisoning people for years whom you know are innocent, while fighting in court to keep them imprisoned.  But that’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing.  Every day that Odiani is kept in a cage is a serious crime.  Just imagine what has happened to his life by being shipped off to Guantanamo for 8 years, starting in 2002 during that camp’s darkest days, with absolutely no justification.  As the court put it (click image to enlarge):

I honestly don’t understand how any Obama DOJ lawyer or official could involve themselves with anything like this.  If you’re willing to work to keep a person whom you know is innocent imprisoned, what aren’t you willing to do?  What decent human being wouldn’t be repulsed by this?  I don’t care how many times someone chants “Pragmatism” or “The Long Game” or whatever other all-purpose justifying mantras have been marketed to venerate the current President; these are repellent acts that have no justification.

Of course, none of this is new for the Obama administration; it’s consistent with their course of conduct from the start.  I highlight this today only because there is an obvious, concerted effort by a slew of Democratic Beltway pundits over the last month or so to attack the so-called “Left” for daring to express displeasure with the Obama administration, and to demonize those objections as unserious, shrill, irrational, purist and all the other clichés long used by this same cadre of party apparatchiks for the same purpose.  This is all coming from a homogeneous clique of Democratic Party pundits who have strikingly similar demographics and background, most of whom supported the Iraq War, and who spend a great deal of time talking to one another in public and private and reinforcing their talking point platitudes, and have spent years railing against the Left.  Just look at who is purporting to lecture liberals on how to promote progressive goals.

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I have finished the 5-minute eggs, and just made a small batch of 6-minute eggs. This time I didn’t use the little snap-gadget that pricks a tiny hole in the shell—and two of the eggs cracked, despite their being at room temperature. So much for that idea. I will return to always punching the tiny hole in the shell.

Six minutes turns out to be more or less perfect for a liquid yolk—better than the 5-minute eggs. Now I’ll try 6′ 30" and see what that’s like. I do like starting with room temperature eggs, have the water fully boiling, and have read the big bowl of iced water to receive the eggs at the end. A slotted spoon is essential.

I used to buy the brand of eggs discussed below, but no more. From PRWatch.org:

Source: AllGov.com, June 19, 2010

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has filed a complaint (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission to stop the country’s largest egg producer, Rose Acre Farms — makers of Eggland’s Best eggs — from making false and misleading misrepresentations in its marketing and advertising about how chickens are treated at the company’s farms.

On its Web site, posters and in media interviews, the company suggests that Rose Acre provides a "humane and friendly environment" for caged birds, that birds have plenty of space to "move around and socialize" with other chickens and that only chickens who are treated well will be "happy" enough to lay eggs. Rose Acre also claims that their chickens are "happy" and "comfortable."

In reality, according to HSUS, millions of hens are confined for their entire lives in barren wire cages stacked four and eight levels high. Cages are so densely packed that the birds cannot even spread their wings fully.

In February and March 2010, HSUS conducted undercover investigations at several Rose Acre Farms locations and videotaped how the chickens are kept.

Chickens lose limbs or endure broken bones from rough handling, some birds get trapped in the cage wire and become unable to reach food and water or get trampled to death, and some chickens die, with the carcasses left to rot in the cages for weeks or longer. Consumers have no way to verify producers’ claims about how chickens are kept.

Cyril R. Salter makes a very good shaving cream, and this morning it was the Almond’s turn. Fine lather with the Rooney 3/1 Super, then three smooth passes with the Apollo Mikron holding a Swedish Gillette blade of few uses, and finally a splash of Floris London JF aftershave. A wonderful way to meet the morning.

A pood is heavier than you think, especially in kettlebell form. I’ll be using this for deadlifts and the like, but I’ll be using the lighter kettlebells for quite a few things for a while.

This article in Mother Jones by Kiera Butler has me thinking about my diet again. I think I’ll move to more meatless days, using tofu, quinoa, beans and rice, and other protein sources. The article begins:

Whether you’re a burger lover or a strict vegetarian (I’m somewhere in the middle—more on this in the July/August 2010 issue of Mother Jones), you’ve probably heard that too much meat is definitely not a good thing. Most recently, researchers have linked overconsumption of red meat with early puberty in girls: A University of Brighton study found this month that about half of UK girls who ate 12 or more servings of meat each week at age seven had started their periods by age twelve and a half, compared to about a third of those who ate fewer than four servings. Worrisome, since some research suggests that girls who go through puberty early are at greater risk for breast cancer.

Meat-heavy diets aren’t great for adults, either: In 2009, a landmark National Cancer Institute study of 500,000 Americans between the ages of 50 and 71 found that people who eat a quarter-pound of red meat or processed meat every day were 30 percent more likely to die in the 10 years of the study than those who ate 5 ounces of red meat or less per week. Compare that to research about vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists, many of whom live significantly longer than the average American.

So, how much meat is too much? Americans eat about eight ounces of meat every day, more than twice the rest of the world’s average. Most health experts agree that’s too much (and in addition to being unhealthy, mass production and consuming this much meat has major environmental consequences). You can find current USDA guidelines for meat consumption here (generally five to seven ounces of meat or beans a day for adults, less for kids depending on age and size), but some some people think those recommendations are suspiciously high: Marion Nestle writes about agriculture lobby groups’ influence over the USDA dietary recommendations in her book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

But you don’t have to swear off summer barbecues, either. As a rule of thumb, nutritionist Dawn Jackson Blatner, proponent of the light-on-meat flexitarian diet, recommends thinking of meat as “condiment instead of a large-meal focal point.” Aspiring flexitarians, she says, should aim for two meatless days per week.

In addition to limiting overall meat consumption, Imogen Rogers, a lead author on the UK study, notes that the World Cancer Research Fund recommends avoiding processed meat (such as ham and bacon), which has been linked to increased cancer risks. “Processed meat is also very high in salt, and at least in the UK the vast majority of children consume well in excess of the recommended maximum salt intakes,” says Rogers. The National Cancer Institute also warns against eating meat cooked at high temperatures. “The way people cook red meat is usually by grilling, barbequing or frying,” says Jie Lin, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas. “No matter what types of meat—red meat or white—if cooked under high temperature, generate HCAs that could lead to cancer.”

Interested in cutting back on meat? Check out the Meatless Monday campaign, an initiative by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health aimed at reducing Americans’ meat consumption by 15 percent.

Ed Brayton again:

Here’s another case where the Obama administration has taken an appalling position in front of the Supreme Court — but this time, the entire court, including the conservatives, rejected their clearly unjust argument. The case is Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder. The Obama administration argued that a permanent resident alien living in the US could be deported solely for being caught with a joint and an anxiety pill (yes, one of each).

Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in 1952 that outlines the circumstances under which immigrants can be removed from the country. Under the INA, an immigrant in violation of federal law is ineligible for cancellation of removal if convicted of an aggravated felony which the INA defines as any "drug trafficking crime."

Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo was a lawful permanent resident when he was convicted for possession of a small amount of marijuana, which is a Class B misdemeanor amounting to 20 days jail time under state law. The following year, he was arrested and convicted for possessing a single anti-anxiety pill without a prescription, a 10-day sentence that was classified as a Class A misdemeanor in Texas. The federal government initiated deportation proceedings against Jose, charging that the state misdemeanor could have been prosecuted as an aggravated felony in a federal court.

Jose and his attorney filed unsuccessfully for cancellation of removal. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), backed by the Department of Justice, tried to argue that even though Jose had neither been charged nor convicted of a federal felony, the fact that he could have been prosecuted for a federal felony, means that he was not eligible for cancellation of removal. The Immigration Judge and the BIA, as usual, sided with the DHS. Carachuri-Rosendo argued tried to argue that he was not ineligible for cancellation because he was not convicted of an aggravated felony by virtue of his second possession conviction.

Their position was so absurd that the court rejected it unanimously. That does not happen often, especially on immigration and criminal justice cases. You can read the full ruling here.

The exercises:

Halo 10x each direction
Pass kettlebell around my body while standing, 10x each direction
Squats with kettlebell 10x

Do the above 2-3x

Overhead press 10x each side
Lunge position one-arm row, 10x each side
TGU to elbow position 10x each side

Do the above 2x

The Turkish Get Up I tried with no weight, then with 5-lb kettlebell. Makes a big difference.

In addition, various stretches, which I’m still working on. Pavel’s Relax Into Stretch seems very good, and I’m using that.

Not the record of promises—those were great. The record of actions: it’s worse than Bush. Ed Brayton:

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero began his talk to a conference of liberal activists on Wednesday by saying this:

"I’m going to start provocatively … I’m disgusted with this president."

Good. You should be. So am I. And he elaborated in an interview with Politico:

"There was a discussion this morning, and there has been generally in progressive circles, about expectations that have not been met. I made the point that expectations were high because the president set expectations very high," Romero said.

Asked why he’s so animated now, Romero said: "It’s 18 months and, if not now, when? … Guantanamo is still not closed. Military commissions are still a mess. The administration still uses state secrets to shield themselves from litigation. There’s no prosecution for criminal acts of the Bush administration. Surveillance powers put in place under the Patriot Act have been renewed. If there has been change in the civil liberties context, I frankly don’t see it."

Because it doesn’t exist.

I beg to differ. Obama has created a new Presidential prerogative: the right to assassinate an American citizen strictly on his say-so, with no due process or appeal. Even Bush never went that far. And Bush never went after whistleblowers with the vengeful attitude of Obama. So there has been a change, a change for the worse.