Fukushima'd Monday

The horror of Fukushima keeps on giving.

Immigrant children who were sent back are being killed.

How lizards regenerate their tails: researchers discover genetic 'recipe':

By understanding the secret of how lizards regenerate their tails, researchers may be able to develop ways to stimulate the regeneration of limbs in humans. Now, a team of researchers from Arizona State University is one step closer to solving that mystery. The scientists have discovered the genetic “recipe” for lizard tail regeneration, which may come down to using genetic ingredients in just the right mixture and amounts 

Lizards?... might want to be careful...

George Bush.

Bank of America gets to pay back 17bn over questionable mortgages.  Do they get to go back and help those people they drove out of their houses and into poverty, too?

Bigger spiders a good thing?  I don't think so....

A cop discusses Ferguson and the behavior of the police.

Oh please, let this be true! The Twilight of Antonin Scalia

One half-hour to change a governor's mind about climate change.  And they don't think it worked.

How much you can save when you stop buying shit.

How amazingly transparent the CIA is....

How do you pronounce pecan?

California drought, before and after comparisons.

Celebrating the Era of Stupid

Those elected to govern who don't know how and 13 reasons Washington is failing.

Justice Antonin Scalia.

CEOs and Wall Street figuring out how to loot pensions.

Watch out, California!

In the end, they will bring out their killer robots.  Then they will destroy the earth.  (Sorry. Getting silly)

And those who fight it:

Bernie Sanders vs. the Koch Brothers.

Paul Krugman.



And the world sits back and is amused by our antics.

You don't say!

A Brief History Lesson for Justice Antonin ‘Racial Entitlement’ Scalia

Baby elephant hugs.

Writing the Unwritten Handbook: Antifascism and Neighborhood Resistance in Athens

State Department’ Keystone XL Report Actually Written By TransCanada Contractor

Poor Jeb Bush.

Here Are Some Rich New Yorkers Whining About Feeling Poor (The comments are enlightening.)

Howard Fineman: We Are Living in the World Dick Cheney Made

The rich poor divide.

To help you win climate change arguments.

A veteran's remorse: what have we done to Iraq?

Skyfalling

Things that have fallen out of the sky.

Greece: Blackwater Mercenaries Guarding Govt and Overseeing Police; Coup Feared

Scaring off lions by being intelligent.

Our new Senator McCarthy.  Bring on the inquisition!

Josh Marshall on Justice Scalia:

Speaking for myself, it’s hard for me to read the sort of stuff Justice Scalia says these days without seeing red. As he’s aged, he’s tossed aside any pretense or desire to hide the fact that he sees himself as what originalists and advocates of judicial restraint are supposed to be against: namely, an appointed super legislator, contemptuous of Congress and happy to impose his own beliefs by judicial fiat. Hearing him rail about “racial entitlement” sounds more like you’re listening to some sort of talk radio blowhard than a Supreme Court Justice. 

But who is he (and his fellow conservatives on the Court) helping at this point? 

It’s now generally recognized (and I think it’s accurate, but who knows) that the Republican drive to disenfranchise minority voters in 2012 backfired spectacularly. The country’s demography has apparently hit a tipping point wherein you piss off and activate more people than you gain by playing to racial animus, hostility to immigrants and attacks on voting rights.

I hope you are right, Josh, because if the Voting Rights Act gets 'modified' in any way, we will have people rioting in the streets.

Blog sprinkles

City that ended hunger

Scalia: Homophobe

Slashing, cutting, blood on the floor? Do I detect a theme?



Fascinating discussion with a representative of Monsanto over at Crooks and Liars (thanks, Mahakal!)

By the way, Obama did NOT ignore mainstream news in his Q&A yesterday. The Sailor at SteveAudio sets the record straight:

And to the moron who thinks he only called on 'niche' reporters?
That's not true. He called on the AP, NBC, ABC, CBS, Univision, Stars and Stripes, CNN, Ebony & AFP. Shoot, he even called on Faux News and the Washington Times! There was only so much time and he answered original questions and followups at length.

BTW, the military, Blacks and Latinos are not a niche in this country, they are Americans who have just as much right as you to ask questions of our president as the MSM does.

Digby: Disaster Capitalist Humor. Just how worried should we be?

Californian Republicans at it again.

The difference between liberals and conservatives.

Mail the Pope a condom?

If you change the meaning of the words you use

You can make your own reality!

Declare Abu Ghraib was a resort!:

Talk about bad timing! Just as CACI International was ramping up for its book tour -- the company's CEO has penned "Our Good Name," which according to the flap copy is "CACI's story of facing one of the biggest scandals in recent history...and coming out honorably with its head high" -- an Iraqi man has sued CACI, saying that employees tortured him when he was held in Abu Ghraib.

Be emphatic that science is just a theory and therefore malleable!:

Gray proved himself a fine substitute for Johnson, however. When the senators pressed him on why Johnson had gone along with the White House and overruled the recommendation of the agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in setting a higher level for smog-forming ozone in the air, Gray wanted everyone to understand that it was "actually a very good example" of the "way in which the uncertainty of science plays an important role in decisions." Gray counseled that "science does not give us a single or precise answer."

But Whitehouse didn't seem to be buying it. "The people that you chose to be the experts unanimously supported this recommendation.... These were the best scientists in the country and you ignored them." Gray responded that Johnson hadn't "ignored" them -- he'd just come to a different conclusion. He did allow, however, that in addition to "scientific considerations," there had been "science policy considerations," which are a "part of moving the scientific process forward." But the EPA wouldn't discuss it's communications with the White House, he said, saying that it was important to keep "discussions with the rest of the federal family" private.

Point fingers! It's Congress' fault Bush has made such a mess of things!:

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Wednesday criticized Democrats in Congress for their approach to dealing with the nation's housing crisis and soaring energy prices and called anew for an extension of expiring tax cuts and government wiretapping authority.

Bush met at the White House with Republican leaders of Congress and then gave a critique of the Democrats' strategy for dealing with major problems.

When you are asked a direct question, critique the semantics!:

...Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia granted his first broad-based television interview, to Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes. There he explained that the torture of detainees does not violate the 8th Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” because, according to Scalia, torture is not used as punishment...
[snip]
Scalia’s parsing of the 8th Amendment blindly ignores reports showing that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was about humiliation and punishment, not information-gathering. In 2004, the Washington Post reported MPs involved in the abuse “said detainees were beaten and sexually humiliated as punishment or for fun.” A recent New Yorker profile of one of the soldiers there confirmed that “mostly what interrogators wanted when they asked for ’special treatment’ was punishment: take away his mattress, keep him awake, take away his clothes.”

And when you can't silence the facts, you can just silence the report:

Sanchez writes that he was told by one of the people who'd done the study that when they'd presented their findings to Rumsfeld, he'd "just shut us down" and said "This is not going anywhere." According to Sanchez, the report validated his account that the entire Pentagon leadership knew that he'd had inadequate support when he'd been in command of the U.S. forces in Iraq after the fall of Hussein. It also showed that Gen. Tommy Franks had discarded the original plan, which called for a twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment.

So... when the Democrats have the White House, will the media let these rules still apply? Betcha they won't.

They say it best

Eli of Multi Medium takes on the spineless Democratic collapse while tangling with the FISA telecom immunity clause of the bill.

Watertiger of Dependable Renegade shows us the horrors of Antonin Scalia's acceptance of torture.

Carrie, Uncensored lists the many positions of John McCain.

Clarence Thomas

Found via res ipsa loquitur at Rising Hegemon, The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin reviews Clarence Thomas' autobiography in an article titled Unforgiven: Why is Clarence Thomas So Angry?. Here are some insightful bits:

A touchstone of Clarence Thomas’s career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls élites.

[snip]

This theme is expanded upon in Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; $26.95). In his book, Thomas is clear about whom he blames for the pain of his confirmation hearings, when he had to defend himself against Anita Hill’s accusations. “In one climactic swipe of calumny,” Thomas writes, “America’s elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I’d accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.”

Triumph over the élites, Thomas writes, took faith in God and, especially, courage. This, too, has been a longtime theme for him, and he elaborated upon it in the annual Francis Boyer lecture of the American Enterprise Institute on February 13, 2001.

[snip]

On this night, in other words, Thomas, while celebrating the courage to speak unpopular truths, was telling some of the most powerful people in the worlds of government, business, and finance precisely what they wanted to hear—that affirmative action was bad, that black people didn’t want or need their help, that government did more harm than good. Be not afraid. Indeed, throughout his judicial career Thomas has, in the name of anti-élitism, shown a distinct solicitude for certain kinds of élites—say, for employers over employees, for government over individuals, for corporations over regulators, and for executioners over the condemned. Thomas’s tender concern for the problems of the powerful reveals itself, in the end, as a form of self-pity.

[snip]

For almost eight years, Thomas seems to have done a competent job running the E.E.O.C. Reagan’s people had, in a model demonstration of affirmative action, looked beyond the traditional candidates for leadership positions, and taken a chance on Thomas, and he had done as well as any white executive could have been expected to do. But, as Thomas moved through the hierarchy of Republican Administrations, the paternalism didn’t seem to bother him anymore—or else he found it convenient to pretend that it did not exist. Thomas’s rhetoric against traditional civil-rights dogma became more strident, even as he became an ever more prominent beneficiary of it. In other words, Yale and Reagan treated him the same way, but he hates one and reveres the other. Thomas never acknowledges, much less explains, the contradiction.

This omission becomes even more glaring when Thomas begins to discuss his judicial career. In 1989, he was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the E.E.O.C., although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.

And that’s also why, in 1991, after Thomas had been a judge for just sixteen months, Bush named him to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

[snip]

As Thomas recalls the conversation with Gray, he said that the Bush Administration wanted “to avoid appointing me to what was widely perceived as the court’s ‘black’ seat.” But, of course, that is precisely what Bush did, and it is inconceivable that a young white lawyer who headed a modest federal agency would have been similarly rushed onto the Supreme Court. In the light of this conversation with Gray, though, Thomas declares that his race worked against him as a potential judicial appointee. It is hard to tell whether this is self-delusion or dishonesty.

[snip]

For Thomas, though, the confirmation hearings served as a metaphor for his larger struggles. “I refused to bow to the superior wisdom of the white liberals who thought they knew what was better for blacks,” he writes. “Since I didn’t know my place, I had to be put down.” Sixteen years later, the hearings remain a fresh wound. At the time, in his own testimony, he memorably called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” and in his book Thomas expands on the comment: “As a child in the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” After sixteen years’ reflection, to compare the actions of Anita Hill’s supporters with those of the K.K.K. reflects an inability to draw distinctions, not least because Thomas, unlike most of those targeted by the Klan, won his battle with his pursuers. Apparently, it did not feel that way to him. Thomas writes in his memoir, “Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

[snip]

"My Grandfather’s Son” scarcely mentions Thomas’s work on the Supreme Court. Before arriving at the Court, he had said little about what kind of Justice he would be; indeed, thanks to the Pin Point strategy, the pre-Anita Hill portion of his confirmation hearings had been close to a farce. Drawing a lesson from Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings, which had taken place four years earlier, Thomas declined to express his views on judicial issues, portraying himself as simply open-minded about matters of constitutional interpretation.

[snip]

Almost immediately after arriving on the Court, Thomas began expressing a quite well-honed judicial philosophy—one that reflects the most deeply felt ideology on the Court.

Thomas’s ideology is originalism; that is, he believes that the Constitution should be interpreted in accord with what he sees as the original intent of the framers. Eight months after Thomas joined the Court, in 1992, it issued its famous Casey decision, in which five Justices upheld what they called the “central holding” of Roe v. Wade, and thus preserved some constitutional protection for a woman’s right to abortion. In that case, Thomas joined Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, which, on the basis of an originalist reading of the Constitution, called for Roe to be overturned. (Thomas had not shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee either his originalism or his hostility to Roe.)

The early alliance with Scalia has long prompted speculation that Thomas merely parrots the views of his fellow-conservative, but that has never been the case. Scalia calls himself a “faint-hearted” originalist, because contemporary conditions sometimes influence his reading of the Constitution. But there is nothing faint-hearted about Thomas’s approach. For example, as long ago as 1995 he was asserting that much of the New Deal, and thus much of the contemporary work of the federal government, was unconstitutional.

The article goes into depth about Thomas' life and job and is excellently well done. But just one thing to note: The Supreme Court's appointment is for life and he's only 59....