One of the nice things about the blogosphere is that you can always find someone who makes the point you wanted to make better than you ever could.
In this case, it’s Oliver Willis (like Kryptonite to stupid).
Margaret Carlson Had A Column To Fill
A long time ago I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn’t true. They’re just stupid.…
This is a real can of worms that we are getting into.
SEC probing Bear hedge fund losses
NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) – Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. (BSC.N: Quote, Profile , Research), which recently agreed to bail out a failing hedge fund it manages, is facing a preliminary inquiry from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, BusinessWeek reported on Monday.
The SEC is looking into why Bear Stearns restated results from the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. The Enhanced Leverage fund is the sister of the fund that Bear said it would bail out with an up to $3.2 billion financing package.
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Maybe only in Green Bay, but Milwaukee would be likely too.
I can’t imagine this in Madison. I can see a Merlot Mania race there.
19th annual Beer Belly Two goes over without a hitch
1,800 to 2,000 take part in charity run
By Kelly McBride
kmcbride@greenbaypressgazette.comSUAMICO — A beautiful morning provided the perfect excuse to get moving — and drinking — for an estimated 1,800 to 2,000 participants in Sunday’s Beer Belly Two.
Final participation totals won’t be tallied until later this week, but a last-minute registration push likely will mean a high turnout for the 19th annual event, organizer Bob Mayer said Sunday.
In fact, the number of last-minute registrants translated to a slight delay for the start of the 10:30 a.m. race, he said.
“Just about 20 after 10, there were hundreds of people signed up to register yet,” Mayer said. “There were, I think more (spectators), too.”
In keeping with Beer Belly Two tradition, runners and walkers had their choice of water, beer or root beer at water stops along the course. After the race was over, organizers held an awards ceremony in the parking lot of the nearby post office.
No injuries or health concerns were reported during the race, Mayer said. But as in years past, there were some participants who preferred the slow and steady approach to getting to the end.
“You always get the people who stop at the beer stops,” Mayer said, “and hardly make it to the finish line.”
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The Republithugs are starting to peel off.
Richard G. Lugar, United States Senator for Indiana – Press Releases
Connecting our Iraq Strategy to our Vital Interests
Monday, June 25, 2007
Mr. President, I rise today to offer observations on the continuing involvement of the United States in Iraq. In my judgment, our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond. Our continuing absorption with military activities in Iraq is limiting our diplomatic assertiveness there and elsewhere in the world. The prospects that the current “surge” strategy will succeed in the way originally envisioned by the President are very limited within the short period framed by our own domestic political debate. And the strident, polarized nature of that debate increases the risk that our involvement in Iraq will end in a poorly planned withdrawal that undercuts our vital interests in the Middle East. Unless we recalibrate our strategy in Iraq to fit our domestic political conditions and the broader needs of U.S. national security, we risk foreign policy failures that could greatly diminish our influence in the region and the world.
The current debate on Iraq in Washington has not been conducive to a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy. Our debate is being driven by partisan political calculations and understandable fatigue with bad news — including deaths and injuries to Americans. We have been debating and voting on whether to fund American troops in Iraq and whether to place conditions on such funding. We have contemplated in great detail whether Iraqi success in achieving certain benchmarks should determine whether funding is approved or whether a withdrawal should commence. I would observe that none of this debate addresses our vital interests any more than they are addressed by an unquestioned devotion to an ill-defined strategy of “staying the course” in Iraq.
Emphasis mine
OOps…Me Bad. Opposing the president apparrently does not mean voting against him.
Wanker.
Lugar won’t switch vote
However, Fisher said the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals.In January, Lugar voted against a resolution opposing the troop buildup, contending that the nonbinding measure would have no practical effect. In spring, he voted against a Democratic bill that would have triggered troop withdrawals by Oct. 1 with the goal of completing the pull out in six months.
Next month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to force votes on several anti-war proposals as amendments to a 2008 defense policy bill. Members will decide whether to cut off money for combat, demand troop withdrawals start in four months, restrict the length of combat tours and rescind Congress’ 2002 authorization of Iraqi invasion.
Expected to fall short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate to pass controversial legislation, the proposals are intended to increase pressure on Bush and play up to voters frustrated with the war.
Sally Quinn is everything that is awful about the inside the beltway set, and she speaks for them.
Atrios describes her as, “Sally Quinn, the permanent hostess of the floating Washington cocktail party.”
Once again, he shows me why he’s an A-list Blogger, and I’m a Z-list blogger.
By Sally Quinn
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; 12:00 AMThe big question right now among Republicans is how to remove Vice President Cheney from office. Even before this week’s blockbuster series in The Post, discontent in Republican ranks was rising.
As the reputed architect of the war in Iraq, Cheney is viewed as toxic, and as the administration’s leading proponent of an attack on Iran, he is seen as dangerous. As long as he remains vice president, according to this thinking, he has the potential to drag down every member of the party — including the presidential nominee — in next year’s elections.
Removing a sitting vice president is not easy, but this may be the moment. I remember Barry Goldwater sitting in my parents’ living room in 1973, in the last days of Watergate, debating whether to lead a group of senior Republicans to the White House to tell President Nixon he had to go. His hesitation was that he felt loyalty to the president and the party. But in the end he felt a greater loyalty to his country, and he went to the White House.
Today, another group of party elders, led by Sen. John Warner of Virginia, could well do the same. They could act out of concern for our country’s plummeting reputation throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East.
For such a plan to work, however, they would need a ready replacement. Until recently, there hasn’t been an acceptable alternative to Cheney — nor has there been a persuasive argument to convince President Bush to make a change. Now there is.
The idea is to install a vice president who could beat the Democratic nominee in 2008. It’s unlikely that any of the top three Republican candidates — former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Sen. John McCain of Arizona or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — would want the job, for fear that association with Bush’s war would be the kiss of death.
Nor would any of them be that attractive to the president. Giuliani is too New York, too liberal. His reputation as a leader, forged on 9/11 and the days after, carries him only so far. McCain, who has always had a rocky relationship with the president, lost much of his support from moderate Democrats and independents (and from a fair amount of Republicans) when the Straight Talk Express started veering off course. And no matter what anyone says about how Romney’s religion doesn’t matter, being a Mormon is simply not acceptable to Bush’s base. Several right-wing evangelicals have told me they don’t see Mormons as “true Christians.”
That leaves Fred Thompson. Everybody loves Fred. He has the healing qualities of Gerald Ford and the movie-star appeal of Ronald Reagan. He is relatively moderate on social issues. He has a reputation as a peacemaker and a compromiser. And he has a good sense of humor.
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There have only been about 10 comments thus far, so not much is lost.
It will allow me to do talkbacks, which will flag other bloggers when I quote them.
This is what Iraq is doing to our military.
We are not just scraping the bottom of the barrel, we are training members of criminal gangs, and they will bring their skills back home.
Gangs of Iraq
Desperate to shore up its flagging ranks, the military is quietly enlisting thousands of active gang members and shipping them to Iraq. Will a brutal murder finally wake up the Pentagon?
By Seamus McGrawe was groggy, thirsty, and in terrible pain. His bowels and kidneys felt like they were about to explode. Faint bruises, some the size of a soldier’s fist, others the size of a military-issue combat boot, were already forming on Sergeant Juwan Johnson’s skin. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
It was almost a miracle he was able to stand, some of the soldiers who were with him that night would later recall. They were amazed he still had the blue bandanna clutched tightly in his fist. Things had gotten out of hand.
A ghost army of gangbangers presents a terrifying challenge for the military. It is “setting the stage for a disaster,” says one longtime military advisorOnly a few guys were supposed to be beating him—maybe three or four, definitely no more than six. They were men Johnson knew and trusted, soldiers he had fought with in Iraq. The beating was only supposed to go on for a minute or so. After all, they weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to make him one of their own.
All he had to do was hold onto the blue rag and silently suffer through the slaps and kicks and punches. When it was over, he would become an official member of the Gangster Disciples, a man with connections all over the United States. Hell, all over the world.
But something had gone awry on that summer night at the Kaiserslautern Army Base in Germany. It seemed like everybody in that secluded pavilion, a grill house not far from the barracks, had taken turns pummeling the small young sergeant from Baltimore. In the frenzy, no one even knew for sure how long the assault had lasted.
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They are looking for names for these maneuvers. The only thing that I can come up with is “holy sh$#!”.
Woah.
The Mig-29 OVT has a 3-D, pitch and yaw, thrust vectoring system.
Russian manufacturer RSK MiG is offering the ultimate prize for the aviation enthusiast – a trip to Russia and a flight in a MiG-29. The prize is on offer to the lucky person who can come up with names for the four new aerobatic manoeuvres flown by the unique vectored-thrust MiG-290VT in its Farnborough display (pictured below).
The prize is available to visitors to the air show, where the aircraft is the star of the flying display. RSK MiG is asking spectators to name the four new manoeuvres flown by the Russian air force’s Swifts aerobatic display team by dropping into the manufacturer’s chalet. There will be a number of prizes for the best suggestions – but the overall winner will win the mouth-watering trip to Moscow, as RSK MiG’s guest. Readers can also email RSK MiG, although the prize is not open to non-Farnborough attendees.
Unfortunately, it’s not here, it’s in the UK.
UK Gov boots intelligent design back into ‘religious’ margins
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 25th June 2007 12:35 GMTThe government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.
It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.
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Maybe I’m paranoid, but I can’t see either this administration, or the military being so concerned about the non white or non Christian people that they bomb.
This is intended for use against US Citizens.
Pentagon Struggles To Define Nonlethal Weapons Roadmap(subscription required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/25/2007, page 55Michael Bruno
WashingtonNonlethal weapons beckon, but Pentagon struggles to ascertain the way forward
Printed headline: Stunned Progression
The U.S. Defense Dept. has a bevy of high-end nonlethal weapon technologies being developed, but whether it can better exploit the seemingly endless possibilities that nonlethal weapons promise, even by the next major war, is still uncertain.
It’s not for lack of trying. There are still dreams of unmanned aircraft raining electromagnetic pulses or corrosive agents on alleged overseas weapons-of-mass-destruction sites to obliterate their navigation, guidance and detonation circuits—as one Naval War College paper once outlined—or UAV fleets dropping polymer foam agents to render an enemy facility temporarily useless without the collateral damage of lethal bombs.
The Active Denial System, heavily promoted by the U.S. Defense Dept. and even formally sought by combat command officials in the Middle East, continues to see deployment slip into the future as researchers try to fine-tune the nonlethal weapon.Credit: U.S. DEFENSE DEPT.Take the Active Denial System, the Defense Dept.’s first nonlethal directed-energy weapon and the most prominent new-technology effort trumpeted by the Defense Dept. The ADS uses a gyrotron to generate a focused millimeter-wave radio frequency beam that, when directed at targeted humans, creates a subcutaneous heating sensation that is often described as feeling like one is being cooked alive. Assuming enemies flee the targeted beam or the weapon is disengaged, effects do not linger
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Of course, they tested this on people with no change in their pockets, contact lenses, eyeglasses, etc.
And that guy with the artificial hip? fugget about it
In the early 1990s, the concept of the “Paperless Office” was all the rage.
In fact, the opposite happened. Paper use soared with the introduction of computers, prompting many wags to say. “We’ll have a paperless toilet before we have a paperless office.“
We now have a paperless toilet.
Paperless toilets rolled out in Britain
By HELEN PIDD
This was the best toilet experience of my life. I went for an innocent loo break between sushi courses and ended up road-testing the lavatorial equivalent of Nasa’s Space Shuttle. In place of the toilet roll, there was a control panel.
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With an array this large, resolution could be very good, and it’s likely that it might have significant stealth detection capabilities.
The resolution of a radar is proportional to the size of the antenna, and the resolution attained here should be sufficient to pick up almost anything.
Conformal radar arrays are now being prototyped(Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/25/2007, page 51David A. Fulghum
El Segundo, Calif.Radars could be mounted on football-field-size plastic sheets
Printed headline: Beyond Big
Conformal radar arrays that a year ago were only concepts are now being prototyped. Large apertures are being designed as skin to hug the complex curves of aircraft wings and fuselages.
A massive structure under construction by Raytheon will form one side of a three-football-field-long airship. About six million elements will make up the 6,000-sq.-meter antenna, says Mark Hauhe, a senior fellow working on advanced radar concept demonstrators.
Third-generation AESA radars may be hundreds of yards long and use electrical components lithographed to a lightweight plastic-like material that is folded to form radiating elements.Credit: RAYTHEON CONCEPT…..
It appears to me that this will be far worse than is currently envisioned by the mainstream financial press.
Of note, the 2nd story uses the “d word”, Depression.
Bear Stearns pledges $3.2 billion to shore up mortgage investments.
By E. Scott Reckard and Kathy M. Kristof
Times Staff WritersJune 23, 2007
Anxiety intensified Friday about the toll the sub-prime mortgage meltdown is taking on the financial industry at large, as Bear Stearns Cos. pledged to lend $3.2 billion to rescue a hedge fund battered by rising defaults on home loans. The jitters sent stocks tumbling across the board.
“We know that these holdings are not unique to Bear Stearns,” said Drexel University professor Joseph R. Mason, co-author of a recent study warning of dangers in securities backed by home loans to high-risk borrowers. “It would be hard to find a Wall Street firm that hasn’t created similar funds.”
The hedge fund, which is managed by a Bear Stearns division, had taken in nearly $7 billion — $600 million raised from investors plus 10 times that sum borrowed from Wall Street firms. Such a great amount of leverage would sharply boost any profit generated — as well as any loss incurred. The fund invested mostly in bonds that paid generous yields and were backed by sub-prime mortgages.
But as the nation’s housing market soured, setting off a wave of defaults on sub-prime loans, the securities held by the fund lost substantial value, although exactly how much hasn’t been disclosed. The borrowing by the fund magnified the losses.
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And then we have this from one of the most respected financial bodies in the world.
BIS warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 9:02am BST 25/06/2007The Bank for International Settlements, the world’s most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood.
“Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and Southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a ‘new era’ had arrived”, said the bank.
The BIS, the ultimate bank of central bankers, pointed to a confluence a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.
“Behind each set of concerns lurks the common factor of highly accommodating financial conditions. Tail events affecting the global economy might at some point have much higher costs than is commonly supposed,” it said.
The BIS said China may have repeated the disastrous errors made by Japan in the 1980s when Tokyo let rip with excess liquidity.
“The Chinese economy seems to be demonstrating very similar, disquieting symptoms,” it said, citing ballooning credit, an asset boom, and “massive investments” in heavy industry.
Some 40pc of China’s state-owned enterprises are loss-making, exposing the banking system to likely stress in a downturn.
It said China’s growth was “unstable, unbalance, uncoordinated and unsustainable”, borrowing a line from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao
In a thinly-veiled rebuke to the US Federal Reserve, the BIS said central banks were starting to doubt the wisdom of letting asset bubbles build up on the assumption that they could safely be “cleaned up” afterwards – which was more or less the strategy pursued by former Fed chief Alan Greenspan after the dotcom bust.
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The bank said it was far from clear whether the US would be able to shrug off the consequences of its latest imbalances, citing a current account deficit running at 6.5pc of GDP, a rise in US external liabilities by over $4 trillion from 2001 to 2005, and an unprecedented drop in the savings rate. “The dollar clearly remains vulnerable to a sudden loss of private sector confidence,” it said.
Mr. Toscano is a numerate and concise real estate expert who writes about the housing market in southern California, particularly San Diego and Environs. Check out his page.
The graphs are from the post linked to below.
This is the ratio of notices of defaults, and notices of trustee sale. It’s as bad as it was in the early 1990s at it’s worst, and it’s still on the way down.
This is a shorter time series graph, with the NOD/NOT to sales ratio.
It shows that foreclosures are up relative to sales.
Go to the link to see more.
BTW, he has the funniest footnote ever in his post:
** – Wow, I even bored myself typing that last paragraph.
The state bar is broken in the case of prosecutorial misconduct, period, full stop.
What Nifong did was not as bad as mistakenly sending a guy to death row. It wasn’t as bad as mistakenly sending a guy to jail.
This was because the defendants were white and rich.
Prosecutor Becomes Prosecuted
By ADAM LIPTAKTHE misconduct that cost the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case his career certainly seemed to call for a severe penalty: he withheld evidence from the defense, misled the court and inflamed the public.
Yet other prosecutors found by the courts to have done similar things have almost never lost their jobs or their licenses to practice law. Even in the aftermath of prosecutorial wrongdoing that helped put innocent men on death row, discipline has been light or nonexistent.
What makes Michael B. Nifong different?
The answer, it appears, is that he got a taste of something like his own medicine, a trial in the court of public opinion.
“The very same facts that made this case attractive to a prosecutor up for election and a huge publicity magnet — race, sex, class, lacrosse stars, a prominent university — also led to his undoing when the case collapsed and his conduct was scrutinized in and beyond North Carolina,” said Stephen M. Gillers, a law professor at New York University and the author of “Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics.”
“If the same case had involved three poor men, instead of defendants with private counsel and families that supported them financially and publicly,” Mr. Gillers continued, “we would not likely see a disbarment, in North Carolina or anywhere. I’d be surprised if there were even serious discipline.”
There is widespread agreement that sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct are quite unusual, but heated dispute about why.
Prosecutors say they seldom face discipline because conduct like Mr. Nifong’s in this sexual-assault case is exceptional.
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The Chicago Tribune, for instance, analyzed 381 murder cases in which the defendant received a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct. None of the prosecutors were convicted of a crime or disbarred.
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Indeed, the North Carolina disciplinary commission that disbarred Mr. Nifong faced criticism for its handling of two recent cases involving charges of misconduct in death-penalty cases.
In one, Alan Gell was sentenced to death after prosecutors withheld witness statements from the defense. The witnesses said they had seen the victim alive after Mr. Gell had been jailed on other charges and was physically unable to have committed the murder. Mr. Gell was acquitted at a retrial.
Two prosecutors received a reprimand.
Last year, the commission dismissed charges, largely on statute of limitations grounds, against two prosecutors accused of withholding evidence in the 1996 capital trial of Jonathan Gregory Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman has been granted a retrial.
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My wife was dropping my son off at his science camp. It’s a week long science camp in Howard County, which is all we need, as Charlie will be back at Forbush next week.
I’m sitting at my desk, and I get a phone call, it’s from my wife.
She says, “Hi Honey!”, and then we both say in unison, “I’m Lost”.
I am Mapquest for She who must be obeyed.
(It’s a reference to Casablanca)
McCain has been dirty since his Keating 5 days.
BTW, when you read this look at the ads. I bet that $#@% McCain ad will be back on the right column.
More Lobbyists On McCain Staff Than Any Other 08 Candidate
John McCain, who made his name attacking special interests, has more lobbyists working on his staff or as advisers than any of his competitors, Republican or Democrat.A Huffington Post examination of the campaigns of the top three presidential candidates in each party shows that lobbyists are playing key roles in both Democratic and Republican bids –although they are far more prevalent on the GOP side. But, all the campaigns pale in comparison to McCain’s, whose rhetoric stands in sharp contrast to his conduct.
“Too often the special interest lobbyists with the fattest wallets and best access carry the day when issues of public policy are being decided,” McCain asserts on his web site, declaring that he “has fought the ‘revolving door’ by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided.”
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It seems that every bit of skulduggery, though not every bit of incompetence, has Abu Gonzalez’s fingerprints on it.
Seriously…This guy is the alpha and omega of Bush corruption.
If he gets flipped, we uncover everything.
A New Dick Cheney-Alberto Gonzales Mystery
NewsweekJuly 2-9, 2007 issue – A new battle has erupted over Vice President Dick Cheney’s refusal to submit to an executive order requiring a government review of his handling of classified documents. But the dispute could also raise questions for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. For the past four years, Cheney’s office has failed to comply with an executive order requiring all federal offices—including those in the White House—to annually report to the National Archives on how they safeguard classified documents. Cheney’s hard-line chief of staff, David Addington, has made the novel argument that the veep doesn’t have to comply on the ground that, because the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, his office is not really part of the executive branch.
Cheney’s position so frustrated J. William Leonard, the chief of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, which enforces the order, that he complained in January to Gonzales. …
Why didn’t Gonzales act on Leonard’s request? His aides assured reporters that Leonard’s letter has been “under review” for the past five months—by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). But on June 4, an OLC lawyer denied a Freedom of Information Act request about the Cheney dispute asserting that OLC had “no documents” on the matter, according to a copy of the letter obtained by NEWSWEEK.
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El Paso Times – Suit shines spotlight on immigration judgeships
By Louie Gilot / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 06/24/2007 12:00:00 AM MDTGuadalupe Gonzalez is the chief counsel for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso, a lawyer with more than 20 years of experience in immigration law and a stellar record. In 2002, she made the next logical career move, applying to become an immigration judge.
“I love El Paso. It is my home. I was born and raised here, and it’s important for me personally to contribute in a role that is both vitally important to our country and of particular importance to the El Paso community,” she said.
But the job went to a Anglo male candidate with no reported immigration experience. In 2004, when two other judgeships opened, they went to two other Anglo males, both of them Gonzalez’s subordinates with markedly less expertise in immigration law than Gonzalez.Ê
Gonzalez, 56, sued the U.S. attorney general for discrimination on the basis of gender and national origin, and the suit is pending in a court in Washington, D.C.
In her filings, Gonzalez claimed that since 2001, only two Hispanics were appointed nationwide for 40 immigration judgeships. The four immigration judges in El Paso are all Anglo men.
The case has attracted national attention amid a scandal over the apparent politicization of attorney general positions and judgeships.
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The folks at Flight International are correct. This is serious Bond Villian Chic.
Pictures: BMW presents Bond-style 787 cabin concept for Russian tycoon
