Never ever try to predict what the Supreme Court is going to do.
If you want to read what it all means, I’ll just point you to Scotusblog. They’ve owned this.
In my reading, two things stick in my head:
To quote Joe Biden.
SCOTUS upheld Obamacare and the mandate.
Roberts was the swing vote, go figure.
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I’m tired, and in about 12 hours, I’m pretty sure that the Supreme Court will be issuing a partisan corrupt decision which reverses about 80 years of precedent.
Good night all.
Full disclosure: I did watch Twilight, it was my daughter’s choice for movie night, and one of the rules is that we all watch, and I saw the Buffy movie, but I never watched the TV series, but I love this:
Link
Merkel has emerged as a strong leader. Unfortunately, she has been leading Europe in the wrong direction.
Seriously, I am surprised that Egyptian President-Elect Mohamed Morsi has announced that he will appointing a woman and a Christian to vice-presidency positions:
Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, will appoint a woman as one of his vice presidents and a Christian as another, his policy adviser told CNN.
“For the first time in Egyptian history — not just modern but in all Egyptian history — a woman will take that position,” Ahmed Deif told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “And it’s not just a vice president who will represent a certain agenda and sect, but a vice president who is powerful and empowered and will be taking care of critical advising within the presidential Cabinet.”
I think that a deal has been cut between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, because we also saw the military’s power to make warrantless detentions rolled back.
Some sorts of reassurances must have been made.
Hopefully, this is a good thing.
Farmers in Brazil have won a 7½ billion dollar lawsuit against Monsanto for shaking them down for never-ending fees:
Monsanto may soon be forced to pay as much as 7.5 billion dollars back to the farmers who say that the mega corporation took their rightfully earned income and taxed their small businesses to financial shambles. It all started with a monumental lawsuit launched by over 5 million farmers against Monsanto looking to recover financial losses from ridiculous seed taxes that bankrupted many families.
Back in April, a Brazilian court ruled that Monsanto absolutely was responsible for paying back the exorbitant amounts of cash back to the farmers, ordering the company to issue back all of the taxes collected since 2004 — a minimum of 2 billion dollars. Afterwards, Monsanto appealed the decision and the case is now suspended until a further hearing is initiated by the Justice Tribune of the local court stationed in Rio Grande do Sul.
Recently, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared that any decision reached in a local court case should apply nationally. The result? Monsanto now faces even larger charges, due to the larger legal application on a national level. Now, the charges total or exceed 7.5 billion dollars.
I don’t expect this to survive appeal, because, after all, it’s peasants versus Monsanto, and you can be sure that the Department of Commerce is already burning up the phone lines trying to fix this, shortly to be followed by State, and probably the Pentagon as well.
Silly peasants, don’t you know that the laws doesn’t apply to rich people and transnational corporation?
Faced with the prospect of the receipt of many more signatures than is required to reverse Michigan’s emergency manager law, and to enshrine labor rights in the constitution, Republican members of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers have resigned to prevent a meeting by denying quorum:
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers has cancelled a meeting scheduled for next Tuesday, June 26th. I confirmed this with a phone call to the Elections Bureau this afternoon. Additionally, Republican Board member Jeff Timmer is rumored to have resigned and it is believed that the other Republican, Norm Shinkle, will resign as well, leaving the Board without a quorum. I have been unable to confirm Timmer’s resignation but I have heard about it from multiple sources.
Without a quorum, the Board will be unable to certify ANY of the referendums headed for the ballot in November. They will need to wait until Governor Rick Snyder appoints replacements, a process that could take … oh, I don’t know … some time. Wouldn’t want to rush into it or anything, make a hasty decision and such.
Despicable.
Let’s be clear here, anyone who thinks that you can negotiate in good faith with folks like this is delusional.
The great Matt Taibbi has a scoop about how Wall Street cheated municipalities on their bond sales, and they have it on tape:
Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.
But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.
In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What’s more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street’s secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves’ cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about “getting a button man to clip the capo,” on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like “pull a nickel out” or “get to the right level” or “you’re hanging out there” – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.
USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we’ve seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordinated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – “an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior,” as one former regulator described it.
………
How did the government manage to make a case against so many Wall Street scam artists? Hubris. As was the case in Jefferson County, Alabama, where Chase executives blabbed criminal conspiracies on the telephone even though they knew they were being recorded by their own company, the trio of defendants in Carollo wantonly fixed bond auctions despite the fact that their own firm was taping the conversations. Defense counsel even made an issue of this at trial, implying to the jury that nobody would be dumb enough to commit a crime by phone when “there was a big sticker on the phones that said all calls are being recorded,” as Grimm’s counsel, Mark Racanelli, put it. In fact, Racanelli argued, the conversations on the tapes hardly suggested a secret conspiracy, because “no one was whispering.”
But the reason no one was whispering isn’t that their actions weren’t illegal – it’s because the bid rigging was so incredibly common the defendants simply forgot to be ashamed of it. “The tapes illustrate the cavalier attitude which the financial community brought toward this behavior,” says Michael Hausfeld, a renowned class-action attorney whose firm is leading a major civil suit against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase and others for this same bid-rigging scam. “It became the predominant mode of transacting business.”
Seriously, what does it take for these guys to get indicted?
He has an addenda on the article here.
Scotus put off the announcement of the opinion until Thursday.
My guess is that someone needed more time for a dissent.
I’ve said on a number of occasions that Antonin Scalia has given up even trying to appear not to be a partisan hack.
Well, I think that I was wrong. Antonin Scalia has gone nuts.
His dissent on today’s Arizona immigration law decision, is a clear evidence of this. A prominent constitutional scholar Adam Winkler, called it jumping the shark, but I simply think he’s gone around the bend.
I cannot excerpt it and do justice, you can read the full opinion and dissent here, he suggests that federal immigration legislation would have sundered the union (this is strict constructionist?), declares it somehow illegitimate for the executive to prioritize enforcement, and that it’s just the same as bubble gum.
Seriously, I think that Scalia has been waiting for nearly 30 years to be the chief justice, and when he realized it was never going to happen, he had two choices:
He has clearly chosen door number two, and I am expecting his spleen to leap from his body and throttle a litigant soon.
As to the actual decision, the Supreme Court struck down 3 of the 4 sections of the law, with the “papers please” section being given a pass for now, though the opinion makes it clear that this is not a final thing, and that there can be additional challenges to this section of the law, either on a constitutional level, or on the specific implementation.
— Bill Maher
He is referring to the fact that 14-year old Caiden Cowger’s hate filled screed against gays:
When 14 year-old boys sound exactly like you [Rush Limbaugh] do and can produce radio shows and books and speeches that sound exactly like yours, maybe you should rethink the sh%$ that’s coming out of your mouth.
Video:
H/t Cthulhu.*
*No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Stellar Parthenon BBS.†
†OK, I’ve never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans‡ would seem to mitigate against this.
‡Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.
It turns out that the Egyptian Generals decided not to steal the presidential elections. My guess is that they decided that reducing presidential authority, as well as disbanding parliament was enough:
As his supporters in Tahrir Square were chanting on Sunday for the end of military rule in Egypt, the country’s president-elect, Mohamed Morsi, had glowing words for none other than the army, saying he regarded it with a “love in my heart that only God knows.”
Mr. Morsi’s remarks, during his first address to the nation after his victory was announced, were an acknowledgment of his new, changed role. He had gone from being a representative of a banned Islamist group to the leader of a nation and its public’s chief negotiator with the military generals who assumed power after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
As the first freely elected president of Egypt, Mr. Morsi has a historic opportunity, but he faces a litany of challenges that could prevent him from becoming more than just a figurehead. He will have to spar with the generals, who, just after the election, stripped much of the power from the presidency, and he must overcome the doubts of those who chose his opponent — nearly half of the voters — and millions more who did not vote.
Mr. Morsi will also have to convince Egyptians that he represents more than just the narrow interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and to soothe fears among many that his true goal is to bind the notion of citizenship itself more closely to Islam.
I’m thinking that there was a lot pressure put on the generals to accept this from inside of and outside of Egypt, and they blinked.
4 Heredim have been charged by the Brooklyn DA with covering up child abuse within the community:
The Brooklyn district attorney, facing a wave of public criticism about his handling of sexual abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, on Thursday charged four men with attempting to silence an accuser by offering her and her boyfriend a $500,000 bribe, and threatening her boyfriend’s business.
The district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, alleged that the men were part of an effort to protect a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community, Nechemya Weberman, who has been accused of 88 counts of sexual misconduct, including oral sex with a child younger than 13 years old. The charges all involve one girl, now 17, who was referred by her school to get counseling by Mr. Weberman, and then alleged she was abused by him during therapy sessions.
The charges are the first time in at least two decades that Mr. Hynes has charged Hasidic Jews with intimidation of a witness in a sexual abuse case, even though victims, their advocates and prosecutors say intimidation has long been a major obstacle to prosecution of abuse among the ultra-Orthodox. In recent weeks, Mr. Hynes has been saying that the intimidation of witnesses in the ultra-Orthodox community is worse than in the world of organized crime.
“I’m hoping that this will be a message to those who are intimidated that they should come forward and help us,” Mr. Hynes said at a news conference. “No one can engage in this kind of conduct and feel free that, based on prior experience, nothing can happen to them.”
Prosecutors charged Abraham Rubin, 48, of Williamsburg with bribery, witness tampering and coercion. They said that he had been recorded offering the accuser’s boyfriend the money, and he suggested that the young couple could flee to Israel to avoid testifying. He also offered to provide them with a lawyer who could help them avoid cooperating with prosecutors.
Prosecutors also charged three brothers, Jacob, Joseph and Hertzka Berger, with coercion, saying they threatened and then removed the kosher certification of a restaurant run by the accuser’s boyfriend. The brothers are sons of a local rabbi who issues kosher certifications to stores.
Good.
I will note that, much like the previous post, it is very likely that this will lead to senior Rabbinic authorities in the region.
Monsignor William Lynn, assistant to the late Cardinal Bevilacqua of Piliadelphis, has been convicted of child endangerment for covering up child abuse:
Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former cardinal’s aide, was found guilty Friday of endangering children, becoming the first senior official of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States convicted of covering up sexual abuses by priests under his supervision.
The 12-member jury acquitted Monsignor Lynn, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, of conspiracy and a second count of endangerment after a trial that prosecutors and victims rights groups called a turning point in the abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church.
The single guilty verdict was widely seen as a victory for the district attorney’s office, which has been investigating the archdiocese aggressively since 2002, and it was hailed by victim advocates who have argued for years that senior church officials should be held accountable for concealing evidence and transferring predatory priests to unwary parishes.
Monsignor Lynn, 61, sat impassively as the jury foreman announced the verdicts, but relatives behind him were in tears. Judge M. Teresa Sarmina of the Common Pleas Court revoked his bail, and the monsignor stood up, removed his clerical jacket and was led by sheriff’s deputies to a holding cell area. His conviction, on the 13th day of deliberations, could result in a prison term of three-and-a-half to seven years; sentencing is set for Aug. 13.
The trial sent a sobering message to church officials and others overseeing children around the country. “I think that bishops and chancery officials understand that they will no longer get a pass on these types of crimes,” said Nicholas P. Cafardi, a professor of law at Duquesne University, a canon lawyer and frequent church adviser. “Priests who sexually abuse youngsters and the chancery officials who enabled it can expect criminal prosecution.”
Here’s hoping that his conviction will encourage other priests to roll on those involved in the coverup.
It’s fairly likely that the path will lead directly to Rome.
And I just helped my daughter with her computer. Looks like I’m going to be spending the rest of the evening decrappifying it.
The power is out because of the thunder storms.
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I agree with the outcome of the ruling, but it’s too limited for my taste:
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Federal Communications Commission failed to give two television networks, FOX and ABC, advance notice of standards before punishing them for broadcasts in which outbursts of expletives and brief nudity were aired.
“The Commission failed to give Fox or ABC fair notice prior to the broadcasts in question that fleeting expletives and momentary nudity could be found actionably indecent,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the unanimous court.
The ruling does not affect the FCC’s policy banning indecency in TV broadcasting.
The court said that it did need not to address the First Amendment implications of the FCC’s indecency policy nor did it need to reconsider its prior indecency ruling in a 1978 decision regarding prolonged recitation of vulgar words.
The 1978 decision was bad, and vague, and they didn’t clear it up.
They took a very narrow ruling, and invalidated the fines because the FCC was arbitrary and capricious, and did not rule on the basic underlying issue. Ruth Bader Ginsberg felt the same way, and noted so in her concurring opinion.
Big Media Matt wonders why construction in Texas has outstripped that of California:
Houston is the fastest-growing city in America, but what’s really remarkable about Houston is that it’s not just Houston. The Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin metro areas are all also growing super-fast and so are several of Texas’ smaller metro areas. There are many factors inspiring this population growth, but as you can see above one striking thing is simply that Texas is handing out building permits at a rapid clip (data here).
It used to be that California led the nation in building permits. That makes sense. Even though California’s not as geographically expansive as Texas it is extremely large. And a whole bunch of factors would lead you to assume that California would add people more rapidly than Texas. They share proximity to Mexico, but California is home to our Pacific Ocean ports and certainly trade with Asia has exploded. What’s more, California has better weather than Texas and substantially higher wages. But in the nineties California downshifted its permitting and ran neck-in-neck with Texas for a while. Then starting in the mid-aughts Texas has just gobbled up a bigger and bigger share of America’s permitting. The precise legal and economic underpinnings of this are complicated, but the key difference to me is simply a different mentality. Texas politicians of both parties by and large want to see growth. They brag about it. California politicians fear it, as if we’re one new building away from dystopia.
He is ignoring the elephant in the room, Proposition 13.
Proposition 13 limits the amount that property taxes can go up by 2% a year, so if you bought a 4BR house in 1980 for $60,000, you would be paying property taxes for a value of $120K.
If you downsize to a bungalow, and it costs $300K, you would be paying 2½ times as much in taxes, because when you buy a new house, the level starts at the sale price.
It really does not make sense to downsize if your property tax bill triples, so you stay in your old home, which restricts the supply, and makes housing more expensive, and reduces demand.
Any analysis of California which does not take into account the suicide pact that is their culture of initiative petitions.
If you bought a house in 1980 for $80,000.00
Under intense pressure at the G20 summit in Mexico to take more decisive action to contain the European sovereign debt crisis, eurozone leaders were reported last night to be preparing to allow the Continent’s bailout funds to intervene directly in the capital markets to ease the pressure on Spain and Italy.
G20 sources suggested that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was preparing to allow eurozone institutions to begin buying bonds issued by member state’s governments. The purpose of the intervention would be to bring down sovereign bond yields of weaker eurozone states, which have been pushed up to unsustainable levels by wary investors in recent months. Spanish 10-year yields this week hit their highest levels in the history of the single currency at 7.28 per cent.
An impending move was hinted at by the Chancellor George Osborne last night. “We will see what the eurozone announce in the next couple of weeks, but there is no doubt that they realise that individual measures in individual countries are by themselves not enough,” he said.
Whoever knocked some sense into Merkel’s head should be commended.