The US Court of Appeals for the 2^nd circuit has ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional.

What’s more they set a very high standard:

This is a really big deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Of course, this won’t make any difference to Scalia when it gets there. He’s a corrupt hack.

Still, it’s a, dare I say it, a fabulous bit of news.

And the number sucks.

It ain’t a swing state, so I don’t have any qualms about not voting for the guy who appointed Eric “Place” Holder.

The title of Marcy Wheeler’s post says it all, “Eric Holder Rewards the Teams that Gave Torturers and Mortgage Fraudsters Immunity“.

Disgraceful.

So, Scott Brown accuses Elizabeth Warren of doing the Elizabeth Warren of working for the asbestos companies, and she responds with an ad with families of the victims of mesothelioma.

His response is to accuse her of using actors in the ad, which is completely untrue:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown suggested Wednesday that his Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren used actors in her advertisements defending the legal work she did on asbestos-related lawsuits.

But three of the people in the advertisements have said that’s not the case.

Brown made the statement during a campaign stop at the Taunton Fire Department’s central station on Wednesday morning.

During a question and answer session, one firefighter commented that both campaigns are publishing advertisements featuring family members of victims of asbestos-related illness. He asked Brown how Warren gets the victims’ family members to go on her commercial.

“A lot of them are paid,” Brown said. “We hear that maybe they pay actors. Listen, you can get surrogates and go out and say your thing. We have regular people in our commercials. No one is paid. They are regular folks that reach out to us and say she is full of it.”

One of the ads, titled “Ashamed,” features Kingston resident Ginny Jackson, whose husband died of mesothelioma after working at a Quincy shipyard that was filled with asbestos.

Reached through the Warren campaign, Jackson responded to Brown’s comments, calling them offensive.

“What Scott Brown said today is so offensive to me and my family after what we went through,” Jackson said. “He’s sunk to a new low.”

Nope, this is the nature of the Massachusetts Republican Party.

It’s who they are.

You should not be shocked.

H/t Wonkette.

The Federal Appeals court of the 6^th circuit has ruled that Ohio must provide early voting in the last days before the election:

President Barack Obama’s campaign won a federal appeals court ruling that requires every citizen in Ohio be offered the same number of early voting days as members of the U.S. military.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati today rejected a bid by Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general, both Republicans, to overturn a lower-court order that blocked a law ending pre-election voting three days earlier for civilians than for service-members and overseas citizens.

“There is no relevant distinction between the two groups,” the three-judge panel said. “The state argues that military voters need extra early voting time because they could be suddenly deployed. But any voter could be suddenly called away and prevented from voting on Election Day.”

Ohio controls 18 of the 270 Electoral College votes Obama or his challenger, Mitt Romney, needs to win the presidency and no Republican has won the office without carrying the state. Obama took Ohio with 51.5 percent of the vote in 2008 when more than 100,000 people, out of a total of 5.77 million, cast ballots in the last three days, according to today’s opinion.

Theoretically, it seems to me that the ‘Phants could shut down the early voting if they were to strip early voting rights from active duty servicemen, but I’m inclined to believe that the the political repercussions of doing this would be too much for them to try this.

I have discovered that Janet Napolitano has eschewed email as a matter of policy:

The woman in charge of U.S efforts to make email secure doesn’t use it herself.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Friday copped to keeping her own communications off the grid.

“I don’t have any of my own accounts,” she told a cybersecurity conference hosted by National Journal. “I’m very secure.”

Asked if her reasons for sticking to other forms of communication had to do with concerns about email security, she hedged and said she avoids email for “a whole host of reasons.”

I have, on a number of occasions used the rule of thumb that people who do not are note to be funded:

As Eric Falkenstein observes:

People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

I applied this to Hank Paulson, and it seems to me that it’s only fair to apply it to Ms. Napolitano as well.

Joe Conason is reporting that Republican political operative Roger Stone is alleging that Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan because the Koch brothers promised to spend $100 million on his campaign in exchange:

Veteran Republican political consultant, unrepentant dirty trickster, and recently reborn libertarian Roger Stone yesterday published a startling accusation against Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on his personal website, The Stone Zone. According to Stone, the billionaire Koch brothers purchased the Republican vice presidential nomination for Ryan from Romney in late July by promising to fork over an additional $100 million toward “independent expenditure” campaigning for the GOP ticket.

Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.

If this is true and Roger Stone’s biography is not something that convinces me of his reliability, thenMitt Romney is a fool.

When someone offers you a lot of money to take on a potential successor, it is because they are thinking about getting rid of you.

I’m not sure though that this is true though. The source, Roger Stone, was one of the leading rat-f%$#ers (that’s what they called themselves) in the Nixon administration, and if reports are true, he has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.

He could be telling the truth, but his background does not convince me that places a high value on the truth in the context of politics, and he is supporting Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, so YMMV.

Case in point, the collapse of the UN’s global cap and trade system:

The world’s only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has “essentially collapsed”, jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.

Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations’ system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.

A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon.

Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: “The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It’s extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously.”

The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves.

Yep, we need to bail out the banksters in order make this policy work.  Our government has to manipulate the market for their benefit.

The real reason that the “very serious people” support cap and trade over a carbon tax is because they went to the same elite schools as the people at the big banks, so they have to structure this policy so to allow their friends to stand athwart the goal of reducing emissions and extract rents.

If you applied a carbon tax, and applied it to imports in the same way that the VAT is applied to imports, you would get the same result, only you would not have the parasites in Wall Street and the City taking a slice from the rest of us.

Scott Brown was asked by Dick Gregory who his favorite Supreme Court Justice, and he answers “Scalia.”

As boos rise from the crowd, he realizes that he just said a bad thing, and he proceeds to over half the other justices on the court, saying that he could not chose from all those wonderful jurists.

As you can plainly see, Warren is trying hard not to burst out laughing.

I’m having a problem not bursting out laughing.

The vid is here.

H/t Americablog both for the story and the GIF.

My “sh%$ty little blog” doesn’t rate them, but Barry Ritholtz problems, particularly in his posts detailing Megan McCardle being a stooge of the Koch brothers, is something I’ve seen before.

I do believe that there are people being paid to troll his comment section.

I believe this because I am an alumni of Netslaves, where the sysop Patrick “Splat” Neeman was getting web design business thrown his way by Lauren “Uncle Meat” Bandler, and so was allowed to troll with impunity.

It destroyed the board and the community.

It’s their goal.

H/t for the xkcd  for the cartoon, which does not obscure the naughty word.

Larissa Faw, a self-styled expert on millennial as well as a millennial herself, has identified the cause of the fact that her generation is not buying cars. It’s because they want a brand new car with all the bells and whistles, or nothing at all:

The reason Millennials are turning away from cars is simply because no one is giving them vehicles they want. It’s not about car-sharing trends affecting city-dwelling youth or that they are avoiding gas guzzlers in order to save the environment. “[Millennials] expect you to be green and to do right by the environment,” says Anne Hubert of Scratch, the consulting unit of Viacom. “You don’t get extra credit for doing what you are supposed to do.”

Today’s teens and Millennials are often called the entitled generation for a reason. They expect to drive their very own fully-loaded luxury vehicle with retractable roof and multi-speaker audio system. If they can’t have their specific dream car, then they don’t want anything and won’t waste time getting a driver’s license. Past generations of young drivers, by comparison, were satisfied with any piece of metal that moved.

My brother and I, like many other Millennials, weren’t willing to downgrade, compromise, or to be forced to drive a parent’s vehicle. I received my license at age seventeen only after I had my red convertible sitting in the driveway. My brother refused to even look at the driver’s manual until he received his BMW at age eighteen. It is this sense of entitlement that is reshaping how automakers market and develop vehicles to appeal to Millennials. “It’s an entire soup-to-nuts makeover. The old recipe isn’t going to work,” says Hubert.

Just because your parents have have more money than common sense, and you are a self-entitled spoiled brat does not make this the normal state of affairs in America.

The sense of entitlement, and the complete lack of awareness of those less fortunate than her, makes me think that she must somehow be related to Mitt Romney.

H/t Atrios.

It’s called the J-31, among other designations.

This one is much more similar to the F-35 and the F-22, so my guess is that this one is later to the game, and it’s probably intended more for the air-to-air role.

It’s appears to be about the size of the F/A-18.

I can’t speak to its level of stealth, but considering the fact that it won’t carry the overhead that the F-35 caries by having an STOVL variant my guess is that the performance would be roughly equal.

The author of any number of works, most notably The Bell Curve, which espouse the same thing, it’s the fault of those n*****s.

Well, Bill Black discusses how Mitt Romney destroying his campaign is fully embracing the ideology of Murray, and in the process gets in some zingers against Charles Murray:

Charles Murray’s newest book: Coming Apart: The State of White America proves two classic truths. First, it is impossible to compete with self-parody. Second, be careful what you ask for; for you may receive it. Charles Murray asked right-wing plutocrats (he dismissed left-wing plutocrats as disloyal to their class and to capitalism) to drop what he derided as “political correctness” and denounce Americans who received governmental support as immoral failures. Murray is a vigorous supporter and flatterer of Mitt Romney, claiming that the fact that he became wealthy at Bain should make him a “slam dunk” for the presidency. Murray’s reasoning is so crude that he announces a new doctrine – the divine right of CEOs to govern America. “Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?”

No need to hold elections; simply make whoever tops the Forbes list of wealthiest people the president. Think of the competitive incentives that rule would create.

This is a nice take-down, but it omits a crucial fact about Charles Murray, one that should be the lead item on any mention of him.

You see, as a teen, he burnt a cross next to a police station.

He has claimed that he did not know what it meant, as a high school senior in 1960.

The entire output of his professional career naturally follows from this.

Seriously, whenever the administration gets in front of a judge and argues for unlimited executive power. they sound like they are acting out one of Dick Cheney’s fascist wet dreams:

The Obama administration warned Monday that a judge’s ruling last week blocking a statute authorizing the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects has jeopardized its ability to continue detaining certain prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan.

In an emergency appeal of the ruling, the government asserted that United States District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest went beyond enjoining the statute — enacted last year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act — and potentially curtailed detention powers it has been exercising for years under its interpretation of the authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Judge Forrest’s order “threatens irreparable harm to national security and the public interest by injecting added burdens and dangerous confusion into the conduct of military operations abroad during an active armed conflict,” the government wrote in a 38-page filing with the federal appeals court in New York.

The motion focused on language used by Judge Forrest that rejected interpreting the original use-of-force authorization as including the ability to detain “substantial supporters” of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as opposed to people who are actually part of those groups. The judge also called into question the idea that the United States could detain members or supporters of “associated forces” that had no involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Thankfully, the judge was having none of this:

“If, following issuance of this permanent injunctive relief, the government detains individuals under theories of ‘substantially or directly supporting’ associated forces, as set forth in” the National Defense Authorization Act, “and a contempt action is brought before this court, the government will bear a heavy burden indeed,” she wrote.

The interesting thing here is that there are at least two alternatives that come to mind:

• They could use the ordinary criminal justice system.
• They could declare them prisoners of war.
• In fact, if they don’t charge them, we are bound by treaty to declare them POWS and accord them all rights inherent in that status.

The thesis advanced by the Obama DoJ is that any inconvenience trumps the Constitution or treaty obligations.

 This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

In 2008, John Cusak was seriously in the tank for Obama, and now he’s said that he’s crossed red lines, and he will not be voting for him:

I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom… in light of the blizzard of bullshit coming at us in the next few months I thought I would put it out now

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court. It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as “ a revolting combination of con men & fanatics— “the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

True enough.

But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.

………

Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to “move on”…
Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple. We cant afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.

………

One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh%$hole for purely political reasons?

It pretty much mirrors my take on this, though I would add a dose of letting the banksters continue doing their evil unimpeded.

You should read the whole thing, I particularly liked the interview/discussion with Jonathan Turley at the end.

 It looks like an increasing numbers of expats are bailing out of China:

Anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing numbers of western expats are beginning to leave China. A recent article that has gone viral in the expat community in China called “Why I’m leaving the country I loved” describes some of the reasons.

I am not sure whether this is a leading or a lagging indicator, but this does not bode well for the world economy.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

We got home too late from Chaim’s Bar Mitzvah to trick or treat.

I feel their pain, but having had the worst Halloween ever (1976, if you don’t know, you don’t want to know), I’ve tried to provide some perspective on all of this.

H/t Jamie O’Keefe.^*
*The good one, not the evil one. In our universe, the evil twin, gonzo video fraudster James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the not evil one has a goatee.

U.S. Said to Be Ready to Sue Banks Over Mortgages – NYTimes.com

Not gonna happen

So, Lockheed-Martin, on a plane that is not really in production yet, and one for whom the cost numbers are very fluid, decided to call out the McDonnell Douglas Boeing F/A-18 E/F by name on operating costs, and Boeing’s response was, “Oh no you didn’t bitch!”.

We now have a contractor cat fight:

Lockheed Martin is peddling untruths about the relative cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Super Hornet, according to Boeing Military Aircraft president Chris Chadwick.

In a Tuesday morning teleconference, Chadwick not only called Lockheed Martin’s claims “fundamentally untrue” but named business development vice-president Steve O’Bryan as the source, and the fact that the claims were denied formally also points to a developing war between the two programs.

The offending statement, quoted in Air Force Magazine’s Daily Report last week (here, search for May 26), claimed that a fully operational F-16E or F/A-18E would be “the same cost” as an F-35 at maturity, around $65 million in 2010 dollars. Not so, Chadwick says, claiming a comparable (recurring flyaway) cost of $53 million for a Super Hornet — including a set of external tanks, an ATFLIR targeting pod and “working” helmet mounted displays.

Any F-35 cost figure, Chadwick pointed out, “is an estimate based on numbers of unsold aircraft.”

Moreover, Chadwick added, current figures show that the JSF — even in its F-35A variant — will cost more to operate than the Super Hornet. Citing a $16,400 cost-per-hour F-35A estimate (in 2002 dollars) in the latest Selected Acquisition Report, Chadwick says that a comparable number for the Super Hornet is $12,200 — less than either the F/A-18C/D or the F-16C/D.

Cat fight!

Though I would note that the F-16, should be cheaper than both to operate, and it should get you there quicker than both too, at least until calling bingo fuel.