The Washington Post has the piece Sotomayor, Kagan ready for battles by Dana Milbank. A few excerpts might give you the gist of the article.

The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Kagan wasn’t about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. “Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia,” she said. “It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”
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Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

Apparently these women Justices and Senators like Elizabeth Warren just don’t know how to show the proper deference to the bullies of the world.  That’s why I voted for Warren and am glad that Obama appointed these two Justices.

We had a successful presentation of the petition at the Mass DEP regional office in Worcester today. You can view the following image gallery without the frame

That is a rhetorical question I have been asking myself.  Rejecting austerity, as the Italian voters appear to have done, is to reject an economy killing program.  Should be good, right?  Well, of course not.  As the Yahoo! Daily Ticker explains in the article Why Italy’s Election Has Caused Global Markets to Crater:

The ECB says it will buy government’s debt, provided that said government engages in various reforms that the ECB wants to see.

There’s only one catch. Voters hate austerity. And voters hate when their own politicians are taking their cues from an institution like the European Central Bank, rather than domestic needs.

And that’s the phenomenon that came home to roost last night.

The political parties seen as continuing along the existing ECB-preferred path did badly. The rebellion voters (Silvio Berlusconi and populist Beppe Grillo) did much better than expected.

And this has the potential to undermine all of the progress made in Europe over the past several months.

So the real problem is that The European Central Bank will only do what it ought to do, inject liquidity into the sovereign debt market, if the countries receiving the injection will do what they ought not do, go on an austerity program.

Just as in the US, there’s a big thirst among elites for structural reforms to reduce long-term deficits.

Well, that’s not the real reason elites want structural reform.  Applying Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, the real explanation could be that the elites want the markets to tank to create a buying opportunity for them.  That way they can buy up whatever assets they don’t already own at fire sale prices.  What else are corporations sitting on several trillion dollars of liquid assets waiting for?

Here is an email that Sharon received:

Sharon–

Remember the job growth chart that helped President Obama win the 2012 election?

It tells a story of an economy built from the middle class out — and you’re a part of that!

But all that progress — all those blue lines and all those jobs — will go out the window if House Republicans let the brutal sequester cuts take effect on March 1st.

If you’ve got the President’s back, click here to tell Republicans it’s time to act now.

President Obama is working around the clock to stop the cuts — but Boehner and Cantor refuse to even come to the table.

It’s going to take the muscle of our grassroots movement to back up the President and force Republicans to act. Join the DCCC, Democratic Governors, and proud Democrats all across the country calling out Boehner and Cantor before the sequester deadline:

http://dccc.org/Stop-The-Sequester

Thanks,

Brandon

Brandon English

DCCC Digital Director

 

Paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee | 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003 (202) 863-1500 | www.dccc.org | Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The IEEE online magazine Computing Now has the interesting article Is Everything We Know about Password Stealing Wrong?

The money mule’s role is to turn a traceable, reversible transaction into an untraceable, irreversible one.  Using a stolen password, the thief transfers money (traceably and reversibly) to the mule’s account using, for example, online bill pay. On receipt, the mule sends this money (untraceably and irreversibly), minus a “commission,” to the thief. By using, for instance, Western Union for this transfer, the mule has made it irreversible and untraceable. By authorizing the withdrawal with a signature, the mule gives up any ability to repudiate. The mule has thus given up any consumer legal protections that he or she might have enjoyed. The mule accepts a bad transfer and initiates a good one.

Consider a fraudulent transfer of $9,000 from a compromised account. Using online bill pay, the thief sends $9,000 from the victim’s account to the mule. The mule sends $8,100 to the thief and keeps a $900 commission. Once fraud is discovered, the victim is reimbursed, and reversal is attempted from the mule account. Thus, before discovery, the victim, mule, and thief have gains of –$9,000, $900, and $8,100, respectively. After discovery and reimbursement, they have $0, –$8,100, and $8,100, respectively.

The moral of the story is that you are less in danger from having your password stolen at an ATM than you are of being talked into becoming a mule. Still, you’ll avoid hassle if not loss of money if you protect your password from theft.

As Kermit might say, “It is not easy being a mule.” Maybe it’s Eddie Murphy that would make that remark.

The full title of this piece from NBC News is Will our universe end in a ‘big slurp’? Higgs-like particle suggests it might.

If the “Higgs-like particle” discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It’ll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.

I don’t know who thought up the name “big slurp”, but I think that person deserves a medal of some sort.

The New York Times has the story Prosecutors, Shifting Strategy, Build New Wall Street Cases.

Criticized for letting Wall Street off the hook after the financial crisis, the Justice Department is building a new model for prosecuting big banks.

In a recent round of actions that shook the financial industry, the government pushed for guilty pleas, rather than just the usual fines and reforms. Prosecutors now aim to apply the approach broadly to financial fraud cases, according to officials involved in the investigations.

Lawyers for several big banks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were already adjusting their defenses and urging banks to fire employees suspected of wrongdoing in the hope of appeasing authorities.

Is this a new corporate idea, firing employees who break the law in the process of carrying out their official duties?  In my 40 odd years in the corporate world, I always thought that such firing was already corporate policy.  That was probably only true of people at my low level.

Perhaps Elizabeth Warren was only one of the voices criticizing the Justice Department, but her voice brought a lot of attention to the issue. See Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing.

If the Justice Department’s worry is that such prosecutions will put the companies out of business, they could also include nationalization of the company as part of the punishment.  This would put the government in charge of an orderly winding down of the failing company.  If the Justice Department has no qualms about hounding individuals until they commit suicide, how about just making corporate executives pee in their pants.

Space.com has the story Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Coming Soon.

Some physics theories suggest that dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles. When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles — an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process.

USA Today has the story Bankruptcy again for ‘Reader’s Digest’.

Reader’s Digest is banking on a second circuit through bankruptcy court to shore up its fortunes.

Is Reader’s Digest the staunch fiscally conservative rag that is always excoriating the federal government for its un-business like habit of running deficits?  What it didn’t understand is that the Federal Government is sovereign in its own currency, but Reader’s Digest is not.

For the last 50 or so years that I have seen political and economic articles in this magazine, I have always wondered why they thought that they had the qualifications for picking which articles to digest.  Certainly the people who wrote these articles were singularly unqualified to be offering their opinions.

You have to reconsider whether you really ought to take financial advice from a right wing magazine.  I did that reconsideration when I was 17 years old or younger.  How long did it take you to figure this out?