JustOneMinute

Gov. Palin To Resign

I am traveling, so let me just have an open thread "Huh?"

[Sorry, embedding links seems to be beyond my current capability.]

The Green Giant

The NY Times tells us about China's commitment to wind and solar power:

DUNHUANG, China — As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.

This oasis town deep in the Gobi Desert along the famed Silk Road and the surrounding wilderness of beige sand dunes and vast gravel wastelands has become a center of China’s drive to lead the world in wind and solar energy.

Check out the Times slideshow and you can see how siting the projects in the Gobi desert solved the NIMBY problem.  Or let's hear it from the man:

“It’s the Gobi Desert,” said Wang Yu, the vice director of economic planning. “There’s not much other use for it.”

As we saw during the Beijing Olympics China has an air pollution problem.  But they also have a national security issue with their energy supply that is similar to that facing the United States, since China imports oil from the same crazy people and places.

China's green push is aided and abetted by their committed government, with uncertain results:

Some top Chinese regulators even worry that Beijing’s mandates are pushing companies too far too fast. The companies may be deliberately underbidding for the right to build new projects and then planning to go back to the government later and demand compensation once the projects lose money.

“The problem is we have so many stupid enterprises,” said Li Junfeng, who is the deputy director general for energy research at China’s top economic planning agency and the secretary general of the government-run Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Stupid enterprises and a wasteful government?  Nah, that could never happen here.

Meanwhile, Back In Waziristan

Just as the Pakistani Army prepared to launch an offensive in South Waziristan, their truce with the militant leaders in North Waziristan unraveled.  From the WaPo:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 29 -- The Pakistani military is at war with the Taliban, but the ambush that killed 16 soldiers in the tribal region of North Waziristan on Sunday was still somewhat unexpected.

"There is no operation which was either planned or being conducted in North Waziristan," Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a Pakistani military spokesman, told reporters Monday. "This attack was completely unprovoked."

The Taliban assault on an army convoy passing through the village of Inzar Kas was one of the deadliest incidents for the military during its two-month-old offensive against the insurgents. But to some analysts, it also served as a warning of a bigger threat -- the possibility that disparate Taliban factions might be closing ranks to battle the army in Pakistan.

The group that has asserted responsibility for Sunday's ambush is led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, one of the many militant commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan who fight -- sometimes against each other -- under the banner of the Taliban. In early 2008, Bahadur's group struck a peace deal with the local administration in North Waziristan, a mountainous tribal region along the Afghan border where the Pakistani government exerts little control. But a spokesman for his group announced Monday that because of U.S. drone bombings and Pakistani military activity, that peace has been shattered.

The BBC has coverage and a helpful map, with Afghanistan as an oceanic blue off in the North-west:

And a bit more from ABC News:

A militant commander who had a non-aggression pact with the Pakistan military has officially scrapped that pact, following a series of CIA drone attacks in the region including one that killed more than 65 at a funeral last week.

Jules Crittenden On Afghanistan

Jules Crittenden has the headline the WaPo lost:

The headline is not Woodward’s fault, except to the extent he buried and obfuscated his lede. He reports after the jump that National Security Advisor James L. Jones briefed commanders on the ground that there won’t be more troops, that requests for more troops will prompt a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” response in the Oval Office.

That’s your lede, Bob. There’s your hed, Washington Post copy desk. Obama to Troops: “WTF?”

Lots of coverage of the new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.  I'll snip this WaPo excerpt:

“We’re doing this very differently,” Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. “We’re going to be with the people. We’re not going to drive to work. We’re going to walk to work.”

Good counter-insurgency quote, we’ve heard it before. Folksy, and about as benign-sounding as 4,000 heavily armed Marines heading into notoriously hostile territory could possibly be made to sound.

Let me add one thing - CJ Chivers of the NY Times spent time with a "walk to work" unit in Afghanistan and delivered some dramatic reporting, including this last May 1:

FIREBASE VIMOTO, Afghanistan — Three stone houses and a cluster of sandbagged bunkers cling to a slope above the Korangal Valley, forming an oval perimeter roughly 75 yards long. The oval is reinforced with timber and ringed with concertina wire.

An Afghan flag flutters atop a tower where Afghan soldiers look out, ducking when rifle shots snap by.

This is Firebase Vimoto, named for Pfc. Timothy R. Vimoto, an American soldier killed in the valley two years ago. If all goes according to the Pentagon’s plan, this tiny perimeter — home to an Afghan platoon and two Marine Corps infantrymen — contains the future of Afghanistan. The Obama administration hopes that eventually the Afghan soldiers within will become self-sufficient, allowing the fight against the Taliban to be shifted to local hands.

For now this vulnerable little land claim — in the hostile village of Babeyal and supported by a network of American infantry positions nearby — offers something else: a fine-grained glimpse inside the Afghan war, and the remarkably young men often at the front of it.

There are nearly 30 Afghan soldiers here. Their senior mentor, Cpl. Sean P. Conroy, of Carmel, N.Y., is 25 years old. His assistant, Lance Cpl. Brandon J. Murray, of Fort Myers, Fla., is 21.

We go on to learn quite a bit about the two Marines.  This detail struck me:

In Corporal Conroy’s war, two Marines train Afghans in weapons, tactics, first aid, hygiene and leadership. They keep the firebase supplied with ammunition, water, batteries and food. They defecate in a rusting barrel and urinate in a tube that slopes off a roof and drains into the air. Fly strips surround them. They have no running water; their sleeping bunker stinks of filthy clothes and sweat.

The corporal has tied a flea collar through his belt loops; he needs it like a dog. He served two tours in Iraq. His four-year enlistment ended last month, but he extended for nine months when promised he would be assigned to a combat outpost in Afghanistan.

He hopes to attend college later. For now, he represents a class of Marine and soldier that has quietly populated the ranks since 2003. He enlisted not to pick up job skills or to travel the world at government expense. He enlisted to fight. “We’re the new generation,” he said. “I’ll tell you what — there are a lot of young Marines who’ve seen more combat than all of the guys up top who joined in the ’90s.”

Immediately after 9/11, and especially when we sent troops to Iraq, there was talk from the usual suspects that the government had pulled the rug out from under those who joined the Army because it was not just a job, it was an adventure (and a chance to collect some money for college, or some useful job training.)

But at this point, I would guess that everyone in the service has re-upped since March 2003 and is getting the wars for which they signed up.  Back to the Times:

He [Corporal Conroy] does not hide that he likes his life here: the senior man in an isolated post, surrounded by the Taliban, waking to a new patrol every day and drilling what he calls the Alamo Plan, to be executed if the firebase is overrun.

“This is the sweetest deal ever,” he said one evening between firefights. “There is no other place I could get a job like this — not at this rank.”

He woke the next day before 4 a.m. for a patrol. As he slipped into his ammunition vest, he groused that back home, when conversations drift to the war, the infantry too often is misunderstood. “You know what I don’t like about America?” he said, in the chill beneath lingering stars. “If you do what I do, then they think either you should have PTSD or you are some sort of psychopath.” PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder.

He exhaled cigarette smoke. “This is my job,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Geez, a cigarette smoker - is he aware of the health risks?

Karl Malden Passes

The great Karl Malden, 97, has passed away.  Mr. Malden was best known in the JustOneMinute household for his role as the Reverend Ford in "Pollyanna", which included this moment:

Reverend Ford: [reading Pollyanna's locket] When you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will. - Abraham Lincoln.
Pollyanna Whittier: He was President.
Reverend Ford: Yes, I know... but I've never heard *that* before.

"Orchestrated" When Bush Did It

The NY Times seems not to have noticed that Obama's town hall on health care was really a stage-managed "town hall".  Here is "reporter" Jeff Zeleney, writing for their Caucus blog:

At the Northern Virginia Community College, about 200 people in the studio audience have taken their seats. The president will take questions from them, as well as from people who submitted their queries through the White House’s official Facebook, You Tube and Twitter pages.

It is the second online forum the White House has staged this year. In March, the president took questions from people via the Web as he was sitting in the East Wing. This time, he’s taken the show on the road. A video monitor here says, “The White House is Open for Questions.”

I guess "staged" was meant to represent hear-hitting reporting that gives us a look behind the curtain.

Let's cut to the WaPo:

In the highly stage-managed event, questions for Obama came from a live audience selected by the White House and the college, and from Internet questions chosen by the administration's own new-media team.

Of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his own staff from people who submitted videos on the White House Web site or who responded to a request for "tweets" from the administration.

The president called randomly on three audience members. Each turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the SEIU union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. White House officials said that was a coincidence.

Apparently a Republican Congressman snuck in a Tweet, or at least, a question fro the Internet:

A physician from Texas -- later proudly identified by the White House as Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R) -- challenged Obama to support caps on medical malpractice awards, something the president has refused to do.

In response, Obama described the case for such caps, saying that advocates believe it would reduce the amount of "defensive medicine" that doctors and hospitals practice. But he said he remained convinced that people with legitimate grievances should still be able to collect.

"I do want to work with doctors to find ways where they can reduce their liabilities," he said. "Are there ways we can reduce the constant threat of lawsuits that doctors and hospitals face?"

The AP walked a middle line on the stage-management; their lead:

ANNANDALE, Va.—President Barack Obama wanted to put a human face on his plans to overhaul health care, and a Virginia woman did just that Wednesday. Fighting back tears, Debby Smith, 53, told Obama of her kidney cancer and her inability to obtain health insurance or hold a job.

The president hugged her—she's a volunteer for his political operation—and called her "exhibit A" in an unsustainable system that is too expensive and complex for millions of Americans.

...Smith, of Appalachia, Va., is a volunteer for Organizing for America, Obama's political operation within the Democratic National Committee. She obtained her ticket through the White House.

And a bit later:

Some of Obama's questioners Wednesday were from friendly sources, including a member of the Service Employees International Union and a member of Health Care for America Now, which organized a Capitol Hill rally last week calling for an overhaul.

Outrageous When Bush Did It

Another Obama promise, this time not to use signing statements, passes its expiration date.

And the big guns are firing!  Rob Warmoski of the HuffPo (No, I've never heard of him either, but then, he has never heard of me) denounced this on June 27.

The DemocraticLuntz at the Daily Kos was fired up on June 26.

In a blog post Charlie Savage of The Times, who picked up a Pulitzer for his coverage of this very topic, tiptoes around the subject in as non-inflammatory a manner as possible:

President Obama issued another signing statement on Friday, asserting that he has the constitutional power to disregard five sections of a supplemental appropriations bill even as he signed it into law.

...

Mr. Obama’s premise that the president enjoys exclusive control over the nation’s foreign policy in such matters echoes a stance frequently asserted by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, in his signing statements.

Mr. Bush’s frequent use of the device to claim a right to bypass laws prompted criticism by the American Bar Association in 2006. Its House of Delegates called signing statements “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers,” and called on presidents to stop using the device and instead to veto legislation if it has sections that the president believes to be unconstitutional.

Shortly after taking office, Mr. Obama issued a directive to executive agencies telling them not to rely on any of Mr. Bush’s signing statements to bypass a law without prior approval from the attorney general. He also promised to use the device sparingly, and only to invoke mainstream theories of the Constitution.

Since then, he has issued several signing statements of his own.

But let's be fair - here is what passes for criticism of Obama from the NY Times, written last March:

As a candidate, Barack Obama offered withering criticism of President Bush’s signing statements — declarations that he would not enforce parts of the bills he signed. So it was encouraging when President Obama invalidated the Bush signing statements last week and explained when he would issue statements of his own.

If Mr. Obama lives up to the principles he outlined last week, he could roll back the excessive powers that Mr. Bush claimed for his presidency, but the new president quickly issued a signing statement of his own that made us wonder just how clean a break he intended to make.

And here is some coverage of that controversy by Charlie Savage.

PROPS:  The Eerily Prescient Rick Moran was on this on June 6.

The Girl Who Lived

There is always hope.

ON WHILE ON THE SUBJECT OF DRAMATIC RESCUES:  I think the Village People owe this construction worker a round of "Macho Man".

A woman is pulled from near the Center Street dam by construction worker Jason Oglesbee on Tuesday. A man who was with the unidentified woman died in the Des Moines River. A rescue team from the Des Moines Fire Department tried several times to rescue the woman but could not get close enough to her. (Andrea Melendez/The Register)

If Bruce Willis needs a stunt double, we've found him.

But there was nothing to it:

"They just harnessed me up and dipped me down in the water and I grabbed her and the crane drug her to the boat and that's it," Oglesbee said. "What are you going to do if she's like that? It's no big deal. The whole crew did it."

The construction crew rigged Oglesbee to a crane after an initial attempt to rescue her with the crane was unsuccessful. The woman was too weak at that point to hold on to the crane or to life preservers being thrown to her by a fire rescue crew, said Sgt. Joe Gonzalez with the Des Moines Police Department.

The Petering Out of PPIP

Noam Scheiber reports that the Treasury PPIP is dead, or at least comatose and fading fast.  I want to pry this out for a special look:

For what it's worth, I've actually talked to several Treasury people about this on background in recent weeks. And while they all tell me the legacy securities part of the PPIP is moving forward in some form, they generally say they'd be pretty happy if it turned out the PPIP were unnecessary. In fact, it ties in with Treasury's view that the Geithner plan was misunderstood in some quarters from the beginning. The point was not, as one Treasury official recently told me, to solve the financial crisis by providing liquidity and magically reviving the prices of toxic assets. (Though Treasury certainly wouldn't have minded if that happened.) The point was largely to make it easier for banks to raise capital by removing the toxic assets from their balance sheet--the thinking being that the bad assets create uncertainty and generally frighten potential investors. So with the banks raising capital relatively easy, one can understand why Treasury isn't disappointed to see the PPIP peter out.

Widely misunderstood?  Whomever do they have in mind?  I penned several posts back in the early days of TARP explaining how the purchase of banks assets *at a fair value* could help recapitalize the banks by (a) improving their asset to capital ratio, and (b) reducing their volatility and making them more appealing to lenders and equity investors frightened by the prospect of bankruptcy.  I would say that lefties intent on promoting the nationalization of Citicorp and BofA were also intent on misrepresenting TARP and the ensuing PPIP.

That said, it should be easy enough to dig up the Congressional testimony and press briefings pitching TARP and PPIP.  I suspect we will see talk of the promotion of price transparency and maybe less on reducing volatility and attracting private investment than the current Treasury backgrounders would prefer.

What If Reports Of Michael Jackson's Death Had Been Greatly Exaggerated?

Unable to move on after being scooped on their home field, the LA Times blog offers this, presumably to the tune of "Bleat It":

How would we have reacted if TMZ had been wrong about Michael Jackson's death?

Wow, first time for everything.  Let me take a stab - I suppose a lot of people would have tried to re-upload "Thriller".  Can that be done at I-Tunes?

The LA Times soldiers on:

Has technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship -- and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts. Have our standards for accountability dissolved?

Hmm, we are talking about celebrity-watching here.  I don't know what the rules are, if any, but my guess is that speed is prized over accuracy (Let me check that with my high school and college girls...). 

The descent into fantasy continues:

“I’m not sure it’s technology that’s breaking down the barriers of accountability,” says Jeffrey Seglin, author of The Right Thing, a weekly ethics column published by the New York Times Syndicate. “The National Enquirer broke facts about the O.J. case before other media outlets did. Matt Drudge reported information on the Monica Lewinsky affair that Newsweek had been sitting on."

OK, I'll accept the point that gossip and rumor were not invented after Facebook and Twitter.  But let's stay with that theme:

“A curious thing is at play here,” Seglin continues. “Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high.

A curious thing is that neither the LA Times nor Mr. Seglin want to mention the John Edwards debacle, broken by the unexpectedly accurate National Enquirer after the national media turned a blind eye to the possible implosion of a major Democratic candidate.  What if the Enquirer had been wrong about that?  But they weren't!  More grist for the LA Times mill...

Last laugher from Mr. Seglin on accuracy and accountability:

That said, Fox News didn’t take as big a hit as it might have after it was revealed that the reports it filed on Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent were based on a hoax.”

Hmm, it's almost as if Democrats and Republicans are treated differently by Big Media.  Did Seglin seriously expect the NY Times editors or columnists to ride to the defense of Sarah Palin?  Or maybe he thought NBC News would shoulder that burden.

THE REALLY LAST LAUGHER: 

Would TMZ take the same approach to a political figure, which in turn could pose a threat to national security? Let’s hope we never find out.

I am hoping never to find out what they heck they have in mind with that.  But let me offer this promise - if TMZ reports that Obama is dead, or even Joe Biden, I promise to double-check before texting 300 people and posting here.

Traitors All!

Paul Krugman celebrates his Nobel Prize in Polemics by declaring that all those who disagree with him on global warming are traitors to the planet.  No, I am not sure what that means either, but it certainly sets a high rhetorical bar - presumably those who disagree with him on health care reform are traitors to humanity, but what about those who disagree with him on the wisdom of nationalizing Citicorp?  Are we merely traitors to our debit cards, or does Krugman contemplate a more dramatic charge?

Well.  Let me not come between you and some lunatic ravings:

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

Deadly heat waves that only occur once in a generation will soon become annual events.  Hmm.  My guess is that one major reason a rare, unusual heat wave is so deadly is because - stay with me on this - it is rare and unusual.  The good people of the great city of Phoenix have a word for the sort of weather that would be a record breaking heat wave in New York City; that word is "normal".  Yet my summer reading does not include headlines of people dropping in the streets of Phoenix like pop flies over the NY Mets infield.   Or turn it around - why, one might wonder, does Washington DC struggle during a snow storm that Buffalo would handle with panache?  Familiarity may not breed contempt but it inspires preparation.

But let's cut to the Health section of the USGCRP report in question (press release) for some more merriment.  About those heat waves? 

Heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. More than 3,400 deaths between 1999 and 2003 were reported as resulting from exposure to excessive heat.

That is about 850 deaths per year.  Each untimely death is tragic and Krugman is surely vexed that this number might rise.  But by way of comparison, a 2002 study estimated that higher CAFE standards would put Americans in smaller cars and result in an additional 2,000 deaths per year; Krugman, as a party-line progressive, surely supports higher CAFE standards.  I denounce Krugman as a traitor to the national highway system!  Not to mention as a traitor to the safety of my wife and kids.

And let's press on with the USGCRP "science":

Projections for Chicago suggest that the average number of deaths due to heat waves would more than double by 2050 under a lower emissions scenario91 and quadruple under a high emissions scenario 91 (see figure page 90). 283

The number of deaths will double or quadruple?  Geez, that is pretty grim.  Of course, as the report notes, the United States population is getting larger, older, fatter, and more diabetic, so all sorts of death rates are rising.  Just for starters, since the population is getting older, what is the heat wave related death rate per hundred thousand for folks aged 65 to 85?  The USGCRP may know, but they aren't telling - all they deliver is an aggregate deaths per 6 million (but they do tell us that the proportion of the US population over 65 will rise from 12 percent to 21 percent by 2050).

My goodness - if this had been delivered under George Bush earnest libs would have hollered that this slippery presentation represented the worst sort of phony, politicized science .  Fortunately, it came out under Obama and tells the story Krugman wants told, so he is delighted to cite it.

Back to Special K:

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Jiminy, Krugman sounds like he just learned he won't be able to chill his white wine.  Relax, prof, there will be ice in the future.  Annual heat weaves are a clear and present danger unless we can invent air conditioners and remind people to flip them on.

I DEPLORE THIS FALSE EQUIVALENCE:  Andrew Sullivan misses the distinction between traitors to the planet and traitors to their party.

BUT SERIOUSLY:  We will let Krugman bash Al Gore while we boost Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist, in this old piece.  Key point:

And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company (as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed to global warming.  His position is that, to whatever extent we have, global warming is just one of many problems and that making it a top priority would be a major mis-allocation of resources.

As an economist, this notion of a cost-benefit analysis ought to be familiar to Krugman.  Ought to be.

Merry Mariano

Mighty Mo picks up his 500th save and his first RBI in a 4-2 victory over the beleaguered Mets.

From the always self-effacing Mariano:

Rivera smiled and said his first run batted in meant more to him than the save.

“But don’t get me wrong, this is definitely special, being the second guy who does that in the history of baseball; it’s kind of special,” Rivera said. “But I’m a team player. My team fought hard today to give me that opportunity to be there. I tried to do my job. Really, all the 500 saves belong to my teammates.”

And the Captain:

“We’ve played together for 17 years,” Jeter said. “He’s the definition of consistency. You can line up all the players who ever played the game. Mo’s been as consistent as anyone. He does it in the regular season; he does it in the postseason; he does it in spring training; he did it in the minor leagues. He’s pretty much been successful everywhere he’s been.”

Sporting News describes the RBI:

Rivera's RBI came after Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez intentionally walked Derek Jeter to load the bases with two outs in the top of the ninth. K-Rod fell behind Rivera 2-0 before squaring the count. Rivera then fouled off a 2-2 fastball before walking on a 3-2 pitch to drive in an insurance run heading to the ninth.

"I just wanted to try to do something,'' Rivera said of the at-bat. "I guess K-Rod came against me too fine. The pitches he threw were close.''

That is not the half of it.  Mariano had come in to get the last out in the bottom of the eighth inning.  The Mets brought in their stud closer, K-Rod, to keep the game close in the top of the ninth.  As circumstances evolved (Yet another missed pop fly, a walk, and two outs), Derek Jeter came to the plate with men on first and second and Mariano ostensibly on deck. 

No team in their right mind would pitch to Jeter when a guy with two regular season at-bats in his career is waiting in the on-deck circle, would they?  They might!  Although it was unimaginable that the Yankees would lift Rivera and let someone else finish the ninth, the Yankees put a batting helmet on Cervelli, a possible pinch-hitter, and had him wave a bat around while Mariano stayed seated. 

K-Rod actually threw Jeter a strike, which left the ESPN announcers aghast.  Jeter looked towards the Yankee dugout and started laughing - he either saw Cervelli or heard the Yankees playing the theme music from "The Pink Panther" - and the Mets came to their senses and gave Jeter an intentional pass, with unfortunate results.

AT LEAST A DECADE TOO LATE, BUT STILL:  Forget "Enter Sandman" - Mariano's entrance song should have been the theme from "A Fistful of Dollars".

Waiting For Ricci

The Supreme Court should release its decision in the New Haven firefighters case today.

[UPDATE:  Sotomayor is overturned 5-4, which preserves her cred as a reliable liberal:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

This won't be that awkward for Sotomayor - she is a liberal judge with, at least on this case, mainstream liberal views.  But it will be helpful to give the Senate Democrats an opportunity to defend her position.

EVEN THE LOSERS:  Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy studies Footnote 10 of the dissent and infers a rebuke to Sotomayor:

First, Justice Ginsburg's dissent contains an interesting footnote -- Footnote 10 -- suggesting that she and the other dissenters were prepared to vacate and remand the case as recommended by the Obama Administration's amicus brief.

10. The lower courts focused on respondents’ “intent” rather than onwhether respondents in fact had good cause to act. See 554 F. Supp. 2d 142, 157 (Conn. 2006). Ordinarily, a remand for fresh consideration would be in order. But the Court has seen fit to preclude further proceedings. I therefore explain why, if final adjudication by this Court is indeed appropriate, New Haven should be the prevailing party.

This would suggest that even the Court's dissenters believed that the Second Circuit did not properly address the issues raised by the New Haven firefighters, even if they would adopt a standard that would make it difficult for the firefighters to prevail.

The Workplace Law Profs summarize the case; Glenn Reynolds has lots.]

RESUMING:

The non-PC Steve Sailer has fun with Emily Bazelon of Slate, who looks with disfavor on family ties and acquired expertise in mundane matters such as saving people's lives but presumably has a different view for important matters such as law school admissions.  A snippet of his Big Finish:

I looked up "Emily Bazelon" on Wikipedia (accessed 16.59 ET, June 28 2009) and discovered that while she’s very bright, she’s not exactly the most self-aware person. When read in light of her biography, her Slate article about privileged white firemen becomes an amusing epitome of unthinking Gown v. Town prejudice.

Wikipedia tells us: [Bazelon] graduated from Yale College in 1993 and from Yale Law School in 2000."

Skip a bit and:

Moreover, this legal writer’s concern about the advantages Frank Ricci garnered by being related to firemen seems a little ironic in light of this Wikipedia line:
 

"She is the granddaughter of Judge David L. Bazelon and cousin of feminist Betty Friedan."

Actually, as her 2005 Slate article Shopping with Betty suggests, she’s more like the second cousin twice removed of the proto-feminist (and crypto-communist) authoress of the bestselling Feminine Mystique. Still, the two were fairly close despite their age difference.

More strikingly, the legal journalist’s grandfather David Bazelon was the most powerful judge in America not on the Supreme Court when he served from 1962-1978 as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Indeed, considering his close relationship with the Svengali of the Warren Court, William J. Brennan, quite possibly Bazelon was more powerful than several Supreme Court Justices.

Mr. Sailer overlooks that she is also a woman.  Well, then.

Authorship Of Obama's "Dreams" - Maybe It Was The Guy Who Forged His Birth Certificate

Is this really as good as it gets?  Jack is back with more "evidence" that Bill Ayers was involved in authoring Obama's "Dreams From My Father".

Jonah Goldberg is utterly unimpressed by the lead tidbit which is that both Ayers and Obama misquoted the well-known description of Chicago as "hog butcher to the world".

As for them both getting the quote wrong, so what?  I would bet that most, or at least a great many, people get that quote wrong in the same way. If you search Google Books, you'll find 605 books or excerpts using the "to" and 655 using "for." If you search Nexis you'll find 536 instances of "to" and only 382 of "for."

I scored it as roughly 5,000 Google hits for the wrong quote and 8,000 for the correct one.  Not exactly decisive.

Mr. Goldberg was kind enough to gloss over the next bit of "evidence", which is either presented opaquely or is some of the worst forensic work I have seen:

I read through all 759 matches and culled out those that I would consider B-Level or above.  There were 180 of these.  As a control, I tested them against my own 2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race.  In that I am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural background than Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of matching.  They don't.  Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six.  Even by the most generous standard, we matched on only sixteen.

So let me see if I understand.  A careful reader identified 180 matches between Ayers' work and Obama's that Mr. Cashill considered to be "B-level or above".  Mr. Cashill only matched at most sixteen of those phrases or features in his own writing, thereby proving... what?

What is the baseline?  For the exercise to be meaningful, a careful reader would need to go through Mr. Cashill's work and compare it directly to Ayers.  If that were done, they might well find 164 other Cashill-Ayers matches which, combined with the 16 in hand, resulted in a total of 180 matches in all.  And since Obama would not be a match on these 164 new entries, I guess we would conclude that Ayers was the author of Cashill's work.

Or maybe a careful reader would undertake a third comparison and discover Cashill and Obama match on 164 unique new points, thereby proving that Mr. Cashill was the author of "Dreams" and could save us a lot of time by simply admitting it.

That said, perhaps a careful, objective reader would establish that the Cashill-Ayers matches only total 30, which might lead us to wonder whether the Obama-Ayers match rate is unusually high.  But right now, we have no baseline at all and no reason to think that Obama, Ayers and Cashill all ought to match on the same phrases.

The third bit of evidence also falls flat:

Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man."

"The old man" - geez, I never thought I would see that in a book, ha, get it, "See", Old Man", Sea....  But semi-seriously, folks - six names match out of how many?  Surely it makes a difference whether the two authors only have six named characters, or each presents a cast encompassing the Chicago phone book.

OK, I can't stop - the next bit of evidence is this:

In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.

When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone.  Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."

Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent.  He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight.  The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.  Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed.  Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."

Wow - the theme of guilt following a self-serving betrayal never shows up anywhere in literature.  Maybe Ayers wrote the New Testament story of Judas, too.  This is real breakthrough stuff.

 I can quit anytime.