Early Friday morning here in France, and the hits just keep on coming. Replace "European Union" with "United States", and we may see into our own future a bit:

The European Union and the 16 nations that use the euro face two crises. One is the immediate problem of too much debt and government spending. Another is the more fundamental divide, roughly north and south, between the more competitive export countries like Germany and France and the uncompetitive, deficit countries that have adopted the high wages and generous social protections of the north without the same economic ethos of strict work habits, innovation, more flexible labor markets and high productivity.



As Europe grapples with its financial crisis, the more competitive, wealthier countries are reluctantly rescuing more profligate economies, including Greece and Ireland, from fiscal and bank woes, while imposing drastic cuts in spending there.

In our case, the division isn't north vs. south, it's red states vs. blue states.

In the meantime, we head for the airport in a little over an hour to fly home ("Back in the US/Back in the US/Back in the USofA!"). But next week, I'll make another trip, this one to a strange country, one with its own peculiar reality and economics, where my sweet wife and I lived for six years. Yes, I'm talking about the District of Columbia. Stay tuned. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:49 PM | Comments (34)
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Why The US Government Is Fiscally Boned In a Single Chart

It spends nearly twice what it takes in.

That can't go on indefinitely. And eventually it won't.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:58 PM | Comments (411)
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Urgent, desperately needed legislation headed to the President for signature. Michelle's "Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act", which freaked out members of the CBC cause it re-tasks funds used for future food stamp benefits, and the "Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation" Act (CALM, get it?), directing the FCC to take action with broadcasters to keep those goddam commercials from blaring at you while you duck into the kitchen for a beer.

Truly, the people's work. Take heart America. You may rest assured, there is no issue too trivial for your representatives in DC.

On the former: $4.5BB for the feds to stick their noses even deeper into what kids eat at school. I want to say "please, dear God, would you just shut the hell up about what kids eat already?" but the nanny state will not stand down, will not be silent, and will expand the scope of the federal government at any opportunity, over any matter, no matter what. So I'll just say "oh blow me."

On the latter: Look, I know about the commercial thing, I mean back before I lost half my hearing on the right side. It was annoying, I get it. But really. This? Advertisers are creative and greedy bastards, if you don't think this won't accelerate direct to brain-wave transmission technology now, well, you probably don't understand why Beer=Sex.

(I've seen the ads and that's what beer seems to be, according to the advertisers. Hot chicks, good food and great times. If you're not getting that out of your beer experience, then you're just not doing it right.) Not my fault. Your fault.

Anyway, thanks Congress!

UPDATE: Oh, all right, for the seventeen of you who actually watch the NFL network, this can be your football thread too. (goddangit I forgot tonight's pick)
more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:18 PM | Comments (264)
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The economy's headed for a double dip and South and North Korea might really, really to go war.

There is some good news. You're not this guy.

Wait, wait, wait -- You're telling me this guy's a blogger? That makes no sense.

Along with DHinMI, Trapper John and Meteor Blades, Greg Dworkin, M.D., 52, is a member of the Daily Kos contributing editor class of 2004, although heÂ’s been active on the site since pre-Scoop days. Areas of special interest include polling data, Iraq and bird flu.

Other areas of special interest include extreme taxidermy, historical reenactments of great moments in diplomatic protocol, and recreational gender confusion disorder.

None of this is fair, of course. I just needed something to post instead of fighting about Sarah Palin with jwest.

Thanks to Krazy Kat.

Unrelated But Also Unimportant: Psych scored big ratings with its Twin Peaks parody/tribute.

Not bad. If you're a fan of either show, or especially both, worth a watch on repeat (or the internet). The victim's name was Paula Merral, so the question posed was "Who killed Paula Merral?"

The mystery made almost no sense and they just announced the solution in a rush without, as far as I could tell, really having found much information along the way pointing to that conclusion. They do that a lot-- they over-write these shows (too many pages) and then when they're forced to cut, they seem to cut out the clues/detection (since, like, who cares?) instead of the comedy bits.

But like I do care about the mystery. Okay, not much, but some. Every once in a while they have a so-so mystery plot. (So-so mysteries are as good as Psych gets, but that's fine, because the comedy parts are the more important part... but let's keep it up at a so-so level, huh?)

They need to get a little more disciplined about writing the right number of pages so they don't chop out the detective part of the show in the editing room.

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (354)
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Wow. At Hot Air, Lindsey Graham is gettin' right with Jesus.

If Graham became more of a conservative, I could get behind him and forgive him. I like his tone and his thoughtfulness... except when he's calling us "bigots" and such.

But he has to get a lot more conservative, or else he's gotta go. Let him be a pundit or elder-statesman type if he wants to be a maverick.

His new tone on immigration is welcome. He wants the border sealed and our Visa system fixed before any amnesty sort of deal goes through.

Oh, and he wants to push a law forbidding funding of any civilian trial of KSM or any other 9/11 conspirator, and change Miranda law so that terrorist suspects aren't given a lawyer or read their rights for a "period of time." Like three or four days, I figure. Maybe a week.

That last bit is so obvious it hurts. Bear in mind, the penalty for not reading someone his Miranda rights isn't that that person goes free, but that incriminating statements solicited in absence of the Miranda statement can't be used as trial. Even without a law like this, it makes sense as far as a trade-off to just write off any chance of getting a court-admissible admission and interrogating the hell out of him anyway. Not for use in court, but for use in intelligence/warfighting.

But it makes sense to formalize it as a law, too, and change the law some too. For example, there's a doctrine called Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. If you elicit information from a non-Mirandized suspect which then leads to the discovery of, say, physical evidence against him (the murder weapon, say), then the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine says that not only is the admission barred from introduction in court, but so is the murder weapon. (The fruit of the poisonous tree, get it?) This is subject to some caveats (prosecutors can prove "inevitable discovery," that they would have found the weapon anyway, even absent the confession, for example), but that's the main line of the law.

Now, that's Court doctrine, but a statute about terrorist suspects specifically can be crafted that says non-Mirandized interrogations will not produce confessions allowable in court but fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine will not apply to evidence collected via information obtained from such interrogations. It's a bit of compromise, could fly. It maintains the core idea against self-incrimination while getting rid of the very arguable and not truly core stuff that's grown up around it.

Stuff like that would be helpful.

Update: AllenG objects that enemy combatants caught on foreign soil should never be Mirandized.

But wait! I agree with that! I specifically have in mind the Christmas Bomber, caught on U.S. soil, who was Mirandized and given a lawyer within two hours or less (I forget how long) and of course shut up.

That's the situation I'm talking about where a new law could help free up law enforcement/CIA interrogators to question a terrorist suspect, even one captured on U.S. soil, without violating the pretty-important constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination.*

* Actually by its own terms that applies at trial only but the Court has ruled that, in practice, if someone gives a videotaped confession at a police interrogation room which is subsequently admitted at trial, that's close enough to compelling a confession at trial. Same practical effect. It's just that the event happens outside the courthouse.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (197)
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Liberals are shrieking like six year old girls that Republican obstruction of this quickie-treaty is "bad faith" and verges on treason.

This NYT piece digests the arguments of the Republicans (James Baker III, Henry Kissinger) for the treaty, and the arguments of those (Ed Messe, Richard Perle) against it. Both sides claim the mantle of Reagan for their position.

I haven't read about this until now. I find myself agreeing pretty strongly with the Meese/Perle position.

[T]he administration is asking a lame-duck Senate, dominated by a party that was rebuked at the polls by the electorate, to vote for this major arms-control treaty, in contravention of the settled traditions of our country—a tactic Reagan surely would have deplored.

Never in U.S. history has a lame-duck Congress voted on a strategic nuclear arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union or Russia. That is why a group of 10 newly elected Republican senators sent a joint letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid demanding that they be allowed to perform their constitutionally mandated task of advice and consent on this treaty.

Right out of the gate, this is a major breach. There is no need to rush this through now as opposed to January. It should be noted that Kissinger, Baker, and Schultz specifically say themselves that they are not urging any specific timeframe for approval (i.e., they do not reject the idea that the elected Senate, as opposed to the lame-duck un-elected Senate, should do this).

One of the biggest arguments is over some language in the preamble which nods towards the Russian position on missile defense, stating that while Russia doesn't mind our current ballistic defense system (which is tiny), any expansion of that system might compromise the Russian deterrent.

Proponents of the treaty argue that language in a preamble is not in fact binding; it is informative, a guidance, a statement of principles only, and not actually executable provisions.

That's not really true. In a pinch, courts have been known to use preamble language as legally binding. In one of the most outrageous cases of this, the Nevada Supreme Court overturned a duly-enacted constitutional amendment requiring a 2/3rds majority to raise taxes on the basis that the preamble of the constitution spoke of "promoting the general welfare" or suchlike and that, they said, was enough to make another part of the state constitution unconstitutional.

Judges do crap like this.

So do presidents. And that's the bigger problem. Meese and Perle says that preamble language establishes a "bias" against missile defense if not quite a bar. The suspicion I have (and I think they probably do as well) is that Barack H. Obama will treat that preamble as legally binding, because he wants to limit missile defense anyway, and will use it as political cover for such actions.

"My hand was forced," he will say. "It's in the treaty. What else can I do?" (Similar to how Republicans can use tougher rules about spending to do push politically-difficult cuts.)

I suspect this is a way to back-door a missile-defense limitation that would never fly politically if put to a vote via this supposedly unenforceable preamble language, which, wonder of wonders, will suddenly become quite enforceable when the treaty is approved.

And that kind of crap will cut some ice with the public.

At the very least, this debate needs to be delayed until the real, elected Senate is seated, rather than the voted-out non-Senators there now.

And unless additional concessions can be wrung from Obama on this point -- that he agrees the preamble language is entirely gestural and has no legal or political force at all -- it should be left to sit until he is willing to make such guarantees.

Twelve Flaws in the START Treaty: Another one -- our global strike response program (rapid-rocket conventional-warhead weapons, basically delivering a prompt conventional payload in an hour or so) is counted against our nuclear-arms cap. I guess on the theory it can be used to take out a nuclear missile silo.

I don't know if that's big enough a problem to be a major hurdle (depends on how many of these sorts of weapons we want/need) but at first blush it sounds objectionable. We should be encouraging less-than-nuclear responses, not treating them as if they're nuclear.

More flaws here.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (89)
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Well, look, I at least wanted a space-protein or prion or somethin'. Biologically-expert commenters were saying this was a bigger deal than I thought, but I ignored them, not because I didn't believe them, but because I thought I'd already spent more time on the subject than warranted.

This blogger says it warrants more attention.

1. This is huge. How can anyone not see tthat this is huge?

2. Of course it's alien life. Whether it developed on this planet independently or it was deposited here by some meteor -- this is alien life.

To borrow a phrase from our most recent podcast, this is at the very least a "proof of concept" for alien life.

Hm, okay. That is sort of cool.

Livestream Over: Sorry, I thought they said 2pm CST, which would have been 3pm ET. In fact, the conference was held at 2pm ET, which means it was over before I posted it.

Here's the link, in case they re-run it. I'll see if I can find some clips on YouTube.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (162)
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"We did not ask you to send us all the illiterates of Anatolia." "We did not ask you to send your stone-age Islamists..."

It's a little more bitingly personal and insulting than I'd like it but his basic point about double-standards and "tolerance romantics" is spot on. And it's some good pushback against the Religion of Ever-Escalating Demands. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (133)
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Ok, not the biggest news story but it allows me to mock two of my least favorite things in the world...soccer and the Obama administration.

First the soccer.

The tiny desert nation of Qatar beat out the United States as the 2022 World Cup host, with FIFA brushing aside doubts about blistering heat to bring soccer's showcase event for the first time to the Middle East.

The 22 voters on FIFA's executive committee, some accused of corruption in the weeks leading up to their meeting, picked Russia to stage the 2018 tournament, another first-time host.

Qatar, an oil-rich nation that has been independent since 1971, has a population of about 1.7 million -- 500,000 less than Houston. At 4,416 square miles, it is smaller than Connecticut.

"We go to new lands," FIFA president Sepp Blatter said.

Qatar, which has promised to overcome heat of up to 130 degrees with air-conditioned outdoor stadiums, won out over the U.S., Australia, Japan and South Korea in a secret vote Thursday. Qatar won the final vote 14-8.

A Muslim nation holding a soccer event? Hookers and drunken English hooligans hit hardest.

I mean soccer is bad enough as is but having to watch it without being drunk?
That's just brutal.

Still, I'd like to thank Qatar for taking the World Cup bullet for us. We really owe you guys one.

As for the Obama administration part in this, they sent AG Eric Holder to represent the US. I guess he had plenty of time in his schedule, what with the whole deciding where to try terrorists and dealing with WikiLeaks all under control, why not jet off to Switzerland for a little skiing, er, salesmanship.

Heck of a job Holdie, heck of a job!

Best of all, it's an excuse to play this video.... more...

Posted by: DrewM at 10:09 AM | Comments (99)
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here in California.

As a resident of this nuthouse, I have heard every crack about California possible.

But the first truly alien life form being discovered about 200 miles east of San Fransisco... we need new jokes. So I challenge all of you to wow me.

Posted by: CAC at 09:59 AM | Comments (87)
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