Friday, January 20, 2006

  • If true, this emerging story will (should!) be HUGE:
    In an exclusive last night on Air America Radio's The Majority Report, Rep. Louise Slaughter alleged that day-traders had been operating inside the offices of Senator Frist and Congressman Delay. Telling us that her source was "as good as gold," Rep. Slaughter promised to investigate further and get back to us.
    "I'm going to track this down, I know it's true," Slaughter told us,"that Frist, DeLay and probably others had some day traders working out of their offices." Those working out of the Congressional offices "would find out there's a bill being written by lobbyists, that there would be no asbestos bill ... and when the market opened the next day, the cost of asbestos stock had doubled."
  • Even more proof that King GW's spying on US citizens is illegal.

  • "Judicial activism" only applies to liberal judges. For Scalia & Co., what's it called?
    Mark Kleiman: Responding to Mike O'Hare's complaint that justice-to-be Alito lacks any sense of ... well ... justice, several conservative and conservatarian blogs, including the estimable Professor Bainbridge, pointed out that a judge is supposed to judge by the law, not by his or her personal sense of right and wrong. Indeed, they said, that's the difference between good (i.e., conservative) judging and bad, liberal judging: conservatives judges know their place in the democratic order and don't try to impose their own views in preference to the views of the people expressed through their elected representatives.

    Now comes Justice Scalia, in dissent in the Oregon assisted-suicide case.
    <..>
    I'm glad Scalia's opinion was a dissent, not so much because a few Oregonians will continue to have access to physician assistance in ending their lives - the job can be done without the use of controlled substances, for example by using a breathing mask hooked up to a tank of an inert gas or nitrous oxide - as for the sake of striking down what seemed to me a clearly illegitimate power grab by the Federal government on behalf of the prejudices of the "God" faction of ruling God-and-Mammon coalition that is the political base of the current ruling oligarchy. But it's also worth noticing how empty the conservatarian promise of "neutral" judging turns out to be when push comes to shove.
  • Maybe this has happened because many of the corporations who pay the lobbyists are also big-time advertisers of such media outlets (i.e. pressured silence).
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