I Found a Job

I mentioned the interview earlier.

I start next Tuesday, and you can be sure that I will post very little about my employer, even if I come across a story about them in the news.

I think that blogging about one's employer is a good way to make an employer^* a former employer.

Since they are near Dulles airport, about 80 miles away, I will be getting a room in area (already lined up), and it includes Internet (Wifi).

Unfortunately, I do not have a laptop at this time, so I am looking to get a wireless enabled one, which is why I've changed my donation button to read Matthew's Saroff's Beer (and Laptop) Fund and Tip Jar.

I will be using the laptop for blogging, and to Skype video calls to Sharon^† and the kids.

It's the 2^nd item down in the right hand column.

Needless to say, my blogging time will be more restricted, though the fact that I will be without a TV may make the effect on my blogging a wash.

Still, having a job as an engineer after 11 months of not having one (the 1 month gig was as a tech writer) is a very good thing, and I am close enough to head home for just an evening occasionally.

^*It's a temporary contract, so technically, they are a client, but still…
^†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Brief Economics Update for the Week

Well, the GDP numbers for the 1^st quarter were revised again, and they were revised down again, down to a 2.7% annual rate, revised down from 3%, which was itself revised down from 3.2% initial figure.

Funny, isn't it.

Meanwhile, initial unemployment claims fell, but still remain well into the "major suckage" range.

I'll Never See Scooby Doo The Same Way Again

OK, This is Weird

I just got a call from Caterpillar regarding whether I got my proxy statement, and how I would be voting on the measures their annual meeting, which is tomorrow.

It appears from reading the proxy statement, that they are worried about push-back on their executive compensation/bonus package, though it might be that they want to beat back a change to their board election procedures: It's currently triennial, and there is a motion to make it annual, or a shareholder proposal for an independent Charmain of the Board.

I've gotten snail mail on such things before, but getting a phone call is a new one for me.

Moron

Notwithstanding the nobility, and moral necessity of his actions, the person who leaked the helecopter "collateral murder" video, the leaker is a f%$#ing moron.

You see, he revealed that he was the leaker to some random guy online, and now has been arrested:

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

Admitting to the leak to some random guy online, particularly given Obama's, and his Department of Justice's, jihad on leakers, is Palin-level stupid and arrogant.

It's even stupider when you realize that he outed himself to Adrian Lamo.

I think that he did the right thing, because the coverups that the military engages in on such matters are simply not acceptable in a democracy, but in blithely telling someone that he did, and then doing something this mind-bogglingly stupid, and getting caught as a result, he dissuades future whistle-blowers, which is a blow to keeping our military, and our government honest.

He's also completely screwed, because while he might be able to prevail on a civilian jury to see that the whistle-blowing served the public good, there is no way that a group of officers is going to show any mercy to an SPC (Specialiats) who does not even qualify as an NCO.

If there has been anything consistent about the progress of military justice since 911, whether it be torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the death, and subsequent cover-up of the details of Pat Tillman, etc. it is that the military will go to extremes to cover-up the truth, and if forced to prosecute, it will go after enlisted men, as a first step.

I Suppose that I Must Comment on This

Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

In an interview, she said:

Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else."

Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:

• It appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing.
• About 60% of the Jews in Israel came from the Arab world, Iran, India, Etc.^*

Needless to say, while I respect Thomas' contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when anyone sounds like Meir Kahane.^†

I'll miss her at press conferences

The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.

(on edit)
I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[/url]:

Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she's doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don't have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas's remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.

Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.

^* They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as "oriental" Jews.
^†Let me google that for you.

Fugly Picture

The collapse in housing sales following the end of the home buyer tax credit:



H/t The Big Picture.

A New Facebook Group I Endorse

Capital Punishment for corporate thugs who ruin this country.

Look Who I Ran Into

Click for full size

---

His hair looks better in person

My wife and I had finished dropping the kids off at school following Natalie's Bat Mitzvah rehearsal, the ceremony is this Saturday, and we stopped at Java Mamas.^*

As we pulled up, there were people getting out of a couple of black SUVs, and I looked over, and said something like, "Would you look at that!"

It was former Maryland governor, and current candidate for governor, Bob Ehrlich.

My wife replied, "Matthew, behave!"

I behaved, but I snapped the shot. He's the one in the shades.

They weren't politicking, they were just getting coffee, and I didn't say anything.

It's not a great pic, though I think that it's about as good a photo as I am likely to take with my cell phone.

He's a little bit grayer than I recall from his last official photo, but that was almost 4 years ago.

I did not stay around, my wife and I had errands, so I cannot speak to tipping, though they did queue up politely and wait their turns.

I don't approve of his politics, but I do approve of his taste in coffee.

^*Good coffee and light fare like sandwiches and salad at Java Mama's, 324 Main Street Reisterstown, MD 21136-1951 (410)833-8100.

This is Brilliant!

Setting the Beatles to the DK's California Über Alles:

Finally, Someone in Arizona Stands Up to Bigots

In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the "Mural Mice."

Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.

The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children's faces:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

It's gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.

Here's hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.

SpaceX Falcon Nine Makes Successful Launch

Click for full size

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Falcon 9 on Pad


Dragon Manned Variant


Unmanned Variant


In Orbit with Solar Arrays Deployed


Engineering Model

It is actually rather rare for a rocket to have a successful launch on the first flight, but everything appears to be nominal, with, "Nominal shutdown and orbit was almost exactly 250km. Telemetry showed essentially a bullseye: ~0.2% on perigee and ~1% on apogee."

So it appears that the NASA/SpaceX public-private partnership is bearing fruit.

This is a verification of the launcher, not a verification of their Dragon reusable spacecraft, which is supposed to function as both a cargo and a crew transport and return module.

Generally, this is all around good news, so I am waiting for NASA to find a way to screw this up.

In any case, here is some picture pr0n.

Employment/Economic Update

Click for full size

---

Still grim, and grimmer still Ex-Census Hiring
H/t Calculated Risk, link has more grim graph pr0n

So, the "very serious people" in Washington and other capitals around the world have decided that we need to reduce deficits, because the financial crisis is over.

Well the employment data seems to show otherwise.

Total payrolls rose by 431,000 last month, but most of that was temporary census employment, the increase in private sector workforce was only 41,000, and you need to create some 100K-125K new jobs each month in order to keep up with natural growth in the labor force.

Add to this the fact that even with improvements, the unemployment claims numbers still suck wet farts from dead pigeons, and I am fairly certain that the "very serious people" are "very seriously wrong people".

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!! (on Saturday)

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

79. First National Bank, Rosedale, MS
    
80. Arcola Homestead Savings Bank, Arcola, IL
    
81. TierOne Bank, Lincoln, NE
    

Full FDIC list

So, here is the graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only):


Last year at this time, the question was whether or not there would be more than 100 bank failures. (It hit 140)

The question this year is whether it breaks 200.

Bad Day at the Office

Not certain as to the cause, but my guess is that it is a write off.


H/t The DEW Line.

Glenn Beck Must Hate Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart takes the Beckster to task using MSNBC, CNN, and Univision^* to demolish Beck's claim that no one else showed the blockade conflict video in showing the Free Gaza protestors used clubs.

Brutal.


^*I think that the use of Children's Television Workshop might be a trick.

Sanity in the Ukraine

Ukraine is formally withdrawing its application to join NATO. It's parliament passed a law making joining the organization illegal.

Ukraine's aspirations, much like Georgia's were clearly motivated more by hostility towards Russia than about the real needs of the Ukrainian people, and this should serve to reduce tensions in the region.

Of course, what can be made through legislation can be unmade through legislation, but at the very least, it should reduce the drama from the Black Sea region for a while.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

So, now George W. Bush has explicitly stated that he authorized torture:

George W. Bush's casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded -- and would do it again -- has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn't seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.

Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is "unequivocably torture", said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.

"As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War," Irvine said. "Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life."

Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn't appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.

Here's a baseball metaphor to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder: You are the umpires, Bush and Cheney are calling you a c*cks*ck*r.

You have no credibility when the worst of the criminals proclaim their crimes, and you do nothing.

This isn't, "looking forward, not backward," it's moral cowardice, it's being a criminal yourself, because by being an accessory to the cover-up you are an accessory to the crime.

What's more, much like Ford's pardon of Nixon, your insistence on denying the rule of law will encourage further law-breaking in the future.

In the Annals of the Unsurprising

Tony Perkins Christo-Fascist Family Research Council lobbied Congress in support of Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill.

Insert Godwin's Law comment here.

Anyone here surprised?

Joe.My.God is right when he says, "It's time for the Southern Poverty Law Center to reclassify the Family Research Council as an official hate group."

Another Domino Tips

And now we have Hungary experiencing debt problems:

Credit-default swaps on sovereign bonds surged to a record on speculation Europe’s debt crisis is worsening after Hungary said it’s in a “very grave situation” because a previous government lied about the economy.

The problem is that the Euro was set up with unrealistic conditions, and people who joined were encouraged to lie.

People Who Piss Me Off

Got a telemarketer calling on a pre-recorded message, with no caller ID, saying "Press 1" for an operator to refinance my house.

I talked to this guy, who refused to tell me the name of the company and contact information, but said that the loan officer could once I gave him information.

Eventually, I threw out bogus numbers, got to the loan officer, asked him questions, explaining that giving him financial information to someone required that.

While I was doing this, I was filling out the FTC's complaint form, and when I got his phone and url, I had all I needed.

I confirmed that we had no prior business relationship, and he said that my number might have expired from the FTC's Do Not Call List, which, was a lie, since the number never expire.

Here's hoping that the rat bastard gets cited and fined.

Quote of the Day

I think Woodward’s capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. I don’t think anything can be so neatly drawn, but I think in this case it can be neatly drawn.

---Novelist, and former Washington Post reporter Lorraine Adams on her former colleague Bob Woodward

(emphasis mine)

A very succinct indictment of what is wrong with the Washington DC press corps.

Oh For F%$#'s Sake!!!!

Bueller? Bueller.

Google™ Adsense™ is at it again.

This time, the American Spectator magazine, which was a useless pile of deceit to begin with, and now that it's no longer channeling the specifics of Monica Lewinski's diet is completely irrelevant, ran an ad on my site.

In the scheme of things, I am sure that it won't matter to them, it might cost them a penny, and get me ¼¢.

I probably would not have noticed, but for the fact that they were touting their new Senior Editor, Ben Stein. You know, the guy who got fired by the New York Times because he was whoring himself out to one of the "free credit score" scams.

They should have fired him for the advice he was given: You can become very rich by listening to Mr. "The credit crunch is way overblown," and going the other way.

He is also thee guy who wrote the speech that Nixon never gave about not resigning.

It is amazing how the lamest of the lame seem to achieve success in this world, and then somehow, they appear in the lamest of ads on my blog.

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

I Will Be Very Busy Over the Next 2 Weeks

My Girl's Bat Mitzvah, a family get together, and some other good news (don't want to jinx it), is keeping me busy.

It means that I'll probably be blogging less than usual.

Is there a Single Straight Man in the Republican Party?

I have to invoke this when discussing the travails of anyone named "Kirk".

And by "Straight Man," I don't mean someone who sets up a joke.

Mark Kirk, the Republican running for Barack Obama's seat in Illinois, has already been outed for exaggerating his military record, and now it appears that he has been just plain outed.

Michael Rogers recounts how when Kirk, who was generally pretty mild on the "hate te ghey" stuff, decided to run for Senate, he went hard right, and he got phone calls:

Until now, Mark Kirk elected not to play the typical Washington game. Instead of supporting his party's dismal record on gay rights, Kirk received Human Rights Campaign ratings of 67% in 2002, 88% in 2004, 76% in 2006 and 85% in 2008. That's more impressive than a lot of Democrats. I even let Kirk slide by when he didn't co-sponsor earlier legislation relating to the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. My thoughts then were that he wasn't THAT bad on gay stuff and that the bill was going nowhere anyway.

………

Within hours of the DADT repeal vote I was contacted by two people who knew Kirk from his college days.

He then goes on to relate how two of his sources gave details on, "described personal details about the House, um, er, 'member,' " and further notes that he (Rogers) was at a party where Kirk essentially admitted that he was gay:

It was at that party that I met Mark Kirk. I was introduced to him by the person I came with and at the time did not realize he was a member of the House. As my friend walked away, Kirk asked me if the man who introduced us was "single or attached." When I said that he had a partner, Kirk replied disappointingly, "oh, well." At the end of that interaction I walked away and didn't think much of it at the time.

I really don't care who a politician f%$#s, unless it's the American public, but Kirk has gone Teabagger on this issue simply for political gain, and that means that, as is the case with his vote on DADT, he is screwing the American public out of craven hypocricy.

Furthermore, I think that the closet, whether it's over sexuality or anything else, is a bad place for anyone who holds power to be, it twists values and world view, and opens them up to blackmail and other forms of coercion.

Needless to say, this makes the row to hoe easier for Friend-of-Barack State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, who is tied up in the failure of his family's bank, which includes allegations of fraud, but I still think that this race is Kirk's to lose.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Uh-Oh.

I don't know what exazctly is going on, but the issuing of corproate bonds has basically fallen off a cliff in the past few days:

The corporate bond market is in the middle of a slump as the appetite for riskier assets has once again dwindled.

No companies issued corporate debt on Friday -- the day before Memorial Day weekend -- and only five sold bonds the day after the long weekend, according to Dealogic, a financial analytics firm. The last time that happened on a trading day was Sept. 4, 2009 -- the Friday before Labor Day weekend.

While this could be partially attributed to the Memorial Day holiday, the slump in corporate bond sales, coupled with rising prices to insure those bonds against default, could be signs that credit markets are tightening again.

I'm a cynic, so my guess is that the insiders know something, but I am not sure what.

IMFed

Yes, going through a debt crisis means selling off state assets at pennies on the dollar, so that private operators can underfund basic maintenance and overcharge consumers for luxuries like, you know, water:

Greece on Wednesday outlined plans to sell stakes in state-owned railway, water and real estate companies as part of a drive to raise billions of euros to help restore its ailing public finances.

…………

The European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout for the heavily indebted country projects revenue of 1 billion euros ($1.22 billion) per year from privatizations for the 2011-13 period.

…………

As part of the plan, the cash-strapped government will sell 49 percent of loss-making railway company OSE, 39 percent of Hellenic Post, 23 percent of Thessaloniki water EYATH and 10 percent in Athens water EYDAP.

I hope you are ready for the riots when people's water bills triple overnight.

It's sh%$ like this makes things worse.

The method is: sell the assets at an undervalued price, remove the revenue stream from your control, and they tell you that net result will be financial stability.

No, it's just a slope to bankruptcy and the destruction of the middle class, and it is why the IMF is so justifiably despised across the world.

Alabama Primaries, and Thoughts on What It Means

Parker Griffith, the Blue Dog Democrat turned Republican, just lost his bid for the Republican nomination to Mo Brooks by 18 points, which is generally known as a shellacking.

So, this is the 2^nd party switcher with the backing of the national party, Arlen Specter being the other who has lost the primary.

In the other race on interest, Artur Davis got destroyed in his bid for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama, and it was another run away, with 62%-38% to Ron Sparks, where Davis was consistently ahead in the polls the entire time.

Hell, the day before, CNN was writing as if his nomination was a done deal.

Interestingly, in Alabama, the numbers appear to indicate that the margins were the same both in predominantly white, and predominantly black areas, despite the fact that Davis is black, and Sparks is white.

So why did black voters walk away from a black candidate in what could have been a historical race?

Well, they looked at Mr. Davis, and found that he had been running hard to the right, looking at November, because he thought that the primary was a "Slam Dunk."

Among other things, he:

• Pointedly disassociated himself from the black community and black organizations in Alabama, refusing to even meet with them, and these organizations came out for Sparks, who actively courted them.
• Voted against the Obama Healthcare bill. (And was the only member of the CBC to do so)
• Cozied up to the "cultural conservatives", which in the USA means people who use code words for, "I want to keep the n*gg*rs down."

I think that a part of this is a mark of maturity of the black political establishment in Alabama, they looked at policy and character, and decided that pigment did not matter.

I think another part is that Davis pointedly took the black vote for granted, and no voter, regardless of skin color, likes that.

It should be noted too that Artur Davis went to law school with, and was a friend of, Barack Obama, which should have given some more pull with voters.

Actually, this is a more general point, with Specter and Davis on the Democratic side, and with Griffith on the Republican side, and it is that base voters are no longer willing to be taken for granted, not even for a "friend of Barack".

When they are, and told to suck it up and vote for the party approved candidate, they either vote for the other guy, or they stay home, and my guess is that it is the latter.

To the degree that either party is playing the , "Suck it up and vote for us card," they will lose.

Unfortunately, while the Republicans have been throwing red meat at their base for the past 2 years, Barack Obama has been studiously cock-punching the DFHs^* because he wants to look "post-partisan".

Unless Obama realizes that compromise in the interest of appearing bipartisan creates both bad policy and bad politics, November will not be pretty.

I have come to the conclusion that Karl Rove's real genius in his political work was not his completely amoral methods, but an understanding that, except in extreme circumstances,^† motivating out the base wins elections.

^*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.
^†A pointless war, "Heck of a job, Brownie", Congressmen hitting on under pages, Terri Sciavo, and corruption and venality that just buggered the mind.

Does Jordan River Water Make You Stupid?

Because it does appear that stupidity is way too common in the Middle East.

Case in point: After 9 deaths, and a major propaganda victory, Hamas is refusing the supplies that the ships were trying to deliver:

Israel has attempted to deliver humanitarian aid from an international flotilla to Gaza, but Hamas -- which controls the territory -- has refused to accept the cargo, the Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday.

Palestinian sources confirmed that trucks that arrived from Israel at the Rafah terminal at the Israel-Gaza border were barred from delivering the aid.

Does this place make people stupid-crazy, or is it that the people who aren't stupid-crazy simply leave?

I'm just wondering, because there has been an endemic of stupid over the past 72 hours or so.

I Know That I Haven't Written Much on the BP Oil Spill

Because Jon Stewart and his writers are so on this:

Japan's Prime Minister Resigns

I really don't have my finger on the pulse of the Japanese body politic, but Hatoyama's resignation appears to set the stage for an LDP comeback in the upcoming elections for the upper house of parliament, and that can't be a good thing.

Deep Thought

Yes, I know, it is completely tasteless humor.

Click picture for source.

Economics Update

The Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index fell from 60.4 in April to 59.7 in May. Note that this is still expansion, but it is a slower rate of growth.

Seeing as how the 2^nd derivative is a pretty twitchy number anyway, I'd wait for the June numbers, and perhaps July, to see if there is a trend.

Meanwhile, construction rose by 2.7% from March to April, the largest one month jump in almost 10 years.

Additionally, serious mortgage delinquencies fell marginally, but since this is the first time that they have fallen since the real estate bubble started to pop in 2007.

Meanwhile, in the department of, "If you listen to the Germans when you set up a currency, you will get screwed," unemployment in the Euro zone rose to 10.1% in April. (PDF)

Why Do I Torture Myself?

I know I shouldn't have, but I read an Amity Shlaes opinion piece again, and this one suggests that regulating banks should be handled in the same way that a social networking site for 10-13 year olds polices itself, because, it's like, you know, too tough to regulate things.

I think that Barbie put it best, when she said, "Math is hard."

Gah!!!!

I think that what got to me the most was her brief bio at the end which noted that, "Amity Shlaes [is a] senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations."

Here is someone who does not have a degree in economics, or history. She has a BA in English, she doesn't understand, or worse does understand and lies with, statistics, and she is a senior fellow in economic history at the CFR?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with our public institutions?

And what's wrong with the publications that employ her?

At least the FT had the good sense to fire her incompetent lying ass.

OK, So Al and Tipper Gore are Separating

It's really no one's business but their own. They are both over 60, and they have been married for 40 years.

It's really none of our business.

So, why am I writing about this?

Because once again, the Washington Post demonstrates just how horrible a human being you have to be in order to have some sort of gig writing opinions for them.

In this case, it's Stephen Stromberg, who is suggesting that there was something "false" about their kiss at the Democratic Convention in 2000 because they are getting separated now.

He's making a point about people complaining about Obama being too cook, but he can't manage not to take a shot at a married couple who are breaking up after 40 years, because that's what the Beltway Kule Kidz do.

Mr. Stromberg, I'm sure that you don't read my screeds, but you are a miserable human being, and I would not piss on you if you were on fire.

Full disclosure: I did actually vote for Nader in 2000, because my vote did not matter, as I lived in Texas, and I regret that vote to this day.

I Will Be So Glad When I Can Add Her to My They Who Must Not Be Named List

Unfortunately, she may run for office, and she is a king maker in the Teabagger set, so she still gets coverage like this:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained Sarah Palin's imminent Facebook post on the Israeli Flotilla incident.

Hey, My Brother is Blogging

Over at the inner walls.

He's a physicist and software guy who is sometimes mistaken for Sasquatch.

About F%$#ing Time!!!!

The Department of Justice has opened up a criminal investigation of BP's oil spill.

I don't know if laws were broken, but we have an environmental disaster, and eleven people died, so there should have been an investigation as soon as the fires were put out.

Of course, prosecuting wrong-doers is looking back and not forward, so I understand why Eric Holder was so loathe to look at BP's actions.

In the Obama administration, prosecution for things that occurred in the past is generally reserved for whistle-blowers who reveal lawbreaking by Bush and His Evil Minions^™.

On the Legality of Executing a Blockade in International Waters

It's come up in the comments, and Galrahn at Information Dissemination, who is arguably one of the most knowledgeable about things Naval out there, nails the issues of maritime law when he says that, "Israeli Actions Are Stupid, But Legal.

He notes that armed stop and seize operations in international waters have always been legal, they are routine operations in US anti-drug operations, for example, and Israel had declared a blockade, and a blockade area:

Under international law, the consensus of the maritime attorney's I have spoken to is that the boarding operation by Israel was legal. The coast of Gaza has been under maritime blockade by Israel, a blockade that was well known - indeed running the maritime blockade for political purposes was the specific intent of the protesters. It is why the press had been reporting all week that the situation was likely leading towards a confrontation. Is anyone surprised that Israel had an established maritime blockade and enforced that maritime blockade? I'm certainly not, Israel made clear all week that the flotilla would not be allowed to pass.

The maritime blockade is a result of the war between Israel and Hamas. Ones political position on that ongoing war is completely irrelevant to the reality that the maritime blockade was established. Knowledge of the maritime blockade by the protesters is also not in debate, and neither is knowledge the flotilla intended to violate the blockade - they made this clear themselves in the press. Once the flotilla made it clear in the press they intended to run the maritime blockade, according to international law, and even US law, the flotilla was considered to be in breach by attempting to violate the blockade.

………

The truly scary part is that under international laws governing maritime blockades, Israel could have outright sank the ship instead of board it as an alternative enforcement of the maritime blockade, and Israel still been within their rights under international law. Such an action could have led to war with Turkey, but even if the ship would have been sunk, Turkey would still be on the wrong end of international law in this situation. Turkey will likely find plenty of populist political support in NATO countries over these events, but if they attempt to escalate they may find that support is fleeting among their NATO allies.

(emphasis mine)

It is that last paragraph that makes it clear just how f%$#ed up everything is.

You can argue over whether the blockade is an illegal mass punishment of the population (illegal), or an attempt to deny war materiel to Hamas (legal), but the execution of a stop/search/seize order in a declared blockade zone even if that zone includes international waters, is clearly legal.

I Have a Job Interview in a Few Minutes.

It looks like interesting work, but, as is my custom, I don't go into specifics about this sort of stuff, but it is safe to provide a link to their site.

Not generally for civilian use, but I can see how archeologists, and possibly utilities, might want to check out the tech in addition to military folks.

Wish me luck.

(I actually posted this yesterday to display now)