Voldermort decided he’d rather we didn’t have $2.4 billion in federal funding for high-speed rail in Florida. Estimates of the jobs lost to Florida range as high as 24,000.
I never was sure the rail plan was a brilliant idea on its own, but as part of a national high-speed rail network, and as a stimulus program, I was in favor of it.
The Buzz Blog reports on Voldemort’s we’ll punish you if you ask my minions any tough questions policy.
Thomas Friedman, writing today about Mubarak, says,
He had no vision, no high aspiration, no will for great educational attainment. He just had this wildly exaggerated sense of Egypt’s greatness based on the past. That is why I feel sorry for those Egyptians now clamoring to get back money they claim the Mubaraks stole. That is surely a crime, if true, but Mubarak is guilty of a much bigger, more profound, theft: all the wealth Egypt did not generate these past 30 years because of the poverty of his vision and the incompetence of his cronies.
We could already say pretty much the same thing about GW Bush (with the difference being that the money siphoned to crony corporations like Halliburton was in the main not stolen, just wasted legally). How long before we are saying something similar (minus the personal enrichment) about Obama?
News of Clark Freshman, a former UM Law colleague now teaching at UC Hastings, that appeared in the SF Weekly: Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.
If the news story is accurate, the police got a clearly invalid warrant, either through carelessness or worse (it described the house completely inaccurately). And indeed, the raid was a bust — for the police.
The SFPD and DEA found no piles of marijuana money at 243 Diamond St., one of six addresses raided simultaneously in San Francisco that morning. Instead, they found Clark Freshman, who rents the penthouse at the two-unit building. Freshman, a UC Hastings law professor and the main consultant to the television show Lie to Me, was put into handcuffs while in his bathrobe as agents searched, despite Freshman’s insistence that they had the wrong place and were breaking the law.
He’s sort of angry:
“I told them to call the judge and get their warrant updated,” he says. “They just laughed at me — I guess that’s why they’re called pigs.”
No, he’s really angry:
[Freshman] pledged to sue until “I see [the agents’] houses sold at auction and their kids’ college tuitions taken away from them. There will not be a better litigated case this century.”
I’d be spitting mad too. Not sure I’d say that about college tuitions, though. They’re sacred.
(Thanks to Michael Marshall for the story.)
Obama’s budget is cruel; the Republicans’ is even crueler. Both are failures to deal with our needs and our problems. These are budgets for rich people on the backs of the poor. They are forms of fiddling while the new Rome burns.
Watch this: Jeffrey Sachs tells the truth about the budget. It’s like a breath of fresh air.
But Sachs’s is a lonely voice in our public debate.
An old joke, but still going strong:
Ben walks into a post office one day and sees a middle-aged, balding man standing at the counter methodically placing “Love” stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and starts spraying scent all over them.
Ben’s curiosity gets the better of him; he goes up to the balding man and asks him what he is doing. The man says, “I’m sending out 1,000 Valentine cards signed, ‘Guess who?'”
“But why?” asks Ben.
“I’m a divorce lawyer,” the man replies.
Via Frank Kaiser.
I like lawyer jokes. So sue me. No, on second thought, don’t sue me.
Jotwell Blenderlaw