Patrick Read’s Prejudice in Favor of Brett Kimberlin

This is the latest post in what I half-jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  The short version is that Kimberlin has been harassing me since last December, his worst conduct being when he attempted to frame me for a crime.  I recognize that this might sound like an incredible claim, but I provide video and documentary evidence of that fact; in other words, you don’t have to believe my word.  You only have to believe your eyes.  So, if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.

Patrick Read has been a figure in this whole Kimberlin/Rauhauser scandal, a champion of “Twittergate” which, as best as I can tell, involved Rauhauser and his buddies (and likely some of his sockpuppets) saying bad things about people on the internet.  Reprehensible, yes, but no one has explained to me so far why this is supposed to be compelling.

And of course he is a member of Brooks Bayne’s website, the Trenches.  Besides the drubbing I gave Brooks earlier for his shallow and dishonest defense of Brett Kimberlin, he has recently been seen mocking Patrick “Patterico” Frey for having been SWATted (calling him “swatterico”) and cheering the incorrect reports that Brett Kimberlin had won last Friday (see here for more accurate reporting).  And having seen this conduct, Read continues to associate himself with him.

But really all you need to know about Patrick Read can be contained in this stunning broadcast on Lee Stranahan’s Blog Talk Radio show:

Our Modern Edward R. Murrow, Thrown Under the Bus(t) by White House

So last week White House Communications Director Dan Pfiefer wrote a post on the official White House Blog (assuming these people write their own posts at all) supposedly correcting Charles Krauthammer and others’ claim that the Obama administration returned a bust of Winston Churchill at the beginning of his presidency.  This included lines like this:

Lately, there’s been a rumor swirling around about the current location of the bust of Winston Churchill. Some have claimed that President Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and sent it back to the British Embassy.

Now, normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column.  He said President Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.”

This is 100% false. The bust still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room. 

Well, I first learned of that post, when I saw Keith Olbermann tweet this out:

Remember that bust of Churchill POTUS sent back to England? He didn't. He moved it nearer to his bedroom.http://m.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/27/fact-check-bust-winston-churchill … #tcot

He then went on to taunt and insult other journalists on the right, writing this for example:

Just a Reminder: Brett Kimberlin Still Wants to Shut Me Up

I found out earlier today that when my lawyer informed Kimberlin that I obtained my stay, that Kimberlin wrote back this response:

From: Justice Through Music

To: Reginald Bours

Sent: Mon, Jun 25, 2012 12:11 pm

Subject: Re: Your peace order against Aaron Walker in the Circuit Court, Case No. 8444D

Again, I want to be left alone by your client.  That is my demand as required by Galloway and the criminal harassment statute.  His false narrative that I framed him is defamatory and inciting extremists to threaten me.  He is responsible for their conduct.  I will not hesitate to seek additional peace orders or criminal harassment charges if he does not leave me alone.

Actually, what Judge Rupp necessarily found is that if I write to a general audience, and did not incite violence or lawlessness against anyone—as defined in Brandenburg—that I was not responsible for the conduct of third parties.  If they harass Kimberlin, by all means Kimberlin should pursue appropriate legal recourse against them, but not try to pretend that I am somehow responsible for third parties over which I have no control.  I am not responsible for the conduct of anyone but myself.

Not even for the ultra-scariness that is Glenn Reynolds:

Bin Laden’s Plan to Ruin America: Make Joe Biden President!

Now, look, we should not make choices among candidates based on this sort of thing, but gosh, this is probably going to result in some awkwardness in the White House:

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

(Source).  My guess is Obama secretly had a laugh, and the secret service agent briefing Biden drew the short straw.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Friday Frivolity: The Joustin with Justin Edition!

So apparently there is an app in the iPhone called Joustin Beaver!  Here’s a pic of some of it:

Apparently the idea is that it is a light parody of the life of Justin Beiber where... well, let’s Kotaku explain it:

Joustin Beaver is about a beaver, who looks as much like Bieber as a cartoon beaver can, floating down a river swatting paparazzi and signing autographs, all the while trying to avoid being sucked into the “whirlpool of success”

You can even watch it in action, here:

(“Beaver Exposed”?  Really?  You had to go there?)

Yeah, so it’s kind of the usual silly stuff you see in the iPhone all the time.  I mean it’s not exactly Angry Birds or Jetpack Joyride (which is silly, but also a lot of fun).  This just looks silly and like a waste of a small amount of money.

So then Justin Beiber’s lawyers sent the game company a cease-and-desist letter and the game company responded by suing Beiber and his lawyers.

Now first you might rationally wonder “can they do that?” as in, can they sue preemptively this way, and the answer is yes.  They can do that to obtain a declaratory judgment—essentially what we would normally call an advisory opinion, but of course the courts have refused to give out advisory opinions so we call them declaratory judgments.  It’s a huge difference.  (Note: sarcasm.)

And I suppose there is value to that.  Would you invest in this game company knowing that they faced the threat of being shut down by Beiber’s lawyers?  So the game company has a good reason for wanting to get this issue settled.

But at the same time, this seems kind of dumb on the Beiber camp’s side.  The game is just enough “parody” to be protected speech, in my humble opinion, which means that I don’t believe their chances of winning are very good.  But in doing this, they have given something to the game company infinitely more valuable: publicity.  I am willing to bet that since the suit has been filed, their sales has been at least doubled.

This is what we talk about when we talk about the Streisand effect.  It means that the attempt to suppress speech ends up generating publicity that harms your ultimate cause.  And it is funny that it is a common enough mistake that we have a term for it.

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On the other hand, if you have a smart phone you should check IGN’s mobile site all the time.  They have constant app store updates telling you about tons of apps that are absolutely free that make this game look like the POS it probably is.  My favorite free game right now?  Jetpack Joyride, although I wish it had some of the humor of Halfbrick’s other classic (which also stars Barry Steakfries), Age of Zombies.  Seriously, there is very little reason to pay for most apps on the iPhone unless it is really vital to doing something important.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

On Breitbart’s Death: Why Do They Do This?

So today we get the news that Andrew Breitbart has passed away.  I’ve never actually met the guy, indeed only corresponded with him once, after an interviewer implied he was an alcoholic, and just asking a few follow up questions about that.  He wasn’t in my orbit, so much as in the orbit of people who are in my orbit, if that makes any sense.  I mean it is no great disclosure to say that Patrick Frey and Mandy Nagy are friends of mine.  I know Patrick is in shock, and I suspect Mandy is, too.

And it is shocking.  He wasn’t shockingly young to die.  I mean at 43 you are definitely starting to get the warnings about diet and exercise, and so this isn’t like a twenty year old ball player dying, but it is still on the young end of the spectrum.  But it was still kind of out of the blue, and that is shocking.

And I think it is hard to believe because... you half expect him to show up on Red Eye tonight and explain that this is just a massive prank on everyone, like they suspected when Andy Kaufman died.

And of course like clockwork you see the ugly side of all of this.  You know it without me saying it, but apparently many on the left couldn’t help but dance on the grave of Breitbart.  I mean, look, I am not above dancing on the grave of a dictator.  I was positively overjoyed when Kim Jung Il died, even writing “may you roast in flames you evil son of a bitch.”  But he was a dictator, a tyrant, and well... even my state flag advocates for the death of tyrants:

But all Breitbart was, was a political enemy.  Not a tyrant but just a guy who engaged in speech some didn’t like.  And because of that, many on the left are cheering his death.

I am not going to quote this ugliness to you.  I mean if you have to look, you can find it here, here, here and here, but really do you need to look?  Do you have any doubt what kinds of things they said and will say?  Of course not.  It’s all “yippee! He’s dead!  A person I disagree with is dead!”

Yes, yippee a wife is without her husband.  And his four young children are without a father.  And friends across the country break down in tears:

And the predictability of this ugliness—dancing on his grave before it is even dug—robs me of anything to say.  It’s already been said in other instances where famous conservatives (or libertarians as was the case with Breitbart) have died, or been diagnosed with dread diseases.  And moreover when people have said these kinds of awful things, other people pointed at it and denounced their ugliness, so even that part is predictable.

So we know what they are going to say, and they know we are going to report it and denounce it and it is going to make them and the movements they represent look bad.  And they do it anyway. They know it is going to hurt their pet causes, but they still do it anyway.

And all one can conclude is that they can’t help themselves.  They feel so much joy at his death that even knowing it will hurt their cause, embarrass any publication they work for, and generally convince decent people that they are cretins, they have to do it anyway.

And maybe I am wrong in a way for not recording and reciting the vile things they said personally.  After all, as Jonah Goldberg said in that interview: “One of his favorite pastimes was to retweet all of the hate that people threw at him because he considered it a badge of honor.”  So somewhere up in heaven right now, Breitbart is checking his holy twitterfeed and smiling at all the hate being spewed at him.  And maybe the best tribute to him is to publicize this spewing of hate.

But I don’t have it in me to do that right now.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Julian Savulescu of the Journal of Medical Ethics Whines That All this Speech is a Threat to Freedom of Speech

So yesterday I told you about a horrifying piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “After-Birth Abortion: why should the baby live?”  In it they argued that well some babies are so deformed or whatever that they really shouldn’t be allowed to live and so we should be allowed to kill them and call it After-Birth Abortion to make it sound less horrifying than the correct term (which is infanticide)?

You think I am exaggerating?  Well, go and read the original and judge for yourself.

One aspect I didn’t get into in my original post is that, well, this shouldn’t surprise you but some people have had some very strong reactions to it.  So we get Julian Savulescu, Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics writes a piece entitled “Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion.”

Now he starts off reasonably enough talking about how they got death threats.  “This article has elicited personally abusive correspondence to the authors, threatening their lives and personal safety.”

That is undoubtedly wrong, and I hope they have reported such death threats to the authorities and that the authorities take it appropriately seriously.

But then he complains about “abusive emails” writing:

The Journal has received a string [of] abusive emails for its decision to publish this article. This abuse is typically anonymous.

I am not sure about the legality of publishing abusive threatening anonymous correspondence, so I won’t repeat it here. But fortunately there is plenty on the web to choose from. Here are some responses:

“These people are evil. Pure evil. That they feel safe in putting their twisted thoughts into words reveals how far we have fallen as a society.”

“Right now I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution under their code of ‘after birth abortions’ they want to commit murder – that is all it is! MURDER!!!”

“I don‘t believe I’ve ever heard anything as vile as what these “people” are advocating. Truly, truly scary.”

“The fact that the Journal of Medical Ethics published this outrageous and immoral piece of work is even scarier”

(Comments from http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ethicists-argue-in-favor-of-after-birth-abortions-as-newborns-are-not-persons/#comments)

He goes on (and on) but here is the real whopper, folks, when he says this:

What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.

I think it is time for a Rule 5 facepalm:

Now of course one of the comments he quoted above borders on an actual threat, saying “I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution...”  I am not sure that is an actionable threat—and indeed the answer might vary wildly by jurisdiction—but I think perhaps a police officer should go by this person’s house and discuss his or her intent in writing that.

But the other comments?  They are nothing more than citizens expressing their opinions.  And contrary to what Mr. Savulescu says, criticism is not a threat to freedom of speech.  That is indeed, what is supposed to happen in a free society.  When someone says something you don’t like, you don’t threaten them or bomb them, you just counter them with your own speech.

The Journal of Medical Ethics Imitates South Park (By Advocating “After-Birth Abortions”)

I have only started to read the article by Alberto Guibilini and Francesca Minerva, entitled (risibly) After-Birth Abortion: why should the baby live?, but it is so full of evil I am likely to fisk it at a spare moment.  Seriously, it is so bad that it falls into a rare exception to Godwin’s Law.  As you might know, Godwin’s law stands as an injunction against comparing anyone or any policy to Hitler, the Nazis, etc.  But there is an exception: when they actually sound like Nazis.

You know, like this:

Euthanasia in infants has been proposed by philosophers for children with severe abnormalities whose lives can be expected to be not worth living and who are experiencing unbearable suffering....

Although it is reasonable to predict that living with a very severe condition is against the best interest of the newborn, it is hard to find definitive arguments to the effect that life with certain pathologies is not worth living, even when those pathologies would constitute acceptable reasons for abortion. It might be maintained that ‘even allowing for the more optimistic assessments of the potential of Down's syndrome children, this potential cannot be said to be equal to that of a normal child’.  But, in fact, people with Down's syndrome, as well as people affected by many other severe disabilities, are often reported to be happy.

Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least) acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion. Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

So living with a “severe condition” including Down’s Syndrome is not really in the interest of the person with that disability.  But they aren’t willing to endorse killing a full “person” with Down’s but if you can kill a fetus for having Down’s then it is fully justifiable to kill a newborn for the same reason.

See what I mean?  Its evil stuff.

And I actually shivered at the phrase “lives can be expected to be not worth living” given how similar it sounded to the phrase “life unworthy of life” used by the Nazis when justifying first the murder of the handicapped and then later the slaughter of the Jews.

Although to their (limited) credit their use of the term “after birth abortion” is acknowledged to be bull____ designed to make the concept more palatable than the correct term which is infanticide:

In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.

Which is where life truly becomes absurd.  Because did you know that South Park has a parody of this?  Here’s a scene from an unofficial script that lines up with my memory of the episode, when Mrs. Cartman decides to get an abortion:

Liane:              I want to have… an abortion.

Receptionist:   Uoh well, we can do that. This must be a very difficult time for you, Mrs.…

Liane:              Cartman. Yesuh- it's such a hard decision, but I just don't feel I can raise a child in this screwy world.

Receptionist:   Yes, Ms. Cartman-if you don't feel fit to raise a child, then abortion probably is the answer. Do you know the actual time of conception?

Liane:              About - eight years ago.

Receptionist:   [processing] …I sseee, so the fetus is…

Liane:              Eight years old.

Receptionist:   Ms. Cartman, uh- eight years old is a little late to be considering abortion.

Liane:              Really?!

Receptionist:   Yes- this is what we would refer to as the - "fortieth trimester"

Liane:              But I just don't think I'm a fit mother.

Receptionist:   Wuh… But we prefer to abort babies a little- …earlier on; in fact, there's a law against abortions after the second trimester.

Liane:              Well, I think you need to keep your laws off of my body.

Receptionist:   Hmmmmm. Tsk, I'm afraid I can't help you, Ms. Cartman-if you want to change the law, you'll have to speak with your congressman.

Liane:              [rises from the chair] Well, that's exactly what I intend to do! Good day! [exits]

So yeah, they are proposing what South Park already parodied... in 1998.  I mean that episode had Mrs. Cartman sleeping with various politicians in order to lobby them to change the law, including...  President Bill Clinton.  That is how old that parody is.

I think the only thing left to do, is show a South Park facepalm…

Really, words are failing me on this one.

(H/t: Hot Air.)

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

So if Sea World is Slavery, Then Isn’t This Genocide?

On petard hoisted:

Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.

The documents, obtained from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were published online by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit organization that runs online campaigns targeting groups that antagonize food producers.

Fifteen years’ worth of similar records show that since 1998 PETA has killed more than 27,000 animals at its headquarters in Norfolk, VA.

In a February 16 statement, the Center said PETA killed 1,911 cats and dogs last year, finding homes for only 24 pets.

So strap yourself in, because I am going to get a little philosophical again.

Now I confess, normally I wouldn’t care very much about any organization killing lots of animals.  While only finding homes for 24 pets is a pretty pathetically low number I can’t say with any certainty that this is an unavoidable result.

But when an organization gets so high and mighty as to claim in court that being a trained animal at Sea World is a form of slavery, then it becomes relevant.

And it is worth going back to that “Sea World is slavery” argument for a second.  In that suit they were seeking, in part, a release of the orcas from Sea World.  But is that really in the best interest of the orcas?

Friday Frivolity: The Really George? Really? Edition...

So today George Lucas is celebrating the re-release of the beloved Star Wars franchise, in 3D, starting with...

Wait, this can’t be right...  Really?  The Phantom Menace?  He thinks that is the movie to start off with?  Not, say, Star Wars, which now we are all required to call Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope?

Um, okay.  And if that is not enough to annoy the crap out of the fanboys, well, he now is trying to deny history.  I mean this may be a generational thing, but remember when you were watching the original Star Wars and Greedo had the gun pointed at Han Solo and Solo keeps him distracted until he could pull out his gun and shoots the guy right then and there.

Well, sorry, you were wrong.  Greedo always shot first.  So says Lucas (via Hot Air):

THR: People can get fanatical about the movies — how does that make you feel? The puppet vs. CGI Yoda ruckus, and the who-shot-first, Han Solo or Greedo furor come to mind.

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

It’s the same thing with Yoda. We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn’t get it done in time. We couldn’t get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn’t as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.

If you look at Blade Runner, it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday and there are all kinds of different versions of it. Star Wars, there’s basically one version — it just keeps getting improved a little bit as we move forward. … All art is technology and it improves every year. Whether it’s on the stage or in music or in painting, there are technological answers that happen, and because movies are so technological, the advances become more obvious.

Now, look I don’t get all worked up about the changes in the 1997 version.  It’s annoying, but I guess I can happily ignore the whole thing, but this is just insulting to our intelligence.  Yes, Han did shoot first, and we were not confused on this point, George.  Watch for yourself:

You changed it in the re-release, George.  Just admit that.  You didn’t like how things would look to kids, so you changed it.  Don’t insult our intelligence by saying it was this way all along.  Because it is the B.S. involved that annoys me this morning, not the change itself.

PETA Should be Sanctioned For Its Suit Claiming that Orcas are Covered by the Thirteenth Amendment

Strap yourselves in because this is a long one, as I get into some philosophical and moral issues, before I get to the bottom line.

So via Hot Air we find out that a Federal Judge has ruled remarkably that an entire class is excluded from the Thirteenth Amendment.  Who is this group that has been shockingly excluded from protection from being enslaved and/or subjected to involuntary servitude?

Orcas.

You know, these things:

(Those whistles and clicks translate to “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming forth to carry me home.”)

Yes, that is right, PETA filed suit claiming that Orcas were protected by the Thirteenth Amendment and therefore Sea World had unlawfully enslaved them and otherwise treated them horribly.  You can read the complaint here.  I have been trying to locate the motion to dismiss and any opposition to that motion that PETA filed, because that would contain more meaty discussion of the central legal issue—whether the Thirteenth Amendment applies to non-humans at all.  But so far I have had no luck finding that, so consider this a bleg.

Look, I am not unsympathetic to the idea that at some point a being becomes sentient enough that the law should provide some protections to them.

[The next paragraph contains a minor *SPOILER* about my novel Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History (which you can purchase here).  Bluntly, it reveals something most people would figure out by the end of the second chapter.  But if you would prefer to be surprised, skip the next paragraph.]

For instance, the main character in my novel is an alien, and at one point an FBI agent points out to him that our criminal laws did not protect him from harm, saying “the laws on murder cover only humans. You shoot a dog or a chimp, it isn’t murder. At worst, it is cruelty to animals. Now maybe you would be lucky and the courts would interpret the laws to include a non-human like you, but wouldn’t you rather get a guarantee on that subject?”

[Spoilers end.]

Friday Frivolity—The "To Kill a Finch" Edition!

Before I started guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications, Patrick started a tradition of running a “Sockpuppet” post every Friday.  In that thread everyone was given permission to use multiple false nicknames impersonating other people in the thread in order to make jokes.  Like with what is in the news, you can expect someone to pretend to be Alec Baldwin, and what do you know?  Here it is.  So when I started there I continued the tradition and added something to it: a Friday Frivolity.  I found some light item and posted about it in the same sockpuppet thread.fou

Well, now that I have came back here, a couple people asked me whether I would run a sockpuppet thread and my answer was that there wasn’t enough of a commenter community here, yet.  That might change.  I have only just begun to allow comments, after all.  And really, if you want to goof around and do an obvious sockpuppet in a thread, including this one, I ain’t going to object, as long as it is obvious in some way.

But I can certainly do frivolity and for this week we have one of Cracked’s excellent lists, this time of movie lawyers who were bad at their jobs (language warning at the link, as is the case with all links to their site).  I am embarrassed to say that I have not seen enough of these movies to really appreciate much of the commentary.  In fact, I am particularly embarrassed to say that I have never seen To Kill a Mockingbird, because it is universally considered a classic.  But I have listened to a book on tape version one time when travelling back and forth from law school and my parents’ home in Texas, and presuming the author of this list is accurately describing the movie, I think this criticism is unfair:

If Peck was such a brilliant lawyer, why didn't he petition for a change of venue? Even Matthew McConaughey's character thought to request a change of venue, and he's Matthew McConaughey.

A change of venue is a legal concept that was basically developed for this very purpose. If it is believed that a fair trial cannot be obtained in the proper jurisdiction, the proceedings can be moved elsewhere "in the interest of justice." There's no way in hell Tom would get a fair trial in Whiteyville, so Peck could just petition to move things elsewhere. One could argue that since the judge has the final say on whether to grant a change of venue, he would just deny the motion for no reason other than being a racist prick, making the gesture pointless. However, Judge Taylor is shown to sympathize with Tom Robinson and holds Peck in high regard (he's actually the one who appoints him as Tom's legal counsel), so there's no reason to believe he wouldn't grant the motion.

Well, of course, the purpose of a change in venue would be to move the trial to a place where your were more likely to have an unbiased jury.  This is takes place just before World War II (at least the book does), and we are talking about Alabama, okay?  They were not talking about changing venue to Massachusetts, they were talking about finding a place in Alabama prior to the entire Civil Rights Movement, where a black man could get a fair trial when he was accused of raping a white woman.

Obama’s Economic Illiteracy on Display: Extending Unemployment Benefits is Stimulus!

I heard about this gem on Twitter last night, but I couldn’t find a citable source until this morning:

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline," he said, "they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance."

Okay, folks let me explain something to you that maybe a lot of you don’t know—I mean, bluntly a lot of people don’t know this in my experience.  Do you know how unemployment benefits are paid for?  In the three jurisdictions I work in (Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.), and I believe in almost all of the rest of the country, it works like this.  Employers are required to contribute directly to the unemployment benefits fund.  Their contribution is determined by their “experience rating.”  There is a lot of complicated numbers in their formulae, but it really comes down to this.  Just about every dime of benefits paid out to an ex-employee gets taken out of the respective ex-employer’s hide.  If a former employee gets $30,000 in benefits in a given year, you can bet that one way or the other the employer will have to pay very close to $30,000 that they would not have had to pay but for that employee getting benefits.

Now this cost can be avoided by different means.  The most common one is by showing that the conduct of the ex-employee was so bad that it justified termination.  If that happens, then the ex-employee gets no benefits, and the employer doesn’t have his or her experience rating increased.  Generally the misconduct has to be reasonably severe and it can’t just be, “we found someone better than him/her.”  In this way, then, the unemployment benefits system is a tax on terminations that are based on anything but misconduct of a relatively severe nature.

So any rational employer  recognizes that if they hire a new employee they run the risk of needing to fire them and then having to pay unemployment benefits for months to come.  Last I heard we were already forcing employers to pay for 99 weeks of benefits, almost two years.  So every time you increase unemployment benefits, you increase the risk and costs associated with hiring new employees.

Now surely Obama would respond by arguing that by giving these unemployed people free money, they are likely to spend more money and that will have a stimulative effect on the economy leading to more job creation.  But that benefit is theoretical at best and so far the Obama administration has had a proven track record of being wrong on this point.

After all, let’s not forget  this chart:

Now that chart is a few months old, and the unemployment rate has crept down to 8.6% since then.  And even that number is not really as good as you might think.  Let’s let Business Week explain this to you:

A big drop in the jobless rate isn’t always good news. A lot depends on what causes the drop. Remember, the unemployment rate is calculated by adding up all the people who tell government surveyors that they can’t find work and dividing it by all the people in the labor force—those either employed or actively looking. So if people give up searching, they’re no longer counted as unemployed, and the rate falls. In November about two-thirds of the improvement in the jobless rate came from people dropping out of the labor force and thus out of the calculation of the unemployed. Only one-third was because of actual job creation.

So in other words about two times as many people gave up on looking for lawful employment* as gained new jobs.

And even if you update the chart to the current 8.6% the fact is that this is still significantly higher than Obama said it would be, even if we didn’t pass the stimulus.  As I wrote over at Patterico’s Pontifications:

Logically there are only two explanations for why things are the way they are:

1.      Either the Obama administration stinks at making predictions; or

2.      They’re making it worse.

That’s it.  There is no third option.  And either way, it leads us to the same conclusion: they need to stop what they are doing.  The reason why option #2 leads to that [conclusion is] obvious, but the reason why option #1 leads there is less so.  The reason why their inability to predict accurately proves they need to stop is simply that if they can’t predict the future, then they can’t possibly know what the effects of their policies would be.

What we need at this point is for a President who will take the Hippocratic [Oath] before attempting to treat our economic “body.”  Like Hippocrates, we need a president who understands first and foremost that he or she doesn’t know very much about the “body” that s/he is treating and therefore he or she must follow the maxim “first, do no harm.”  Obama stands before us today saying (paraphrase), “trust me, the economy would have been in much worse shape today if I didn’t intervene.”  He is like one of the quacks of old who bled a person to death’s door, claiming that if he hadn’t, then the patient would have been in even worse shape.

The maxim “first, do no harm” means that you don’t do something you know will hurt the “patient” on the hope (without proof) that the benefits will outweigh the harm.

Applied to this situation, the President is proposing to do something that we know will reduce the incentives of businesses to hire new employees.  You can be almost guaranteed that this will put a downward pressure on hiring.  On the other hand, he is also hoping that this will have a stimulative effect.  Even forgetting how just plain bad he is at predicting what will and will not stimulate the economy, that would be a dubious proposition.  First do no harm, Mr. President.  Do not depress hiring in the hopes that something good might come out of it.

And you know what really helps the economy? New hiring.  And that is because instead of paying people not to work, then you are paying them to work.  And that in turn means that those people just might help in the creation of real things that create real wealth.  Hiring 100 new employees at an auto plant is not economically identical to paying the same 100 people to sit on their duffs all day, because the members of the first group are not only receiving money that they will presumably pay into the economy, but they are creating real things of real value.

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* I wonder why economists never consider the possibility that some of these people dropping out of the labor pool might in fact be turning to illegal professions such as drug dealing or prostitution.  Now by the very nature of such work, it will be almost impossible to estimate how many people left the workforce for this reason, or just gave the hell up, you have to think that this is at least part of the explanation.

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Update: I should thank JWF for giving me this link.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.

The International Humanitarian Community Reduced To Absurdity

Now before I dig in, let me point out that there is a strong difference between the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross.  My understanding form years of news reports is that basically the American version is relatively sane and doesn’t get itself into stupid politics (but, dear reader, feel free to correct me I am wrong), and is truly separate from the international version.  And I suggest you bookmark the pages I refer you to and tuck them away to bring up the next time someone talks about the latest International Red Cross Report complaining that we are not being sufficiently nice to terrorists, so you can remind everyone what a bunch of bedwetting ninnies these people really are.

You see the International Red Cross is considering action to protect a group that has been horribly abused for years.  And the most horrific thing about it is that the persons committing these gross violations of human rights law are often shockingly young.  We are talking sometimes kids as young as three years old committing horrific atrocities.

So what is this poor oppressed group that the IRC is considering intervening on behalf of?

OMG!!! O’Donnell Compared Gay Sex to Adultery (and Other Idiocy Related to Gay Rights)

Christine O’Donnell makes an adult point about gays in the military during the debate last night.  Think progress plays the tired game of “can you believe she compared gay sex to that?”

Specifically when asked about DADT, she said (assuming Thinkprogress is not actually lying—which is not always a safe assumption with them):

The military already regulates personal behavior in that it doesn’t allow affairs to go on within your chain of command. It does not allow it you are married to have an adulterous affair within the military. So the military already regulates personal behavior because it feels that it is in the best interest of our military readiness.

So Thinkprogress argues this is “compare[ing] allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military to ‘adultery.’”  First, she was not saying allowing gays to serve openly is like the act of adultery.  Second, she was not comparing gay sex to adultery, either.  She was pointing out that the military does in fact regulate private consensual sexual behavior that the law ordinarily would not prohibit, and few would even credibly question that practice.  You can literally go to jail for adultery in the military.  And it makes the point that whatever right to privacy exists in civilian life is significantly reduced in military life.  If you can prohibit adultery in the military without a constitutional problem, it significantly undermines the argument for repealing DADT.

This is a logical and cogent argument.  And Think Progress wants to pretend that it is somehow out of bounds.  Don’t play this game, conservatives.  By the time you are done, you won’t be allowed to make any argument for your side on any subject.

Also for bonus points they denounced her belief that being gay is an “identity disorder” four years ago, explaining that it is a “position that has been universally rejected by science and psychology since the early 1970s.”

Oh, there is a consensus!  Where have we heard that before?

Russian Embarrassment Watch

Russia is now using fake, inflatable tanks and the like to make them look like they have a bigger military presence than they do.

That slapping you just heard was the sound of an entire nation doing a giant facepalm.  The only thing worse than using a bunch of inflatable tanks, is telling the whole world you are doing it.

Jerry Brown Demonstrates He Doesn’t Know How to Do His Own Job

So they had the last debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman in California and Brown was asked about his staffer saying the word “whore” in that now infamous recording.  Mary Catherine Ham has a pretty good blow-by-blow over at Hot Air.  It is pretty clear that when Brown denied that calling a woman a whore was as bad as calling a black person the n-word, that was a bad misstep, because the audience really started to boo him.  And Whitman lost points by trying to distinguish it from someone on her staff calling congress a gaggle of whores (because it is truth in advertisement?).  But I think he got the worst of that exchange.

But  let me pause for a moment to say that in all honesty I never got all riled up about it.  That’s why it never made the blog, because I was like, “meh, who cares?”  I wouldn’t do it myself, but I am not shocked and appalled by it either.  Now if women feel this is really offensive to them I ain’t gonna begrudge them of that.  And if people just feel that our discourse needs to be more civil, I can get on board with that, too.  But I am not personally all that appalled.

But what I can’t stand is bullshit, so when he said this, I started to get annoyed:

“It’s unfortunate. It was a private conversation,” Brown said. “I’m not even sure it’s legal ’cause you have to get the consent of all the parties and there’s lots of people talking, so again, Ms. Whitman, I’m sorry it happened.”

Well, Moonbeam let me break it down for you, because apparently you don’t understand the criminal law of your own state at all.

First, who caused that conversation to be recorded?  You did.  You caused a recording device to record, and failed to turn it off, but gave everyone the impression that you had, vitiating any consent.  So if it was illegal, you would be the criminal.

Second, you pathetic excuse for a lawyer, if you actually bothered to crack open your statute books, this is what you read:

Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication

It goes on telling us that it is a crime and what the punishment is, but Jerry, did you notice that little word right at the beginning?  “Intentionally.”  This isn’t legal mumbo-jumbo, Jerry.  If you accidentally leave it on, you are not intentionally committing that crime and so thankfully, you can clear yourself of all wrongdoing.

Now a reasonable person might say, “well, can you really expect him to know every statute off the top of his head.”  And if he was just a regular lawyer on the civil side, sure, I would agree.  But you, Jerry Brown, are the top criminal prosecutor in the state, and I expect that issues of surveillance by police comes up all the time.  Therefore I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect you to know this law backwards and forwards.  So if you don’t know for a fact that your conduct was legal, I consider it a confession that you are incompetent at your current job.

And besides all that, there are two other things that irritate me about his comments on that subject.

Forget Death Panels, in Greece They Have Amputation Panels

For the big “WTF?!” headline of the day, it’s hard to beat this one: Greek Health System Opts for Amputation as Money-Saver.

Gerry Connolly Admits He Is Not Doing His Job (And Neither is Congress)

So Gerry Connolly (D) is running against Keith Fimian (R) in Northern Virginia.  So Fimian proposes at one point that Congress get its pay cut down to $50K, but then if Congress balances the budget, they get a bonus of $250K.  Personally this strikes me as “stunty.”  You won’t get the votes for that unless congress actually supports balancing the budget.  I mean I like the principle of performance bonuses generally, but usually they are imposed by a higher authority—by your bosses, for instance; self-imposed performance bonuses seem farcical.

But then Connolly comes back with an ad saying that it was outrageous that Fimian wants Congress to get a bonus “for doing its job.”  Now Paige Cunningham suggests this is deceptive.  I don’t quite agree.  The ad in question does show enough context that we can hear Fimian’s full remarks.

But okay, so balancing the budget is doing your job, eh Gerry?  Well, then you are not doing it.  You are actively contributing to the massive spending in our federal budget, voting for stimulus payments and even earmarks for your district.  Seriously, does this look like you are doing your job?

 And let’s put that in perspective with an old but useful chart:

And let’s dig into the numbers a little here.  Connolly for instance bragged about bringing home these items in the budget...

“$64 million to the Prince William schools, saving 304 teaching positions for a year.”  That comes out to over $210K per teacher.

“$3.9 million for eight additional buses for the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission.”  That comes out to over $487K per bus.  Hey just googling on the web, I found a pretty nice looking bus for about $32K.

“A $767,000 grant for Manassas to hire four additional police officers.”  That works out to over $191K per officer.  So apparently they are cheaper than teachers.  /sarcasm

“$790,000 for homelessness prevention.”  Hey, you know what helps prevent homelessness, too?  Tax cuts.  I have a similar criticism about his other item “$7 million in small business grants to Prince William companies.”  And that is only the low-hanging fruit.  I bet there is more waste there than that.

But the lamest thing is that Gerry Connolly doesn’t even seem to understand how to do his job.  This is an exchange with Ben Bernanke:

CONNOLLY: I’m telling you, they don’t have an open mind. They have publicly expressed that they do not favor — you know, they’re all for deficit reduction as long as anything having to do with revenue [i.e. taxes] is off the table. Can we get to serious deficit reduction — change that trajectory you talked about — if we eliminate half of the ledger sheet?

BERNANKE: Well, theoretically you could if you cut enough, but it would be very difficult to do that.

CONNOLLY: Is there enough spending to be cut?

Um, you don’t know?  I mean you are on the House Budget Committee and you don’t know that there is enough spending to be cut?  Oy vey!

I mean that is the line of bullshit they sell you when they argue that it is fiscally conservative to raise taxes.  They say, “how are you ever going to reduce the deficit, without raising taxes?”  Now conservatives like to then mention things like the laffer curve and while that point has validity, they are making the mistake of playing their game.

I mean let’s try a little thought experiment.  Let’s imagine that we do not have a deficit, but there is only $500 billion in waste in our budget.  I know, fantasy land, but let’s play pretend and keep the numbers simple.  So you could have a $250 billion tax cut, and then still cut $250 billion from the budget.  In other words, if you have enough waste, you can cut taxes and cut spending.  Not to mention that the laffer curve does show that if you cut taxes, you can increase tax revenues (because it turns out that business persons know better how to invest their money than the government—go figure!).  So to pretend we have to choose between cutting taxing and cutting spending, is just bullshit.

So bottom line, by your own terms, Gerry, you have confessed you are not doing your job.  You are saying congress is not doing its job.  And you are saying that you don’t even know how to do your job.  So why exactly should you keep your job?

Life Imitates Monty Python (Example #475)

One of the more absurd moments in Monty Python and the Life of Brian was when one of the oppressed Jews complained that the Romans was suppressing his right to an abortion.  The retort was something to the effect of, “but you’re a man!  You can’t even get pregnant!”  The pro-male-abortionist went on to say that if he could have a baby, the Romans would deny him the right to abort it, so he was being oppressed and eventually he convinced his cell of radicals to complain about that, too.

Stupid, huh?  Well, then get a load of this: Spanish fathers entitled to breastfeeding leave.  Fortunately we are talking about Spain, but the situation is so stupid its worth reading it in full: