....to A-. Not the end of the world, but being a step above Greece isn't saying much.

1.8%, baby!

From Gawker, of all places:

There was a time, a couple years back, when CBS was in the tank, and Letterman spent night after night specifically mocking, by name, CBS President Les Moonves. It was wonderful TV. Letterman is a crank, of course, but once CBS recovered, he stopped. Moonves may be a prick, but CBS is on top. Conan doesn't have Letterman's killer instinct, but the time might be right to switch from the "NBC" jokes to Jeff Zucker jokes. Amusingly, they know each other: when they were at Harvard, Conan was with The Harvard Lampoon and Zucker was the president of The Harvard Crimson.

As a prank, O'Brien's staff stole all the Crimson issues one day before they could be delivered. Zucker called the cops. "My first meeting with Jeff Zucker was in handcuffs, with a Cambridge police officer reading me my rights," says O'Brien.

See? Humorless a@#hole then, humorless a@#hole now.

http://gawker.com/5447336/

http://gawker.com/5447336/

Turning on the news to find out that Lane Kiffin is all USC could find to replace Pete Carroll is for Trojan football fans the functional equivalent of falling asleep next to Eliza Dushku and waking up to find Sandra Bernhard. USC must be looking at some horrendous NCAA sanctions if they're inclined to settle for Kiffin for the time being--no use paying a real coach if you won't be able to recruit or compete anyway.

This is what it looks like.

I note with amusement Dowd's omission of the first person: she does not say that she needed to be "reassured" or "instructed" by the President following a terrorist incident. America, I think MoDo just called you a bunch of ignorant p*ssies! Whaddyagonnadoaboutit?

Iranian nuclear physicist and opposition figure Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed by a bomb outside his house today. Nuclear scientist and opposition leader strikes me as a pretty dangerous combination, damn near everyone wants you dead. First tier suspects:

Iran Govt. Evidence for: They don't like opposition leaders, and they're generally murderous and violent. Evidence against: Why bother with the fancy bomb? It's not like they're shy about openly arresting opponents.

Israeli agents. Evidence for: They don't like nuclear scientists, and they're generally murderous and violent. Evidence against: Israelis usually do a lot more open nudging and winking when denying a kill, and usually go after higher value targets.

MEK. Evidence for: They don't like anyone, bombing is their signature technique, and they're generally murderous and violent. Evidence against: Their normal targets are politicians and security personnel.

2nd tier suspects: CIA, Baluchis, Kurds, Al-Qaida. When you think about it, it's remarkable he stayed alive this long.

LINK

Hopefully this happens in the next few months.

(h/t - Balloon Juice)

has noticed -- shocking, I know -- that jihadis, at least the dangerous ones, are not subliterate peasants but radicalized professionals. (The assumption that any foreigner who has mastered technology can thereby be assumed to have become culturally "Westernized" says more about the West than about its foes, but I digress.) She hits the nail on the head by noting that:

Those are worthy questions. But a worthier question still is: are the counterarguments valid? Is the United States actually a liberal and tolerant society, or is it a bellicose and authoritarian one? P.R. -- as the CIA, infant-like, rediscovers to its surprise in each new war -- can only take you so far.

Arguments about political power and legitimacy are hardly new, either. The trouble is that we seem to have lost all faith in even the partial solutions afforded by history. We maintain lip service to them, to be sure, but we don't practice them. This means we are hypocrites. It means we can't hold up our side of the argument. And worst of all, it means that the Bayraks and Balawis of the world are not entirely wrong.

1) The way that anti-racism was pushed from the top down over the last forty years was for the most part a massive success. Changing social attitudes can take generations, so it is damn impressive when the state, media, entertainment industry, educational establishment &c. can all get on the same sheet of music and achieve something.

But to some extent, the rapidity of this effort has meant lots of cutting of corners. The biggest area of a cut corner was the blanket adoption of the N-word taboo. Making said slur the most unacceptable thing you can say in public was a shortcut. The idea was to get rid of a set of linguistic structures that were part of a larger apparatus of oppression. A side effect, however, is that a lot of people have the idea that racism has become of a matter of not saying dirty words. Witness the nonsense about Reid's use of the term "negro."

Another part of the anti-racism efforts were the inculcation of what I call the essentialization of racism. When society at large defined racist as the worst thing someone could be, we wound up with the idea of racist as a noun, of something that you are rather than something you do. So you get things like, "I'm not a racist, but why are they so lazy that they can't be bothered to learn proper English?" or indeed, any of the million other iterations of, "I'm not a racist, but..."

(Of course, none other than Eichmann basically said, "I'm not an anti-Semite, some of my best friends are Jewish" at his trial in Jerusalem, so this sort of thing goes at least back to the 60s).

2) Some anecdata about the job market. Last month, I was talking about teaching a course in another state with a program co-ordinator, but in the end, decided against it (because a single course isn't worth relocating unless one is independently wealthy). As part of this mulling, I was searching for opportunities for second jobs in the area to which I was relocating. I was using the nifty job aggregator indeed.com. In mid-December, the opening page noted in the neighborhood of 400k job postings nationwide for the prior week. Give that this number was down substantially from previous weeks, it was not surprising that December's job numbers were negative.

Today, out of curiosity (and to avoid other responsibilities), I checked again and noted that there were over 900k postings over the last week. These sort of things are noisy, but job postings tend to serve as a rough barometer of employment. I've also got a single anecdatum in that the boss at my U6 job is planning on (finally!) hiring some more help.

Moreover, I've noticed that in the last month or so, the LTL truckers doing pickups have tended to have trucks that are just about full, whereas back in October, the trucks that would do pickups from my shipping area would usually have all of one pallet, the one that I was shipping, and that would be it. So it looks like some genuinely sustained growth.

Of course, since my escape from one form of underemployment to another depends on the budgets of the states, my inner Guerreriste wants to see the federal government borrow (or the Federal Reserve conjure up) another few hundred million dollars to help the state governments make it through the next year or two.

3) Backdoor erosion of the Bill of Rights.

It is generally known and accepted that one cannot cure a pederast. So we have something of a tricky question as to what happens once someone has molested a child, been caught and sentenced, and then finished his sentence. What *does* one do if we know with an almost absolute certainty that if released they will only molest again?

The solution is civil commitment, i.e., if a prisoner is determined to be "sexually dangerous," keeping him confined in perpetuity. Now then, this practice has been challenged and is going before the Supreme Court today so that they can rule on its constitutionality.

Supposing that they do rule that a pederast can be confined indefinitely, regardless of the length of his sentence? What does this mean for the Constitution if we gradually keep adding on to the category of people who are Too Dangerous to Ever be Released? I mean, it is pretty clear that you can't just release a terrorist or pederast out into the general population, but once you start adding to the categories of people who get extra-judicially locked away for the duration, where does it end? Better to make some convictions automatically carry a life sentence and do it within the law than to do this. But then, my mind isn't entirely made up in this matter.

4) Iraqi police and Iraqi Army S-2's appear to finally be getting serious with bomb prevention. For the past few months, the Iraqi response to the big bombings was to grab someone, beat a confession out of him, and proclaim that they'd gotten the perp. They finally appear to be getting better about doing things left of boom, as it were. Good for them.

And that is all.

Methinks there are a lot of DNC minions defecating masonry chunks about now.

Peter Robinson, is the N. Ireland, ruling party leader:

Mr Robinson is facing a claim that he knew his wife obtained £50,000 from two developers for her teenage lover but did not tell the proper authorities.
Iris Robinson, an MP and an NI Assembly member, is currently receiving "acute psychiatric treatment" following a BBC Spotlight documentary broadcast last week.

It reported that she obtained £50,000 from two property developers for her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley, to launch a cafe.

She failed to register the money with the authorities in Stormont and Westminster, as required by the law.

It also reported that her husband, the first minister, knew about her financial dealings but did not tell the proper authorities.

It has been announced that she will step down as an assembly member and MP this week due to ill health. Sources have also confirmed that she will be leaving the DUP.

*********

Good stuff when 50 yr old women have 19 year old lovers.

No wonder Vin's Nephew was unsettled, Sigourney Weaver still unsettles me also.....lol

Traveller

Dear AP:

This is a good story, but if you want traction, you can't be reporting that cadmium is deadly when ingested. You gotta say that cadmium causes a euphoric feeling, gives relief from pain, increases appetite, and is non-habit-forming. That'll get the fascist soccer moms of the world rabidly aware.

LINK

If the answers to those questions are going to determine the outcome of the trial then I think SSM will prevail. To date, I haven't heard a practical reason to prohibit SSM. My guess is I won't hear one during this trial either.

I seem to remember some of you have strong opinions about dogs. Well ... chew on this, like that innately violent pit bull did with his teeth:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/10/omar-martinez-pit-bull-at_n_418027.html

Fox signs Palin! Fox signs Palin!!

How about a series co-hosted with Glenn Beck? I can dream, can't I?

Works for me.

Read it all, here.

another threat by the government to take over businesses, this time after he devalued his country's currency by 50%.

Patterico's final sentence:

Tom Geoghegan in a NYT Op-Ed today:

I've been asked to advise on a career, but have no personal experience. Wikipedia is dismissive, I see.