Warning, "In the News" piece repeated below. As part of a rather long comment re: NBC's skipping the Olympics 7/7 memorial & demands for a Munich moment of silence, I'd made a snide aside re: memorializing the King David Hotel bombing (location of once-PM and famed Irgun warrior Menachem Begin's greatest atrocity against the British soldiers enforcing the Palestinian Mandate).

Israel astounded international observers this week as former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy announced in effect: "Israel never occupied nobody!" Imagine a President Romney asking Justice Scalia to provide a definitive interpretation of the Obamacare decision. The results could hardly be more unsurprising.

Fox, meet chicken coop. Chicken coop, meet fox. With Netanyahu assembling / stacking this committee of like-minded thinkers to come up with a way to prove their settlements were legal, they creatively fell back on familiar ground: the West Bank was already Israel's so they could build wherever they want anyway.

Imagine the 2 leaders of the world's Conservative movement agreeing that industry is destroying the environment, and taking decisive, concerted action to stop it.

That in effect is what happened in 1987 when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, to ban CFCs, which took effect less than 2 years later and had drastically beneficial effects on the Ozone Hole. 

Of course it wasn't just conservatives who pushed this measure, and it was based on science that evolved over a decade, but from the view of 2012 it's still amazing. Now the conservative official line is that man can't really affect the environment, which rather than relying on the "6000" history of the world, simply denies confirmed reality of 25 years ago. Work across the aisle for the sake of the Environment? Pshaw. Rio? D.O.A.

Roberts delivered a delight today.

Not only did he pull out a justification for the mandate, he did it in a way that still slams the overreach of the Commerce Clause, provides insight that it's fungible as a tax, and aligns with liberals for the first time in.... never.

It's tickling in one sense to see him acting as a real conservative - the mandate *was* an overreach for Commerce - by breathing, the government can make you buy *anything*?

CMaukonen's nicely been tracking Taibbi & Yves Smith's effort on bank collusion on public bonds (transcript here), that stole money from every local initiative over how many years, audaciously justified in court by "the towns got a good enough rate". In their eyes, "market rate" = "bargained collusion rate", and since they're fair enough, the market just works. 

Imagine how messy it'd be if towns had to compete to get actual highest returns for their bonds? What's wrong with everyone giving hand signals to rotate the winners of bond deals between 3 veteran financial houses?

Yeah, I'm rising from disrespect to contempt to despise.

Perhaps it's people telling me what I should do, but I think it's mostly his actions.

I woke up with one piece of judicial news and a non-finger-pointing assessment of our Supreme Court problem, and I was convinced: vote Obama, reverse Supreme Court.

A couple articles later, I revise equation: hold nose, sneer, vote Obama, pray the Supreme Court is enough.

Ah yes, trotting out those tired old lines:

”You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated

No matter how many times someone points out the myth of hippies spitting on vets just didn't happen in any numbers, that the protests were aimed at the Pentagon, not G.I. Joe, the story just won't die.

Apparently Obama missed one of the major vibes of the period, trying to end the war, trying to keep our neighbors from dying for no good reason. Are the kids at Kent State included in the remembrance of Memorial Day?