It’s been a pretty busy week, with the anti-free speech stalwart Kagan nomination hearings, historic SCOTUS rulings, not so good economic news, that you might have completely missed the government’s latest attempt at taking away more of your economic freedom.  They have therefore entitled their effort, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Well, some of you may have missed it, others like Mr. Gasparino is all over it.  What might he be writing about?  AIG testimony?  Goldman Sachs testimony?

No, he’s more concerned with one missing actor in this drama, JP Morgan.  While writing for the Huffington Post, Mr. Gasparino explains to us (here):

Of all the events that led up the great financial collapse of 2008, in my mind, one truly stands out: The decision by super-bank JP Morgan to demand billions of dollars in collateral from the troubled Lehman Brothers in mid-September of that year….

Now… if you want to talk about some laser like focus, this is truly amazing.  Mr. Gasparino doesn’t remember anything about houses going up in value for double digits for a decade?  Doesn’t remember Fannie & Freddie with strong political help encouraging this?  Doesn’t remember all those warnings about just these things?

No, he tells us, the real villain here, is JP Morgan:

…The move, according to senior Wall Street executives, was akin to a death knell for the firm, which was just about on life support already. JP Morgan demanded some $8 billion, it said, for clients that traded with Lehman….

Because….

….Once word went out that JP Morgan was nervous about Lehman’s ability to survive, a bank run ensued. Lenders pulled lines of credit; Lehman couldn’t trade with its counter-parties. In less than a week, Lehman had declared bankruptcy and the entire financial system began to implode…

To translate this tripe he seems to be stating that by merely asking a company who owes you money, but can’t pay and then goes bankrupt because they can’t pay money they owe, is the entire reason for the financial collapse.

Oh, and least we forget… the company which borrowed all that money and couldn’t pay it back and went bankrupt – it wasn’t their fault at all – it was those greedy bastards who wanted what was rightfully theirs.

In a close, but what I believe is an ultimately correct decision, the Supreme Court upheld every citizens’ right to defend their homes (via Yahoo News here):

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Supreme Court found Monday a Chicago handgun ban to be unconstitutional in a far-reaching ruling that makes it much harder for states and city governments to limit gun ownership.

In a major victory for gun rights activists, but a bitter blow for those seeking to maintain gun controls in the United States, Justice Samuel Alito said the constitution was clear on the right to bear arms for self-defense.

The 5-4 majority ruling extended to all cities and states the Supreme Court’s 2008 landmark affirmation that Americans have theconstitutional right – as enshrined in the Second Amendment – to own weapons, including handguns….

This is not only a landmark decision as it marks the first SCOTUS decision that wasn’t limited in scope to the municipality the lawsuit was brought against, but for those who believe in freedom – it’s another step forward in a world where we seem to be giving up more and more freedoms.

However, like any freedom, when people think you might use that freedom for things they don’t agree with, they don’t think it’s a freedom anymore. And like any other petty tyrant, Mayor Daley is just going to make other arrangements to ensure Chicago residents don’t enjoy this freedom for long (via CSMonitor here):

…Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said officials were already at work rewriting the city ordinance to adhere to the court ruling while protecting Chicago residents from gun violence….

I guess he forgot to finish his statement – “we want to protect residents from gun violence so long as they aren’t able to protect themselves”…

But either way – for now.  Chicago residents have the right they should have from birth – the right to defend themselves.

Anyone notice that throughout history, there always seems to be this longing for times gone past, regardless really to whether those by-gone days were really all that great.  This is a common function of humans, you grow up during a time period which helps set you in your ways and the next generation comes in and starts changing all the scenery.

It’s almost as if you could see people during the Enlightenment, sitting around the local tavern table, chugging ale, screaming about how the Dark Ages were sooooo much better.

Remember the 50′s?  When a multi-million dollar computer the size of a yacht, combined with 23 million punch cards…. assembled in the right order of course, using enough power to run a small prison, you could then calculate the square of 3 in just under 6 years.

Here’s another reminder via Boing-boing (here):

With a capacity of 5 MB, the IBM 350 disk storage unit could have stored about two MP3 files. This photo, showing a unit getting forklifted onto a plane, is from 1956.

IBM’s history website has more information about the drive.

Mexico is and has been in trouble for a long time.  The drug laws, combined with government corruption, poverty, and a seemingly unlimited demand for illegal narcotics from their neighbor, Mexico is fast becoming a place you don’t want to visit.  The following is but a minor example in Mexico’s ongoing dramas…

Via Stratfor (membership required – full post here):

Around 9:50 a.m. on June 14, during the daily guard shift change, 18 inmates at the Center for the Execution of Crime’s Legal Consequences in Mazatlan, Sinaloa state, allegedly tried to break out of the facility. The 18 men, whom some reports linked to Los Zetas, were housed in special security block 21 and were reportedly armed with three large-caliber handguns, an AK-47-type automatic assault rifle and a sledgehammer to force their way through the facility’s exits…..

Fortunately, this prison break was prevented, but with the combination of massive state corruption and very powerful organized criminal organizations (some whose intelligence & military capabilities rival nations), this isn’t always the case:

In May 2009, members of Los Zetas arrived outside the Center of Social Rehabilitation of Cienguillas in Zacatecas state in several buses with an armed SUV escort. A total of 53 inmates filed out of the prison and onto the buses in an orderly manner without a shot being fired. Surveillance video footage showed guards simply standing by watching the inmates walk out of the prison and onto the buses. Several prison officials have since been arrested on corruption charges….

& this:

More recently, 41 inmates at the Matamoros municipal prison, known as CEDES Matamoros, were freed after an assault by armed men between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. on March 26….

& least you think this is just a prison problem in Mexico:

Jesus Manuel Lara Rodriguez, the mayor of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, Chihuahua state, was assassinated by a group of gunmen in Ciudad Juarez at about 1 p.m. on June 19, inside his home….

DA asked about a month ago whether  Mexico’s President should be scolding Arizona for a state law (here) considering their current predicament; this is just an update on that predicament.

It should be no surprise to those who watch, but just know:  the tide against freedom is continuing.

Today – it’s the DISCLOSE Act, meant to remove the freedom enhancing SCOTUS decision earlier this year (via the Atlantic here):

…The DISCLOSE Act, aimed at addressing the Supreme Court’s Jan. Citizens United v. FEC ruling by requiring additional campaign finance disclosures from outside organizations that can run political advertisements, ran into snags last week….

What is this wonderful legislation you ask (here via ABC News)?

…A pending piece of legislation known as the Disclose Act would require the heads of companies, unions and nonprofit groups to personally appear in any sponsored political ads and endorse the message. It would also require them to reveal the names of the top five donors who helped foot the advertising bill….

Which seems like a solution a Senator might have picked up from visiting an elementary school, but the reality is the Disclose act is an incredible move against free speech.  There are some complaints about the political nature that are indeed worth noting:

…But House Democrats, eager to pass the bill and avoid a fight with one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies, have agreed to exempt from the new rules a small but highly influential group of organizations that most notably includes the NRA….

Obviously excluding certain, influential lobbying groups for tighter rules is a no-no, but the real danger is losing the idea of anonymity with reference to free speech.

The objections come from the usual sources – Cato (here).  They note that while proponents of the bill claim to resolve these ills:

Rep. Price cites three harms from such speech: “the opportunity for corporations, unions and associations to dominate the playing field, intimidating public officials and drowning out the candidates’ own messages.”…

That in reality:

…Notice that these alleged harms are caused by the speech itself and not by the fact that the speech might be anonymous….

Yes indeed, what Senators and the White House is claiming is that by knowing exactly who wrote message X, or even who funded message X, that you now understand more about message X than you would’ve otherwise.   Which works well on a micro level, say arguing on the play ground & when you start losing you can just yell out “liar” or “stupid”, but in real life – for those seeking the best we can hope for, the messenger is less important overall than the message itself.

Don’t misunderstand – pointing and laughing at hypocrites who tell us what to do when they refuse to do so is funny, amusing, and a good waste of time, but ultimately irrelevant to whether the points they made were indeed true.

The odd part about this… it’s likely to die solely because of the exemptions and not because it’s an attack on free speech… but in case it does contain longevity, here’s the ACLU’s thoughts as well (via Reason.com here):

1. The DISCLOSE Act fails to preserve the anonymity of small donors, thereby especially chilling the expression rights of those who support controversial causes….

2. The DISCLOSE Act would chill not only express advocacy on political candidates, but also issue advocacy….

3. The DISCLOSE Act imposes impractical requirements on those who wish to communicate using broadcasting messages….

4. The DISCLOSE Act imposes unjust restrictions on contractors, TARP participants and corporations with minimal foreign participation.

Ahhh… the NY Times – telling us how great it is to die in Rwanda of a heart attack with health insurance, than to survive a heart attack in the US without (via Cato here).  The premise from the NY Times is a Rwandan official who is just besides themselves when they met an American college student who doesn’t have health insurance.  Cato wonders what they are thinking when:

…[In Rwanda] Dialysis is “generally unavailable.”  As are many treatments for cancer, strokes, and heart attacks, making those ailments “death sentences” more often than in advanced nations.  Life expectancy at birth is 58 years, compared to 78 years in the United States.  Rwandan children are 15 times more likely to die before their first birthday (7 vs. 107 deaths per 1,000 live births) and 25 times more likely to die before turning five (8 vs. 196 deaths per 1,000 live births) than U.S.-born children.  (If you want to meet some Rwandan kids struggling to make it to age 5, read my friend’s blog, Life of a Thousand Hills.)  And yet, the saddest thing is a healthy-but-uninsured American college student…..

But the NY Times isn’t alone in their idiocy (as usual).  Via Reason.com (here), they wonder how a floating grocery store can possibly be a bad thing?

Nestle has put together a floating supermarket barge, and on Friday it sailed the product-laden boatmarket (superboat? grocerybarge?) into brave new Amazonian emerging markets…

My first reaction: Neat!…

Apparently that reaction is not shared by all. At Alternet, Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, calls this an “especially disgusting news item” about which “writing about it is the only way I know to release my outrage. My version of screaming from the rooftop.”…

Yes, apparently many pundits from around the world are working tirelessly to keep all the options they have out of the hands of lesser people… for their own good of course.  As reason writer Ms. Mangu-Ward summed it up:

…Nestle is sending its boat into the hinterlands precisely because those hinterlands are now full of people who might be able to swing the purchase of the occasional chocolate bar, something well outside the scope of their financial lives just a few years ago. Hardly the sort of thing that makes me want to take to the rooftops–or the Internet–to express my outrage….

Arlen Specter….you remember, the guy who was going to lose his Senate seat so changed parties from Republicans to Democrats…. only to be soundly defeated in the primary?  Well, if you care, you can see an example of the last, desperate gasp of a man losing all of his power (via Politico here).

Good news on the medical front.  Via Bloomberg, Stem Cells From Own Eyes Restore Vision to Blinded Patients, Study Shows:

Patients blinded in one or both eyes by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted, according to a report by Italian researchers at a scientific meeting….

DA noted earlier how President Obama’s poll numbers are dropping.  What is interesting to note is that he is losing the left.  For me, I thought he should of lost them long ago (full post here):

…After all, this is not only the same administration which is pushing for specious financial regulations, but they are also the same group which after years of railing against the Patriot Act, when the time came to do something, they did. Theyreauthorized its use to maintain their power….

Stewart’s take on Obama:

What a year and a half makes, huh?  From change we can believe in right into the same ole song from yesterday.

Via The Big Picture – Is WordPress As Big As Guttenberg?Almost.:

WordPress, the blogging software that powers The Big Picture along with 11 million other blogs and has 256 million unique visitors to its hosted sites, may not be as revolutionary as movable type but it is a crucial element in what has made it possible for blogging to grow from a hobby into a major threat to the mainstream media….

Via Reason.com – In England it’s so bad, cops rob you! (here):

Police in Exeter, England, say some residents make life too easy for burglars, and to prove it, they’ve burgled around 50 homes themselves. The police look for places with unlocked doors or open windows, and then they slip inside and put valuables into a bag for the owners to find.

Via Cato – Cisneros, the Clinton Administration’s head of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) explains how the government had little to do with the housing crisis – Cato responds (here):

In a recent speech to real estate interests, former Clinton HUD secretary Henry Cisnerospreposterously claimed that the recent housing meltdown “occurred not out of a governmental push, but out of a hijacking of the homeownership process by some unscrupulous interests.”

The only criticisms Cisneros could muster for the government’s housing policies over the past 20 years were that regulations weren’t tough enough and it should have focused more onrental subsidies.

Imagine that… government officials acting as if they  weren’t effecting anything even though their entire intention was to affect the housing market.  Their entire reason for being is to affect the housing market.

Seems oddly similar to recent reports from the White House on the oil spill.  Listen carefully and you’ll hear this:  ”We have been in charge since the incident occurred, but everything that is happening is someone else’s fault.”

Speaking of which, Obama’s approval rating down (here via Gallup).  In late January of this year, 66% approved, only 19% disapproved.  The latest figures show 49% approval, 44% disapprove.  That was quick…

Lastly, but certainly not least – great pictures of the birth of a star (here via Yale):

New Haven, Conn. — Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal.