As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the “free culture” movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party.

That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama’s first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America’s favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama’s pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the same law that Lessig and his allies unsuccessfully sued to overturn.

Obama made both announcements on Monday, saying that his picks “bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times.” The soon-to-be-appointees: Tom Perrelli for associate attorney general and David Ogden for deputy attorney general.

Campaign rhetoric aside, this should be no surprise. Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as vice president showed that the presidential hopeful was comfortable with someone with firmly pro-RIAA views. Biden urged the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users and tried to create a new federal felony involving playing unauthorized music.

I wonder if this will have less impact now that Apple is removing DRM from iTunes.  But I have to think this would cause a hue and cry among the Obamaites, if they were paying attention.  The RIAA is supposed to be the quintessence of evil.

the idea of more “stimulus” as the answer to this crisis approaches the point of flat-out unbelievable. Leaders in Washington told us last spring that things would get better if we just sent $150 billion in stimulus checks. We were told the same as we reached $2.3 trillion spent and committed to various stimulus and bailouts for the year. Now the tab for what’s been committed has crossed $7 trillion—half of the yearly U.S. economy. A group of Democratic governors, meanwhile, recently promised that spending just $1 trillion more would be the answer.

Would Americans continue to frequent the same mechanic if each repair bill increased in cost but got no closer to fixing the problem? Taxpayers are already on the hook for over $52 trillion in unpaid-for political promises. That represents a hidden mortgage of $450,000 per American household, and some of us don’t think it’s right to bury future generations even further under this mountain of debt.

As I noted below, we’re slated to run a $1.2 trillion Keynsian stimulus tab already.  Is this not enough?  I’m sympathetic to the argument Surowiecki makes that people are pouring money into bonds right now and the government can use that to inject liquidity into the market.  But if we get any more liquid around here, we’re going to drown.  At some point, the flow of cheap uninflated cash is going to dry up.  And I suspect it will be sooner rather than later.

As many as five rockets fired from Lebanon exploded in northern Israel on Thursday, the first since the Jewish state launched an offensive in Gaza two weeks ago, Israeli police said.

The rockets reportedly struck around the town of Nahariya, 5 miles south of the Lebanese border and wounded at least one person.

Israeli forces immediately returned fire, blasting mortars across Lebanon’s border after the attack. A military spokesman said Israel fired five artillery shells aimed as “a pinpoint response at the source of fire.”

Israeli defense officials said the military had been on alert for rocket attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia since Israel intensified its battle against Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza, on Israel’s southern flank. At the same time as Thursday’s northern barrage, six rockets from Gaza hit towns in southern Israel.

Hezbollah had no immediate comment. The heavily armed group is a strong ally of Hamas, but has held its fire during the Israeli offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Well, it looks like they may not be holding their fire for much longer. That sound you hear is the shit hitting the fan.

China has bought more than $1 trillion in American debt, but as the global downturn has intensified, Beijing is starting to keep more of its money at home - a shift that could pose some challenges to the U.S. government in the near future but eventually may even produce salutary effects on the world economy.

At first glance, the declining Chinese appetite for U.S. debt - apparent in a series of hints from Chinese policy makers over the past two weeks, with official statistics due for release in the next few days - comes at an inopportune time. On Tuesday, the U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama, said Americans should get used to the prospect of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come” as he seeks to finance an $800 billion economic stimulus package.

Normally, China would be the most avid taker of the debt required to pay for those deficits, mainly short-term Treasury securities. In the past five years, China has spent as much as one-seventh of its entire economic output on the purchase of foreign debt - largely U.S. Treasury bonds and American mortgage-backed securities.

But now, Beijing is seeking to pay for its own $600 billion economic stimulus - just as tax revenue falls sharply as the Chinese economy slows. Regulators have ordered banks to lend more money to small and midsize enterprises, many of which are struggling with slower exports, and Chinese bankers say they are being instructed to lend more to local governments to allow them to build new roads and other projects as part of the stimulus program.

“All the key drivers of China’s Treasury purchases are disappearing,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist in the Hong Kong office of the Royal Bank of Scotland. “There’s a waning appetite for dollars and a waning appetite for Treasuries. And that complicates the outlook for interest rates.”
....

In the United States, China’s voracious demand for American bonds has helped keep interest rates low for borrowers ranging from the government to home buyers. Reduced Chinese enthusiasm for buying those bonds takes away some of this dampening effect.

But with U.S. interest rates still at very low levels after recent cuts to stimulate the economy, it is quite cheap for the U.S. Treasury to raise capital now. And there seem to be no shortage of buyers for Treasury bonds and other debt instruments: Prices for U.S. debt have soared as yields have declined.

The long-term effects of this shift in capital flows - with China keeping more of its money home and the U.S. economy becoming less dependent on one lender - are unclear, but the phenomenon is something economists have said is long overdue.

Years of borrowing are coming home to roost. Even Communists don’t want to lend us money anymore.

Obama is talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security.  I hope this isn’t just jerking off because that’s the only way we can crawl out of this hole in the long term.

New rule effective immediately: no politician can use the term “lynching” to describe an otherwise routine political impasse. Nor can it be used for low-grade racial conflicts. Between 1880-1910 African Americans were lynched at a rate that averages out to two per week. These were people who were routinely tortured, shot and castrated before being set afire. Being passed over for a job—even a job you deserve—just isn’t in the same category as recreational murder.

First Clarence Thomas, inventor of the portable crucifix, hailed that he was the target of a hi-tech one (the only lynching to culminate in a guarantee of lifelong employment for the victim) and now every black politician who gets questioned on an expenditure smells kerosene in the air. (And this damn sure doesn’t give Bill O’Reilly a pass on reckless lynching references either.)

...

If Roland Burris is not seated it will constitute anything close to a lynching. It won’t even approach the last instance of Congress attempting to block someone from taking a seat—when the House refused to seat another black politician, Adam Clayton Powell (more on that later.) And given Illinois history as the only state to elect an African American to the senate since Reconstruction (and it ran up the score by voting for both Carol Mosely Braun and Obama) the Burris pick reeks of unjustifiable desperation. It’s not like an appointment by a tainted governor is the only chance a black candidate has of entering the Senate from the state. As a matter of fact, Rush could’ve made that no-blacks-in-the-Senate comment in any state other than the one he resides in.

I think that Burris should be seated for a very simple reason. The Democrats had time to officially block Blago from appointing the new senator and did not. Until they do, he can appoint who he wants.  There’s no need to drag out a race card.

Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.

The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (WUR’-zuhl-bah-kur) says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting.

He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”

Considering that Israel won’t let any reporters near the actual fighting, I’d like to know how he’s going to go about this. First he wants to run for congress and now this. But I guess you milk your fifteen minutes any way you can.

Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.

“The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,” said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. “The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.”

...

Flynt and Francis concede the industry itself is in no financial danger — DVD sales have slipped over the past year, but Web traffic has continued to grow.

But the industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

They’re joking, of course.  At least, I hope they’re joking.  Still, it would be nice to have a bailout in which taxpayers get screwed the good way.

Many Christian groups and churches welcomed the campaign for putting God into such a prominent position in the public eye.

Paul Woolley, director of the religious think tank Director of Theos, said: “We think that the campaign is a great way to get people thinking about God. The posters will encourage people to consider the most important question we will ever face in our lives.

“The slogan itself is a great discussion starter. Telling someone ‘there’s probably no God’ is a bit like telling them they’ve probably remembered to lock their door. It creates the doubt that they might not have.

“A new Theos research study, to be published next month, shows that there are as many people finding God in Britain today as losing their faith, so this campaign is speaking into a very live debate.”

Mike Elms, a Fellow of The Marketing Society and former Chief Executive of ad agency Ogilvy and Mather, said that the campaign could play a role in the revival of Christianity.

Mr Elms said: “For too long, the British public has been able to dodge the ‘God choice’ - is there or isn’t there? - by scribbling C of E on their hospital admission form. But now atheists are challenging us to make that choice one way or another. The atheist campaign opens the door toward a very public debate on the existence and nature of God.”

The Methodist Church also welcomed the campaign. The Rev Jenny Ellis, spirituality and discipleship officer, said: “We are grateful to Richard for his continued interest in God and for encouraging people to think about these issues. This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life.”

She disputed that thinking was anathema to religion. “As Christians, we respond to Jesus’ call to love God with our minds as well as our hearts, souls and strength. Christianity is for people who aren’t afraid to think about life and meaning. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism believed that no one should be saved from the trouble of thinking, because that is the path to understanding God.”

Strangely enough, I’m more on the churches’ side here. There are, IMO, more effective ways for atheists to make intellectual arguments for their case. As a skeptic, I really wish the likes of Dawkins and others would be more willing to debate directly rather than pull stunts like this, even if it does get peoples’ attention.

Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together… Conservatism’s core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it.

And the rest of us are going to be paying the bill for years to come. When you have the RNC offering their hand out to Ron Paul, you know there’s a problem. Ironically, Bush’s ultimate legacy may be that he has made libertarian views fashionable in the Republican Party again.