Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??!!??!!??

OK, I get the optics.

Having Obama give his nomination acceptance speech in a huge outdoor stadium, with a much louder and more enthusiastic crowd, as he did in 2008.

It gives his speech more excitement.

I get it.

But to give the speech in Bank of America Stadium?!?!?!?

First, he chooses an anti-union right to work state, and now he's testifying in an edifice named after a bank?

And it's not just a bank.  It's one of the "too big to fail" banks that got billions (trillions?) in taxpayer bailouts.

Great googly moogly!

Jon Stewart is the Best Journalist in America

Brilliant!

Stewart looks at Foxconn and what it does to its workers in order to make the iPhone.

He plays it for laughs, but he absolutely nails just how horrific the conditions are, and how little we actually save for the pain that we inflict.

He takes a complex issue, researches it, provides documentary evidence, and puts it all in context better than anyone in the news media today.

He is a national treasure.

So, the Keystone XL Pipeline Is On Hold

The 'Phants forced a decision in the payroll tax bill, and so he denied the application:

President Obama on Wednesday rejected, for now, the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, saying the $7 billion project could not be adequately reviewed within the 60-day deadline set by Congress. While the president’s action does not preclude later approval of the project, it sets up a baldly partisan fight over energy, jobs and regulation that will most likely persist through the November election.

The president said his hand had been forced by Republicans in Congress, who inserted a provision in the temporary payroll tax cut bill passed in December giving the administration only until Feb. 21 to decide the fate of the 1,700-mile pipeline, which would stretch from oil sands formations in Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The State Department, which has authority over the project because it crosses an international border, said there was not enough time to draw a new route for the pipeline and assess the potential environmental harm to sensitive grasslands and aquifers along its path. The agency recommended that the permit be denied, and Mr. Obama concurred.

“As the State Department made clear last month,” the president said in a statement, “the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.”

The Republicans think that they have an issue, but it will be long forgotten by election time.

As to the final outcome, it will be approved after the election, and Obama will tweak the route a bit, and claim some sort of post partisan victory, all while basically selling out to big oil.

And as SOPA/PIPA Goes Down, the Supreme Court Decides to F%$# the Concept of Public Domain

The Supreme Court just ruled that the public domain can be taken away whenever Congress wants to:

We've been talking about the Golan case, and its possible impact on culture, for years. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's the third in a line of cases, starting with the Eldred case, to challenge aspects of copyright law as violating the First Amendment. The key point in the case was questioning whether or not the US could take works out of the public domain and put them under copyright. The US had argued it needed to do this under a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyrights. Of course, for those who were making use of those public domain works, it sure seemed like a way to unfairly lock up works that belonged to the public. It was difficult to see how retroactively taking works out of the public domain could fit into the traditional contours of copyright law... but today, on the day of the big SOPA/PIPA protests... that's exactly what happened (pdf).

The ruling is ridiculously depressing. The Justices basically just keep repeating the mantra they first set forth in Eldred, that as long as Congress says it's okay -- and that the "fair use" and the "idea/expression" dichotomy remain -- all is just dandy. They also claim that since the very first copyright law took works from the public domain and gave them copyright protection, clearly there's nothing wrong with removing works from the public domain. This decision reinforces why the Eldred decision was a complete disaster, and just keeps getting worse. The Eldred ruling basically ignored the fact that copyright had changed entirely in a way that went against the First Amendment... by retroactively granting copyright extension. Now that ruling is being used to take works out of the public domain as well.

First, as with Eldred (and the second case in the trilogy, the Kahle case), I believe that the Court is greatly mistaken in its analysis of copyright law. First it claims that there's little fight between copyright and the First Amendment because the two things were put in place at about the same time. That's a specious argument for a variety of reasons. First, the original copyright law was significantly limited in a way that it was unlikely to really come into conflict with the First Amendment. It was limited to just a few specific areas, and for a very short period of time. It's only now that (1) copyright law has been totally flipped to make just about everything you create covered by copyright, (2) the law has been massively expanded in time and (3) changes in technology make us all create tons of "copyrighted" material all the time -- things have changed an entirely. It's hard to see how the Court can reasonably argue that the traditional contours of copyright law have not changed... but that's exactly what it does. Stunningly, the majority decision here, written by Justice Ginsburg, seems to suggest that there's no First Amendment issue here, because if people want to make use of the works that were previously, but are no longer, in the public domain, they can just buy those rights:

This ruling sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

IP increasingly resembles the Enclosure Acts in England, with a similar outcome. The ordinary people get f%$#ed, and the nobility makes out like raped apes.

Needless to say, this does not serve, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as the constitution states.

Oh My F%$#ing Ghod!

The Obama administration is floating Larry Summers as the next head of the World Bank:

President Barack Obama may put his mark on the World Bank by nominating Lawrence Summers, his former National Economic Council director, to lead the bank when Robert Zoellick’s term expires later this year, according to two people familiar with the matter.

While a Summers nomination may draw criticism from some Democrats who disagree with his past stances on deregulating the financial industry, he has support inside the administration from top officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC Director Gene Sperling, said one of the people.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also being considered, along with other candidates, said the other person. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Larry Summers' record was too toxic for Obama to nominate him as secretary of the treasury, and the parts of his record that aren't rife with incompetence or corruption show that he is completely incapable of operating in an environment like the World bank, which requires consensus.

There is no eleventy dimensional chess.  This is just stupid and arrogant.

H/t Felix Salmon.

It's Been the SOPA/PIPA Protest Day Today

Click for full size

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Wikipedia Went Dark

Well, it looks like the rent seekers who normally win this stuff (the "Mickey Mouse" Sonny Bono Copyright Act anyone?) are getting at least a temporary brush-back over their attempt to turn the internet into a gated community:

When the powerful world of Old Media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America, and of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable Old Guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the looting of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the antipiracy legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

Legislation that just weeks ago had overwhelming bipartisan support and had provoked little scrutiny generated a grass-roots coalition on the left and the right. Wikipedia made its English-language content unavailable, replaced with a warning: “Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Visitors to Reddit found the site offline in protest. Google’s home page was scarred by a menacing black swatch that blotted out the search engine’s label.

Phone calls and e-mails poured in to Congressional offices against the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect I.P. Act in the Senate. One by one, prominent backers of the bills dropped off.

It should be noted that the Republicans are walking away from this faster than the Democrats.

Even Orrin Hatch, the MPAA and RIAA's bitch,^* has withdrawn his support of the bill.

BTW, this debacle is largely the fault of the entertainment industry, because until now they have refused to meet with the tech companies to work out differences, though they are begging for that now.

Here's a suggestion to the tech companies:  keep your boot on the MPAA's.

You'll be doing them a favor.  You might remember then MPAA chair Jack Valenti claiming that the VCR would destroy the studios, when the video rental revenues actually saved their bacon.

Here's a thought to the unproductive leeches who are entertainment executives, whose business, after all is to rip off the artists who actually produce this stuff:  Do less cocaine, fire your worthless brothers-in-law, and invest in treating the actual creative people, and in producing better content.

^*For which he has been richly paid through record contracts from the labels.

Like a Bad Penny

Un-Dirty-Word Believable

She keeps coming back.

Sarah Palin has endorsed Newt Gingrich, and Newt Gingrich has said that Sarah Palin would have a "major roll" in his administration:

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday he would consider former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for a "major role" in his administration if he is elected president.

"Certainly, she’s one of the people I’d call on for advice. I would ask her to consider taking a major role in the next administration if I’m president," Gingrich said on CNN. He added that he has not discussed the idea with Palin, who he called "a very good reform governor."

Palin told Fox News on Tuesday that she would vote for Gingrich in South Carolina "in order to keep this thing going."

Palin has not endorsed a candidate in the Republican race, and her comments Tuesday weren't exactly an endorsement either, although Gingrich characterized them that way on CNN.

You see, Sarah Palin is saying that the problem is that in 2008, there was a candidate who was not properly vetted (@ about 1:10 in the vid), and she's referring to Barack Hussein Obama, not Sarah Louise Heath Palin.

Who says that Irony is dead?