Did Roberts bend under peer pressure?
...Progressives gain status and profit from expanded judicial power and from flexible constitutional rules, because they gain the ability to use the Supreme Court to trump voters’ and legislators’ decisions.

Much of the evidence for a Robert surrender consists of language in the so-called “dissent” written by the minority of four conservative judges.

The dissent includes language referring to the majority opinion as the “dissent.”

That “dissent” term is normally applied only to the minority’s explanation of their votes.

The likeliest explanation for the mismatched terminology is that Roberts initially joined the group of four conservative judges who wished to strike down the law. His vote made them the majority, and allowed them to label the progressives’ opinion as the minority dissent....

More Hints that Roberts Switched his Vote
...UPDATE: Ed Whelan notes a related theory: Roberts assigned the opinion to himself, and wrote most of what became the four-Justice dissent. He then switched on the tax issue, and the four dissenters adopted most of his original majority opinion as a dissent. This would explain why the dissent is unsigned. Other blogs are noting that Justice Ginsburg directs much of her ire at the Chief, which is the sort of things Justices do when they think they’ve lost someone’s vote, not when they are trying to keep a tenuous vote to uphold uphold the law in question on board....

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Top doctor's chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year
NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.
It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.

There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.

Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’....

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McConnell warns of attempts by Obama, Media Matters to silence critics
...The Kentucky Republican noted that President Obama must not oppose efforts to silence conservative critics, because he has never condemned intimidation tactics aimed at his opponents, ranging from targeting businesses that support conservatives to the illegal tactic of “SWAT-ing” — whereby conservative writers have been harassed using 911 services to claim murders in the homes of targeted individuals.

And that should come as no surprise, McConnell explained, when the president has allied himself with the very groups that specialize in intimidating critics of the government.

“The tactics I’m describing extend well beyond the [Obama] campaign headquarters in Chicago. To an extent not seen since the Nixon administration, they extend deep into the administration itself,” McConnell warned.

“News reports suggest that top White House officials have long participated in a weekly conference call with a left-wing organization in Washington whose stated purpose is to track conservative media voices, seize on potentially offensive content and then use it to mount corporate intimidation campaigns aimed at driving these voices clear out of the public square,” said McConnell referring to the liberal messaging group, Media Matters for America.

As reported by The Daily Caller, Media Matters has indeed participated in a weekly strategy call with the White House and the far-left Center for American Progress during most of President Obama’s time in office. It is unknown if those conference calls continue to this day....

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Professor fired after expressing climate change skepticism
Oregon State University chemistry professor Nicholas Drapela was fired without warning three weeks ago and has still been given no reason for the university’s decision to “not renew his contract.”

Drapela, an outspoken critic of man-made climate change, worked at the university for 10 years.

In the early years of his career, he published a number of textbooks, received a promotion to senior instructor and, in 2004, received a Loyd F. Carter award for outstanding and inspirational teacher.

In 2007, Drapela began giving talks on his own climate change skepticism. He often and openly questioned the science behind man-made global warming.

Drapela told the Daily Caller he was “blindsided” when the department chair called Drapela into his office to fire him on May 29.

“He read a prepared statement and took my key,” Drapela said, adding that he was given no reason in this meeting as to why he was being let go.

The timing of the termination was odd because Oregon State University was still in session, with finals approaching.

Students were impacted, he told TheDC, because “I was unable to hold office hours in my office because I didn’t have a key.”...

The Wisconsin Blues
...Progressive morality fits a nurturant family: parents are equal, the values are empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and cooperation. That is taught to children. Parents protect and empower their children, and listen to them. Authority comes through an ethic of excellence and living by what you say, rather than by enforcing rules.

Correspondingly in politics, democracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public....

Peter Gleick’s Possible Involvement in Drafting Fake Heartland Document: Either Not Investigated or the Relevant Results Not Released
...You’ve heard of non-denial denials. This is a non-confirmation confirmation. Any lawyer worth his salt would read the Pacific Institute’s statement and assume that, while the investigation supported Gleick on the issue that no one disputed (“regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute”), it probably did not support (or was silent) on the issue on which the Heartland Institute seemed to have the more likely explanation.

So there are two possibilities: EITHER (1) the report did not support Gleick on the origin of the fake document and the Board of the Pacific Institute is now trying to mislead the public with an evasive press release, OR (2) the Board of the Pacific Institute is extremely incompetent at writing press releases...

Pacific Institute reinstates Peter Gleick – but won’t provide confirmation of the “independent investigation”
...So, there is no way to confirm the investigation even took place. Since they even refuse to name the firm, it could be entirely made up for all we know....

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Tough Guy Leaking: Iran edition
...Beyond the substance of this revelation, there is something quite notable going on here. This morning’s story by Sanger is but the latest in a long line of leaks about classified programs that have two attributes in common: (1) they come from senior Obama administration officials; and (2) they are designed to depict President Obama, in an Election Year, as a super-tough, hands-on, no-nonsense Warrior. Put another way, the administration that is pathologically fixated on secrecy and harshly punishing whistleblowers routinely leaks national security secrets when doing so can politically benefit the President.

Last year, top-level Obama officials shuffled sensitive information about the bin Laden raid to Hollywood filmmakers working on a pre-election hagiographic film, followed by TV interviews with a grateful, reverent Brian Williams in the Situation Room Where it All Happened, at the very same time they were insisting in court that the bin Laden raid was too secret to permit any disclosures. Earlier this week, The New York Times published extensive details about how President Obama has personally taken charge of deciding who will die in drone attacks — disclosures that came from “three dozen of his current and former advisers” — even as the administration has been continuously insisting that no courts can review the legality of their actions or compel any form of disclosure on the ground that even acknowledging the existence of this program would endanger national security....

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How extremism is normalized
...The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage had previously reported that Obama OLC lawyers David Barron and Marty Lederman had authored a “secret document” that ”provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war” (“The memo concluded that what was reasonable, and the process that was due, was different for Mr. Awlaki than for an ordinary criminal”). Attorney General Eric Holder then publicly claimed: “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” Both of those episodes sparked controversy, because of how radical of a claim it is (Stephen Colbert brutally mocked Holder’s speech: “Due Process just means: there’s a process that you do”).

But that’s the point: once something is repeated enough by government officials, we become numb to its extremism. Even in the immediate wake of 9/11 — when national fear and hysteria were intense — things like the Patriot Act, military commissions, and indefinite detention were viewed as radical departures from American political tradition; now, they just endure and are constantly renewed without notice, because they’ve just become normalized fixtures of American political life. Here we have the Obama administration asserting what I genuinely believe, without hyperbole, is the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime — that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the State cannot deprive you of your life without “due process of law” is fulfilled by completely secret, oversight-free “internal deliberations by the executive branch” — and it’s now barely something anyone (including me) even notices when The New York Times reports it (as the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer asked yesterday: “These Dems who think executive process is due process: Where were they when Bush‬ needed help with warrantless wiretapping?” — or his indefinite detention scheme?)...

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Doctors in Britain to strike
Doctors in Britain plan to strike on June 21, The Telegraph reports.

The British Medical Association, the union for doctors in Britain’s socialized medical system, says that doctors will postpone non-urgent operations and other nonessential appointments that day, resulting in a “very serious impact on waiting times, not only for the patients on that day but all subsequent patients in the following weeks and months,” according to the Department of Health....

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Drugmakers Vowed To Campaign For Health Law, Memos Show
Drugmakers led by Pfizer (PFE) Inc. agreed to run a “very significant public campaign” bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, including TV ads, while the Obama administration promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers, documents released by Republicans show.

The internal memos and e-mails for the first time unveil the industry's plan to finance positive TV ads and supportive groups, along with providing $80 billion in discounts and taxes that were included in the law. The administration has previously denied the existence of a deal involving political support.

The documents were released today by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. They identify price controls under Medicare and drug importation as the key industry concerns, and show that former Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Kindler and his top aides were involved in drawing it up and getting support from other company executives.

“As part of our agreement, PhRMA needs to undertake a very significant public campaign in order to support policies of mutual interest to the industry and the Administration,” according to a July 14, 2009, memo from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. “We have included a significant amount for advertising to express appreciation for lawmakers’ positions on health care reform issues.”

The goal, the memo said, was to “create momentum for consensus health care reform, help it pass, and then acknowledge those senators and representatives who were instrumental in making it happen and who must remain vigilant during implementation.”...

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The IPCC: Going Where No Scientist Should Go
...The next IPCC report will include a chapter that discusses gender inequality, marginalized populations, and traditional knowledge. So much for providing “rigorous…scientific information.”...

Varied Views on Extreme Weather in a Warming Climate ...The Hansen piece is policy more than it is science, to be sure, and one can read it for the former. But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.

The article makes these additional assertions:

“The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather…”

This is patently false. Take temperature over the U.S. as an example. The variability of daily temperature over the U.S. is much larger than the anthropogenic warming signal at the time scales of local weather. Depending on season and location, the disparity is at least a factor of 5 to 10.

I think that a more scientifically justifiable statement, at least for the U.S. and extratropical land areas is that daily weather noise continues to drum out the siren call of climate change on local, weather scales.

Hansen goes on to assert that:

“Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.”

Published scientific studies on the Russian heat wave indicate this claim to be false. Our own study on the Texas heat wave and drought, submitted this week to the Journal of Climate, likewise shows that that event was not caused by human-induced climate change. These are not de novo events, but upon scientific scrutiny, one finds both the Russian and Texas extreme events to be part of the physics of what has driven variability in those regions over the past century....

Return Of The Jedi
And now the FEMA director says:

...“Well, I’m not a meteorologist. I’m not a climate scientist, and hurricanes are cyclic,” Fugate responded. “I do know history, and if you look at history and you look at hurricane activity, there are periods of increased and decreased activity that occurs over decades,” Fugate said. “Throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, early ‘80s, up until about ’95, the Atlantic was actually in a period of below-average activity, even though you had significant storms like Andrew, Frederic, and David.”

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Dumbing Down America
...In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin -- that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the "social spirit" needed to bring about a collectivist society. Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, published in 1916:

When knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.

When the social quaility of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent. intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else.

And he wrote in School and Society in 1899:

The tragic weakness of the present school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting ...

The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of merely learning, there is no clear social gain in success threat....

Climate Depot: Time for Next Eco-Scare?! Obama follows lead of green movement and demotes global warming --UN now says case for saving species 'more powerful than climate change'
Formerly outspoken proponents of man-made climate fears are now openly admitting climate is not even the biggest environmental problem, let alone the biggest problem we face. See: Demoted: UN officially throws global warming under the bus: UN now says case for saving species 'more powerful than climate change' – May 21, 2010

The scientific claims made by proponents of man-made climate change were coming up short and the movement could not hold together. See: Special Report: A-Z Climate Reality Check -- 'The claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing'

Global warming will not go away as an environmental scare campaign, but it does appear likely that climate change will be rolled in to the larger issue of biodiversity. Below are but a few examples of how the UN and the environmental movement seems to be giving up on man-made global warming as their flagship environmental issue. AGW Demoted -- Again: Time Mag. warmist Bryan Walsh on global warming: 'It's not the only environmental problem — and it's not even the biggest one'

Obama Steers Clear on Global Warming: 'This year? The word 'climate' didn't even get a mention. Gone are the urgent statements warning of melting glaciers and rising sea levels'...

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NY Times Columnist: Glass-Steagall Wouldn't Have Prevented the JPMorgan Loss or the Financial Crisis
...A meme around Glass-Steagall has been created, repeated so often that it has almost become conventional wisdom: the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the financial crisis of 2008. And, the thinking goes, has become almost religious for some people, that if the law were reinstated, we would avoid the next crisis.

The facts — basic facts — just aren’t that convenient. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall has seemingly become the sine qua non of the financial crisis, it is pure historical revisionism. [...]

Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the last financial crisis. And it probably wouldn't have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion-plus trading loss. The loss occurred on the commercial side of the bank, not at the investment bank. [...]

The first domino to nearly topple over in the financial crisis was Bear Stearns, an investment bank that had nothing to do with commercial banking. Glass-Steagall would have been irrelevant. Then came Lehman Brothers; it too was an investment bank with no commercial banking business and therefore wouldn't have been covered by Glass-Steagall either. After them, Merrill Lynch was next — and yep, it too was an investment bank that had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall.

Next in line was the American International Group, an insurance company that was also unrelated to Glass-Steagall. While we're at it, we should probably throw in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which similarly, had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall....

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Under Asset Forfeiture Law, Wisconsin Cops Confiscate Families' Bail Money
...The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It's a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.

It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family's money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."

Wisconsin is one of four states (along with Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon) that prohibits bail bondsmen. So bail must be paid either in cash, with a registered check, cashier's check or credit card. In fact, Donna Kuchler, a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney based in Waukesha, said police aren't allowed to insist on cash.

"I would be suspicious of why they would do that," Kuchler says. "I had a case last year in Fond du Lac County where they tried to say my client could only pay in cash. My guess is that they probably intended to do the same thing that happened here....

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Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe
...A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

The report summarized 10 years of research evaluating the capability of international institutions to deal with climate and other environmental issues, an assessment that found existing capabilities to effect change sorely lacking. The authors called for a “constitutional moment” at the upcoming 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in June to reform world politics and government. Among the proposals: a call to replace the largely ineffective U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development with a council that reports to the U.N. General Assembly, at attempt to better handle emerging issues related to water, climate, energy and food security. The report advocates a similar revamping of other international environmental institutions.

Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Behavioral economics and other forward-looking disciplines in the social sciences try to grapple with weighty questions. But they have never taken on a challenge of this scale, recruiting all seven billion of us to act in unison....

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Another round of updates to the mortgage meltdown article

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Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it's as addictive as cocaine More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' scientists claim the saying is biologically true. The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women. This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive. ...

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Senior climate scientist queries temperature data ‘adjustments’
...“And I must admit that those adjustments constituting virtually all of the warming signal in the last 40 years is disconcerting. When “global warming” only shows up after the data are adjusted, one can understand why so many people are suspicious of the adjustments,” he said in a blog post on the problem this week....

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Free fall: How government policies brought down the housing market
...The affordable housing goals imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992 were the major contributors to both the deterioration in underwriting standards between 1992 and 2008 and the growth of an unprecedented ten-year housing bubble that suppressed delinquencies and stimulated the growth of a private securitization market for subprime loans. But other government policies are also to blame for the deterioration in the US housing market, including the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, the mortgage interest tax deduction, the right to refinance without penalty, and the Community Reinvestment Act. Until Fannie and Freddie’s market dominance and the government’s role in the housing finance system are substantially reduced or eliminated, the United States will continue to have an inferior and unstable housing market....

...In 1995, expanding the idea in the Best Practices Initiative, HUD issued a policy statement titled “The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream.” The first paragraph of chapter 1 leaves no doubt about what HUD had set out to do: “The purpose of the National Homeownership Strategy is to achieve an all-time high level of homeownership in America within the next 6 years through an unprecedented collaboration of public and private housing industry organizations.” The paper then made clear that reducing down payments would increase homeownership: “Lending institutions, secondary market investors, mortgage insurers, and other members of the partnership should work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer downpayment requirements. Mortgage financing with high loan-to-value ratios should generally be associated with enhanced homebuyer counseling and, where available, supplemental sources of downpayment assistance.”

HUD’s policy was successful. In 1989, only 1 in 230 homebuyers bought a home with a down payment of 3 percent or less, but by 2003, 1 in 7 buyers was providing a down payment at that level and by 2007, the number was less than 1 in 3.10 The program’s contribution to the reduction in home equity and the subsequent increase in leverage is obvious....

...In 1993, for example, shortly after the goals were adopted, the FHA began to increase the percentage of its loans that involved down payments of less than 3 percent; these went from 13 percent in 1992 to 28 percent in 1996. From there, they rose sharply to more than 50 percent in 2000, coinciding with another increase in the AH goals. After that, the FHA’s percentage of these risky loans began to decrease as the GSEs—which were off-budget enterprises—took on more of the risky loans necessary to meet the increasing AH goals....

...Thus, although there were strong incentives for making CRA-type loans, the actual numbers and their delinquency rates are hard to find. However, in its 10-K annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission for 2009, Bank of America made one of the few bank references to CRA loan quality: “At December 31, 2009, our CRA portfolio comprised six percent of the total residential mortgage balances, but comprised 17 percent of nonperforming residential mortgage loans. This portfolio also comprised 20 percent of residential net charge-offs during 2009.”...