Just now on Talking Points Memo: "At the moment, it's Rudy about 300 votes ahead of Ron Paul."
Stop the presses!
I've had a number of conversations with friends recently about the 2008 elections. A couple are afraid we're going to repeat the 2004 elections, in which we Democrats believed the day before the election we were going to win, but woke up the day after to a brave old world.
Today we've seen the first hard number that shows, without a doubt, we're going to rout the Republicans this year: tonight, an all-time record 227,000 Democrats caucused in Iowa, almost double the number in 2004.
We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more.
Via Marc Andreesen (yes, the Marc Andreesen), from Variety:
[O]verall music [CD] sales during the Christmas shopping season were down an astounding 21% from last year. From the week of Thanksgiving up through the day before Christmas Eve, 83.9 million albums were sold, a decrease of 21.38 million from 2006's 105.28 million.
It's important to realize, as the RIAA simply can't grasp, this has nothing to do with piracy. Suing people isn't the answer; getting a clue and selling over the Web is.
The city of Half Moon Bay, Calif., is in danger of dissolving after losing a major lawsuit:
Half Moon Bay is wrestling with unpleasant options for responding to a court ruling that officials say threatens the "very existence of our city government"—a $36.8 million judgment against the city for turning a proposed housing development site into wetlands.
Under the worst-case scenario, officials say, Half Moon Bay would become the first Bay Area city forced to dissolve, and the coastal town's land would become an unincorporated part of San Mateo County.
As of this moment (12:00 EST), less than 400 days remain in the worst presidency in U.S. history.
The New Jersey legislature yesterday voted to abolish the death penalty, becoming the first state to do so formally since executions were re-instated in the U.S. in 1976:
The Assembly voted 44-36 on Thursday to approve the legislation, which passed the Senate on Monday by a 21-16 vote. Gov. Jon S. Corzine said he will sign it within a week.
New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, but nobody has been executed in the Garden State since 1963.
New Jersey has been barred from executing anyone under a 2004 court ruling that declared invalid the state's lethal injection procedures.
A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn't deterred murder, and could kill innocent people.
The Stanford law professor is focusing on corruption as a way of combating creeping copyrights:
Mr Lessig has concentrated for a decade on copyright law and its interaction with the internet. So he left some people feeling confused earlier this year when he announced a new focus for his campaigning efforts: tackling corruption. Not everyone understood that this change in academic and activist emphasis is more of a shift in strategy than in substance.
For years Mr Lessig has presented legal arguments against excessive copyright extensions. But he says lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realise that counter-arguments to copyright extensions exist. Even though Britain's Gowers Review, published in 2005, argues against such extensions, and eminent economists such as the late Milton Friedman have declared the importance of copyright limits to be a “no brainer”, Mr Lessig says legislators are clueless about “an issue that any rational policymaker has no problem understanding.” Swayed by campaign contributions from vested interests—such as film studios, music companies and book publishers—America's Congress has lengthened copyright terms 11 times in the past four decades, he observes.
Princeton economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman thinks Tresury's subprime plan won't do much:
[W]e're almost surely looking at less than $10 billion in losses avoided. Meanwhile, estimates of subprime losses to investors are currently running in the $300 -$400 billion range. So the back of my envelope suggests that this plan is a drop in the bucket.