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.
This one from the Washington Post. Unlike the one I mentioned from WQAD, WaPo's limits you by party, and to the top 5 in each.
I came up all Edwards again, mostly because of his positions on health care.
Via my dad, an interesting tool to help pick your primary-election candidate from the NBC affilliate in the Quad Cities.
Apparently I'm closest to Kucinich, though of the three front-runners in my party, I'm closest to Edwards. (Which I knew anyway.) Only 65 days until the Illinois primary...and only 414 days, 21 hours and 42 minutes remain in the worst presidency the Republic has ever known.
Via Talking Points Memo, the White House is planning to stay in Iraq indefinitely:
When last we left the Bush administration's so-called benchmarks for strategic progress in Iraq—that is, the political progress that military success allows—they weren't being met, and the White House didn't care. Now that the year's almost over and the administration is beginning to bring the "surge" troops home, it's worth asking: what happened to the benchmarks? The New York Times reports that the administration has quietly given up on them, preferring nebulous goals for which it's easier to claim success.
We still have (up to) 420 days, 22 hours, and 30 minutes left in the worst presidency in history.
Via Bruce Schneier, apparently the physical security of British nuclear weapons until around 1998 consisted of, essentially, a bicycle key:
To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
Oh. Well. Of course. Why use a hard-to-forge sequence of letters and numbers like the U.S. or U.S.S.R. when a little key will do?
So what prevented an accidental (or deliberate) British detonation until Tony Blair fixed the problem? Why, tradition, of course, what what!
The Royal Navy argued that officers of the Royal Navy as the Senior Service could be trusted: "It would be invidious to suggest... that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders."
(Insert nervous laughter here.)