Is Scalia the most vile person in Washington?

Washington, hell. Frankly, I like his chances in the regional bracket.

Go. Watch. Now.

(Via MeFi.)

This is what they WANTED. Attempting to negotiated with these halfwits is a fool’s errand, because they don’t care if we cut the budget in stupid, excessive ways.

Robert Reich at Salon has more.

I’ve contended for years that the justice’s much-discussed “originalism” was little more than a thin veneer over a legal mind more than happy to rule based on outcome rather than principle; he’s done it over and over.

So this development won’t surprise you at all. More here.

Serious question, though: Does anybody know an Originalist who isn’t pro-life? There’s nothing about the positions that should join them at the hip, and yet pretty much everyone I’ve ever encountered who claimed the former was also actively using it the further the latter. It’s almost as if they picked a doctrine to support their point of view! Which is convenient, since, like Scalia, it’s likely they don’t really mean Originalism anyway.

In other words, these actions will never be subject to legal scrutiny.

The only fix here is broad adoption of real encryption without back doors for snoopy LEOs. It’s not a question of stopping terrorism. It’s a question of preventing the state from having to much power with too little oversight.

The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was overtly, deliberately political, and had nothing to do with right or wrong.

Yet another reason why everyone involved in that railroading effort should be shunned forever from all reasonable society.

This is ridiculous, and MUST be protested and stopped:

The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

Seriously? Without SUSPICION? Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Elizabeth Warren went knives out the other day, asking the SEC some very, very difficult questions about their “oversight” role.

Metafilter pointed us to The True Costs of Health Care back in November, and I’ve been trying in vain to write intelligently about it since then.

I’ve given up. I don’t think I can add much to the work already done here, other than to suggest you take a look. The so-called Obamacare improves our health care system in terms of access, but it doesn’t do much about costs. That’s the next step. Understanding how the system works now is imperative if we want to figure out how to be more efficient. And becoming more efficient isn’t optional; the growth curve for health care costs under the current system is unsustainable.