1305 Obama - Mr Magoo

By ELIZABETH WURTZEL

Anyone who toils in the legal-industrial complex -- better known as Big Law -- should be able to tell you how we got here. Corporate attorneys like me, even those with the eyesight and insight of Mr. Magoo, all should have been able to see this financial collapse coming.

The market has lost a dozen years worth of wealth in a matter of months. Millions of hours of manpower put in by investment bankers on Wall Street and the lawyers who enabled them -- the kind that brought home those bright shiny bonuses that are now causing a populist uprising in the hinterlands -- have been wasted away by what is kindly called the credit crisis. And whatever lessons the powers that be might learn from this adjustment -- that salary structure should change, or that the billable hour is an anachronism -- it seems no one has stated the obvious: The whole system is warped.

These days, deals are down. It's so quiet that even at mergers-and-acquisitions hothouses like Cleary Gottlieb and Skadden Arps, junior associates have been known to sneak out of the office and head home by six o'clock. Exposed to the sunshine that exists outside of corporate skyscrapers for the first time, these people now know what we've all been telling them for years: The sky is actually blue.

But daylight savings time notwithstanding, the traditional life of a law lackey -- even, or especially, a graduate of a fancy law school like Harvard or Yale -- has meant virtual residence at the firm. Meals were delivered by Seamless Web and the roll-top desk was used for catnaps, because whatever it is that had to happen had to happen immediately, or yesterday. The emergency-room atmosphere that permeated the processing of derivatives deals, corporate takeovers, and whatever else has been going on at Goldman, Bear, Citi and Merrill for the past decade, could rival that of an operating room during open-heart surgery. Only, of course, it was a matter of money -- not life or death.

Perhaps money and mortality are all the same to some. But as a way of making the former, this hysterical ER-approach has proved futile. All those lost nights of sleep are now lost 401(k)s. So what was the point? Corporate lawyers could have been sunning in St. Bart's and ended up with the exact same result, plus a tan.

Money made the mad hours worth it. This is why the insanity of working as if the very fate of nations were at stake when it was actually just about whether or not to do a leveraged buyout of, say, a company in Decatur, Ill., went unnoticed by an entire industry.

Anyone in a position to criticize this inhuman work ethic -- meaning, anyone who liked sleeping, or dating, or occasionally walking his own golden retriever -- opted out instead. These are the people who are now attorneys in the public sector, who run nonprofit organizations, or who simply made what money they could and are now painting landscapes in Taos, or skiing full-time in Sun Valley.

The Wall Street atmosphere -- in both law offices and investment banks -- is not open to dissenting opinion. If you blow the whistle, it's only to hail a taxi to take you away, because complaining is just not tolerated. So anyone sharp enough to say that these deals were a bad idea in the first place didn't stay on long enough to make the point. And we all know that organizations that don't retain thoughtful opposing views are doomed by hubris. Hello, Lehman Brothers!

Still, I don't believe any of the major players are re-evaluating their ethos -- only their decision to invest in subprime mortgages. And this is foolish, since the problem is not just that the financial instruments were bad bets, but that the corporate structure and the feverish rush of it all are fundamentally flawed.

I would love to call the system despicable or detestable or something evil-sounding, but that would be giving it too much credit. It's really just the march of dunces.

A dozen years worth of sleepless nights down the drain like dirty bathwater. Pity these people.

1306 Obama - Pour Gas

"President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?"

1307 Obama - Gulliver

Rick Wagner Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Normally it would not seem the United States Constitution and Lemuel Gulliver would have much in common, but this fictional character and our bedrock document of government have received similar treatment.

Just as our traveler, Gulliver, was a giant in the land of Lilliputians, so our Constitution is in our Republic. And, as Gulliver was restrained as he slept by tiny men to bend him to their own purposes, such has been the recent treatment of our founding document.

Jonathan Swift’s character in Gulliver was written as political and social satire and, while the context of the era may have lapsed, the messages still ring true.

In the annals of history, the United States Constitution and its framers loom as giants. Many of their interpreters are diminutive in comparison, but they seem forever busy turning the Constitution from a great shield for the citizen to a sword for the activist.

Jurists seeking to insert substantive due process into the document and let judges discover rights not written, but divined by their interpretation, threw the first silken cords. A case in 1967 supplied a fragment of language that serves as the jumping off point for this misapplied reasoning, as the Supreme Court quite reasonably struck down a law from the Jim Crow era outlawing marriage between different races as being antithetical to the clause guaranteeing equal protection under the law. Toward the end of the decision, the court added language that marriage was a substantive right.

This implied that there were rights granted individuals beyond those named by the Constitution, which could be interpreted from a meaning given to the language of the document. This gave rise to future courts interpreting “shadow” rights that were often used as battering rams against social norms.

This interpretation of “shadow” rights most famously is found in the decision of Roe v. Wade, preventing the states from interposing legal barriers to abortion on the grounds that such action would violate the court’s discovery of a fundamental and substantive right to privacy in the Constitution.

This decision is often misunderstood to be about whether the Supreme Court views abortion as legal. The question actually is whether a right to privacy exists that can be interpreted to prevent the states from deciding if abortion should be legal or regulated within their individual boundaries.

Employing a visioning process that discovers intentions beyond the pen of the author, and elevates them to be substantive and fundamental, makes it nearly impossible for the states or the citizenry to affect their exercise.

This becomes important as we consider one of President Obama’s first judicial nominations.

David Hamilton presently is a trial court judge at the federal level whom the president wishes to elevate to the appellate court in Chicago. Judge Hamilton’s interpretation of the right to privacy and substantive due process has led to him to declare unconstitutional a law to require convicted sex offenders to allow authorities access to their personal computers.

The New York Times noted that the judge, in his decision, felt that the amendment cut into the heart of a person’s right to privacy in his home. He added, “The ability of the individual to retreat into his home and therefore to be free from unreasonable intrusion by the government stands at the very core” of constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

This makes a jumble of whether a search is reasonable within the sanctity of one’s home, a possibility that clearly exists within the Constitution, by placing it in an almost subservient role to a right to privacy, which has only been interpreted to exist in the Constitution.

Such a view is troubling to those who believe the framers knew what they meant and were capable of deciding if a right to privacy was important enough to be written into the Constitution and placed upon the same level as the Bill of Rights’ prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

I hope that those who treasure the genius of our Constitution do not sleep like Gulliver.

1308 Obama - Grid Spies

Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies, Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON --

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

...

1309 Obama - Dashboard

you too can have one of these ($12.95 American - made in China)

1310 Obama - Goverment Car Care

Autorepair center