The House of Representatives voted in the early hours of Friday 226-135 in favor of passing a bill that takes away people’s right to vote for mayors, district heads and governors, and gives it instead to regional legislatures.
Eric Holder To Step Down As Attorney General →
President Obama said on Thursday that Holder, 63, intends to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed, a process that could run through 2014 and even into next year
DEFENSE CONTRACTORS ARE MAKING A KILLING →
War is big business.
The Pentagon recently estimated that military operations in Iraq were costing an average of $7.5 million a day between June and last week — an annual rate of about $2.7 billion. But even if costs ballooned to, say, $15 billion a year, the figure would still be dwarfed by the approximately $1.3 billion a week we’re still spending in Afghanistan.
And for now, there’s no cash flow problem: Obama can just dip into the “Overseas Contingency Operations” budget, the $85 billion ”all-purpose war funding credit card” Congress just gave him – $26 billion more than he had even asked for.
Books for the Horde: The New Jim Crow, Chapters 2 and 3 →
This sounds like an incredible book:
On the financial incentives implicit in the War on Drugs:
In fact, the Times reported that police departments had an extraordinary incentive to use their new equipment for drug enforcement: the extra federal funding the local police departments received was tied to antidrug policing. The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding .... As a result, when Jackson County, Wisconsin, quadrupled its drug arrests between 1999 and 2000, the county’s federal subsidy quadrupled too .... Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.
On the (predictable) result of these incentives—plunder:
One highly publicized case involved a reclusive millionaire, Donald Scott, who was shot and killed when a multiagency task force raided his two-hundred-acre Malibu ranch purportedly in search of marijuana plants. They never found a single marijuana plant in the course of the search. A subsequent investigation revealed that the primary motivation for the raid was the possibility of forfeiting Scott’s property. If the forfeiture had been successful, it would have netted the law enforcement agencies about $5 million in assets. In another case, William Munnerlynn had his Learjet seized by the DEA after he inadvertently used it to transport a drug dealer. Though charges were dropped against him within seventy-two hours, the DEA refused to return his Learjet. Only after five years of litigation and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees was he able to secure return of his jet. When the jet was returned, it had sustained $100,000 worth of damage.
A sense of injustice in China? →
In fact, there is an alternative reading of Whyte's data that comes to a somewhat darker conclusion. It is true that there is a large majority in Chinese society who are optimistic about the direction of change China is undergoing, and who are optimistic about their futures and those of their children. But there also seems to be a meaningful percentage of China's population who do not share these attitudes and beliefs. And perhaps this group is large enough to portend the kind of social conflict that Whyte is so skeptical about. When it comes to the likelihood of social unrest, perhaps it is not the modal individual but the disadvantaged minority who is most salient.
Wal-Mart launching mobile checking account →
Wal-Mart is introducing a mobile checking account for its customers that will eliminate the overdraft and bounced-check fees traditionally charged by banks.
This Week's Biggest Hit To International Terrorism Might Have Taken Place In A Courtroom →
Yesterday, a federal jury found the Amman-based Arab Bank liable for terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, the anti-Israel terrorism campaign in which over 850 civilians were killed, including several Americans. According to the New York Times, this ruling in favor of 297 American victims or family members of victims of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas marked "the first time a bank has ever been held liable in a civil suit under a broad antiterrorism statute."
Meet The Khorasan, The Terrorist Group That's Suddenly A Bigger Threat Than ISIS →
The key difference between ISIS and Khorasan: US intelligence believes Khorasan poses a threat to the US and its homeland, while it believes ISIS does not currently have the capability to carry out a large-scale attack on the US homeland.