Indian Programs Cut to Pay Lawyers (alt link).
Which circle of hell best befits these people?
Update:As Ann Bartow noted in the first comment, the good folks at Wampum have figured out that there seems to be a connection between the BIA scandal and the Abramoff scandal. It seems Abramoff ran a slush fund to obstruct the accounting of the Bureau of Indian Affairs mishandling of Indian funds.
Amazingly, we haven’t hit bottom yet with this crowd.
Marty Lederman deconstructs what he calls — with positively British understatement — a rather remarkable and unusual event: “the Chair of a congressional intelligence committee asserts that the landmark framework statute over which his committee has jurisdiction is unconstitutional.”
We knew that John Boehner, the new GOP leader in the House, was a sleazy guy (he famously handed out tobacco lobbyists’ checks on the house floor).
I admit, though, that I didn’t know Boehner wanted to undermine the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It seems he supports state-sponsored prayer in the public school, was for allowing federal funding of poverty programs that require aid recipients to join in religious activities, supports the state-sponsored display of protestant Christian translations of religious texts, opposed criticism of proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, and that he enthusiastically pushed for legal requirements that “Intelligent Design” be taught in Ohio schools. Yes, all this (and more) seems to be true.
Of course, it’s hardly surprising — I’d bet these views are far more characteristic of GOP House members than of the population at large.
My sporadic search for a new cell phone took me to an ad for the highly overpriced Motorola Ultimate U6 Quadband Bluetooth. The ad includes the usual marketdroitspeak (“Quadband operation and an integrated digital video camera makes the Motorola Ultimate U6 the perfect phone for your active lifestyle.”). But it also touts a feature I’ve never seen before in an ad for a phone:
Fungus resistant coated mini jet black clamshell design
The mind boggles. Is this a common problem with cell phones? With Motorola phones particularly? Are buyers of overpriced phones especially fungus-phobic, making this a selling point?
I would have thought it was a turn-off, myself…
In a discussion of the security aspects of last week’s post office shooting, Bruce Schneier says that the US Post office’s reputation for harboring (or creating) a workforce of repressed homicidal maniacs is in fact undeserved,
There is a common myth that workplace homicides are prevalent in the United States Postal Service. (Note the phrase “going postal.”) But not counting this event, there has been less than one shooting fatality per year at Postal Service facilities over the last 20 years. As the USPS has more than 700,000 employees, this is a lower rate than the average workplace.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
