31 January 2010 >> As relayed by Stephen Bainbridge:

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common’s men’s washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill said: “That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

28 January 2010 @ 12:35PM >> The Photo of the Day, via Don Surber:

Photo credit: Robert Philabaum

25 January 2010 @ 8:40AM >> The New York Times is on the receiving end of a very good point:

To the Editor:

In “The Court’s Blow to Democracy” (editorial, Jan. 22), you strenuously disagree with the proposition that “corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.”

Every day, The New York Times Company exercises its First Amendment right to engage in political speech. Today, it expresses its desire to deny that right to most other corporations.

The Constitution does not permit the government to criminalize speech based on the identity of the speaker. If any corporation has First Amendment rights, all corporations must have First Amendment rights.

Adam J. Kwiatkowski
Baltimore, Jan. 22, 2010

The writer is a lawyer in private practice.

20 January 2010 @ 8:35AM >> Two weeks ago, I wrote, “Democrats losing Ted Kennedy’s seat would be a massive political earthquake.” Well, yesterday, the once-unthinkable happened, and the deep blue state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican senator since 1972.

Today, politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle will be spinning, assigning blame, and taking credit.

Here’s my not-at-all-scientific breakdown of the factors I think went into Scott Brown’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley:

• 30% - Opposition to high taxes and out-of-control government spending
• 25% - Backlash at the political hijinks of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s “get it done at all costs” tactics
• 20% - Rejection of ObamaCare specifically
• 15% - Martha Coakley being a bad candidate
• 5% - Scott Brown being a charismatic candidate
• 5% - Disappointment in President Obama’s first year
• 0% - Repudiation of Ted Kennedy’s legacy

By this measure, it’s hard to say that President Obama had nothing to do with the defeat, but in my view, his party shares more of the blame than he does personally.

11 January 2010 @ 9:18AM >> Another tale from the annals of government competence:

Someone is getting called for jury duty...but it’s no human.

A family is trying to figure out how their pet cat was summonsed for jury duty.

[...]

[The cat’s] owners, Guy and Anna Esposito, think they may know the source of the mix up: [the cat] really is a member of the family, so on the last Census form, Anna Esposito listed him under “pets”.

[...]

Anna filed for [the cat’s] disqualification of service. However, the jury commissioner was unmoved and denied the request.

[The] service date at Suffolk Superior Court is set for March 23. Anna said that if the issue isn’t cleared up by then, she will simply have to bring the cat to court.

8 January 2010 @ 9:22AM >> CBS News reports:

Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.

According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

Guess which radical Yemeni cleric won’t be using the same communication channels anymore?

This is why we shouldn’t be trying to fight wars in a courtroom.