it'd simply be "lawsuit-ready," with a least a decade of draft 1,000+ page EIS documents (Environmental Impact Statements), and greenie lawyers (and other interested groups) rushing to court to challenge every one of them (I once worked with a UNLV team on a challenge to the Yucca Mt EIS for Clark County). Moreover, SW Airlines alone has 40 flights a day from the 4 SoCal airports to LAS. They aren't gonna permit Mag-Lev competition.

I live in Vegas. I knew from Day One that there was no such allocation in the bill. But, hey, never let facts interfere with cool soundbite. And, you never say "L.A. to Las Vegas," you always say "Disneyland to Sin City."

LOL!

WTFC?

Juvenile anthropomorphic silliness.

Juvenile anthropomorphic silliness.

Bigots are immune to historical facts, rationality, or nuance.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

Civil rights -- most notably "equal protection" here -- are not properly subject to the plebiscite du jour.

See Messrs Jefferson & Madison on reining in "factitious majorities."

before Alan Keyes angrily denounces stem cell research as "Nazi experimentation on children"?

'eh? Office pool, anyone?

July of 1997. It was 3 a.m. Knoxville time, winter of 1985, a few hours before I would catatonically arise to trudge to my next-to-last quarter mid-term exams at the University of Tennessee. The caller was the Emergency Room 'Attending' at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in, well-- Hollywood (yes, the Hollywood).

He needed parental assent over the phone to authorize treatment of my daughter for injuries she sustained in a fall from a 3rd floor apartment window. Recall: She'd been at a raucous party of dubious propriety and had reflexively exited what she'd assumed to be a street-level window when the police arrived in response to a noise complaint.

One afternoon Sissy failed to return home from school. A ghastly and mostly sleepless month would pass before I would abruptly learn of her whereabouts during that jarring 3 a.m. call. L.A. Juvie authorities shortly thereafter shipped her back to me in a wheelchair-- on their dime. An endless swarm of runaways. Cheaper to just ship 'em out, gratis....

http://www.bgladd.com/1in3

Yeah, runaway daughters. Yeah.

"Life Begins at Conception."

Not the issue.

Refutation in my name link.

I love that. Keep trotting that canard out, Goopers.

My wife and I were over in the EU a few years ago. Looked pretty OK, on balance, to us. Given the mess our Unfettered Big Swingin' Capitalists have made here, there could be worse things.

STFU, your Boy got punked. Justifiably so. Why don't you go on The Daily Show to make your case?

I could not agree more, nazdagg.

I've been corresponding a lot of late with Bill Black (Wm. W Black), of "accounting control fraud" fame. See my current "Dukes of Moral Hazard" post (link in name).

Fraud. Unprecedented.

And, now, we are starting to learn just how AIG pulled an apparent Enron, with intra-offshore subsidiary "reinsurance" deals designed simply to cook their books and evade regulation. The whole thing may come crashing down in orders of magnitude more ferocity.

Ugly.

if you really wanna get depressed. They been pulling an Enron. Things may be WAY worse than we think.

Hey Jonathan-

I'm trying to discern a cogent point there. What? Because other bad shit has repeatedly gone down, we have no right to point up current malfeasance?

AIG (the supposedly "healthy" non-CDS "insurance" side) may have been pulling the reinsurance equivalent of an "Enron," i.e., incestuously "buying" "reinsurance" contracts from its own offshore wholly-owned internal subsidiaries. Having cooked their books in this Enron-esqe manner, they may not have anywhere near the capital reserves to cover their contingent liabilities (much of which may soon be actual rather than "contingent"). If true, this would severely complicate the prospect of them being allowed to go BK.

A mind-bending mess. They may yet precipitate a total global economic death spiral, irrespective of what the feds do now.

Read Matt Taibbi's latest in Rolling Stone, btw. His take: The Wall St. coup d' état is now essentially complete -- though it may be a Pyrrhic victory.

In my current blog post (link in my name, scroll way down in "The Dukes of Moral Hazard"), I speak to the ENR-AIG parallels:

Diff'rent day, diff'rent "ENRON," same egregiously reckless, fraudulent M.O., it would appear. Recall how Enron had all those myriad nominally "independent business units" eventually simply trading pieces of paper back and forth, booking each inter-subsid "sale" as "revenue"? Recall their self-congratulatory PR chest-beating regarding their unsurpassed financial/risk management acumen and "unsurpassed financial capacity," blah, blah, blah? Some eerie parallels here, I would think.

I return to my "Tranche Warfare" lament: We appear to have learned nothing.

And I wrote that prior to getting hip to the equally dubious "reinsurance" thing.

"the weekly David Sirota sky-is-falling column. Obama sucks, the government sucks, Wall Street sucks, everything sucks - except for my hair, which looks great on TV!"

Why do you read Sirota?

______

Read Matt Taibbi instead. Much better writer, both analytically and stylistically.

"double-standard America" falls under "Blinding Glimpse of The Obvious."

Oh, yeah, "Vegas sucks" too (my town), said he, as he flew in, disdainfully pondering our unsustainability, oblivious to his own carbon footprint irony.

AIG may having been pulling an Enron by using wholly-owned offshore subsidiaries that wrote "reinsurance" contracts for various of the supposedly "legit" and "solvent" AIG business units.

Newsweek recently broke the story at

http://www.newsweek.com/id/189917

Really bad, it this proves true.

Fertilized ova are not people. "Life" may "begin at conception," but "people" ("slaves") do not.

"Life begins at conception" is a tiresome, sophomoric red herring.

Link in my name.

I see you're a speed reader.

Nice.

Look, pal, you have a good laugh at my expense, being so amused and summarily dismissive. Be my guest.

" since when is a microscopic bit of cytoplasm a "person"?????"

____

It is not. Even Scalia admits that.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner.