Obama isn’t a schmoozer but to get background, the New York Times quotes two Senators who are members of the Democratic caucus without noting their specific willingness to oppose the President:

“Maybe if something isn’t working, you’d say, ‘What can I do better?’ ” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, expressing dismay that the president seemed to have little interest in taking a warmer approach with Democrats. “Maybe we wanted something different. But it kind of is what it is.”Asked to characterize his relationship with the president, Mr. Manchin, a centrist Democrat who has often been a bridge builder in the Senate, said: “It’s fairly nonexistent. There’s not much of a relationship.”Few senators feel a personal connection to the president.“In order to work with people, you need to establish the relationship first before you ask for something,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent member of the Democratic caucus. “And I think one of the things the White House has not done well and the president has not done well is the simple idea of establishing relationships before there is a crisis.”

via Obama Is Seen As Frustrating His Own Party – NYTimes.com.

King may caucus with GOP after these coming midterms.
Manchin sued President Obama over EPA regulations before Boehner did.

They aren’t the people Obama needs to caucus with first. The biggest deal in this article is Harry Reid’s disappointment in the President. All the rest is centrism for centrism’s sake. King will probably caucus with the majority party and Manchin is a very conservative Democrat. Not the core of the Democrats senate base.

“systematic weaknesses”

Revelations that the government’s largest post-conviction review of forensic evidence has found widespread problems counter earlier FBI claims that a single rogue examiner was at fault. Instead, they feed a growing debate over how the U.S. justice system addresses systematic weaknesses in past forensic testimony and methods.

“I see this as a tip-of-the-iceberg problem,” said Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and expert on modern scientific evidence.

via Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI lab unit spanned two decades – The Washington Post.

Let’s see how far this goes.

Who could have guessed:

In July 2013, No Labels held a rally where lawmakers of both parties crowded a park outside the Capitol, stood on a grandstand and one by one declared themselves “problem solvers.” The government shut down a few months later as Republicans, including some who appeared on that stage, refused to allow a budget to pass unless it defunded the president’s health care law.

[…]

It turns out that for a group that consistently bills itself as above the partisan politics and the corrosive culture of Washington, No Labels has come to exemplify some of the most loathed qualities of the town’s many interest groups.

[…]

Among those donors are a former top Enron employee, John Arnold, and his wife; Alfred Taubman, a real estate magnate who spent 10 months in prison for antitrust violations, and his wife; and No Labels’ own legal counsel. Top GOP donor John Canning Jr., a private-equity chairman, hosted a June luncheon for the group in Chicago to familiarize other prospective supporters and is himself a donor, though neither he nor No Labels would disclose how much he has donated.

via No Labels? No results? No problem. – Yahoo News.

No Labels = More donor access, less constituent service. The Republicans in the group got to call themselves “problem solvers” and went right back to obstruction they said they were committed to. The Democrats in the group seem to have taken their word for it.

Fourth, and most important, the history of the electric power industry teaches that the presence or threat of competition from the public sector is one of the best and surest ways to secure quality service and reasonable prices from private enterprises involved in the delivery of critical public services.

via Joho the Blog » Municipal nets, municipal electric power, and learning from history

Read the whole article from 1994. Applies to every utility we know.

America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does.)
[…] A phrase like “mass incarceration” obviates the fact that “mass incarceration” is mostly localized in black neighborhoods. In Chicago during the ’90s, there was no overlap between the incarceration rates of black and white neighborhoods. The most incarcerated white neighborhoods in Chicago are still better off than the least incarcerated black neighborhoods. The most incarcerated black neighborhood in Chicago is 40 times worse than the most incarcerated white neighborhood.

Perhaps black people are for reasons of culture or genetics 40 times more criminal than white people. Or perhaps there is something more elegant at work

via This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic.

Note: In wake of this whole Donald Sterling, one thing the players who are members of the NBA Players Union should learn is that they do have some power and they specific ways they can exercise it.

Moreover, MICT isn’t the only method of tracking mail. In July 2013, the New York Times published an article on Leslie James Pickering, a former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front member who was being tracked via "mail covers," the predecessor to MICT.

via Sorry Jimmy Carter, the Government Monitors Snail Mail Too | Motherboard.

Thomas Friedman in NYTimes.com:

I don’t like Keystone. Extracting oil from tar sands leads to even higher carbon emissions than drilling and devastates the landscape. But, if approval is the price for a truly transformational clean energy policy, I’m in. You’re not going to move the vested interests without a trade, but it has to be a smart trade.

Yes he’s talking about grand bargains. Going to kick the football with Lucy? Good luck with that Charlie Brown.

According to Madoff, there were “constant” confrontations with senior JPMorgan executives over a period of about 10 years. Madoff claims that the bank ultimately never cut ties with him because he brought in too much profit for the bank.

via Bernie Madoff: ‘JPMorgan knew’ – MJ Lee – POLITICO.com.

For what it’s worth.