He said once he looked at Bernie's publicly available sales-pitch materials, etc., it was pretty obvious he wasn't investing any of the money he took from investors.

Main tip off: Bernie was the biggest fund around, so if he made trades they'd be big enough to move the markets, ie, they'd leave "footprints." Yet there were no footprints from him. Ever.

Therefor the only way he could pay out the supposed investment "returns" was to use money from new investors. Classic Ponzi scheme.

In fact, what appears to be happening is that Barack Obama is listening to his policy people. He didn't scale back the health-care reform bill because they convinced him that the different pieces didn't work on their own. He's trying to close Guantanamo because a lot of people who work on this stuff think we should close Guantanamo. That's the thing about electing a smart technocrat as president: He's swayed by smart, technocratic arguments. The political people are being used to help sell and shepherd the policy, and to figure out how much of the policy can pass Congress, but they seem to be losing the major arguments over what that policy should be.

The obvious counterargument here is the stimulus debate, but as Michael Tomasky has noted, the limits on the size of the stimulus appears to have come from the House of Representatives (and then, later in the process, from the Senate). Maybe Rahm and the White House didn't do enough to break through those limits, but they also thought the recession would be a lot milder than it actually was, and so didn't act with quite the urgency that better information might have furnished.[emphasis supplied]

First quote:  Being a technocrat is unfortunately just not going to cut it when visionary programs are required - HOLC, a big jobs bill, etc.  

Second quote:  So our smart technocrats were morons?  Because I'm pretty sure most people on the Left who were not devoted to worshiping Obama knew that the recession was more serious than Obama thought it was, and that a bigger stimulus was required.

Obama's giving a speech tomorrow on - what else? - the health care plan.  There's a new plan, apparently, arising out of the summit.  It's going to be smaller ("Honey - I've shrunk the bill!"), and if you spot House leadership all sporting slings, it's because there's been a lot of arm-twisting to get the House to agree to vote on the Senate bill first.

[W]hile no one said that the issue of "incorporating" the Second Amendment into the 14th Amendment had already been decided before the argument had even begun, the clear impression was that the Court majority was at least sentimentally in favor of that, with only the dimensions of the expansion to be worked out in this case and in a strong of likely precedents coming as time went on.

[. . .]

The first argument to collapse as the argument unfolded was the plea by the lawyer for gun rights advocates, Alan Gura of Alexandria, VA, that the Court should "incorporate" the Second Amendment into the 14th Amendment through the "privileges or immunities" clause.   In the first comment from the bench after Gura had barely opened, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., noted that the Court had essentially scuttled that argument with its ruling in the SlaughterHouse Cases in 1873.  And within a few minutes, Justice Antonin Scalia -- the author of the Heller opinion and the Court's most fervent gun enthusiast -- was sarcastically dismissing the "privileges or immunities" argument.

"Why," Scalia asked Gura, "are you asking us to overrule 140 years of law....unless you are bucking for some place on some law school faculty."  The Justice said the "privileges or immunities" argument was "the darling of the professoraet" but wondered why Gura would "undertake that burden."  And Scalia noted that the "due process" clause -- an open-ended provision that he has strongly attacked on other occasions-  was available as the vehicle for incorporation, and added: "Even I have acquisced in that."  

Situational (and frankly pragmatic) "strict construction" from Scalia.

An English dog-owner was fined and barred from driving for six months after taking his pet for a stroll while sitting behind the wheel of his car.

Prosecutors said Paul Railton was spotted by a cyclist driving slowly along a country lane in December, holding his dog's leash through the car window as the animal trotted alongside.

Railton pleaded guilty Monday to not being in proper control of a vehicle, but told the court that "a lot of people exercise their dogs in that manner."

My take, its cool to bring your kids to the pub, I sure went to plenty as a toddler and tike...but it is wrong to expect other patrons to watch their language or curb their bar behavior for your kid's sake.  iow, if you bring the kid don't expect others to cater to you....if thats a problem leave the rugrat at home.