So you were tempted to root for Florida Gulf Coast over Florida were you? Nevermind, the 1%er coach, you thought, it is still a heartwarming Cinderella story.

Well think again:

It’s a great story: the virtually unknown, 15th seeded Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), has made it to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. But there’s something you might not know about FGCU: its economics department is, as a consequence of grants from Randian businessman John Allison and the Charles G. Koch Foundation[.]

Rooting for the Cinderella Eagles is rooting for the Koch Brothers.

Do the right thing, root for the land grant public university established by Abraham Lincoln:

Go Gators!!!

The investments today:

Syracuse +6 over Indiana, Arizona +4½ over Ohio State, Marquette +6 over Miami Florida, Wichita State -4 over La Salle.

Currently 25-21 ATS, +15 units, for March Madness.

Open Thread.

There are lots of new developments in the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case. Before I get to them, some readers will remember that about 10 days ago, I wrote about the newly released ABC recording of a portion of Benjamin Crump’s March 19, 2012 interview with Witness 8 and said I would follow-up with analysis. [More...]

The Supreme Court in Italy has overturned Amanda Knox's acquittal by a lower appeals court. According to media accounts, a new trial will be held. According to her U.S. Attorney, Ted Simon, only a "revision" of the acquittal was ordered, which is like a reconsideration, and it's far from certain a new trial will occur.

He characterized the outcome of Tuesday’s court decision as a "revision" of the case, as opposed to a retrial, saying: "Merely because they have sent it back for revision does not mean that anything else will happen other than she will be recognized as not guilty and the same thing will happen again."

[More...]

The return of the Texas search warrant for Evan Ebel's black Cadillac has been released. It took a while, but I finally found the document, thanks to Denver's Fox 31 News.

Other items found are more interesting to me than some random materials that might be used to make a bomb. For example, he had a wireless video surveillance system (Uniden Model UDW-155), surveillance cameras and a voice recorder. And at least one female had been in the car at some point in time -- there was one earring, a pink hair tie and a hair clip. [more...]

The Supreme Court has taken a step to keep the 4th Amendment from going to the dogs. It ruled today that police may not use the fruits of a warrantless dog search at the front door to a residence as probable cause for a search warrant. The case is Jardines v. Florida and the opinion, written by Justice Scalia, is here.

[More...]

TalkLeft's webmaster and I have spent the entire day working on having the premium content option for our content available on this site, rather than on the new premium site. We are almost done.

We are now working with Media Pass instead of Tiny Pass, which was able to accomplish this. We had an hour and half conference call on joinme, which is pretty cool since we could each show stuff on our computers. Media Pass has incredible customer service.

So, it looks like I spent a week and half designing a site that won't be used at TalkLeft. I'd much rather have spent that time writing blogposts. But, pretty as it is, it is better to keep all TalkLeft's content in one place.

I'll be back to regular blogging soon, this is an open thread, all topics welcome.

It's close to sundown here, which marks the beginning of Passover. Best wishes to all observing.

I just got back from the grocery store and was really surprised -- there was an entire aisle of Matzoh, from the U.S. and Israel, and all the regular Matzoh was sold out. Only options: Sodium free, gluten-free, etc. Also gone: white horseradish -- they had hundreds of bottles of the red horseradish. They also had an entire case of Kosher meats, but they were from Iowa, and ever since the labor violations of Agriprocessors came to light, I'm not buying meat from Iowa.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Award-winning, long-time (former) New York Times reporter, columnist and professor Anthony Lewis has died. Here is a link to a collection of his writings.

A few examples: The Imperial Presidency and Silencing Gideon's Trumpet and Guantanamo's Long Shadow. In the New York Times Review of Books: Making Torture Legal.

R.I.P. Anthony Lewis.

Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald has a graphic and disturbing update of the continuing hunger strike at Guantanamo (background here.)

By this weekend, the U.S. military had defined 26 of the 166 captives as hunger strikers. Eight were being fed nutritional shakes through a tube snaked through a shackled captive’s nose to his stomach. Two were hospitalized, getting nutrition through a tube and intravenous hydration as well. Lawyers for the captives quote their clients as counting dozens more as long-term hunger strikers, who are getting weaker by the day.

Each meal is prepared, brought to the detainee, and when refused, thrown away. [More...]

Is anyone watching the Phil Spector movie on HBO? It's very strange. It's like they are all playing caricatures of caricatures. I'm switching to the Good Wife.

I've been working on TalkLeft's premium page all weekend, trying to add features we have here that Wordpress doesn't have -- particularly in comments. I must have tried 15 plugins, none of them adequate. So even though I think I've figured out the subscription issues, I'm going to tinker with it some more before asking people to use it.

One thing that's very noticeably lacking on older blogs like this one not using Wordpress is the lack of web fonts. They really make the blog so much easier to read. The possibilities are endless -- and of course, not free. It's great that Wordpress offers them in themes -- as does Bootstrap, but figuring all this out is way beyond my skill set and time availability.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Attorney General Eric Holder sent out a memo to Justice Department employees Friday (available here) saying he transferred $150 million from DOJ's funds to the Bureau of Prisons to avoid mass furloughs of prison guards and staffers.

Absent this intervention, we faced the need to furlough 3,570 staff each day from the federal prisons around the country. The loss of these correctional officers and other staff who supervise the 176,000 prisoners at 119 institutions would have created serious threats to the lives and safety of our staff, inmates, and the public.

[...more]