The trial of Mohammed Wali Zazi, father of admitted terrorist Najibullah Zazi (the airport van driver from Denver), charged with obstucting justice by lying to investigators about his son's activities and tampering with and destroying evidence to cover up his son's actions, begins tomorrow in federal court in Brooklyn.

The elder Zazi's brother-in-law, Naqib Jaji, will testify for the Government. The defense has said it will call Najibullah Zazi, who cooperated with the Government, pleaded guilty and has not yet been sentenced. Mohammed and Najibullah have not spoken in two years. [More...]

Open Thread.

A reporter from The Atlantic visiting his parents in Orange County, CA, home to one of 10 theaters across the country playing a new documentary about Sarah Palin, decided to go check it out and maybe interview some of those in attendance. Only no one showed up.

He watched it alone (except when two tourists walked in, not knowing the movie was about Palin, and they left after 20 minutes.):

"We looked online for the latest movie playing," Jessie added. "But all the Harry Potters were sold out, and then we saw 'The Undeafeated.' We don't even actually know what we're seeing."

Probably wasn't the action flick they were expecting. At the end, a couple came in to sit in the back row and make out, but they left too. So the reporter had no one to interview. [More...]

Krugman:

Everyone in the forecasting business is scrambling to mark down both their estimates of second-quarter growth and their forecasts for later in the year. Goldman Sachs (no link) was pretty optimistic a few months ago; now they’ve grown quite pessimistic[. . . .] At this point, GS is predicting an unemployment rate of 8 3/4 percent at the end of 2012 — five years after the Great Recession began.

The New Normal:

So, terrible growth prospects; low inflation; oh, and low interest rates, with no sign of the bond vigilantes. Ordinary macroeconomic analysis tells you very clearly what we should be doing: fiscal expansion and monetary expansion by any means we can manage[. . .] And what are we talking about in policy terms? Spending cuts and an end to monetary expansion.

I am supporting President Obama for reelection because the alternative is worse. But there is an argument to be made that it is a terrible precedent for a President to win reelection with terrible economic policies that treat 9% unemployment as the New Normal.

Speaking for me only

We have sunshine today, so I'm not going to spend the day at the computer.

For those of you following the Rupert Murdoch news empire misadventures, here's the latest on the resignations of Lee Hinton, the publisher of the WSJ and Rebekkah Brooks, who ran the British papers. U.S. connections to the phone-hacking scandal are growing.

Here's a Kaiser report on the fiscal effect of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Here is the transcript of the final day of the Roger Clemens trial, which ended with a mistrial after the Government played a video and showed a transcript to the jury containing the very statements of Andrew Pettitte's wife Laura that only a week earlier, the Court had ruled inadmissible.

There was no snafu, no playing of the wrong tape, and no forgetting to edit or redact the tape and transcript. The Government acted deliberately. [More...]

I've been following the amounts we spend on the war on drugs for a while. (More here.) Here's today's sequel.

Our Justice Department thinks that technology is hampering its ability to wiretap our phones. So it wants more money. From the DEA's 2012 Budget: [More...]

It's still raining. Thunder, lightening, the whole nine yards. 9 days and counting.

Speaking of Who'll Stop the Rain (one of my favorite movies with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty about Vietnam, heroin, Haight-Ashbury, federal drug agents and Percodan), I watched the Lincoln Lawyer last night. It was good -- not as great as some of the reviews, but worth seeing.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled (opinion here) that TSA's body scanners at airports were illegally implemented . But it also refused to order their suspension, directing the Agency only ".. promptly to proceed in a manner consistent with this opinion."

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rejected arguments from the Obama administration that the TSA was exempt from laws requiring federal agencies to first notify the public and seek comments.

"It is clear that by producing an image of the unclothed passenger, (a full-body) scanner intrudes upon his or her personal privacy in a way a magnetometer does not," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg for the three-judge panel.

The Court rejected constitutional arguments against the use of the body scanners, including a 4th Amendment challenge. [More...]

Matt Yglesias again trots out his tired trope that "the Left" does not understand the importance of monetary policy:

Part of what I think goes wrong in the contemporary left’s understanding of this is that people have a kind of romance with the idea of the Works Progress Administration. [. . . H]owever, [. . .] lurking behind this fiscal measure is a monetary one. Under the fiscal system that prevailed between the wars, the government’s ability to spend money on public works was limited by its ability to get its hand on gold. This is why leaving the gold standard is so crucial, both here and abroad, to launching recovery from the Depression[.]

"The Left" fully understands this. But it understands something more - that printing money is not enough in a liquidity trap. In 1938, Keynes explained it to FDR:

Reading news reports of the mistrial declared in the Roger Clemens perjury trial, one is left wondering how did the Government not know what was in its own exhibit? As if some paralegal or tech person on the Government team failed to properly edit a videotape shown to the jury.

This was a case the Government not only knew was being closely watched by millions, but a case on which it had a team of prosecutors, backed by investigators, paralegals and technology experts to assist with exhibits. There was even an FBI agent, their lead agent, sitting at counsel table.

It strains credulity to suggest that prosecutors didn't review Clemons entire hearing testimony and carefully select the portions they thought would bring them the most bang for the buck, and then have a video prepared of those segments to introduce as an exhibit for the jury. [More...]

Open Thread.