The LA Times has an interesting article today on coffee shops in high-tech areas like San Francisco that have stopped offering wi-fi and/or ban laptop computing. The shops say, aside from the drain on revenue, the internet has become too much of a distraction. Customers seem fine with the decision,

"People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted," [Downbeat Cafe owner Dan Drozdenko said.]

It's true. The internet has turned into as much of a time-waster as a productive tool. [More..]

In Colorado, it has been really hard for dispensary owners to get and keep a bank account. They don't want the business, fearing the tension between between state and federal law with federal law declaring all marijuana is illegal.

Wells Fargo was about the only one to buck the trend. According to the Denver Post, that's now changing. While it stopped accepting new accounts a while ago, this week it sent out letters to existing customers with dispensary businesses saying they needed to find another bank as it would be closing their accounts as well.

"It's based really on the complex and inconsistent legal environment across the country related to medical-marijuana dispensaries," said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Cristie Drumm.

Unless something is done, this will force the dispensaries to operate cash-only businesses, which is what states like Colorado, which have spent months drafting regulations for the businesses, are trying to avoid.[More...]

Open Thread.

I'm headed out for dinner, the TL kid is cooking tonight...here's an open thread for those of you online, all topics welcome.

I guess I understand why some Dem bloggers are upset now that the Supreme Court confirmation process has become, horrors, "partisan." But I just am not one of them. Kevin Drum writes:

Elena Kagan was only barely confirmed to the Supreme Court yesterday, continuing a recent trend of court picks becoming ever more partisan. Jon Chait comments: [. . .] Th[is] trend has many legal observers lamenting a Supreme Court confirmation process on a steady trajectory toward complete polarization and a seemingly inevitable filibuster."

So what happens if this becomes institutionalized? It means that no president with a Senate controlled by the opposite party will ever be able to place someone on the Supreme Court. [. . .P]erhaps some change is in order?

Why exactly is this a bad thing? Imagine a system where Scalia and Thomas were not on the Court? Imagine a system where the electorate realized that the Senate had to agree with the President on who should sit on the Supreme Court? Oh wait, that is how the Founders designed it:

The AP takes an unflattering look at Colorado's primaries in "Colorado's Three Ring Political Circus." While I've focused on Bennet vs. Romanoff, and the Republican meltdown in the Governor's race, the description of the two Republican Senate candidates (both conservative, one an elected District Attorney and former AUSA and the other a former Lt. Gov. and the Executive Director of the Denver Police Foundation, married to a former U.S. Attorney appointed by Reagan and Bush I), is telling:

[Ken] Buck, a former federal prosecutor and the elected district attorney from a northern county, raised eyebrows by mocking [Jane] Norton's "high heels" while noting that his cowboy boots are stained with cow dung.

He crusades against illegal immigration, and once obtained search warrants to seize thousands of tax returns filed with a firm that caters to Hispanics..... the state Supreme Court ruled that it violated privacy rights.

Apparently, not too many people are paying attention:

A Senate debate scheduled Wednesday in Pueblo involving Norton, Buck and Romanoff was canceled for lack of interest.

My prediction: It will be Bennet vs. Buck in November.

Open Thread.

Update (TL): If you haven't yet voted in Colorado's primary, it's too late to mail your ballot but you can drop it off. Find your location here for any county. I have endorsed Sen. Michael Bennet, and BTD says if he were voting in Colorado, he'd vote for him too.

Via Markos and Glenn Greenwald, The Not So Tolerant Museum of Tolerance:

The new Museum of Tolerance New York opened in the heart of Manhattan this week, citing an ambitious mission to help enlighten city residents and tourists on issues of discrimination, prejudice and social inequality. But the museum's financial backer, the Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, says it cannot tolerate the planned location near Ground Zero for a mosque and Islamic community center.

I'm sorry, but that's kind of funny. It's wrong of course, but also funny. Not so funny:

In Jerusalem, Israel—where the Wiesenthal Center plans to open its next Museum of Tolerance—construction of the proposed tolerance museum has “resulted in digging up the remains of people who had been buried in a Muslim cemetery for generations,” M[arnia] Lazreg[, a professor at City University of New York Hunter College] said. “I am not sure that I would have chosen a site close to Ground Zero for building a mosque and cultural center, although there is no law against doing so,” she said. “But we have to be fair …. The mosque-center promoters have not engaged in acts of physical desecration of the victims of 9/11 attacks.”

That's DIFFERENT the "tolerant" folks would say no doubt. The differences of course, are all too obvious. Nice kickoff for the "Tolerance" Museum.

Speaking for me only

Through an examination of flight records and interviews with U.S. officials and others, the AP has learned the Bush Administration used "Ghost Air," the secret airline that flew detainees to overseas "black hole" prisons for harsh interrogation, to whisk four high-level detainees out of Gitmo and back to a black hole overseas prison -- right before the Supreme Court was to rule on whether detainees can have access to the courts.

Who were they? None other than Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. [More...]

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today became the first appeals court to rule that police need a warrant to install a GPS tracking device on a vehicle. In doing so, it reversed a conviction and life sentence of an alleged major trafficker.

In striking down the drug conviction of Antoine Jones, former co-owner of a District nightclub called Levels, the D.C. court said the FBI and District police overstepped their authority by tracking his movements round-the-clock for four weeks, placing a GPS monitoring device on his Jeep after an initial warrant had expired.

...Here the police used the GPS device not to track Jones‘s ―movements from one place to another,‖ Knotts, 460 U.S. at 281, but rather to track Jones‘s movements 24 hours a day for 28 days as he moved among scores of places, thereby discovering the totality and pattern of his movements from place to place to place.

Contrary positions have been taken by federal appeals courts in other districts, making Supreme Court review a real possibility, if it's not reversed en banc. The decision is here. [More...]

8 days and no verdict in the trial of former Illiniois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his brother Rob.

Montana's medical marijuana has an unintended loophole -- you don't have to be a resident of the state to get one.

"The law is mute on the subject of legal residency and there is no recourse for the Department of Public Health and Human Services but to keep the situation as it stands," Council said. "On Monday, we will be moving forward, status quo, on the processing of out-of-state applications."

What else is going on in the world or your neck of the woods? This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Andrew Romanoff seems like a nice guy. He really wants to be Senator. If I met him at a social event, I bet I'd like him. If he gets the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator for Colorado, I'm sure he'll be much better than his Republican opponent and I'll vote for him.

But I can't support Andrew Romanoff in the primary race against Sen. Michael Bennet, and I voted for Sen. Bennet. I voted against Romanoff because of his record as a state legislator (including his tenure as former Speaker of the House) on criminal justice, immigration and sentencing reform issues. I don't want to see a repeat performance in the U.S. Senate. (Details below.)

If you're sitting on your mail-in ballot, I hope you'll do the same, in time to beat the deadline, or vote in person on August 10. [More...]: