Update: Live feed removed as the threat has passed.

10:10 am MT: The tsunami is expected to hit Hilo, Hawaii first at 11:05 am Hawaii time. The shores of all islands may be in danger. Advice for those in high-rises: Get to the third floor or higher. Stores are open and they are recommending people get food and water and medications for 5 to 7 days.

Maui is having trouble with cell phones. Don't dial 911 unless there is an absolutely emergency. Twitter is the recommended source of updates.

What will Sully and Charles Murray say about this?

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Heh. For serious critique of the study see PZ Meyers.

Speaking for me only

The new Village Dem offensive (to be clear I am fine with it) is to portray the use of reconciliation as incidental to the passage of the whole of the health bills. The argument goes the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes and the House passed a bill so ironing out the differences through reconciliation is normal. Indeed, it is precisely what reconciliation was designed for. See Henry Aaron's tip of the spear article (PDF). Aaron wrote:

The idea of using reconciliation has raised concern among some supporters of health care reform. They fear that reform opponents would consider the use of reconciliation high-handed. But in fact Congress created reconciliation procedures to deal with precisely this sort of situation — its failure to implement provisions of the previous budget resolution. The 2009 budget resolution instructed both houses of Congress to enact health care reform. The House and the Senate have passed similar but not identical bills. Since both houses have acted but some work remains to be done to align the two bills, using reconciliation to implement the instructions in the budget resolution follows established congressional procedure.

This is more than a bit disingenuous. Conference reports are the usual way House and Senate bills are "reconciled," not companion reconciliation bills. After all, before Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, there was not going to be a reconciliation bill. More . . .

NYTimes:

A massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, shaking the capital of Santiago for 90 seconds and sending tsunami warnings along much of the Pacific basin. [. . .] The Associated Press quoted the Chile President Michele Bachelet as saying that a huge wave had swept into a populated area in the Robinson Crusoe Islands, 410 miles off the Chilean coast, but there were no immediate reports of major damage there.

[MORE . . .]

Apolo Ohno and Lindsay Vonn (skiing with a broken finger) are on tonight.

What's on your agenda this weekend?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Could this man be doing 8 years in prisonin Minnesota for a fatal accident because of a Toyota faulty gas pedal? (hat tip to Scribe.)

The convicted man is a recent Hmong immigrant. He insisted he did everything he could to avoid the accident and hit the brakes.

Lee, a recent Hmong immigrant with only about a year of driving experience, was driving his pregnant wife, 4-year-old daughter, father and brother home from church the afternoon of June 10, 2006, when their Camry zoomed up an Interstate 94 exit ramp in St. Paul. Police said it was traveling between 70 and 90 mph when it rear-ended an Oldsmobile stopped at a red light.

Good for the prosecutor who said he's willing to take another look at the case.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote this letter to Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner yesterday. It's a "butt out" letter on Congress' threat to ban funding on U.S. terror trials of those at Gitmo, but he also accused them of trying to block the Administration's intended trial of suspects in "reformed military commissions."

Too bad the commissions aren't really reformed. I guess he's talking about Thomson, Illinois Correctional Center, which is set to become Gitmo of the Midwest. Obama and Holder intend to use the facility both for trial by military commission and continued indefinate detention without charges.

On a related note, the ACLU filed habeas petitions today for four detainees at Bagram, AFB in Afghanistan. [More...]

NY Governor David Paterson has announced he won't run for re-election. It was only a week ago he announced his re-election campaign.

“There are times in politics when you have to know not to strive for service, but to step back, and that moment has come for me,” Mr. Paterson told a room full of reporters in an afternoon press conference. In the most dramatic moment, the governor raised his right hand and offered what he called a “personal oath,”

...“I have never abused my office, not now, not ever,” said Mr. Paterson, his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, by his side.

There are calls for him to resign now, which mostly seem to be a result of his alleged intervention in a staffer's domestic violence case: [More...]

Via FDL:

More curling at the Olympics. Jeralyn has the hammer now for posting the rest of the day.

This is an Open Thread.

Update 5:30 MT (Jeralyn): Just got back from court, I'll check the news and if anything happened, I'll be posting tonight, and have an open thread. Thanks, BTD!

Cenk Uygur repeats the call first made by mcjoan and tweeted out by Kos - let's have an up or down vote on the public option. And for those concerned that it will gum up the works, I repeat my own suggestion:

[I]t can be done by allowing an amendment to the base reconciliation bill for those concerned it will gum up the works. What's wrong with this approach? Nothing of course, except that pols will have to go on the record against a proposal very popular with the Dem base.

Time for an up or down vote on the public option.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias on President Obama's broken campaign promises, including on the public option:

I’ve heard Obama talk about how for progressive policy to have a chance of getting support from the American people he needs to try to rebuild people’s faith in the ability of the government to do useful things and do them well. I agree with that. But he also needs to rebuild people’s faith that engagement with the political process can accomplish something. The unseemly wriggling away from campaign promises he’s engaged in is going to achieve the reverse.

The problem is not with Obama on this score. The problem is with anyone who puts their faith in pols, any pols. My old refrain, pols are pols and do what they do: