The facts of Caperton v. Massey are startling, to put it mildly. In 1998, Hugh Caperton filed a lawsuit against Massey Coal in state court in West Virginia over a business deal gone sour. The jury sided with Caperton, and Massey Coal was ordered to pay $50 million in damages. Massey Coal appealed the verdict at the same time that the campaign for seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court was heating up. Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Coal, donated $3 million to support Brent Benjamin’s bid for election to the high court ("one dollar for every West Virginian," Blankenship boasted—and it’s more like $1.66). Blankenship’s contribution amounted to 60 percent of the total spent in Benjamin’s bid for election. And it paid off when Benjamin won a seat on the court.

Caperton’s lawyers filed a motion asking Justice Benjamin to recuse himself. But Justice Benjamin refused, explaining that there was "no reasonable basis" for doubting his impartiality. He then cast the decisive vote to reverse the $50 million verdict against Massey Coal, transforming Blankenship’s $3 million from a generous contribution to a very wise investment.

You may wonder how a judge with such an obvious conflict of interest gets to hear a case involving the man who bankrolled his candidacy for office. The answer? In West Virginia, judges decide for themselves whether a conflict is serious enough to justify recusal. As Slate’s Amanda Frost notes, that‘s a bit like allowing the “fox to decide whether he should be guarding the henhouse.” Now, the US Supreme Court will (hopefully) remind West Virginia that justice requires a somewhat more restrictive policy.

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. So I won’t.

But as often happens on Youtube, I almost immediately discovered a video that did the “human space invaders” thing a whole lot better.

Turns out, there’s a whole series of videos that uses an auditorium and stop-motion video to whimsically recreate old school video games like Pong and Tetris. Dubbed the GAME OVER Project, the group schedules their collaborative art projects at different art and film festivals around Europe. Once the auditorium is booked, they use festival attendees in their shoots and later screen the films for the same audience:

GAME OVER is one of the art projects developed by the French-Swiss artist Guillaume REYMOND (NOTsoNOISY creative agency). It consists of a series of collaborative animation movies which revive some of the very first video games. The pixels are replaced by a group of real human-beings that are moving from seat to seat in a theatre during about 4 to 6 hours. Each "pixel" has its own rules and decides what s/he wants to do for each picture. Once all these pictures are turned into a short animation movie, a giant human-scale video game unfolds "live".

Pretty cool.

Page 279 — Rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands

Page 280 — Mine rescue / mine safety

Page 290 — Motorsports racing track facility

Page 290 — Hurricane Katrina and Gulf opportunity zone

Page 295 — Wool modifications

Page 296 — Permanent authority for undercover operations

Page 297 — Child tax credit

Page 300 — Children and wooden arrows

How do you bail out an economy that’s been wrecked by crippling deficits, a weakened dollar, and the fast-rising price of oil? Give ourselves a racetrack!

Hat tip: Mike the Actuary

Jack Thompson made a name for himself by repeatedly suing videogame makers using the same thoroughly discredited legal theory: that video games incited kids to commit violent acts, and that game studios were therefore liable for the kids’ actions.

Well, Florida has now disbarred Jack Thompson, in part for falsely accusing his enemies of distributing child porn. Or more generally, he’s getting the boot because he’s a crazy sumbitch. Now, Thompson has become the subject of a sub-hilarious Twitter meme in which gleeful geeks proclaim: “Jack Thompson is so disbarred, he _____.”

Most of them aren’t very funny, but it’s still an awesome way for the haters to justifiably celebrate the most high-profile disbarment since Arkansas (and the US Supreme Court) gave Bill Clinton the boot .

From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson
Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Via the Wall Street Journal