Thursday briefs

Chuck Schumer, defending Big Business against the little guy: Only he’s with the publishers and Apple who colluded to set higher prices on ebooks. He’s getting slammed at Ars Technica, even though its Apple editor wrote a fairly favorable(to Apple) version of the lawsuit. Here’s the condensed version: Apple and five of the Big Six publishers colluded to set prices for ebooks and force Amazon to accept them. The DOJ is suing them for collusion, because it violates this little thing known as anti-trust when companies get together to set prices. The booksellers and Apple are saying, “Look over there! Amazon monopoly!” in order to deflect attention from the fact that they colluded to set prices so that consumers would pay more for ebooks. Apple and the Five are being supported by Scott Turow and the Authors Guild, who seem to think that their job is to push publishers’ lines, not tell publishers that their ebook royalties of 17.5% (vs. Amazon’s 35-70%) suck. It’s good to know that our elected officials care so very much about consumers that they’ll defend a colluding group of publishers whose aim was to keep the price of ebooks artificially high.

Is this the end of little Bashar? The Dorktator is in hiding. Yeah, I’d be hiding too, if my brother-in-law had just gotten blown up by the enemy.

You say that like it’s a bad thing: The AP published a report painting Israel as a country that will refuse to allow Syrian refugees flee battles into the Golan Heights. You read plenty of things like this:

Israel’s defense minister: We’ll block Syrian refugees
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, standing within earshot of fighting in Syria, said Thursday that Israel would stop Syrian refugees from entering the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights if they try to flee there.

With fighting licking at the Israeli-held frontier, Barak observed that Syrian refugees, who have already started fleeing to Turkey and Jordan, might also start streaming toward the Golan.

“If we have to stop waves of refugees we will stop them,” he said in the statement.

But you don’t find out to the very end why Israel is different from Jordan and Turkey. Here’s a hint: Israel is still technically at war with Syria. what does the AP say?

While Syria and Israel are bitter enemies, the border has been mostly quiet since 1974.

Right. Another piece of objective journalism from the MSM about Israel.

It was a suicide bomber: Apparently, Israeli security in Bulgaria has a few holes. The bomber cased the buses for over an hour before boarding one and exploding the bomb. They have video. Also, he used a forged U.S. passport. Do you think we’ll get as much outrage over this as we did over the forged passports used to assassinate a Hamas terrorist in Dubai, or is the world’s phony outrage only in view when Israelis use fake passports and ignored when terrorists use them? (Of course, that is a rhetorical question.) The Israelis who could travel are home now. Iran, of course, denies responsibility. By the way, the bomber was using a Michigan driver’s license. Gee. Detroit is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the U.S. I wonder if Detroit Muslim groups will issue a statement condemning the bombing. Or CAIR. Nope, just checked. Nothing.

However, an investigation carried out by Bulgarian authorities in conjunction with the FBI, CIA and Israeli authorities now points to a suicide bomber described as a Cauacasian man with long hair and sports attire, according to the report.

Let’s see who it turns out to be.