BarbaWire, April 12

Song of the Day: "The Girl's Attractive" by Diamond Knights

Get Over It
Square-jawed crybabies Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and their pal Divya Narendra were shot down in their attempt to undo the $65 million settlement they made with Facebook. These are the guys that say they Mark Zuckerberg stole the concept for Facebook from them. You remember them from the movie. They settled a few years ago, but then tried to call a do-over because they said Facebook misrepresented its value. In case you forgot, Facebook has a market value of $65 billion. The judge is pretty sassy in his ruling. I wonder who will play the judge in the sequel? More.
Tyler already tweeted that they are going to appeal.

Cover-Up Crime
France’s burqa ban is now in effect and a couple of women have already been arrested. Their arrests seem largely symbolic, since this law will rarely be enforced, experts said. This seems pretty screwy, anyway. How do you distinguish between a woman wearing burqa worn for religious reasons or someone very bundled up in the winter? Come to Chicago in January – you’ll see a lot of women with only their eyes exposed. #sogladitiswarmingup! More.

Japan Update
Japan’s nuclear disaster level might be upped to level seven…out of seven. It would tie Chernobyl. That’s not good. More.

Mitt-In
Looks like Mitt Romney is going to run for president. I don’t completely dislike him, but I have two problems. He makes it seem like the current economic malaise – ok, the current economic mess – is President Obama’s fault. I hear ya, Roms, some of his programs haven’t worked as well as they should have, but let us not forget how many jobs we’ve lost from the total collapse of the residential real estate sector. Those didn’t happen on Barry’s watch, dude. Secondly, whatcha lookin’ at, buddy? I’m over here. More.

Politico has a good breakdown of the budget.
Read here.

Terrorist Caught
Commit this story to memory and think of it every time you take off your shoes at the airport and prepare to have the TSA sucios check out your goodies. Still, as my friend Kevin once pointed out, catching terrorists at the airport is a little late. More.

Professor Madoff
The Financial Times has a great profile of Bernie Madoff, where the imprisoned Ponzi schemer talks about his firm’s shift from a legitimate business to one build on using new investor money to pay old investors. I've always been curious about that element. My favorite parts? That he reads Danielle Steel novels and might be teaching a business ethics class at Harvard or Northwestern. Hey, if Bristol Palin can push abstinence, why can’t Berns teach ethics? More.