the politics

Minority Babies Make up Majority in U.S. Births (by PBSNewsHour)

I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM LEAVE ME ALONE I CAN QUIT WHENEVER I WANT

‘The Information Diet’: More ‘Conscious Consumption’ Needed? (by PBSNewsHour)

(via The Best Argument For Birth Control - Jest Video)

inothernews:

1. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
2. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
3. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
4. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
5. “Is this all we have — water?  Can I get, like, some Gatorade or something?”
6. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
7. “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”
8. “Oh shit — did I really allow one of our European investment arms to blow through three billion dollars?  Well I guess I know why y’all want regulators up my ass, but this sort of shit happens all the fucking time.”
9. “Oops.  Can you please strike my last set of remarks from the record?  I was thinking out loud.  It happens after I drink.  Drink Pepsi, that is.  Pepsi and rum.”
10. “Also, on the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer further questions based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.”

kateoplis:

“THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not…

"Back before the housing bubble burst, sending America’s economy into a tailspin, hedge fund manager and former CitiGroup banker Bruce Rose was marketing himself as the guy who single-handedly invented subprime mortgage-backed securities. Indeed, Carrington Investment Partners, part of a cluster of related companies founded by Rose, competed with the big investment banks to package and sell mortgage debt to investors. Now Rose and his companies are positioning themselves to feed off the tail end of the meltdown their business practices helped create, joining a foreclosure-to-rental trend that experts say could hurt homeowners even more."

This, via Josh Harkinson, is your morning must-read. (via motherjones)

(Source: think-progress)

"

The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.

And he would learn later that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”

Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.

“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”

The New York Times, “Leading Psychiatrist Apologizes for Study Supporting Gay ‘Cure’” (via inothernews)

motherjones:

Yeah, what he said.

"I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American."

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colorado), speaking to supporters. Coffman later said he “misspoke.”

Seriously, why don’t these guys just buy one of our mugs?

(via barackobama)

(Source: officialssay, via barackobama)

i loled

cheatsheet:

AP: Facebook stock closes at $38.23, a gain of 23 cents, on its first day as a public company. (h/t @ShortFormErnie)

(Source: thesochillnetwork)

Mitt Romney: “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.”

(Source: youtube.com)

lolol

(Source: youtube.com)

"Batali admits the challenge was difficult at first, but he has adapted. Instead of eating expensive items such as filet mignon or truffle oil, he chooses beans, rice, chicken, and pasta."

SO BRAVE!

Celebrity Chef Mario Batali Goes on Food Stamps Budget

(via Mr. Fish: I Believe)