November 2010
89 posts
“But of course, really, Fox Business is my favorite and Fox generally, anything...”
– -Sen. Joe Lieberman
WatchIn this funny and insightful talk from TEDxHouston, builder Dan Phillips tours us through a dozen homes he’s built in Texas using recycled and reclaimed materials in wildly creative ways. Brilliant, low-tech design details will refresh your own creative drive.
Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff
American power: Another day in the life of the... →
On the evening before the holiday of Thanksgiving, with well over a quarter-million American troops stationed around the globe in over 150 nations and territories, with the nation’s budget buckling under the strain of supporting our military obligations, and with tensions on the Korean peninsula arguably higher than at any time since the armistice of 1953, it seems as apt a time as any to ask...
WatchZainab Salbi: Women, wartime and the dream of peace
“Our program covers all categories of disabilities — mobility, hearing,...”
– Doctors question TSA’s use of pat downs, body scans
I loled.
“For example, Chief Justice John Roberts in a public employee privacy case before...”
– Breyer says justices must adapt to Facebook world
What the fuck has Obama done so far? →
“In a recent CBS News poll, 4 out of 5 Americans supported the use of full-body...”
– 4 out of 5 Americans would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
CNN.com / Benjamin Franklin
Study: Few Afghans know of 9/11, reason for war →
The report by The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) policy think-tank showed 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.
“The lack of awareness of why we are there contributes to the high levels of negativity toward the NATO military operations and made the job of the Taliban...
“The President of the United States can unilaterally order the assassination of...”
– Yglesias » Living in America
“According to a new Pew poll, only 46 percent of those surveyed correctly...”
– Poll: Less than half know GOP won the House
How Senator Al Franken Got Serious About Congress →
In July 2009, after a cliff-hanger of an election and an ugly court battle over the results, Al Franken finally arrived in the United States Senate. Eager to lay the groundwork for legislative accomplishments, the author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot looked for common ground with his new GOP colleagues. In the case of Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, that common ground was music. In...
WatchAuret van Heerden: Making global labor fair | Video on TED.com
Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands... →
Despite a stubbornly sour national economy congressional members’ personal wealth collectively increased by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to a new study by the Center for Responsive Politics of federal financial disclosures released earlier this year.
And while some members’ financial portfolios lost value, no need to bemoan most lawmakers’ financial lot: Nearly half of...
Diseases of Affluence →
Here is our normal: 40 percent of North American adults have metabolic syndrome. The syndrome is caused by being fat, even at levels North Americans would not recognize as abnormal. Obesity prompts the receptors that insulin acts upon to become numb to its effects. As we grow fatter, and insulin resistance proceeds, higher and higher levels of insulin are necessary to get the sugar out of the...
“Today, Senate Republicans voted unanimously against legislation to close the pay...”
– Senate Republicans Vote Unanimously Against Bill To Help Guarantee Fair Pay For Women
Hey MAMA GRIZZLIES, this is the party for you!
Tea Partiers: The Most Oppressed Minority? →
Tea party critics won’t be surprised to hear that 61 percent of people who identify with the movement said discrimination against whites “is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” (White evangelicals also saw doors slamming in the faces of white people, with 57 percent agreeing that discrimination against people like themselves was equal to that...
“And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is...”
– the missing portion of Tina Fey’s acceptance speech, which was snipped by PBS from last night’s broadcast of the Mark Twain Prize ceremony. (via washingtonpoststyle)
“15.5 million children are living in poverty in the United States, that’s...”
– The greatest, freest, richest nation on earth.
Our Banana Republic →
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42...
Obama's moderate health-care law →
People tend to form their impressions of how liberal or conservative something is by looking at how much partisan activity there is around it. And there was, of course, a lot of partisan activity around Obama’s signature legislative effort. But if you believe “liberal” and “conservative” refer to coherent schools of ideological thought, the health-care bill was the...
The Big Lie →
It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse - the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus - were described by the right as...
Driver in fatal Conn. crash sues victim's parents →
A driver who’s serving a manslaughter sentence for striking and killing a 14-year-old boy is suing the victim’s parents, blaming them for their son’s death because they allowed him to ride his bike in the street without a helmet.
Matthew Kenney’s parents, Stephen and Joanne, sued 48-year-old driver David Weaving shortly after he was sentenced last year to 10 years in...
WatchPresident Obama takes a minute to chat with our future robot overlords
Your Child Left Behind →
We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own...
Human rights groups press Obama on child soldiers... →
Twenty-nine leading human rights organizations wrote to President Obama on Friday to express their disappointment with his decision last week to waive sanctions against four countries the State Department has identified as using child soldiers.
The human rights and child advocacy community was not consulted before the White House announced its decision on Oct. 25 to waive penalties under the...
Cellphones and Cancer - A Far-From-Settled Issue →
WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body. I’m paraphrasing here. But the legal departments of cellphone manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn’t want iPhones...
Sarah Palin's 'refudiate' named 2010 Word of the... →
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced Monday that “refudiate,” a word made famous by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, had won its 2010 Word of the Year award.
“Refudiate” became an instant classic back in July when national media and Palin watchers ridiculed her for using a non-existent word that seemed to be a cross between “refute” and “repudiate.”
“From a strictly lexical...
“And over time that will help us be more targeted about what content choices we...”
– Microsoft exec caught in privacy snafu, says Kinect might tailor ads to you — Engadget
Well that is horrifying.
Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget - Interactive... →
Look, I just fixed the problem in like 2 minutes so I really don’t see what the big deal is.
Democrats and the rule of law →
If it were true — as most Obama defenders argued — that giving civilian trials to accused Terrorists is not merely a good option, but required by the Constitution, the rule of law, and our values, then isn’t it logically and necessarily true that Obama’s refusal to grant such trials constitutes a violation of our Constitution, our rule of law and our values? And if so,...
News flash: Deadly terrorism existed before 9/11 →
Here’s a scenario:
Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.
While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300...
Two economies: U.S. has a Big Money and a Average... →
According to a Wall Street Journal survey released last week, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
But there’s another American economy, and it’s not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday’s jobs report showed 159,000 new...
Goldman Sachs’s Tax Rate Drops to 1%, or $14... →
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.
The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying...
Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of... →
Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions...
Aristocracy still owns a third of Britain's land →
More than a third of Britain’s land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years.
In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue-blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates.
A group of 36,000 individuals - only 0.6% of the population -...
