Apparently, Rick Santorum has a Twitter problem along with his Google problem. (via)
Also, too: Dog pee can’t stop Santorum.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 51 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
Apparently, Rick Santorum has a Twitter problem along with his Google problem. (via)
Also, too: Dog pee can’t stop Santorum.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 134 Comments
This post is in: Education
ED had an interesting video on his site about educational reform, and it mentioned that ADHD is a bit of a regional phenomenon. I wondered if that was true, so I took a look and found that not only is ADHD regional, but it’s also a growing “epidemic”:
Here’s 2003 (click to embiggen).
This is 2007.
Apparently the Southeast is a hotbed of inability to sit still and pay attention, while the Southwest is stocked with well-behaved children.
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 80 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Assholes
Amid shouts from gangs of men and threats of beatings, police officers arrested more than a dozen gay rights activists, including a few foreigners, who attempted to hold a rally in Moscow on Saturday.
Among the arrested were Dan Choi, an American Iraq war veteran and gay rights campaigner, and Andy Thayer, a Chicago-based activist, who were in Moscow to support the rally. They were later released.
…
The Moscow authorities, who rarely tolerate antigovernment demonstrations, have vowed never to allow Russia’s small community of gay rights activists to hold a rally in the capital, though similar events have been permitted in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city.Last year, the European Court of Human Rights fined Russia more than $40,000 for its refusal to allow gay rights supporters to hold peaceful demonstrations in Moscow. This year’s rally was banned, nevertheless.
The fight for gay rights in the Western world has often begun at the end of a police baton.
Political oppression and the toleration of brutality will eventually be overcome, but I suspect there will be a lot more photos from Russia like the one above before that happens.
For those of us who take for granted the rights we have to sleep with whoever we want and profess our love in a public forum, this photo bears witness to the enforced silence and fear that others around the world suffer every day simply because they are gay.
Photo: Reuters/Mikhail Voskresensky.
Text added after initial posting. My apologies for just posting the picture without explanation. I’m getting absent minded – Sarah.
by Dennis G.| 48 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment
A few days ago, an environmentalist who thinks Climate Change is big problem got an opinion piece in the Washington Post. His name is Bill McKibben and I think he managed to get it pass Fred Hiatt with snark. For example:
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history).
No, that doesn’t mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected. [snip]
Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. [snip]
It’s very important to stay calm.
Somehow, this shrill attack on Fred’s pals managed to slip onto the editorial pages, but it was a few days ago and nobody really noticed. We do not have to think about Climate Change anymore because Al Gore is fat, and also too, Ayn Rand dreams of magic metal. Bill McKibben is just shrill. He rejects wingnutopia talking points in favor of science and we all know that science and reality have a liberal bias.
Sure, there are some shrill folks who worry that these extreme weather patterns are in sync with the predictions of climate change, but we do not have to worry about them because George Will said so.
I think Hiatt was drunk and a copy boy slipped it in.
And with that let’s go to an Open Thread.
Cheers
This post is in: Bleg
Somehow I have lost the ability to use the ’embed’ function on YouTube… I can still load a clip and watch it, no problem, but when I hit the ‘Share’ button my machine goes into the Infinite White Screen of Nothingness. I’m using Firefox 3.xx, and I’m guessing some subroutine has corrupted itself / been trojaned?
Do any of you tech wizards have a solution other than ‘purge your hard drive and reload everything’ and / or ‘add more memory’?
ETA: Riggsveda for the win, and thanks to everyone who participated!
by DougJ| 65 Comments
This post is in: Politics, We Are All Mayans Now
I’ve come to realize that it’s pathetic for me to to hope that Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann will get into the Republican primary. My support for anything that pisses off David Brooks is no better than conservatives’ support or anything that pisses off liberals. Anyway, I suspect that Steve M. has it right on Palin ’12:
If I had to guess, I’d say she’s never going to announce a run, she’s never going to announce that she’s not going to run, she’s going to threaten to jump into the race until the last conceivable second, and even then she’s going to threaten to declare herself a candidate at a brokered convention as long as the race is in flux. Oh, and she’ll also never declare herself a third-party candidate, but she’ll never stop floating rumors that she might become one.
by DougJ| 42 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment, We Are All Mayans Now
Sometimes I want to go home, sit in a hot bath, and open my veins. A self-described liberal at the liberal Washington Post:
But the killing of Osama bin Laden four weeks ago has revived the old debate about whether torture works. Could it be that “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed during the George W. Bush administration helped find bin Laden’s now-famous courier and track him to the terrorist in chief’s now-infamous lair?
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and current administration officials say no. Former attorney general Michael Mukasey and former vice president Dick Cheney say yes.
Joe Nocera from the liberal New York Times:
[T]he Democratic Party might be well served in trying to use the Ryan plan to bury their political opponents, the country itself is not. The debate we need is not about whether Medicare should be reformed, but how. […]It would be nice if we could treat the Ryan plan not as an object of derision but as a launching off point for a serious debate.
Serious people think Dick Cheney and Cheney’s own personal Bieber may be right about everything. Only a hippie would disagree with them.
I wonder if European media sounded this way during the run-up to World War I.