February 2012
41 posts
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joshsternberg reblogged your link:
U.S. House Votes to Make Protests Illegal
Ladies and gentlemen, the people we elected to Congress are idiots. Maybe we should protest this?
The copy-editor in me would cover the story as follows: Three House members vote against taking away right to speak
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U.S. House Votes to Make Protests Illegal →
Sorry Goldstandardians: Gold Is Not Money
politicalprof:
Gold is a naturally occurring substance that human beings choose to dig out of the ground or pick up on the surface, usually in or near riverbeds in which running water has exposed previously subsurface gold. It has historically been valued for its perceived beauty, its malleability, and its comparative scarceness. It is because of this last condition, its scarceness, that some...
WSJ: Time for a Good Old-Fashioned Nervous Breakdown?
After ending an unhappy marriage and getting laid off twice, Hannah Shapiro last year found herself alone with two small children to support in Miami, far from her family in England. “I was so scared, I was paralyzed,” she says. “My heart was racing. I would take the kids to school and get back into bed.”
After a...
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"Much has been made of Democratic efforts to turn... →
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At the risk of feeding the trolls, let’s all remember that what Rick Santorum calls “indoctrination,” normal people call “knowing facts.”
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Morality, Not Markets, Is The Heart of Healthcare →
Deregulation to make market work ‘better’ in healthcare, and to ‘empower’ consumers in the market, really only **serves one purpose: to strengthen the position of those market participants with the most power and information, the insurers. **
When politicians talk about applying free market principles to our healthcare system, therefore, what they are really trying to do is further empower...
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“I don’t believe in an America where the separation between church and...”
– Rick Santorum, who, it is relevant to point out, is leading the GOP primary polls.
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“The system doesn’t work, it’s broke today. The end of insurance companies, the...”
– Mark Bertolini, CEO and Chairman of Aetna Insurance.
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New thought: Is the time you spend writing an opinion column inversely proportional to how good it ends up being?
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Someone wrote a book about Jeremy Lin in 72 hours →
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A company retained me to help publicize its lawsuit against its bank that alleges fraud and breach of contract. Here is our statement.
25% of super PAC money coming from just 5 rich... →
Five wealthy people, led by Dallas industrialist Harold Simmons and Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, have donated nearly $1 of every $4 flowing to the super PACs raising unlimited money in this year’s presidential race, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
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Why I hired a journalist to run my company blog →
He reigns me in when it comes to tooting my own horn. He helps me practice some restraint and diplomacy when I feel compelled to blast my competitors. He makes sure that I’m not just repeating headlines but focusing my thoughts around particular news events.
He’s making me relevant.
More importantly, he’s charging me a fraction of what a PR firm might charge me for a bunch of other services...
Austan Goolsbee publishes op-ed about Jeremy Lin. →
There are at least three things in that sentence that I like.
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The Latest Market Craze: Stock Trading Robots... →
It appears that while we were busy over the past month spreading the Greek pre- and post-bankruptcy balance sheet, and otherwise torturing Excel (something we urge other financial journalists to try once in a while - go ahead, it doesn’t bite. In fact, it is almost as friendly as your favorite Powerpoint) our peer at such reputable financial publications as Forbes, and many others, were laying...
Oh, Hello There, Ezra Klein →
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Awhile ago I wrote:
Right now, if a company wants to spend, say, $200,000 next year to have a good blog, there isn’t one single provider they can use for that service. That company would have to piece together several service providers — content, design, public relations — to have an end product that’s worth paying for. Because PR and design firms don’t know how to legitimately create good...
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Rick Santorum’s mysterious, paradoxical manifesto,... →
This gets close to the Santorum paradox. On one level, he is a thoughtful conservative, wearing his erudition on his sleeve, bragging in his book about working with Senate Democrats (even Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton) to sponsor legislation that tried to achieve liberal goals through conservative institutions like the church and traditional families. But then, a few pages later, Santorum goes...
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“The suggestion that falling unemployment and that the revival of a major...”
– Alex Seitz-Wald of ThinkProgress
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The new Occupy Wall Street SuperPAC is more or less a joke, but it does make me wonder if a (semi)serious one would get much financial support, and if so what legislative or political causes it would use the money to promote.
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On this $26 billion dollar mortgage settlement
squashed:
Speaking tentatively, because I don’t have all the details I would like, I’m happy with this settlement. It’s huge. As in, it’s over three tines bigger than the huge tobacco settlement. Critically, it also preserves borrower’s rights to sue.
Here’s the bottom line: a dead bank on a platter doesn’t help anybody. Twenty-six billion in relief to struggling borrowers, however, is huge....
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“We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats.”
– Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), to CPAC attendees. CPAC is the largest annual gathering of conservative advocates. For the proper context to this remark, head over to the DNC website to read about the issues that DeMint says conservatives disagree with.
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“I do care about not 99 percent or 95 percent. I care about the very rich and the...”
– Rick Santorum, pledging his support for welfare for millionaires in a speech earlier this week. Keep talking. Please, keep on talking.
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I’ve been sarcastically applying quotes to Karen Handel’s former title, “vice president of public policy” of Susan G. Komen, because — objectively speaking — she was dispelling spectacularly bad public policy advice to the organization.
What would have been a more apt title for her?
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“Neither the decision nor the changes themselves [to cut off grants to Planned...”
– Karen Handel, former vice president of public policy for Susan G. Komen, in her resignation letter. Does anyone on the planet believe this?
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It’s all kinds of win when someone can explain global economics by using an example from physics. Ezra Klein writes:
In physics, the central problem is that separate sets of rules govern big things and small things. The workings of the big stuff are best described by the general theory of relativity. The small stuff works according to quantum mechanics. But on some basic level, this...
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patriciahandschiegel:
There is an article today about Google laying down internet infrastructure.
This above all is likely Google’s smartest move yet. While the internet feels open and that it belongs to the software side of the platform (those who create websites, apps, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) it’s actually owned by carriers. That means it’s not really really open. Only those who own...
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The Washington Post tries a new weapon to fight... →
For example, in a front-page story in December, Donna St. George reported that black students in the D.C. area were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites. That story attracted 3,736 comments, more than 2,000 of those by 9 o’clock in the morning.
With prodding from the interactivity team, St. George struck while the iron was hot. She began engaging commenters directly...
For their next public demonstration of disrespect, Republican leaders will demand the president come to their homes and do their yardwork for them.
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