NotesBut a major online backlash has evolved, with everyone from lawmakers to Web-freedom advocates to some of technology's biggest players calling it a greedy and dangerous overreach that could have a chilling effect on free speech and innovation.Unfurl
NotesItem number 3,785 in the Republicans-really-don't-care-about-the-deficit file is this from Speaker John Boehner rejecting yet another offer of concessions from Democrats in the Super Congress negotiations. Unfurl
NotesOn Tuesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane. Unfurl
NotesâSomething funny happened on my way to a transportation meeting in Northgate. As I got off the bus at 3rd and Pine I heard helicopters above. Knowing that the problems of New York would certainly precipitate action by Occupy Seattle, I thought I better check it out. Especially since only yesterday the City Government made a grandiose gesture to protect free speech. Well free speech does have its limits as I found out as the cops shoved their bicycles into the crowd and simultaneously pepper sprayed the so captured protesters. If it had not been for my Hero (Iraq Vet Caleb) I would have been down on the ground and trampled. This is what democracy looks like. It certainly left an impression on the people who rode the No. 1 bus home with me. In the womenâs movement there were signs which said: âScrew us and we multiply.ââUnfurl
NotesElisabeth Hasselbeck had quite a bone to pick with Bill Maher on The View this morning about a joke he'd told about her months ago, and pick it she did. One would think he'd mind being attacked, but on tonight's Late Show, Maher told David Letterman he was actually pleased with how she reacted: "Thank you, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, for making me look good!"
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NotesRemember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But itâs also now confirmed that itâs now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.) FeedUnfurl
NotesIn aggressively clearing them from the park, Bloomberg spared them that fate. Zuccotti Park wasnât emptied by weather, or the insufficient commitment of protesters. It was cleared by pepper spray and tear gas. It was cleared by police and authority. It was cleared by a billionaire mayor from Wall Street and a request by one of Americaâs largest commercial real estate developers. It was cleared, in other words, in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next. Unfurl
NotesThe irony is that they are just playing into the hands of those in the 1% who want to see this cultural uprising squashed. They are the Kent to Prof. Terry Hathaway.Unfurl
NotesThereâs really no arguing with the consensus view that, after repeatedly courting calamity in prior debates, Rick Perry did grave damage to his presidential campaign Wednesday night. First the guy says that anyone who disagrees with him on illegal immigration must not have a heart, then he gets all twisted up while trying to attack Mitt Romney, and finally comes this new gaffe about ⊠um ⊠hang on a second ⊠wait, itâll come to me.EmbedUnfurl
Notes In other words, we've got five years to make a dramatic shift in the sorts of power plants we're building, or there's no way we're going to limit climate change to stated goals. It's also worth noting that the IEA ran a "New Policies" scenario that takes into account all current pledges by national governments. It resulted in much higher emissions and a likely temperature rise of 3.5°C. Still, if the New Policies targets aren't implemented, then the IEA estimates that we would be on track for a rise of 6°C. Unfurl
Notes<blockquote>After our story, the Capitol Fax, an Illinois political website, contacted Walsh for a response. Walsh wrote in an e-mail that he was âworking on an empty stomach and had a quicker fuse than normal.â Despite the fact Walshâs biggest campaign benefactors come from the banking industry â $132,329 in campaign contributions from the finance industry and $18,400 from bank employees â the freshman congressman claims that heâs âno pal of the big banks.â</blockquote>
I guess along with his government healthcare, we need to make sure he has handlers that keep his blood sugar level up.Unfurl
NotesAfter taking office, Clinton immediately seized the mantle of fiscal discipline from Republicans. Rather than simply trimming the federal deficit, as his GOP predecessors had done, he set out to balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt. To do so, he hiked the top tax bracket to nearly 40 percent and boosted the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. "It cost him both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections," says Chafee, the former GOP senator. "But taming the deficit led to the best economy America's ever had." Following the tax hikes of 1993, the economy grew at a brisk clip of 3.2 percent, creating more than 11 million jobs. Average wages ticked up, and stocks soared by 78 percent. By the spring of 1997, the federal budget was headed into the black.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes What would banking look like if bonuses were eliminated? It would not be too different from what it was like when I was a bank intern in the 1980s, before the wave of deregulation that culminated in the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that had separated investment and commercial banking. Before then, bankers and lenders were boring âlifers.â Banking was bland and predictable; the chairmanâs income was less than that of todayâs junior trader. Investment banks, which paid bonuses and werenât allowed to lend, were partnerships with skin in the game, not gamblers playing with other peopleâs money. Unfurl
Notes Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) predicted a third political party will emerge in response to Americans' economic frustrations and said it might as well be called "the Fed-Up Party," Reuters reports.Unfurl
NotesYou know what, Mitch? If you don't want to look "intransigent" ... then don't be intransigent! If you don't want to look like you're sabotaging the economy ... then don't sabotage the economy! And if you think rejecting the jobs bill makes you look bad ... then don't reject it!Unfurl
NotesA while back, a memo surfaced that reportedly came from a Fox News executive, in which he directed his staff to always present opposing views on something we can essentially regard as a fact: our planet has been getting warmer. There has been plenty of anecdotal indications that this strategy has been carried out, including a truly bizarre incident in which Bill Nye, on the channel in order to discuss volcanic activity on the Moon, was asked if these volcanoes raised doubts about climate change.Unfurl
NotesFreshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is known for his anti-Obama rhetoric on cable television and his inability to pay his child support payments. But during a recent meeting with constituents in his Chicago-area suburban district, Walsh lost his cool when several attendees asked about why banks have so much power in government. At one point, Walsh even threatened to eject a man who asked Walsh about the revolving door of bank lobbyists infiltrating Congress and financial regulatory agencies. Unfurl
Notes"This is a truly vital piece of legislation that needs to be approved in a bipartisan manner as swiftly as possible, and if that means passing it one single linguistic element at a time, then so be it," the president told reporters, claiming he and Republican lawmakers had already agreed on several synonyms that could be substituted for various controversial modifiers.Unfurl
NotesKayvan Sabeghi, a veteran of the US Army Rangers, is in the ICU at Oakland's Highland General Hospital after a clash with Oakland PD during the Occupy Oakland protests. Sabeghi claims he was "jumped" by OPD officers who severely beat him and subsequently denied him medical treatment. Unfurl
NotesWhat we're seeing here is another piece of evidence that Republicans are more committedâmuch more committedâto opposing Barack Obama than to doing even the most basic, routine things to keep the economy going and keep bridges from collapsing under us. Filibusters like this are exactly why 50 percent of people believe Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy. (And, of course, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are joining them.)Unfurl
Notes"I think Congress got it right, but I think the courts are getting it wrong," Pariser said during a panel discussion at the NY Entertainment & Technology Law Conference. "I think the courts are interpreting Congress' statute in a manner that is entirely too restrictive of content owners' rights and too open to [Internet] service providers.
"We might need to go to Congress at some point for a fix," Pariser added. "Not because the statute was badly drafted but because the interpretation has been so hamstrung by court decisions." FeedUnfurl
NotesThe tone of the White House's response to many of the petitions has spawned the latest rapidly-rising request for a White House response, so far signed by over 3,000 registered site users. A less sarcastic, but equally critical petition criticizing the White House's treatment of the petitions has reached 13,000 signatures.Unfurl
NotesIn many respects, austerity feeds on itself. If the country needs to invest in education and rebuilding infrastructure to regain competitiveness, as many economists of varying ideological stripes argue, those initiatives are in large part precluded in a political environment that places top priority on deficit and debt reduction. Retrenchment, in effect, becomes a noose, choking off prospects for growth.EmbedUnfurl
NotesYes, yes. All these plots are "unrelated." We can't possibly blame them on a right-wing ideology that revels in paranoid claims about the future of the country and how extraordinary measures are required to save it from whatever the latest bogeyman is (usually, revolving around some not-conservative figure being the ideological equivalent of Stalin, for reasons that are, shall we say, never well explained), because that would be mean. We can't blame the authors and promoters of far-right fantasias (the men in this story were inspired by a fictional novel about murdering government workers fer freedomz, etc) because that would be "persecuting" them or some such, and heaven knows the right wing feels "persecuted" enough already. And heaven forfend anyone point out how very, very often these stories have a Fox News connection or find that the alleged terrorist had written long, rambling messages on some well-known conservative blog.Unfurl
NotesTheyâre fighting you, winning big-time, and youâre the loser. Itâs just one generation since conservatives put Reagan in office: In those three short decades the income and wealth of the top 1% has tripled while the income of the bottom 99% of all Americans has stagnated or dropped.
...
Yes, folks, America really is under attack daily. We are fighting on the defense in an historic class warfare. Yes, the Rich Class really did start this war. And yes, they really are winning, big-time. And yes, they are addicted to winning at all costs, to get richer and richer just for the sake of getting richer and richer. Unfurl
NotesYou asked, The White House answered: "The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race"FeedUnfurl
NotesThe debate over spending among Republicans in Congress has become so intense that one Senate Republican leader has started wearing a flak jacket to meetings.Unfurl
NotesIn the middle of an Occupy Chicago teach-in this week, traders at the Chicago Board of Trade dumped several sheets of paper on top of the heads of protesters below. Demonstrators were angered to find out they were showered with employment applications for McDonaldâs.Unfurl
NotesRosalind S. Helderman / Washington Post:Senate blocks $60 billion infrastructure plan, another part of Obama jobs bill â The Senate shot down another piece of President Obama's $447 billion jobs bill Thursday, as a stalemated Congress goes through the motions of attempting legislation to spur...FeedUnfurl
NotesThe bottom line: A family with an income level of $40,000 to $50,000 would pay $3,407 more a year in taxes, while families making $500,000 to $1 million a year would pay on average $80,315 less, according to the Tax Policy Center.Unfurl
NotesTwo-thirds of likely Iowa Republican caucus goers earning less than $50,000 a year believe they personally would be better off or in the same situation under Herman Cainâs 9-9-9 tax plan, The Des Moines Registerâs new Iowa Poll shows.
Research-group reviews of the plan have found that most families making $100,000 or less would pay thousands of dollars more each year.Unfurl
Notes Many in the tech industry believe the Chamber is doing the bidding of Hollywood and other deep-pocketed members of the content industry. The Chamber believes the IP bills are needed to stop rogue sites from profiting off the content its members spend millions making.Unfurl
Notes<blockquote>As long as the CIA â now backed by the military and the State Department â has a free hand to wage the secret drone war in tribal Pakistan, it will continue to bottle up al-Qaida and its allies, degrading the threat they pose. They will also kill more Tariqs and Waheeds. And because the drone war remains a classified CIA program, the CIA will not have to account for its actions to anybody, least of all the U.S. or Pakistani publics.</blockquote>
This headline is wussy. Impersonal DRONES don't kill people, assassin pilots at remote consoles kill people. This isn't Terminator, yet.Unfurl
NotesRemember when President Obama made the same alligator moat joke? Â Rick Perry called it reprehensible back then. Rick Perry yesterday, mocking the idea of building a fence along the border: HANNITY: You don't need a fence, in your view? PERRY: Oh, I think there's places that strategic fencing.....Unfurl
Notes Nancy Cordes / CBS News:Boehner: Debt deal will include new tax revenues â House Speaker John Boehner addressed one of the biggest sticking points for the 12 member Congressional âsupercommitteeâ today, acknowledging that any bipartisan agreement will need to include some new tax revenue.FeedUnfurl
NotesIâm all for sorting out the rules that govern the entertainmentâs supply chain, but letâs keep some perspective here: when we ââsolveââ copyright problems at the expense of the Internet, we solve them at the expense of 21st-century society as a whole.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"Everybody believes we have infrastructure deficiencies and more needs to be spent to repair, replace and in some cases build new infrastructure," Boehner said in a speech. "The problem is nobody wants to pay for it."Unfurl
Notes Today, the Senate is talking about whether they should vote to debate a jobs bill. Another Republican filibuster looms, in which the Republican Senate won't even vote to allow the Senate to debate and vote on doing a little something to try to save this economy. In this madness, Democratic leadership hopes to at the very least shame Republicans and possibly get a few of them to peel off from the Republican agenda of wrecking everything in sight and stealing all the rest. Unfurl
NotesJUDY WOODRUFF: Do you view China as a potential military threat to the United States?
HERMAN CAIN: I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States. [...] They've indicated that they're trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.Unfurl
NotesRepublicans may be trying to focus their messaging on jobs and the economy â and hammering President Barack Obama for campaigning â but they still have time for some red meat base-baiting on the House floor.Unfurl
NotesIn a letter to Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and 182 other House Democrats signaled that including controversial policy provisions known as riders could again risk a government shutdown, and the lawmakers demanded that those measures be removed.Unfurl
NotesProblem is, there is no âJeremy.â The quote was from a satirical piece by columnist Mark Schatzker, entitled âOccupy Toronto: The one-week anniversary party.â Above that headline was the word, âSatire.âUnfurl
Anti-piracy bill meets Web-freedom backlash - CNN.com
How Pizza Became A Vegetable Through The Magic Of Influence-Peddling
BBC drops Frozen Planet's climate change episode to sell show better abroad - Telegraph
The Other Problem With Perry's 'Oops' Moment - NYTimes.com
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich | Politics News | Rolling Stone
RIAA lawyer says DMCA may need overhaul | Media Maverick - CNET News
3,000 sign whitehouse.gov petition seeking "vapid response," cookies
The Politics of Austerity - NYTimes.com
There's No Such Thing As Aliens | MetaFilter
memeorandum: Senate blocks $60 billion infrastructure plan, another part of Obama jobs bill (Rosalind S. Helderman/Washington Post)
Iowa Poll: Many think Cainâs 9-9-9 plan would help them | Iowa Caucuses
Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Itâs Time to Stop Talking About Copyright