This is pretty hilarious: The survey also revealed some serious gaps in the knowledge base of Americans following foreign policy. For example, although 78 percent of respondents claimed to “closely” follow international affairs, an equal 78 percent said they had “never heard” of Ban Ki-moon when asked about him. When those surveyed were told that Ban was the secretary-general of the United Nations, 41 percent of respondents still had no idea who he was. It’s actually an interesting survey, done by the Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research Associates on behalf of the United Nations Foundation. It...
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Watch: The Gulf coast oil spill explained
Al Jazeera with a pretty solid explanation of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Guess the other news channels were busy or something.
Continue reading...The Number of the Beast
You’d be remiss to not check out Richard Eskow’s new post on his blog: Revelation/Channel 13: “Biometric ID,” The Mark of the Beast, and Immigration Reform, where he does a spectacular job explaining why many evangelical/fundamentalist Christians will fear the proposal in immigration reform requiring workers to carry biometric identification by comparing it to the the “Mark of the Beast” referenced in Revelation, and why the administration may want to tread carefully on this: If Arizona’s draconian new law has put immigration back in the public consciousness, the proposal for a national “biometric ID” is about to...
Continue reading...Guns vs. Hammers
I read an article yesterday about a recent spate of violence at schools in China. In the latest attack, on Friday, a farmer attacked children at a kindergarten with a hammer before setting himself on fire. This story is horrific, as were the other two recent attacks, which took place with assailants with knives. It’s awful and scary when unhinged people (the MSNBC article says the attacks “have been blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness”) seemingly randomly turn violent. I was struck, though, with the contrast between the recent attacks in Chinese...
Continue reading...Florida Governor Charlie Crist to run for Senate as independent
It’s been expected, but now it’s all but official: Aides confirm that Florida Governor Charlie Crist will, indeed, announce tomorrow that he will run for the U.S. Senate as an independent. Crist has been a Republican his entire career, but a run from former state House speaker Marco Rubio on his right has pushed him both out of the party primary and into the center. This, in effect, both blows up this race, as well as solidifying it earlier than the primary would have. Rubio now has a longer time to move center to try and court...
Continue reading...Tim Wise: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black"
(Got from Ghost, but since he’s at work or the bar or something, I’m stealing it.) Tim Wise nails it: Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters – the black protesters – spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester – these black protesters with...
Continue reading...Tax rates, visualized
To illustrate, Weather Sealed’s infographic team charted the historical U.S. income tax brackets for singles, adjusted for inflation, from 1910 to present. The colors indicate the marginal tax rate: black for low, red in the middle, and yellow for high. The horizontal axis is the tax year, and the vertical represents taxable income, log-scale, normalized to 2010 dollars with the Bureau Of Labor Statistics’ monthly CPI-U figures. The bracket data comes from The Tax Foundation and the IRS, and the effects of Social Security, capital gains, AMT, and other tax varieties are not included. The really is...
Continue reading...Diane Wood
As the de facto left-wing short-list candidate for Justice Stevens’ seat on the Supreme Court, Diane Wood has already drawn lots of ire on the right for her supposedly radical views, especially on abortion. Several articles this week make a strong case for Judge Wood– nothing that would persuade right-wingers, of course, but it’s good to see these articulate defenses. On Monday, Glenn Greenwald wrote a lengthy piece on Judge Wood’s record, calling her “a superior alternative” for the seat. He starts with the following analogy, calling attention to the fact that Judge Wood is not actually...
Continue reading...SEC Employees Fiddle With Themselves As Wall St. Burns
An internal audit of SEC employee computer use has uncovered some staggering details about exactly what employees and contractors were doing with their time and their laptops. The results: “During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time,” said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general’s office. The aerial view presented in the above...
Continue reading...It's all about the Benjamins, baby
So, the new $100 bill unveiled by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, is pretty baller. Heck, it’s basically the Avatar of money, what with the spankin’-new 3-D features. Other thing that is awesome: The website for the Bureau is moneyfactory.gov. In other dollar news, according to a recent Marist poll, a substantial majority—79%—think it’s a bad idea to change the face on the $50 bill from Presidents Grant to Reagan. I’ll just point out: This means more people think Obama is a secret Muslim Socialist Nazi Pig-dog than think Pres. Reagan should be on money.
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