- Hillary Clinton’s ruthless campaign
Penn omitted any mention of labor union organizing for Clinton in Florida, which could be construed as a violation of the no-campaigning pledge. In contrast, Obama did not use major surrogates in the state. While no campaign can control all of its supporters, candidate Obama stayed away.
Such finessing of the nominating process was not Clinton’s first attempt to win delegates with the help of state party officials. In New Hampshire, Democratic officials helped to block Obama volunteers from observing who signed in to vote at precincts — thwarting their get-out-the-vote efforts. In Nevada, party officials turned away blue-collar voters at precincts in Las Vegas casinos that were thought to be Obama strongholds, informing clearly upset voters they had to work an afternoon shift that day to participate. Clinton’s campaign also gave out a manual telling precinct captains to lock caucus doors a half-hour early. Obama’s campaign formally complained to party officials.
- Why Caroline Kennedy backed Obama
The behind-the-scenes story of Caroline’s journey into the Obama camp features her three teenage children, her uncle—and a long-forgotten controversy from the 1960 presidential campaign. The complicated tale involves an angry Sen. John F. Kennedy, Vice President Richard Nixon’s “truth squad,” baseball great Jackie Robinson and a group of stranded African students trying to book passage to the United States—including Barack Obama Sr., father of the presidential candidate.
- Sounds like Bill Richardson is leaning Obama
[H]e said he likes Obama, telling a story about how Obama saved him during one of last year’s Democratic debates:
“I had just been asked a question — I don’t remember which one — and Obama was sitting right next to me. Then the moderator went across the room, I think to Chris Dodd, so I thought I was home free for a while. I wasn’t going to listen to the next question. I was about to say something to Obama when the moderator turned to me and said, ‘So, Gov. Richardson, what do you think of that?’ But I wasn’t paying any attention! I was about to say, ‘Could you repeat the question? I wasn’t listening.’ But I wasn’t about to say I wasn’t listening. I looked at Obama. I was just horrified. And Obama whispered, ‘Katrina. Katrina.’ The question was on Katrina! So I said, ‘On Katrina, my policy …’ Obama could have just thrown me under the bus. So I said, ‘Obama, that was good of you to do that.’”
[…]
If Richardson is to endorse either Clinton or Obama — “I might, I might not, how’s that for an answer?” — he said he’ll do so by the end of the week.
“If I do endorse, it’s going to be a gut feeling. It’s not going to be about statistics, about past ties,” Richardson said. “I’ve been on the campaign trail with both of them. I feel that I know them. I feel I know the issues. I feel I know what makes them both tick.”
- Ted Kennedy to endorse Barack Obama
Rejecting a personal entreaty from President Bill Clinton, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) plans to endorse Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president in a joint appearance on Monday, Democratic sources said.
Awesome! Of course, this was not an endorsement that Clinton wanted to lose. In fact, her campaign wanted it so bad that they did a phone flood campaign to convince him otherwise:
The Clinton campaign launched a last-ditch effort over the last few days to stop Kennedy’s move, orchestrating a flood of phone calls to Kennedy from sources ranging from union chiefs to his Massachusetts constituents.
This would, of course, seem to fly in the face of the Clinton campaign’s statement in response to the news of the endorsement:
“At the end of the day, the voters are going to choose a candidate on their merits, not on their endorsements.”
Which of course immediately raises the question: if they didn’t care about endorsements, then why go through such a massive effort to keep Kennedy from endorsing Obama? Sounds to me like more Clinton politics, and I’m sick of it.
- OMG! Macenstein just found out Sinbad uses a Mac!
Too bad he’s about 8 years late in his revelation. Dumbass.
- Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?
A few highlights:
Logsdon on a not-so-obvious incentive for manned space travel: “Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering.”
Vernikos on the R.O.I. of space travel: “Economic, scientific and technological returns of space exploration have far exceeded the investment. … Royalties on NASA patents and licenses currently go directly to the U.S. Treasury, not back to NASA.”
Cowing on space expenditures relative to other costs: “Right now, all of America’s human space flight programs cost around $7 billion a year. That’s pennies per person per day. In 2006, according to the USDA, Americans spent more than $154 billion on alcohol. We spend around $10 billion a month in Iraq. And so on.”
- Boll ejected from big-budget ring
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
- Libertarians read, right? Then read this
As for military matters, Paul’s objection to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not that we ignored world opinion and attacked unilaterally, but that we violated the Washingtonian-Jeffersonian doctrine of “avoiding foreign entanglements.”
Iraq was deliberate aggression, a crime, but here’s a news bulletin just in for strict constitutionalists like Paul: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been dead for two centuries. Our world is just ever so slightly different from the one they knew. Realities have changed. If Virginia Sen. Tom Jefferson were roaming the halls of Congress today, he’d probably be a Democrat. Hell, he might not even own any slaves.
But this is the consciousness that Ron Paul would bring to the arena of international relations, the consciousness of 1796. The modern world is all about interaction, interdependence and active engagement, not isolationism. Sorry, Ron. I miss candlelight and hoop skirts, too, but you can’t go back.
Good article. I just have to note, however, my disagreement with the author about his comment that “atheism is faith”. That is a tired, old argument and has repeatedly been demonstrated to be a flawed argument.
- Voter fraud, voter ID, SCOTUS and shades of Jim Crow
While some of the justices noted that there might be ever-so-slightly less stringent ways to be able to prove a voter’s identity, Ginsburg wondered aloud why picture IDs couldn’t be given as part of voter registration rather than requiring voters go through a whole different process to get identification, but that was both too logical for Indiana (and the other states that have passed these laws) and missing the point. Ruth, honey, it’s not about passing laws that make sense and help enfranchise voters! It’s about making potential voters on the lower end of the income/mobility scale jump through just enough hoops to discourage them about the process but not so many that getting an ID looks like another form of a poll tax.
Oh, wait, you thought IDs were free? No, they’re not. But that doesn’t make it a poll tax, see, because it’s just a fee to get a card that you’ll be required to have in order to vote. See the difference? See?
- Second Life bans traditional banking
Second Life creator Linden Labs recently announced a ban on all in-game banking institutions that “offer interest or any direct return on an investment” without the same government regulation that applies to banks in the real world.
This drastic step comes in reaction to the dissolution of the unregulated Ginko Financial, an in-game bank whose failure saw investors (read: players who had deposited money) lose the equivalent of $750,000.
- Comparative Planetology
A truly fascinating interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Here’s an excerpt:
I don’t think people fully comprehend what a gigantic difference their infrastructure makes, or what it feels like to live in a city with public transport, like Paris, compared to one of the big autopias like southern California. The feel of existence is completely different. And of course the carbon burn is also different – and the sense that everybody’s in the same boat together. This partly accounts for the difference between urban voters and rural voters: rural voters – or out-in-the-country voters – can imagine that they’re somehow independent, and that they don’t rely on other people. Meanwhile, their entire tech is built elsewhere. It’s a fantasy, and a bad one as it leads to a false assessment of the real situation.
- Chinese blogger beaten to death by government officials
A Chinese blogger has been beaten to death by Government authorities for the crime of attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone.
When Wei was present at some sort of confrontation or protest by local villages against municipal authorities when more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes.
According to CNN, the killing has sparked outrage in China, “with thousands expressing outrage in Chinese Internet chat rooms, often the only outlet for public criticism of the government.”
- First snow for 100 years falls on Baghdad
The director of the meteorology department, Dawood Shakir, told AFP that climate change was possibly to blame for the unusual event.
“It’s very rare,” he said. “Baghdad has never seen snow falling in living memory.
“These snowfalls are linked to the climate change that is happening everywhere. We are finding some places in the world which are warm and are supposed to be cold.”
- MIT, others ask ‘What would E.T. see?’
As astronomers become more adept at searching for, and finding, planets orbiting other stars, it’s natural to wonder if anybody is looking back. Now, a team of astronomers that includes a professor from MIT has figured out just what those alien eyes might see using technologies being developed by Earth’s astronomers.
- PopSci, Nov. 1939: Skyscraper Airport for City of Tomorrow
What the metropolitan skyport of tomorrow may look like, as conceived by Nicholas DeSantis, New York commercial artist, is shown in the illustration below. His remarkable proposal, embodied in a model that he has completed after five years’ study of the project, calls for a 200-story building capped by an airplane field eight city blocks long and three blocks wide. A lower level of his “aerotrop-olis,” as he has named it, offers a port for lighter-than-air craft. Hangars for planes and airships occupy the top fifty floors.
- Ominous arctic melt worries experts
An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.
- Vast cloud of antimatter traced to binary stars
Four years of observations from the European Space Agency’s Integral (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) satellite may have cleared up one of the most vexing mysteries in our Milky Way: the origin of a giant cloud of antimatter surrounding the galactic center.
- US medical system ranked the worst in 19 industrialized nations
We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997 - 98 and 2002 - 03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.
- Kucinich asks for New Hampshire recount in the interest of election integrity
“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery - not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”
- Parted-at-birth twins ‘married’
A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister, a peer told the British House of Lords.
- $725,000,000 Gundam
Ever wondered how much it would cost to build a working, life-sized Gundam robot? At least $725 million for the parts and materials, according to an estimate published on the SciencePortal website run by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The price tag for this giant humanoid, which would stand 18 meters (60 feet) tall and weigh 43.4 metric tons (nearly 100,000 lbs), does not include the cost of labor (this is where an extensive pool of robot slave labor comes in handy), nor does it include the cost of the infrastructure needed to support the machine once you are ready to climb aboard and take it for a walk.
- The Victorian Holocaust: how come no one knows about it?
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
- Under pressure from EMI, RIAA could disappear
Is the RIAA as we know it about to disappear? As rumors continue to swirl that EMI will pull its funding from music trade groups like the RIAA and IFPI, an IFPI spokesman tells Ars that the group is in the middle of a major internal review of its operations.
Now this is an interesting development. The dismantling of the traditional music industry is well under way, but the question remains: what will take its place?
- The Pirate’s Dilemma
In these situations the only way to fight piracy is [to] legitimize and legalize new innovations by competing with pirates in the marketplace. Once the new market space is legitimized, more opportunities are created for everyone.
You know, like Apple did with online music downloads.
- Man cuts off and microwaves his own hand
Apparently he believed that he had the “mark of the beast” on it, and took the biblical advice of cutting off sinning appendages.
- Time travel in the brain
The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year’s Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.
- Reversal of alzheimer’s symptoms within minutes in human study
An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
- Incredible moments in marketing history
Hard to pick a favourite, but I think the pig carving itself into savoury slices of ham to sell French pork is it.
- Ron Paul newsletters unearthed: claim MLK a gay pedophile, praise David Duke, speculate 1993 WTC bombing was mossad job
What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
Really, is anyone who’s not a Paultard surprised by this?
- China slaps filmmaking ban on producers of Lost in Beijing
Note to self: avoid the Chinese film market.
- In the wake of her defeat in Iowa, Hillary Clinton resorts to 9/11 fearmongering
Clinton usually only talks about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when she speaks of her work helping Ground Zero workers cope with medical problems. But in an airport hangar this morning, she said: “We have people who are plotting against us right now, getting ready to repeat the atrocity of Sept 11. We know it, I see the intelligence reports.” She also said, “I don’t think there has ever been a more important decision for the citizens of New Hampshire.”
Dooooooooom!
- The generational divide in copyright morality
In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.