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Related: Google Invests In Startup That Predicts The Future.
Archive for 2010
May 5, 2010
TWEET OF THE YEAR: Well, the week, anyway.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D HAVE OPEN RACIAL SEGREGATION IN AMERICA — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Ann Arbor elementary school bans white students from field trip, principal defends discrimination.
JOURNALISM: Prof. Jacobson: WaPo Distorts Its Own Poll On Perceptions of Tea Party Racism. It’s all about the narrative . . . .
UPDATE: More here.
NOSTALGIA: Cross Country Camping In the VW Vanagon.
GOD, GUNS, AND NASCAR: Roger Simon Goes To The Races With Gov. Rick Perry.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO La Shawn Barber.
AND YET, THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING IS “MORE REGULATION:” Govt. Regulators Gave BP A Pass. “The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.” Hmm. Who was President “last year?”
UPDATE: Related: Politico: Obama Top Recipient of BP Cash. “BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: That’s interesting — the WaPo link at the top of this post now goes to a completely different story that doesn’t mention regulators giving BP a pass. But this seems to be the story.
RETRACTO IS BACK, demanding a correction from McClatchy over bogus “N-word” reports. “In the day of cell phone cams and flip cams, McClatchy relies upon hearsay that comes from an unidentified ‘colleague’ of Rep. Lewis.”
OBESITY LOWERS TESTOSTERONE.
DAVID HARSANYI: The global war on … well, something.
MEGAN MCARDLE: “Don’t worry about poor America, having to struggle along without its Ivy League talent. Worry about what that Ivy League talent just did to our banking system.”
VIDEO: Aptera Hitting The Cones.
DAVID OBEY throws in the towel.
XENI JARDIN: An Inconvenient Nuke.
“WAR ON PHOTOGRAPHY” REACHES OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY: OSU backtracks in arrest of ‘Lantern’ photographer. “Until cooler heads prevailed yesterday, Ohio State had soared to breathtaking heights over a meadow muffin, beginning by handcuffing and detaining a student news photographer who was chronicling the roundup of two escaped cows. Alex Kotran was doing his job as a photographer for The Lantern, OSU’s student-run newspaper, on April 21 when campus Police Officer William Linton ordered him to move along, then handcuffed him. The officer arrested the photographer presumably because Kotran crossed a crime-scene line. In truth, there being no crime-scene tape, any line drawn was not only invisible but arbitrary as well.”
Dopes. They deserve humiliation, and a lawsuit. Plus this: “Shame on Police Chief Paul Denton for not telling Linton, ‘Put your gun away, Barney. This is Mayberry, not Miami Vice.’ . . . Shame on a university whose inaction suggested that it cared so little about the First Amendment that it would not even rise to protect a photographer to whom it paid nothing for the gathering of its news.”
MYTHS ABOUT THE “Smart Grid” Proposals.
IN THE MAIL: From Katherine Rosman, If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter’s Notebook.
MARK TAPSCOTT: Time for some oil spill perspective. “From an environmental perspective, off-shore oil drilling is far safer than Mother Nature. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, oil that seeps naturally from the ocean floor puts 47 million gallons of crude into U.S. waters annually. Thus far, Deepwater Horizon has leaked about three million gallons. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is. But the Exxon Valdez leaked 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Even those figures are dwarfed, according to the Economist, by the amount of oil spilled in man-made disasters elsewhere around the world.”
UPDATE: A reader points out that the oil leaked into Prince William Sound, not Prudhoe Bay.