Today’s topic: dispatches from the firing squad. Continue reading
Frontline on PBS recently covered a bizarre story out of the West that might help answer a burning question: Does Citizens United matter?
The Supreme Court handed down the decision in Citizens United in January 2010, which declared that corporations — as associations of individuals — have constitutionally-protected free speech rights under the First Amendment. Political speech is the kind of speech that the courts have most explicitly protected in the past century, and so campaign finance laws that would limit the amount of spending by corporations on political ads (in which they express their political opinions) are therefore unconstitutional. Continue reading
The election is over, finished and done,
It’s time for football, time for some fun.
Poor Mitt Romney, never thought he would fail,
Now you are free to discuss which celebrities you would nail.
Don’t worry you junkies, never should you fear.
Before you know it, the midterms will be here.
So sit right down and pull up a seat,
My recaps on the season just can’t be beat.
Have you exhaled yet? Continue reading
Holy crap, is it time for another installation of Top Chef? Why, yes, yes it is!
Join us in the comments as we drool over the unpronounceable culinary oddities the cheftestants produce and as we wonder just <i>how</i> stoned Padma is! Continue reading
In news that I’m sure is shocking to absolutely no one, when last night’s election results are compared to the polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports, it turns out that Scott Rasmussen put a sweaty, slab-like, thumb on the scale in favour of Republican candidates at both the Presidential and US Senate levels. I decided to do a comparison between last night’s results and Rasmussen’s final polls so that I could quantify for all of our information just how much bullshit Rasmussen is shoveling.
Before I get into the meat of the subject, a few ground rules for this comparison. I looked at states for which Rasmussen Reports published polls with field dates falling within the last three weeks (for the vote for President) or the last four weeks (for the Senate races) before the election. If Rasmussen published more than one poll during that period, I looked only at the most recent one. I have calculated what I refer to as a “net miss”, which is stated as either R+X or O+X. That number is calculated by adding or subtracting the amount by which the Rasmussen poll number for each candidate differed from the final result for that candidate. If Rasmussen showed a given race with Romney five points over his final result and Obama three points under his final result, that would be noted as R+8. Continue reading
I wanna know. Have you ever seen the rain? Continue reading
Today’s topic: reporting from the ashes. Continue reading
One of the things you get used to living in the deep South is kudzu. The stuff’s everywhere; it’s probably the hardiest plant in existence, surviving periods of intense heat and cold, all manner of chewing bug and animal, and it creeps up to three feet a day. I imagine if there were a camera in space over a long enough period of time, you could string together a time-lapse video of the stuff actually expanding outward. Continue reading
One of the great pleasures of my public-library volunteer work is that I get to do it with a lady who was a teenager during the second world war, in Hungary. We chat away non-stop. The other day, talk got around to penny-pinching and frugality, and how those practices are still around, often these days under the header of ‘recycling’. My own parents learned a lot about frugality in post-WWII Britain, with rationing still firmly in place, and I learned a lot from them.
When we had a big yard, I had 3 composters going. Mr. S. built me an ingenious sifter for it, out of hardware cloth (half-inch wire mesh) and sticks. It was custom fitted to my wheelbarrow. Awww. Continue reading