Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The View From Your Window

Estavayer-le-lac, Switzerland, 10 am

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/Hke_2X065jI/the-view-from-your-window-26.html

John Mccain Barrack Obama

Quote For The Day III

"Sarah Palin is telegenic?and she clearly requites the camera?s love a thousand-fold. We don?t care; such behavior is no longer unseemly. Far more important than her potential to be the first female president is her potential to be the first...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/DXhDTyv15rg/quote-for-the-day-iii-1.html

Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton

Afternoon Fix: DSCC Chair says to expect strong Scott Brown challenger ?within weeks?

Democrats say they will have a ?good, strong candidate? to take on Scott Brown soon, Sarah Palin is going on a bus tour, Tim Pawlenty would sign the Ryan plan and he?s hiring Jeb Bush people.

Make sure to sign up to get "Afternoon Fix" in your e-mail inbox every day by 5 (ish) p.m.!

EARLIER ON THE FIX:

Read full article >>

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=288d81a5e22e22c55ea741e384e6c0df

Barrack Obama Bill Clinton

Monday, May 30, 2011

North Dakota?s Out Of Control Higher Education Pay Put Into Perspective

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SayAnything/~3/P53qOnXdqdc/

Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton

Palin Family Tours Washington 'Incognito'

Sarah Palin and her family visited monuments Sunday night as part of their "One Nation Tour" by charter bus, but her aides continue to refuse to say where else they might show up.

Source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/palin-family-tours-washington-incognito/

Alvin Green John Mccain

NY-26: Why Democrat Kathy Hochul's win is not easily minimized

Hochul headlines
Let me start this little dollop of post-game analysis by doing something extraordinarily rare: agreeing with the GOP spinmeisters and the esteemed community of political pundits. It is possible to read too much into Tuesday's special election victory by Democrat Kathy Hochul in upstate New York.

Of course, it is also certainly possible to read too little into it. And it sure seems as if those two groups are practically straining their collective larynxes attempting to do just that. We have read a lot of postscripts about why the election of a Democrat in a historically Republican seat doesn't matter all that much. In proving their case, four dominant bits of evidence have been proffered.

On Wednesday here at Daily Kos, I took on two of the congealing bits of conventional wisdom that emerged from Tuesday night in an attempt to minimize the Democratic victory. While I will spare you a re-run of the entire piece (heck, you can always click the link, right?), here is the highlight reel:

1. Jane Corwin did not lose because of Jack Davis.

One of the primary articles of faith in the Republican community [Wednesday] morning is that Jane Corwin was done in by the spoiler effect of having Tea Party candidate Jack Davis on the ballot.

The problem is that an analysis of the results, coupled with the final polls in the district by PPP and Siena, undermine that argument. The baseline assumption was that the entirety of Davis' support would have bled to Corwin. The data from those two pollsters simply doesn't back that up. To be clear, Corwin almost certainly would have received more of Davis' support than Hochul. But enough to win? Unlikely.

The bottom line: the gap was too wide, and Davis' eventual vote totals too small, for him to be accurately labelled a "spoiler". All his presence did, in the final analysis, was pad Hochul's lead.

2. The "Democratic enthusiasm gap" has badly eroded, if not disappeared.

In the New York 26th, the two best performing Democratic counties [Tuesday] night were Erie and Niagara Counties. In 2010, those two counties combined for 50.7% of the total vote in the district. On Election Night 2011, they combined for 55.4% of the total vote in the district. Meanwhile, the largest GOP-friendly part of the district (Monroe County), which gave Corwin a narrow win [Tuesday] night, dropped from being 22.5% of the total district vote down to just 19.4%.

There is other evidence to suggest that Democrats were more fired up to participate. Districtwide, Hochul's vote total (47.14%) was only a few points higher than the combined performances of the Democratic and Working Families nominees in 2008 (45.03%). But in the Democratic stronghold in the district (Erie County), those numbers leapt up, from 48.5% up to 53.4%.

Even those who tried to flog the "GOP vote got split" meme were ignoring a key point: even if you buy the fallacious assertion that all of Davis' votes would have gone to Corwin (all evidence to the contrary), Hochul still got north of 47% in a district where they have only sniffed those numbers once: in 2006.

Every Democrat would rejoice, and every Republican would shudder, at the notion that the current electorate would look most like the 2006 electorate.

In the four days that have elapsed since that analysis posted here at Daily Kos at Wednesday, we have been treated to two additional bits of analysis to suggest that Hochul's victory was not such a big deal, after all. They deserve a closer look, as well:

3. The New York 26th is a Republican district. Quit pretending that it is a swing district.

When confronted with an unexpected outcome, be it in sports or politics, a favorite defense mechanism is to declare the upset as an entirely predictable outcome. In politics, that usually entails getting awfully creative about describing the terrain in which the election takes place. Palm Beach County being a Buchanan stronghold, for example...

In this case, the creative analysis is in attempting to portray the New York 26th as a kind of "fair-play" district where victory by either party could reasonably be expected. Consider this nugget from Hotline On Call writer Dan Roem, who (rightly) dings newly-anointed DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz for a bit of hyperbole, but then makes a bit of a stretch in his own analysis:

Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday that N.Y.-26 is "the 426th worst-district for Democrats in the country. There's only nine districts out of 435 that are worse than this one."

She's presumably looking at 2010 election results, when former Rep. Chris Lee faced nominal Democratic opposition. But just two years before, Lee won election with 55 percent of the vote - and Democrats spent millions in contesting the seat.

A more useful metric to measure the partisanship of House districts is the Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index, and it shows that the district is less Republican than the average Republican-held House seat.

There are over 240 GOP-held House seats. So the fact that the New York 26th district is less Republican than the "average" House seat would seem to be small consolation to the GOP. After all, by Roem's own calculations later in the article, there are nearly one hundred Republican-held House seats with a Cook PVI that are either equal to, or more Democratic than, the New York 26th.

ABC's political newsletter, The Note, adds a few other fun facts about the district that makes this defeat seem a little more significant for the GOP:

How Republican is New York?s 26th district? Only three Democrats have won the House seat in this area in the past century. It was one of just four districts in the state that voted for John McCain over Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. And it was one of the few districts that voted overwhelmingly for Republican Carl Paladino in last year?s governor?s race. Paladino lost to Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin, capturing only 34 percent of the vote in the entire state.

Of course, Paladino hailed from the region, which makes his success here somewhat predictable. But a century is a long time, and to have the region only represented by a trio of Democrats in all of that time is rather telling, indeed.

Let's be clear: the 26th is not a swing district. In two outstanding Democratic cycles, the GOP held this seat with 52% and 55% of the vote. On Tuesday night, they won just over 42%. Even if you re-allocate Jack Davis' vote, the GOP would have been unlikely to crack 49%. That is signficant, and cannot be minimized easily.

4. Special elections are unpredictable, but that doesn't mean they aren't meaningful.

When all else fails, another convenient defense mechanism upon losing a contest is to deny the importance of the contest. Particularly, in politics, there seems to be a direct correlation in the wake of a special election between the amount of relevance a party places on the election, and said party's performance in the election.

With that in mind, it was not surprising to read some Republicans warn solemnly post-election that it is dangerous to try to divine predictive value from special elections, which are often unpredictable and poor predictors of future electoral currents.

This time around, that analysis was echoed by several in the pundit/analyst class. Case in point: Real Clear Politics' number-cruncher Sean Trende:

Some political scientists note, going back to 1900, the party that nets seats in special elections picks up seats in the House roughly two-thirds of the time. But this relationship has weakened over the years; if we just look at special elections in the 1990s and 2000s, the party that has netted seats in special elections has actually lost seats in the upcoming elections 58 percent of the time.

Special elections are, simply put, quirky things, and this one was particularly so.  Looking back from November of 2012, the benefit of hindsight may well enable us to conclude that this election was the first clear sign of the ebbing of the tea party momentum that had propelled the big Republican victories of 2009 and 2010. But there is as good a chance that this Democratic victory in upstate New York will reveal little in the context of the larger macro election forces at work, much like PA-12's results last May revealed very little about the GOP's 63-seat pickup in November.

The problem with Trende's analysis is that it is hard to accept his notion that this special election was "particularly" quirky. Hawaii-01 last year, with it's "all-comer" format allowing Charles Djou to sneak through when the Democratic vote got split, was quirky. New York-23, with Doug Hoffman essentially substituting for DeDe Scozzafava as the de facto GOP nominee in 2009 was most definitely quirky.

But this election? The quirkiest thing about it was Jack Davis, and his support cratered on Election Day, dropping him into the single digits. There wasn't even the grand schism we have seen in New York elections in the past: Jane Corwin was both the Republican and Conservative Party nominees. There was no great disparity in funding--Corwin's self-funding plus third-party contributions likely gave her a cash edge. Indeed, the quirkiest thing about this election proved to be its outcome.

Trende's primary point (that special elections aren't always predictive) is a legitimate one. However, there are legitimate reasons to suspect that this election is different than others. For one thing, NY-26 didn't happen in isolation. You had legislative special election wins in nominally hostile districts in Wisconsin and New Hampshire in previous weeks, plus the near-miss in Wisconsin's judicial election, where Republican David Prosser dropped from a vast lead in the primary to a nail-biter on Election Night. Polling data has also shown distinct and real movement. Even GOP-friendly Rasmussen has the generic Congressional ballot down to a toss-up, while other recent polls have echoed similar trends.

For another, as Dante Chinni noted, the geographic distribution of support for Hochul paints a pretty interesting picture, as well, with major implications for 2012:

As we have noted often on this blog and in longer-term reporting, the Service Worker Centers, have long tended to vote Republican and often by sizable margins.

These 660 counties gave George W. Bush a 14-percent margin of victory in 2000 and a 17-percent margin of victory in 2004. In 2008, Sen. John McCain won them by only 5 percentage points, but by the 2010 midterms they looked solidly Republican again -- GOP congressional candidates won the counties by some 12 percentage points.

What does that have to do with NY-26? Well, those trends were mirrored in the five Service Worker counties in the district through 2010. And Hochul's numbers in those Service Worker counties look a lot like Obama's 2008 numbers in them -- eerily so.

In Genesee, Hochul took 39 percent, Obama had 40. In Livingston it was 42 Hochul, 45 Obama. In Niagra, 47 for Hochul, 47 for Obama. In Orleans, 40 for Hochul, 41 for Obama. In Wyoming, 36 for Hochul and 36 for Obama.

Republican rhetoric, to say nothing of Republican governance, has been based on the premise that the American electorate has a 2010 mentality. It underscores many of the false premises that my friend DemfromCT skewered earlier today.

There is nothing in the electoral results from this week that bolster that case. And while it would be a mistake for Democrats to prematurely declare 2012 victories based on the results in upstate New York this week, it would be a larger mistake for the GOP (and, for that matter, the pundit class) to minimize what happened there, as well. Indeed, the best thing for Democrats in 2012 might well be if the GOP insists on making that very mistake.


Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/XKkdtjiuVYA/-NY-26:-Why-Democrat-Kathy-Hochuls-win-is-not-easily-minimized

John Mccain Barrack Obama

Sunday, May 29, 2011

2012 field making history already

(CNN) – For the first time since 1900, no sitting U.S. senator on either side of the aisle is running...

Source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/27/2012-field-making-history-already/

Roosevelts George Bush

What Israel Does For The US

Noah Millman outlines the "psychic benefits" of the American-Israeli relationship: Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/SrPISaoVdds/what-israel-does-for-the-us.html

John Mccain Barrack Obama

An Empire Built On Excrement

A new study credits llama poop with paving the way for the Incan Empire. According to researcher Alex Chepstow-Lusty, "The widespread shift to agriculture and societal development was only possible with this extra ingredient ? organic fertilisers on a vast...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/9A---Wfk0M8/the-power-of-poop.html

George Bush George W. Bush

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Over A Year After The BP Oil Spill We?re Still Waiting For That Alleged Ecological Disaster

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SayAnything/~3/CVZjmh_2Oao/

Obama Michelle Obama

Counting Gays

Americans are way off: Karl Smith is puzzled: What makes this interesting to me is not that people are bad at demographics. It's that I would assume that people?s immediate experience is influencing their estimate of all of America. Yet,...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/JW_upxEORLU/counting-gays.html

George W. Bush Rush Limbaugh

Open thread for night owls: Banking on a profitable political agenda

Photobucket

Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen writes that Chevron is banking on a profitable political agenda:

With 43 lobbyists and a federal influence-peddling budget of at least $35 million this past election cycle, Chevron must have an ambitious agenda for the politicians in Washington, DC. The company just paid $4.3 billion to acquire Atlas Energy and its extensive holdings in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale so first and foremost on the company's agenda will be fighting any efforts to have the federal government regulate hydraulic fracturing.

Second, Chevron produced 260,000 barrels of oil and natural gas per day from the Gulf of Mexico, so preventing Congress from reforming offshore drilling rules in the wake of the BP disaster will be key.

Third, Chevron will join forces with the US Chamber of Commerce and others to demonize pending Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and continue opposing efforts for the US to lead the way in battling climate change.

Fourth, look to Chevron to help lead the chant of "Drill Baby Drill!" as the company seeks to exploit the Presidential race to open new areas to oil and natural gas drilling.

Fifth, expect the company to take evasive action against efforts to revoke billions of dollars in oil company tax breaks and royalty relief.

Finally, Chevron will probably seek to protect investments overseas from meddlesome foreign government actions on prioritizing the environment and workers' rights by getting the US to enact favorable trade agreements.

Chevron's lobbyists are a Who's Who of former government officials. DC's rule of thumb: corporations ensure better access to lawmakers when they put their former colleagues from government on their payroll.

Chevron pays the Breaux Lott Leadership Group of the law firm Patton Boggs $135,000 every three months to lobby members of Congress. That means former Senators John Breaux and Trent Lott hobnob with their Senate contemporaries, and ask whatever Chevron tells them to ask for. Chevron has lobbyist Richard Hohlt on retainer, close friend of Karl Rove, and the kingmaker of a monthly gathering of GOP leaders inside DC called the "Off the Record Club." Chevron pays the law firm Akin Gump $90,000 every three months to take advantage of the firm's Democratic stars, including Al From, and former top staffers to Senator Max Baucus and Rahm Emanuel. ...

So why does Chevron bother spending this kind of money on the political system? Because, dollar for dollar, nothing provides a better financial return than investing in politicians. With environmentalists pushing to hold oil companies accountable for their pollution, corporations like Chevron would be forced to spend millions of dollars to make their oil and natural gas drilling operations and oil refineries cleaner and safer.

? ? ? ? ?

At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

To recap: [Jeffrey] Rosen printed an attack on Sonia Sotomayor based completely on anonymous sources; he used the same attacks outlined in a Republican-generated memo; he admitted he hadn't bothered to read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to verify the veracity of the claims; and his article was widely refuted, even as conservatives latched onto it as a "basis for opposing" Sotomayor.

And despite all of this, Rosen is given a prominent platform in The New York Times to give his very serious thoughts ... from the liberal point of view ... on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Once again the traditional media rewards insiders and gives them legitimacy despite their previous blind or biased work.

? ? ? ? ?

See High Impact Diaries here. See Top Comments here.


Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/iaIcCus66AA/-Open-thread-for-night-owls:-Banking-on-a-profitable-political-agenda

Michelle Obama Sarah Palin

Friday, May 27, 2011

Wisconsin GOP could simply re-pass law, but recall elections causing delay

nervous_elephant

As Jed already noted, a county judge has issued a permanent injunction against the Wisconsin law stripping public workers of collective bargaining rights. The state Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the matter on Monday, June 6.

Still, as long as they would give 24 hours notice, Wisconsin Republicans could simply pass the bill through the state legislature again. They have plenty of time to do so before the July 12 recall elections.

However, don't count on Wisconsin Republicans taking this path unless they are absolutely forced to do so by the state Supreme Court. This is because they would like to avoid casting another vote that would anger the most important swing voters in Wisconsin?union households who supported them in 2010. From PPP in late February:

We'll have our full poll on the Wisconsin conflict out tomorrow but here's the most interesting finding: if voters in the state could do it over today they'd support defeated Democratic nominee Tom Barrett over Scott Walker by a a 52-45 margin.

The difference between how folks would vote now and how they voted in November can almost all be attributed to shifts within union households. Voters who are not part of union households have barely shifted at all- they report having voted for Walker by 7 points last fall and they still say they would vote for Walker by a 4 point margin. But in households where there is a union member voters now say they'd go for Barrett by a 31 point margin, up quite a bit from the 14 point advantage they report having given him in November.

In the most recent PPP Wisconsin poll, Barrett still leads Walker by that same 7-point margin.

Since union households account for almost the entire swing in Wisconsin public opinion, re-passing a union-busting bill right before the election elections would be harmful to Republican chances. That's the real reason why Wisconsin Republicans are waiting on the courts to enact the law for them.

Now, if the state Supreme Court upholds today's ruling, or if the bill remains in legal limbo as July 12 gets too close for comfort, expect Wisconsin Republicans to bite down hard and re-pass the law anyway. They have demonstrated a willingness to enact their agenda no matter the political costs, even if they do try and take more politically expedient routes to so do at first. Still, if you are wondering why it is late May and Wisconsin Republicans haven't just taken a simple step that would allow them to start busting unions immediately, it's because they are actually scared that formerly pro-Republican union households could kick them out of office on July 12.


Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/1Gl0udZAEtc/-Wisconsin-GOP-could-simply-re-pass-law,-but-recall-elections-causing-delay

Sarah Palin Alvin Green

Lisa Murkowski Shows Independent Streak

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/27/lisa-murkowski-shows-inde_n_867998.html

John Mccain Barrack Obama

Links for 2010-06-16 [del.icio.us]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/oscarrob/a_plague_on_both_your_hou/~3/UqmOkXV-aPM/oscarrob

Alvin Green John Mccain

Thursday, May 26, 2011

DC Liberals Sign Petition To Ban Conservative Websites

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SayAnything/~3/hg1jjm2Y1es/

Barrack Obama Bill Clinton

Aruba Networks' Q3 Beats Expectations; Outlook Disappoints

Aruba Networks connected with better-than-expected results in its earnings report late Thursday, but its outlook for the current quarter disappointed some investors. Aruba's shares were down 3% after hours, after it issued its results and outlook. In answering a question on a conference call with analysts, Aruba CEO Dominic Orr said the company didn't want to be too aggressive in its guidance because of a still-uncertain global economy. The outlook

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InternetTechnologyRss/~3/dAJInOa2JMc/Article.aspx

Michelle Obama Sarah Palin

So You Thought She Wasn't Running?

Actually, all of Washington said so. Palin has been airbrushed out of the GOP race by the entire scene - from Politico to National Review. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, she has secretly put together an hour long "Triumph...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/Eb_FvHlrhQ0/sarah-palin-the-movie.html

Hillary Clinton Roosevelts

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Live blog from President Obama's address to British Parliament

(CNN) - President Obama addressed both houses of Britain's Parliament Wednesday, the second day of a state visit blending pomp,...

Source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/25/live-blog-from-president-obamas-address-to-british-parliament/

Rush Limbaugh Obama

Climate Change Champion Al Gore Got A ?D? In Natural Sciences At Harvard

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SayAnything/~3/kqTHe1zdF3A/

Rush Limbaugh Obama

The 2012 surprise candidates

Is the 2012 Republican presidential field set? There?s increased talk that a surprise candidate might jump into the race following the recent decisions by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and former Arkanasas governor Mike Huckabee not to run.

And, while most Republican political professionals believe that the field is now set, the fluidity of the current campaign is almost certainly attractive to any candidate with even a passing interest in running for president.

Given that, here?s a look at the people who could still get in the race ? and why they probably won?t.

Read full article >>

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=d675d54117b724970d7e5ca47689405d

George Bush George W. Bush

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

House Republicans still playing games with debt ceiling default threat

Paul Ryan
Democrats should call the GOP's bluff (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
 
Yesterday, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't support raising the debt limit without cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid. That might be a reminder of the GOP's plan to end Medicare, but it's actually a fairly inconsequential statement; the GOP doesn't control the Senate, and the party in power is usually the one who is responsible for voting for raising the debt ceiling.

But when House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said yesterday on Meet The Press that Republicans would hold the debt ceiling hostage, it was a bigger deal:

MR. GREGORY:  All right.  Before you go, what about the debt ceiling negotiations?  Do you think they'll be a deal, or will this go down to the wire?

REP. RYAN:  Well, first of all, I think there will be a deal, and it'll probably take a while.  Look, we have till August.  It's May right now.  This is going to take time.  Our position's really simple.  For every dollar the president wants to raise the debt limit, we're saying let's cut more than a dollar's worth of spending.  He's asked for a $2 trillion increase in the debt limit, we've laid out $6.2 trillion in spending cuts.  So we can show the president plenty of ways and areas to cut more than a dollar's worth of spending and it's very important for the credit markets, for our economy to show that we're going to get this situation under control, that we're going to get the debt stabilized and get spending under control, as we deal with this debt limit.  Nobody wants default to happen, but at the same time, we don't want to rubber stamp just the debt limit increase that shows we're not getting our situation under control.

It's remarkable how Republicans continue to conflate deficit reduction with spending. Even if you stipulate that they've proposed $6.2 trillion in spending cuts, they've also proposed trillions in tax cuts. They're not interested in reducing debt, they're interested in reducing spending. And the debt ceiling vote is not a place for a debate about spending.

But the most amazing thing about this is the extent to which Republicans are betting the farm on Democrats being willing to treat raising the debt ceiling as a hostage worth saving. They seem to think they have the same amount of leverage as they did in the tax cut fight. Who knows, maybe they are right. But the thing is that raising the debt ceiling is politically unpopular, and it's hard to imagine that Democrats are going to be willing to take the politically unpopular position of accepting the GOP's ransom note simply so they can take ownership of another unpopular move, raising the debt ceiling, especially given that Republicans know they ultimately must raise the debt limit.

The smartest move for Democrats at this point is to stop serious negotiations with Republicans over the debt limit. At some point, Republicans are going to drop their insistence on major policy changes and will instead demand a fig leaf. Until that point comes, there's nothing to be gained from negotiating over a non-negotiable item.

If Republicans really are crazy enough to force the country into default, no amount of negotiating is going to stop them; if you keep on letting an armed madmen take hostages, sooner or later somebody's getting shot. So let's put them to the test and find out whether they are bluffing or not.

My bet is that they are bluffing and they back down and the country can move past the GOP hostage-taking theatrics. But if they don't, they were going to shoot a hostage at  some point anyway, and it's better to find that out sooner than later, so we can get back on track with moving the country forward.


Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/DKxMTRJClVM/-House-Republicans-still-playing-games-with-debt-ceiling-default-threat

Michelle Obama Sarah Palin

Austria's Richest Man

Businessweek profiles Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz: [Red Bull's slogan, "It Gives You Wings"] was just what Mateschitz needed?something to convey that Red Bull had tangible effects. That, in turn, would allow his product-positioning master stroke: He would sell Red...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/wjUIzR61HRc/austrias-richest-man.html

Barrack Obama Bill Clinton

Twitter Proving No Slam-Dunk For Online Advertising Efforts

Advertisers' hearts aren't all atwitter. Online ad agencies see mixed results from early tests of ads on Twitter, a sign the microblog service could have a tough time competing with Facebook, Google and others in the multibillion-dollar online ad market. Twitter, a way to share tweets -- messages limited to 140 characters -- has become fashionable tour de force. It's become a staple for celebrities to keep in touch with fans, media to distribute

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InternetTechnologyRss/~3/WX7kCtMiD-8/Article.aspx

Obama Michelle Obama

Monday, May 23, 2011

Best Stephen Colbert Quotes Ever

Stephen Colbert Quotes Happy birthday to Stephen Colbert, who turns 47 today. As a tribute, we've compiled some of the best Stephen Colbert quotes of all time:

"Newt Gingrich is so pro-marriage, he can't stop doing it. He is so morally upright, that he's only had sex after he was married. Just not always to the woman he was married to.'' —Stephen Colbert

"I'm upset that Mike Huckabee criticized Natalie Portman for having a child out of wedlock. Listen, I'm no fan of unwed mothers either, but this is Natalie Portman we're talking about. That unborn child is Luke Skywalker." —Stephen Colbert

''We got somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 states. We could lose a few. I mean, do we really need two Dakotas? And NEW Hampshire? I'm sure the old one's fine.'' —Stephen Colbert

"I've long been against illegal aliens, partly because they distract us from an even bigger threat: real aliens." —Stephen Colbert

Read more classic Stephen Colbert quotes...

More Funny Quotes:
Best Jon Stewart Quotes
Best Bill Maher Quotes
Best Conan O'Brien Quotes
Latest Late-Night Jokes

Get Political Humor on Facebook and Twitter

Source: http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/2011/05/13/best-stephen-colbert-quotes-ever.htm

George W. Bush Rush Limbaugh

Pain: A Disease

The caption to Elliot Krane's TED talk: We think of pain as a symptom, but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself. ... Elliot Krane talks about the complex...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/pDD7B1LVxLg/pain-a-disease.html

Sarah Palin Alvin Green

Jimmy Carter: I Feel Like I?m ?Superior? To Other Former Presidents

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SayAnything/~3/Ify3VVMMVT8/

Michelle Obama Sarah Palin

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Science Behind What Bugs Us

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/22/the-science-behind-what-b_n_865293.html

John Mccain Barrack Obama

Pain: A Disease

The caption to Elliot Krane's TED talk: We think of pain as a symptom, but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself. ... Elliot Krane talks about the complex...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/pDD7B1LVxLg/pain-a-disease.html

Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton

Lying About STDs

Tracy Clark-Flory explores why people do it: Sex is one of the most powerful ways that we seek pleasure, connection and acceptance -- and the disclosure of an STD can feel like a threat to all that. This cuts straight...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/~3/2Z6FlUrPxPw/lying-about-the-herp.html

Rush Limbaugh Obama