"This week, we discovered an utterly charming card used by Isaac Asimov ('natural resource' is right) and, inspired, began hunting for more
famous peoples' business cards, whether boilerplate or highly designed, staid or comical."
posted by gilrain
on Jan 22, 2013 -
92 comments
The aging of Obama. "Photos of Barack Obama on Election Night 2008 look like they were taken much longer ago. Now his face has deeper creases and crow’s feet, while his hair has turned white." Maybe damaged
cell tips are to blame.
posted by Xurando
on Jan 17, 2013 -
89 comments
My Dearest Barack: A collection of letters that student Dylan Hansen-Fliedner wrote back to the Obama campaign, in response to donation requests.
posted by growabrain
on Dec 1, 2012 -
16 comments
Undecided on election day? Sat through all the debates and still not sure who's right and who's wrong? What you're really looking for is an endorsment by people you can trust completely, you can look up to, true heroes? Well, J. Caleb Mozzocco has taken the trouble to interview
a representative cross section of superheroes and is starting to see a pattern.
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Nov 6, 2012 -
35 comments
Charlie Pierce is a longtime sportswriter and author who has, among other things, reported for
Grantland,
Slate, and the
Boston Globe, paneled on
more than a few games of
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, and
fished diapers out of trees as a state forest ranger. He's also made a name for himself as one of the sharpest and most incisive political columnists since Molly Ivins. The lead writer for
Esquire's Politics Blog ever since a
caustic article on former Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell
cost him his Globe job, Pierce has churned out
an uninterrupted stream of clever, colorful, and challenging commentary on the 2012 election season and its implications for the nation's future, dispatches often seething with eviscerative anger but shot through with deep love of (or perhaps grief for) country. Look inside for a selection of Pierce's most vital works for some edifying Election Eve reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 5, 2012 -
73 comments
As
internal leaks from the Romney camp suggest a campaign in serious disarray, and
poll-of-polls meta-analyses show him with little time to recover his position before November, Mother Jones has acquired video from a private Romney fundraiser at which the candidate said of Obama supporters:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. Ezra Klein puts aside the
political ramifications and
crunches the numbers about who does and doesn't pay income tax in America.
The Romney camp responds to the leak.
posted by gerryblog
on Sep 17, 2012 -
5817 comments
The year 2009 began a disturbing new trend: the criminalization of whistleblowing. The Obama administration has pursued a quiet but relentless campaign against the news media and their sources. This Article focuses on the sources who, more often than not, are whistleblowers. A spate of “leak” prosecutions brought under the Espionage Act has shaken the world of whistleblower attorneys, goodgovernment groups, transparency organizations, and civil liberties advocates. The Obama administration has prosecuted five criminal cases under the Espionage Act, which is more than all other presidential administrations combined. [more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Aug 15, 2012 -
32 comments
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address. [more inside]
posted by gerryblog
on Mar 10, 2012 -
189 comments
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies:
Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception. [more inside]
posted by troll
on Dec 31, 2011 -
340 comments
Scott Walker,
Michele Bachmann,
Robin Vos,
Karl Rove,
Joe Moore,
Ron Paul,
Scott Serota,
Newt Gingrich,
Rahm Emanuel,
Eric Cantor, and, today,
Barack Obama
posted by finite
on Nov 22, 2011 -
195 comments
Categories as fundamental as fact and fiction, news and entertainment, gender and sexuality, have eroded away. In literature and architecture, in cuisine, in music, in fashion and furnishings, everywhere, everything—it’s fusion and mix.
Barack Obama emerged as a literal embodiment of this age. To educated people, especially younger people with generally progressive views, other candidates suddenly looked parochial by comparison—or simply outdated. In his ethnicity and biography and in his personality and politics, Obama, the conciliator, was above all a combiner. Because he was from virtually everywhere—Kenya, Indonesia, Honolulu, Harvard, Chicago’s South Side—he was also from nowhere. The pastiche of his persona made him “his own man” in a new sense of the term.
On the Politics of Pastiche and Depthless Intensities: The Case of Barack Obama
posted by Rumple
on Aug 25, 2011 -
22 comments
In a 32 page
report to Congress [pdf] President Obama concludes:
...the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent
with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require
further congressional authorization, because U.S. military
operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities”
contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.
Now, the
New York Times reports that this legal opinion was reached by rejecting the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department. It is instructive to
compare President Obama's actions with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
[more inside]
posted by ennui.bz
on Jun 20, 2011 -
240 comments
During his campaign, skeptics warned that Barack Obama was nothing but a "beautiful loser," a progressive purist whose uncompromising idealism would derail his program for change. But as president, Obama has proved to be just the opposite — an ugly winner. Over and over, he has shown himself willing to strike unpalatable political bargains to secure progress, even at the cost of alienating his core supporters. This bloodless, if effective, approach to governance has created a perilous disconnect: By any rational measure, Obama is the most accomplished and progressive president in decades, yet the only Americans fired up by the changes he has delivered are Republicans and Tea Partiers hellbent on reversing them. Heading into the November elections, Obama's approval ratings are mired in the mid-40s, and polls reflect a stark enthusiasm gap: Half of all Republicans are "very" excited about voting this fall, compared to just a quarter of Democrats. But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. The
Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson argues
The Case for Obama.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Oct 15, 2010 -
177 comments
BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example,
internet cafés,
the influence of Islamic art on William Morris,
South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane,
Yiddish,
the importance of cows,
novelist Chinua Achebe,
financial risk management,
Obama as an intellectual,
the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a
podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.
posted by Kattullus
on May 8, 2010 -
22 comments
