After interminable months of campaigning, debates, and
roller-coaster polling, the first official vote of the 2012 presidential race is in -- and boy, is it a doozy.
Ames straw poll winner Michele Bachmann placed second-to-last, while former juggernaut Rick Perry performed so badly he's
canceled upcoming events and is said to be on the verge of dropping out. Meanwhile, perennial laughingstock Rick Santorum, consolidating the support hemorrhaging from Perry, Bachmann, and an
ad-blitzed Newt Gingrich, rocketed past the
youth- and independent-backed Ron Paul and, with 99% of the vote counted, is separated from Mitt Romney by
four votes out of ~120,000 -- by far
the closest result in caucus history. As the shaken field contemplates the path ahead through Romney firewall New Hampshire, conservative South Carolina, Florida, Super Tuesday, and beyond, President Obama staged
a quiet redux of
his own dramatic caucus win four years ago, a dry run for the looming general election. And as for powerhouse
Buddy Roemer? Don't worry --
his team is ready to do battle with
evil.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jan 3, 2012 -
277 comments
"When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough." With a sharply-worded rebuke of the congressional GOP, Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond has announced
he is withdrawing as a candidate for the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors due to GOP obstructionism. Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a leading critic of Diamond's appointment,
welcomes the announcement and raises a predictable call for a candidate "capable of garnering bipartisan support in the Senate."
posted by saulgoodman
on Jun 6, 2011 -
86 comments
Minecraft mastermind Markus "Notch" Persson has
officially announced his company's next project:
a hybrid online board game/trading card system called
Scrolls. Spearheaded by Mojang co-founder Jakob Porser (
interview) and with backstory penned by Penny Arcade wordsmith Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, the game will consist of turn-based battles between collectible "scrolls,"
illustrated character cards strategically deployed on an abstract gaming grid. In an interesting inversion of the
Minecraft model, the game itself will be free, while updates in the form of additional scroll packs will cost a nominal fee -- a business model gaming analyst Sean Maelstrom decries as
"snake oil." Mojang, for their part, is unafraid and even eager to target an untested slice of the gaming market, and is angling to get their playable prototype of
Scrolls ready for a possible Alpha release this summer.
posted by Rhaomi
on Mar 2, 2011 -
128 comments
Australia is copping another pounding from natural disasters.
After the floods across Brisbane (
previously) in South-east Queensland,
North Queensland is in the firing line for a
Category 5 cyclone called
Yasi.
The official warning: THIS IMPACT IS LIKELY TO BE MORE LIFE THREATENING THAN ANY EXPERIENCED DURING RECENT GENERATIONS.
[more inside]
posted by bystander
on Feb 1, 2011 -
183 comments
An anonymous hacking outfit called "Gnosis" has
infiltrated Gawker Media,
hijacking the front page and
leaking the company's internal chat logs, source code, and content databases along with the usernames, email addresses, and passwords of over 1.3 million users (including Gawker staff). The attack, which was motivated by
what the group describes as the "outright arrogance" with which the company's bloggers
taunted anonymous imageboard 4chan (semi-previously), affects every site in the Gawker network, including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Jalopnik, and io9. While most of the leaked passwords are encrypted, more than 200,000 of the simpler ones in the torrent file have been cracked, and the links between account names and email addresses are in plaintext for all to see. Since
the integrity of Gawker's encryption methods remains in doubt, it is recommended that anyone who has ever registered an account on any Gawker property change their passwords immediately, especially if the same log-in information is used for other services.
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 12, 2010 -
312 comments
"Retiring Judge Accuses Colleague Of Corruptly Siding With Major Financial Firms Over 20 Years." As also reported by
Washington Post and elsewhere, retiring Judge George Painter recently leveled the explosive claim that a colleague, Judge Bruce Levine, had privately admitted to entering into a secret agreement with Wendy Gramm, former Republican chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to rule against investors in every case brought before his court.
"On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor," Painter wrote. "A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow," Painter wrote.
Murdoch's Wall Street Journal meanwhile runs with
a slightly different take on the story (behind pay-wall).
posted by saulgoodman
on Oct 22, 2010 -
55 comments
Breitbart strikes again. Conservative media activist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart made news again this week, bringing to light apparent
video evidence of racism among the NAACP's ranks, in the form of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, who was allegedly caught on tape in a speech to the NAACP, admitting that race had influenced her decisions not to provide assistance to white farm workers. But despite the fact that Sherrod was summarily dismissed from her USDA post as a result of Breitbart's accusations,
the complete, unedited footage of the speech reportedly confirms Sherrod's claims that "her comments were taken out of context... that the anecdote was part of a larger story, one in which she explains how she overcame her initial prejudice" and that in fact, the reported incidents took place before Sherrod worked for the USDA, when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund. The white farmers described in the story have since confirmed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that,
in fact, Sherrod saved them from bankruptcy. [
Via]
[more inside]
posted by saulgoodman
on Jul 20, 2010 -
291 comments
