Against Despair: How Our Misreading of History Harms Progressives Today (Michael Tomasky) from Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
"Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. ... But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting... It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. "
Let's Talk Some Strategy (Editorial) from the Times of India [in English]
"Now that the US-India strategic dialogue has had its inaugural meeting, how does the state of the relationship between the world's largest two democracies look? Not different from the uncertain shape it was before the dialogue, say sceptics. Not bad at all; the dialogue yielded results, say optimists. Given the reality of today's geopolitics, the optimists are probably right."
US Banks Set to Lose Swaps Desk from the Financial Times [of London]
"Banks are likely to lose a key lobbying battle in the US over whether they will be forced to spin off their lucrative swaps desks, according to people familiar with financial reform negotiations in Congress. Defeat, which would be a further blow to Wall Street, has been made more likely by Paul Volcker, the influential former Federal Reserve chairman, softening his opposition to the provision."
A Gambling Man (Editorial) from the Economist [of London]
"CONTRARY to what a lot of people say, voters are not stupid. They know that Barack Obama did not make the hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. ... That is why all the recent talk about Deepwater Horizon putting an indelible stain on Mr Obama’s first term, perhaps even deciding the fate of his presidency, is overblown. He will decide the fate of his presidency. You could in fact argue that he has decided it already, by placing three huge and deliberate bets during his first year and a half in office."
This Week, Screws Tighten on BP to Pay Damages from the Atlantic
"As the leak continues to gush at twice the initially-estimated rate, the administration is under mounting pressure to take control of the crisis and impose concrete measures to hold BP accountable."
BP Faces a Crude Awakening from Politico
"The company owned the uncontrollable pollution of the Gulf, and now the president is ready to own the controllable cleanup. “We’re at a kind of inflection point in this saga, because we now know ... what we can do and what we can’t do in terms of collecting oil, and what lies ahead in the next few months. And he wants to lay out the steps that we’re going to take from here to get through this crisis,” Axelrod said. "
Boring Politics, Please (Mark Schmitt) from the American Prospect
"In the 12 years since the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, being interested in politics or lucky enough to write about "
The Very Angry Tea Party (J.M. Bernstein) from the New York Times
"My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding. "
SC-Sen: Democrats Increasingly Convinced of Election Fraud in SC Primaries from Raw Story
"Depending on whom you ask, Alvin Greene's electoral victory in Tuesday's South Carolina primaries is either evidence that voting machines don't work, or that the Republican Party is planting phony candidates in Democratic races -- or both."
EDUCATION NUGGET!!
Can People Become Experts without the Experience? from Scientific American
""We know a lot about how to educate people on facts, but we know almost nothing about how to educate people on acquiring perceptual skills other than lots of repetition, which can be very time-consuming and expensive," says cognitive scientist Robert Jacobs at the University of Rochester. "It would be great to develop more effective training procedures." The key here is a wearable eye-tracking device that can monitor what people look at in a natural environment."
POLITICAL BOOK NUGGET!!
Book Review of Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane from Daily Kos
"There was a whole lot of signaling going on, and it's precisely this sort of signaling that Amato and Neiwert dissect so skillfully in this work.These dog whistles are dangerous, as case after case of triggered violence documented by the authors indicate."
ENERGY NUGGET!!
Windows That Work as Solar Cells from Discovery News
"A Swiss professor has just received the Millennium Technology Prize for developing low-cost solar cells that can be built into glass windows. So instead of installing solar panels on your roof; you'd just install them as windows, which you need anyway."
No comments:
Post a Comment