News Nuggets 1133

DAYLEE PICTURE:  The warbler frog of Vietnam.  From the Daily Mail of the UK.

UP-FRONT OBAMA NUGGET!!
2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President (Michael Scherer) from Time Magazine
GREAT choice!!
"Obama’s secret weapon: the people who don’t much care for politics. A sizable chunk of the President’s most ardent backers don’t admire either party yet think Obama is somehow above it all, immune to all the horse trading and favor mongering that politics entails. These voters aren’t political in the cable-TV sense of the word."

UP-FRONT CHRISTMAS NUGGET!!
Christmas 'To Don't' List: What Not To Stress About This Year from the Huffington Post
"Some simple tactics can help reduce the holiday stress and allow you to enjoy the season more, like letting go of past family arguments and making time for yourself, whether it be to get some extra sleep or go to yoga. Just in case that's a little easier said than done for you this year, here is your official permission to stop stressing about these 25 things this Christmas."

State Benghazi Report Is Harshly Critical Of Department, Busts Many Right-Wing Myths from the Huffington Post
"...while the unclassified version of the report, which was released Tuesday night, is undeniably harsh in its analysis of the State Department's management ahead of the attack, it also appears to undermine a number of the more outlandish charges made during the heat of the uproar this fall."

Obama's Push on Gun Violence Begins to Take Shape (Michael O’Brien) from NBC News
"The contours of Obama’s plan to address mounting gun violence began to take shape in the nation’s capital as the White House started to outline some of the specific measures the administration would favor as part of its new initiative."

Democrats Getting More Concrete on Proposed Gun Law Changes (Laura Clawson) from Daily Kos
"President Barack Obama and members of Congress are moving from the immediate but vague "we've got to change something" response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School toward some more concrete policy proposals. While the proposals start with bringing back the assault weapons ban, they don't stop there:"

Obama To Tap Biden To Lead Gun Control Efforts from Talking Points Memo 
"President Obama on Wednesday will name Vice President Biden to lead gun-control efforts in the wake of last week's Newtown, Conn. shooting, the Wall Street Journal reported:"

Beating Guns the Bloomberg Way (Jacob Weisberg) from Slate
"The New York mayor, not Obama, knows how to defeat the NRA."

Guns, Risks and Safety (Alan Jacobs) from the American Conservative 
"Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe — or, really, “safe” — with cold steel strapped to one’s ribcage."

The Republican Solution To Preventing School Shootings? Armed Teachers from the National Memo
"...after the horrendous massacre of  20 student and six adults at Sandy Brook School in Newton, CT, Republicans have a new use in mind for teachers. Republicans in Tennessee have introduced legislation that would have one armed faculty member in each school."

How Obama Knew How You'd Vote, Even Before You Did (Dan Rowinski) from Readwrite
"What the Obama team did was little short of amazing. It essentially created a cohort-analysis system of data to judge every single voter it wanted to get to the polls. Obama's team took the usual system of
analytics and reduced it to the most granular level: the individual voter."

A More Perfect Union: How President Obama’s Campaign Used Big Data to Rally Individual Voters, Part 1 ( Sasha Issenberg) from MIT Technology Review
"But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn't just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be."

Team of Mentors: Obama's Senate Mafia (Michael Hirsh) from the National Journal
"Emerging national-security team will likely be a longtime cabal that includes his powerful VP."

MI-GOV: Snyder's Popularity Plummets from Public Policy Polling
"Just last month when we took a first look at the 2014 landscape we talked about how much Rick Snyder had improved his popularity during his second year in office and how he led a generic Democrat for reelection by 6 points, even as Barack Obama won the state comfortably. Last week he threw all that out the window."

HOLLYWOOD COMEDY NUGGET!!
Mel Brooks on How to Play Hitler, and How He Almost Died Making Spaceballs (Steve Heisler) from AV CLub
"Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about."

BODY ART NUGGET!!
My body IS the art: The human canvas who has spent 800 hours staying still as friend transforms him into incredible paintings from the Daily Mail [of the UK]
"Chadwick Gray stands as motionless canvas for up to 15 hours at a time. Friend and fellow artist Laura Spector used water-based theatre make-up."

LINCOLN NUGGET!!
‘A Bombshell on the American Public’ (James M. McPherson) from the New York Review of Books
"All four of these books provide detailed and careful renderings of these events and of Lincoln’s intellectual journey."

FISH TORNADO VIDEO NUGGET!!
Making David and Goliath from Octavio Aburto at Vimeo