January 2012
82 posts
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“Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park?”
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Newt Gingrich in 1996.
It’s in his book, To Renew America.
So … if you’re interested in dinosaurs living on American moon base, remember: Only a Gingrich administration can promise you this.
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“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon...”
– Newt Gingrich, in Florida, to applause.
“Does that mean I’m visionary? You betcha,” he said.
You know, if he doesn’t win the nomination, he could always be Space Czar in a Romney or Santorum administration. You know whose administration definitely wouldn’t have a...
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For the record: Story overreached in calling... →
Quite. A. Retraction.
From the Boston Globe:
Editor’s note: A front-page story on Jan. 17 drew unsupported conclusions and significantly overstepped available evidence when it described former Liberia president Charles Taylor as having worked with US spy agencies as a “sought-after source.’’ The story, based on a response by the US Defense Intelligence Agency to a long-pending records...
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“I am rooting for you, Merrill Garbus. I like your record, and I hope you make...”
– Chuck Klosterman on tUnE-yArDs
I really like what Chuck Klosterman writes, I’ve been baffled by the number of times that people have told me I should give tUnE-yArDs a listen, and I’m puzzled by what exactly people like about this music every time I listen to Merrill Garbus.
So,...
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WatchIn today’s news, Nebraska considers repealing Prohibition.
A few quick thoughts:
Who really wants to drink at 9:30 in the morning?
How much does anyone think this bill really matters, given that every city can make its own laws that would continue the prohibition of alcohol sales on Sunday mornings?
Can I claim, as a member of a minority religious group, that my rights are being unduly...
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The Hero Report
I’m excited to announce a new venture on which I’m about to embark: A weekly video podcast on heroism with my friend Matt Langdon, an educator and blogger from Michigan (via Australia) with whom I’ve been in conversation for a few years now. Our first episode — which features a discussion on the Costa Concordia shipwreck, the captain’s dereliction of duty, and whether...
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“If any case properly should be described as extraordinary, it is this one. For...”
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In breaking news, Joe D’Ambrosio has been exonerated and becomes the 140th inmate released from death row in the United States since 1973.
The above quote, from Judge Kate O’Malley provides some insight into D’Ambrosio’s exoneration.
More here (via NCADP).
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On Joe Paterno's Passing
When I read about Joe Paterno’s passing this weekend — on two separate occasions, strangely — I found it impossible to separate the coaching legend of so many decades from the sexual abuse scandal of recent memory. For good or ill, one event or choice can fundamentally alter public perception of a person’s life and legacy.
Indeed, this is a central element of the book...
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U.N. genocide court moves first case home to... →
News from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:
“With significant law reform, we’ve been able finally to convince the judges that the legal framework in this country adequately provides fair trial for any of the accused who is sent over to this country,” ICTR prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow told a news conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
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The Right to an Attorney, Any Attorney →
Scott Lemieux comments on the Supreme Court’s decision this week in the Maples case about the right to legal counsel:
Surely the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment entails more than being nominally represented by someone who has passed a bar exam somewhere. But Scalia’s defense of the “right” of the state of Alabama to put people to death (even if they’ve never been...
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Doctors Demand Restrictions On Another Execution... →
For lack of a better phrase, the noose continues to tighten around lethal injection in the United States. With sodium thiopental already so difficult to come by that states are turning to drug brokers in other countries to provide them with an ill-gotten supply, now we learn from Brian Evans at Amnesty International USA’s blog that doctors are taking aim at the second in the traditional...
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Watch
In this recent Bloggingheads diavlog, Glenn Greenwald and Katha Pollitt debate whether or not the disgruntled Left ought to embrace Ron Paul. Not at all surprisingly given their columns on Paul, Greenwald and Pollitt come to this question from different angles, though they both seem to have moderated their positions a fair amount from what they wrote in the recent past. Also not surprisingly,...
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“The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans...”
– Barack Obama, nailing shut the coffin of the Keystone XL pipeline.
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Watch
Here is some good news as a final follow-up to my post from ten days ago, in which I called on readers to sign a petition asking that Robert Gattis be spared the death penalty:
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell today announced he is sparing the life of condemned killer Robert A. Gattis, who was scheduled to die by lethal injection early Friday morning.
It is the first time in modern memory, and...
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Is religion ridiculous? Many atheists think that...
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One U.S. family is responsible for half of... →
This is all sorts of fascinating:
Members of a single American family have donated half of the NIS 330,000 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has raised for his Likud party primary campaign in the past few weeks. Four members of the Falic family from Florida are responsible for contributing some NIS 165,000.
There’s an interesting discussion already underway — in Israel and in the...
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A Centrist's Lament →
The Jerusalem Post published as an op-ed today a piece by Erika Dreifus — whose work I must admit I’ve never read — that describes a serious problem she faces. She’s an American author who has to keep unsubscribing from email lists, unfollowing other authors on Twitter, and declining to join petition campaigns because they all become “a reliable source of condemnation...
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Roosevelt, Corporations, and Politics
The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of any commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the...
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Appropriating Auschwitz
Earlier this week, David A. Graham posted this photo of Newt and Callista Gingrich at Auschwitz over at The Atlantic:
There was, he said, “something distinctly off” about it.
The photo is several years old, but it was quickly picked up by a whole bunch of people and pretty much everyone rushed to agree that this is one of the more stunning examples of Gingrich being clueless and...
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UNL professors work to create digital Walt Whitman... →
Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments...
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Do Israelis Really Want to Bomb Iran? →
Dalia Dassa Kaye on some of the complexity regarding the Israeli position on the possible Iranian nuclear threat:
[I]mportant divisions are emerging within the Israeli strategic community over how to deal with the Iranian nuclear challenge. U.S. politicians may feel comfortable with framing Iran as an existential threat to Israel, but not all Israeli leaders do. An increasing number are...
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“To understand Newt Gingrich, you have to envision a mixture of “Kill Bill” and...”
– Gail Collins
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Course Evaluations
Last semester’s course evaluations are in and I thought I’d post some of the highlights. As is the case every semester, students reported that they were overworked but that — by and large — they enjoyed themselves. And, as in previous semesters, every time one student made a suggestion for improvement, three or four students said the exact opposite:
“The warnings I...
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“It’s astounding to me that the president is claiming these are recess...”
– Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) Will Prove Congress Isn’t In Recess As Soon As She Returns From Recess
Honestly, this is such comedy gold that I wanted it to be from The Onion. If I tried really, really hard to come up with something this funny, I don’t think I could do it. But, amazingly, these...
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WatchI have, in the past, written about the problem of extrajudicially executing American citizens. I’ve also written extensively about the death penalty. I’ve explained why I think justice and vengeance aren’t synonymous.
I hadn’t written a whole lot about assassinating scientists, but I suppose I ought to have done so. Or, at the very least, I might have included this...
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“I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or...”
– —Journey’s Steve Perry, on the enduring mystery of the reference to South Detroit, a non-existent neighborhood, in the early ’80s classic “Don’t Stop Believin’”
More:
Reached in San Diego, the former Journey front man explained that some of the enduring...
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What Does a Philosopher Look Like? →
What does a philosopher look like? The label calls to mind a classical bust of a man with noble brow, beard, and blank inward-seeing eyes. His high forehead conveys deep wisdom, like those super-smart aliens on the original Star Trek with their big-brained bald heads.
…
What do philosophers actually look like? Rather odd, I’m afraid, or if truth be told, unappetizing – at least if we are...
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The Death Penalty and the Frivolity of Following... →
I’ve written before about the fact that Nebraska has been using a drug dealer in India to illicitly procure lethal injection drugs that are in short supply in the U.S. Today, the saga continues and this interesting example tells us a lot about the way the death penalty is perceived by its proponents, namely that the rules apply to defendants but not to the state that wants to kill them:
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