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The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705

"Countless studies have shown that people who spend less time in nature die younger and suffer higher rates of mental and physical ailments." So this Washington Post page allows you to check your own area to see how good your access to nature is.

Marie: If you don't like birthing stories, don't watch this video. But I thought it was pretty sweet -- and funny:

If you like Larry David, you may find this interview enjoyable:


Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Allison Hope comments in a CNN opinion piece:

~~~ Here's Chapman singing "Fast Car" at the Oakland Coliseum in December 1988. ~~~

~~~ Here's the full 2024 Grammy winner's list, via CBS.

He Shot the Messenger. Washington Post: “The Messenger is shutting down immediately, the news site’s founder told employees in an email Wednesday, marking the abrupt demise of one of the stranger and more expensive recent experiments in digital media. In his email, Jimmy Finkelstein said he was 'personally devastated' to announce that he had failed in a last-ditch effort to raise more money for the site, saying that he had been fundraising as recently as the night before. Finkelstein said the site, which launched last year with outsize ambitions and a mammoth $50 million budget, would close 'effective immediately.' The New York Times first reported the site’s closure late Wednesday afternoon, appearing to catch many staffers off-guard, including editor in chief Dan Wakeford. As employees read the news story, the internal work chat service Slack erupted in what one employee called 'pandemonium.'... Minutes later, as staffers read Finkelstein’s email, its message was underscored as they were forcibly logged out of their Slack accounts. Former Messenger reporter Jim LaPorta posted on social media that employees would not receive health care or severance.”

Washington Post: “The last known location of 'Portrait of Fräulein Lieser' by world-renowned Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was in Vienna in the mid-1920s. The vivid painting featuring a young woman was listed as property of a 'Mrs Lieser' — believed to be Henriette Lieser, who was deported and killed by the Nazis. The only remaining record of the work was a black and white photograph from 1925, around the time it was last exhibited, which was kept in the archives of the Austrian National Library. Now, almost 100 years later, this painting by one of the world’s most famous modernist artists is on display and up for sale — having been rediscovered in what the auction house has hailed as a sensational find.... It is unclear which member of the Lieser family is depicted in the piece[.]”

~~~ Marie: I don't know if this podcast will update automatically, or if I have to do it manually. In any event, both you and I can find the latest update of the published episodes here. The episodes begin with ads, but you can fast-forward through them.

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Tuesday
Dec282010

The Commentariat -- December 29

** In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. -- William Booth of the Washington Post

War and good health are incompatible. -- President Jimmy Carter ...

... Maggie Fick of the AP: former President Jimmy Carter has nearly won his 30-year battle against the guinea worm, having reduced the annual number of cases from an estimated 50 million to a reported 3,190, but the worm persists in the unstable nation of Sudan where "semi-nomadic pastoralists who have little education and low sanitation standards." You can read more about it at this Carter Center site.

Harry Reid. Contour photo. Mark Warren of Esquire profiles Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Mikhail Gorbachev, in a New York Times op-ed, urges the Senate to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty, which must be ratified by all "nuclear technology holder states."

Sean Gregory of Time: unlike New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who has been sharply criticized for his handling of blizzard cleanup) & New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (who was AWOL in Disney World), Cory Booker, "... the tweeting mayor of Newark, N.J., is now a social-media superhero, able to move towering snowbanks in a single push — or by sending the shovels and plows your way."

David Hilzenrath of the Washington Post: "More banks failed in the United States this year than in any year since 1992, during the savings-and-loan crisis, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Amid high unemployment, a struggling economy, and a still devastated real estate market, the nation is closing out the year with 157 bank failures, up from 140 in 2009. As recently as 2006, before the bubble burst, there were none. Now, there are more on the horizon." ...

... ** Christine Harper of Bloomberg: "Wall Street’s biggest banks, whose missteps caused a global financial crisis and economic slowdown two years ago, were more agile when it came to countering the political and regulatory response.... Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years." ...

... David Leonhardt of the New York Times on 2010: the year the economy fizzled. Leonhardt has a follow-up post here.

David Herszenhorn of the New York Times: Team North Dakota breaks up. Sens. Byron L. Dorgan & Kent Conrad & Rep. Earl Pomeroy are "best friends and Democrats who spent the last 18 years serving as North Dakota’s entire Congressional delegation," but Dorgan his retiring & Pomeroy lost his re-election bid. CW: and we are left with Conrad. Eeww.

Jay Millman of The Hill lists the key provisions of the Affordable Health Law that will go into effect January 1.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: "... the memory of the attempted bombing last Christmas Day hangs over the presidential Hawaiian escape. Mr. Obama and his advisers, still smarting over the criticism they received for the seemingly flat-footed response, have gone into overdrive to prepare for what counterterrorism experts say is a heightened threat this holiday season."

Shai Oster, et al. of the Wall Street Journal: "Foreign companies have been teaming up with Chinese ones for years to gain access to the giant Chinese market. Now some of the world's biggest companies are taking a risky but potentially rewarding second step—folding pieces of their world-wide operations into partnerships with Chinese companies to do business around the globe

A Distinction without a Difference: Earmarks v. "Lettermarks." Ron Nixon of the New York Times: "Though [new Sen. Mark] Kirk and other Republicans thundered against pork-barrel spending and lawmakers’ practice of designating money for special projects through earmarks, they have not shied from using a less-well-known process called lettermarking to try to direct money to projects in their home districts. Mr. Kirk, for example, sent a letter to the Department of Education dated Sept. 10, 2009, asking it to release money 'needed to support students and educational programs' in a local school district."

Trevor Curwin, writing for NBC: "With energy prices increases likely as economic growth picks up, the next-generation of nuclear energy could prove to be a cleaner, cheaper solution to keeping power prices down. Several firms are working on new reactor technologies that replace the classic uranium fuel rods with less expensive and less polluting ones, composed of thorium. 'There are no technical hurdles,’ says John Kutsch, executive director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, an industry trade group, pointing out the process itself is already technologically proven." Thanks to reader Doug R. for bringing this to my attention.

Army History, Revised. Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post: "The Army's official history of the battle of Wanat - one of the most intensely scrutinized engagements of the Afghan war - largely absolves top commanders of the deaths of nine U.S. soldiers.... An initial draft of the Wanat history ... placed the preponderance of blame for the losses on the higher-level battalion and brigade commanders who oversaw the mission.... The final history, released in recent weeks, drops many of the earlier conclusions and instead focuses on failures of lower-level commanders." ...

... CW: here's what happens when a state lets incompetent right-wing ideologues write their history & social studies books. Kevin Sieff of the Washington Post: historians have found "dozens of errors ... since Virginia officials ordered a review of textbooks by Five Ponds Press, the publisher responsible for a controversial claim that African American soldiers fought for the South in large numbers during the Civil War. 'Our Virginia: Past and Present,' the textbook including that claim, has many other inaccuracies, according to historians who reviewed it. Similar problems, historians said, were found in another book by Five Ponds Press, 'Our America: To 1865.' A reviewer has found errors in social studies textbooks by other publishers as well, underscoring the limits of a textbook-approval process once regarded as among the nation's most stringent."

Linda Milazzo in AlterNet: "Enough, CNN! Enough! Stop trivializing and dramatizing critical issues and pitting one hack against another.... Report the news. Report the truth and stop whoring your twisted wares in the name of journalism. This isn’t journalism..., CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS and talk radio. This wretched corporate media cheered us into Iraq. It’s made downtown Manhattan the flash point for xenophobia and racism over the building of a community center intended to unify neighbors. It’s given a platform to birthers. It’s undermined global warming. It’s created the monster Sarah Palin and it craves creating more. It’s desecrating the living and it’s desecrating the dying."

AP: "Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation of Delaware Republican Christine O'Donnell to determine if the former Senate candidate broke the law by using campaign money to pay personal expenses...." ...

... Crackpot News

Jillian Rayfield of TPM: "The good news is that the right-wing isn't talking about President Obama being a secret Muslim right now. The bad news is that they're now concerned that he's going to use his honorary status as a Crow Tribe Indian to return the United States to Native Americans.... Last week, the 'Director of Issues Analysis' for the Christian conservative American Family Association, Brian Fischer, wrote a blog post claiming that 'President Obama wants to give the entire land mass of the United States of America back to the Indians. He wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords.'"

Because They Might Get Cooties. Brian Fitzpatrick of the right-wing World Net Daily: "Two of the nation's premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.... FRC and CWA join the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage in withdrawing from CPAC. In November, APP organized a boycott of CPAC over the participation of GOProud."

Leave it to Tucker Carlson to make you feel sorry for Michael Vick:

Local Politics

Karen Hawkins of the AP: "Congressman Danny Davis has a message for former President Bill Clinton: Don't take sides in the Chicago mayor's race - or else. Davis, a longtime friend of Clinton, warned the ex-president on Tuesday that he could jeopardize his 'long and fruitful relationship' with the black community if he campaigns for former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel instead of one of the two leading black candidates running - Davis or former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun."

Public Policy Polling: "It's a well known fact that Sarah Palin is the most unpopular major political figure in the country...one thing that may be less well known is that one of the states where voters have the dimmest view of her is her own home state of Alaska."

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