On February 24, 10 days after multiple internal documents from a Heartland Institute Board meeting were published on the web, The Heartland Institute posted redacted screen captures of some of the emails that had been sent to Peter Gleick’s spoofed email address. These emails show that there are some discrepancies between the files Heartland transmitted and those that were later published. The emails also show how easy it was for Gleick to impersonate a member of Heartland’s Board. Full story »

Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43.

The fair-and-balanced corporate media is in full swing, calling him a “conservative blogger,” which is true; a “conservative activist…[and] an influential voice in US Republican politics known for his attacks on liberals and Democrats,” which is true; and a “US conservative author and activist known for publishing embarrassing sting videos of left-wing groups,” which is at once true and pathologically deceptive.

For instance:

• In 2010, he posted two videos excerpting a speech by Shirley Sherrod, then Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA, at an NAACP event. The videos were edited together in a way that made it appear Sherrod was saying things she never said or meant, but the result was Sherrod being fired. Once the entire speech was made available, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was compelled to apologize to Sherrod and offer her a new job. Full story »

Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, cuts to the chase in his lede:

Call it creative if you want, but this is what economic destruction looks like. Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011.

“This” is a graph in a post by Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan.

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Davy Jones died yesterday in Florida at 66 of a heart attack. I was 6 when I discovered him–towards the tail end of the TV series. Davy spoiled me forever with his English accent. To this day, a male voice with an English accent makes me look for the source. Too bad I was so young and he was so short.

The Monkees were completely silly as a TV show and as band. Sure they had some catchy songs. “Last Train to Clarksville” was one of my first 45s and the first album I bought with my own allowance and my own trip to the record department was The Monkees (yes, I still have it). But the TV show was just the sort of late 60s insanity that would appeal to a 6-year-old: 4 cute guys in really colorful and fun clothes tripping over themselves, clowning around, and playing music. My other favorite shows from the period: H.R. Pufnstuf and The Banana Splits (whose serialized cartoon version of The Three Musketeers inspired my early love of history and my later crush on Richard Chamberlain, but I digress). Full story »

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GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney emerged from an expensive and bruising campaign in Michigan, the state of his birth, with a narrow three percent victory over his current chief rival, Rick Santorum, in the overall vote counts. He tied with Rick Santorum, however, in the delegate count. Michigan is not a winner-take-all primary state. Santorum and Romney each won seven of Michigan’s 14 Congressional districts. So each man gets 14 delegate votes for the convention.

On election night the Detroit Free Press produced an interactive county by county map of the primary results. It shows Romney did well in southeast Michigan, the more densely populated Saginaw Bay area and the tip of the mitt. Santorum scored better on the state’s west side and in less populated areas with strong Christian fundamentalists and in much of the Upper Peninsula. The cult charge against the Mormon Romney likely helped.

CBS political war horse and commentator Bob Schieffer made some insightful comments about Romney’s traction problem on the network’s morning news show Wednesday. Full story »

So, the Susan Komen Foundation has hired a big-hitter PR firm. And not just any PR firm, either.

Now, Komen is assessing the damage, and it’s using a consulting firm founded by two former Democratic strategists. Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), the firm Komen hired to help determine how badly the crisis hurt its reputation, is founded by former Democratic strategists Mark Penn and Doug Schoen.

The goal here seems obvious. Komen’s recent bout of ballistic podiatry cost it massive amounts of support among people who believe that women’s health shouldn’t be held captive to a reactionary, partisan social conservative agenda. The foundation has accurately understood that this means it needs people from the center and points left in order to thrive. Or, at this point, survive. So they go out and hire … Mark Penn.

Wait, what? Full story »

Southern Indiana, 5:30 a.m.

My wife and I each schedule one drill per month, and do not tell each other when it will be. On this cold, February morning, the alarm goes off and she sits straight up in bed, confused.

“It’s time,” I say, “Plan B. Go.” Full story »

Caveat emptor: you may find what follows heretical.

As you are likely aware, there is (and has long been) a strident outcry from certain quarters in Christianity against homosexuality as a behavior and, in the worst cases, against homosexual men and women (pick/choose/mix liberally, as you will) themselves. To my chagrin, the religious voices from those quarters make a great many references to the Old Testament of their holy book and generally opt to leave out references to the New Testament. When they do choose to include the New Testament as part of their attack ideology, they keep flipping right past the Gospels, right past Acts, and on to Paul. That’s interesting to me, because as I understand the Bible, Paul wasn’t the one born of Mary. Full story »

“American officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe that Iran would retaliate by” not only firing missiles at Israel, but, write Thom Shanker, Helene Cooper, and Ethan Bronner in a New York Times articles titled U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes, “terrorist-style attacks on United States civilian and military personnel overseas.”

Gen. James E. Cartwright, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command (which includes nuclear weapons) told the authors:

The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control. … The balance [they] will try to strike is doing damage that is sufficiently significant, but just short of what it would take for America to invade. Full story »

I’m sure everyone in Alfond Arena wondered who the hell I was that I rated a handshake from the senator. It was May 1995, and I was graduating from the University of Maine with my master’s degree in English. Olympia Snowe, long-time member of the House of Representatives, recently elected to the U.S. Senate, stood up from her seat on the speaker’s platform, took a few steps forward, and shook my hand.

Olympia was the Commencement speaker that afternoon. As a member of the local media, I’d interviewed her during a press availability prior to the ceremony. As the news director for a radio station in Bangor/Ellsworth, I’d covered Olympia a lot, and we’d become friendly over the years.

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Pity, that. This one may be far more apt.

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by Anonymous

The situation is Chardon is all too familiar: a bullied outcast with a troubled home life snaps. If TJ Lane had broken in the usual manner, he might have committed suicide. But TJ snapped differently and took a gun to his tormenters. In an instant, any sympathy for his situation is gone and he’s just a thug, maybe a psycho, and the words “Columbine,” “Goth,” and “Dark Side” start getting thrown around.

Bullying has always been a fact of life in the US–now it’s commercialized and glorified as entertainment. A lot of people turn in to American Idol and other reality shows not for the great performances, but for the truly dreadful ones and the cruelty that follows. The losers tuck their tails between their legs, cry for the camera and their supporters and go home to face down the humiliation.

That’s what the victims of bullying are supposed to do: suck it up.

But victims fall into three categories: the A Victims, those who put up with it until they can get away from it; the B Victims, those who break and turn on themselves; and the C Victims, those who go all Carrie on the world. Full story »

“From a dramatic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombies. From a factual anthropological, religious, or historic standpoint, there is no connection between the voodoo zombie and the modern zombie.”

So writes author Matt Mogk in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies. As a professional zombie expert—he’s president of the Zombie Research Society—Mogk has written the bible on zombies. If my task was to trace the connection between voodoo zombies and flesh-eating movie monsters, I figured this was the book to check out. And indeed, it answered my question: There is no connection.

But as Mogk’s book warns, “The scientific study of zombies is largely an exploration of all that is strange and disturbing in our natural world and often leads to more questions than answers.” The same could be said of his zombie bible: it answered one question and posed a hundred others. Full story »

I greatly enjoy dissecting the news and tearing it apart. Unfortunately, there is such a vast wealth of poorly presented news that it’s often like shooting fish in a barrel. I also enjoy shredding the statements of public and private officials. If the wealth of poor journalism is merely unfortunate, the dicta of officials is a treasure trove of calamitous proportions. Put the two together and we get not a gilded lily, but far too frequently a sugar-coated cyanide capsule.

My general rule of thumb is simply this, “first, doubt.” A healthy skepticism is necessary if we are to avoid being utterly and completely manipulated on every front by hired opinion brokers. If someone goes to the great trouble of presenting “information” (a description of the content which is debatable from the start, as it’s rather likely to be mere noise), especially if that someone has a budget to do it, it’s a safe bet there’s an agenda behind the presentation and a sincere desire to persuade the audience. Full story »

Lucy pushed her finger into the tear in Blue Bear’s stomach and pulled the cotton out. It was nasty to make a slit with her Biro, but she needed a place to hide her mums ring. The ring  had a green stone in the centre, her mum said it reminded her of Lucy’s eyes. Lucy put the ring on every finger and thumb. It slid off every time. Why couldn’t she have fat fingers like Jenny? She gathered the cotton and stuffed the ring back into Blue’s stomach, kissed his navy blue nose and put him back under the bed.

Jenny’s shoes echoed in the hallway. She poked her head around the corner.

‘What are you doing up here?’

‘I wanted to get my certificate to show Mum.’

‘That’s a really nice idea.’

Lucy pulled  the yellow gymnastics certificate out of her bedside table and handed it to Jenny.       Full story »