Hindsight is 20-20
Harry Reid has joined the Canavan caucus.
“If there were ever a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, it’s tonight,” Reid said on the floor. “These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t. They were right. The rest of us were wrong — or most of us, anyway. What a shame.”
Disturbing the Graves of the Old Ones
Easter Island heads have bodies. Here’s one vote for putting them back the way we found them and never speaking of any of this again.
Saturday Night!
* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.
* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.
* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”
* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?
* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.
* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!
Saturday!
* Today, Trina is one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. I was pretty cranky about this the other day on Twitter with respect to the Mitt Romney bullying story (on which subject fellow UNCG MFA alum Steve Almond gets biblical here).
* Brazilian politicians and journalists were not placated. “We’re going to show this gang that they can’t come down here and create whatever environmental mess they want,” Carlos Minc, a co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and environmental secretary of Rio state, told the newspaper O Globo. “I want to see the CEO of Chevron swim in that oil.” Great!
* The free market as more efficient than central planning, case 751.
* All of the current administrative solutions are perverse and/or unsustainable. Public universities cannot solve their financial problems by raising tuition even more quickly in the face of the tuition bubble, the student debt bubble, public anger after decades of similar annual increases at 3-4 times inflation, a pro-education president who is campaigning to punish tuition increases with further funding cuts, and mounting damage to an entire academic generation symbolized by the recent tripling of the number of PhDs on food stamps.
* Funny how this works: Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.
Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.
* A quick note from Jameson about base and superstructure.
* The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening. I’ll take one of each applicable video game system, please.
* Wes Anderson Tumblr blogs. It’s early going, but “Directed by Wes Anderson” may eventually be your winner here.
* And I’d have paid good money to see a Maurice Sendak Avengers.
Unit 731
Led by the enigmatic Dr. Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 committed thousands of macabre experiments and infected hundreds of thousands with the plague in China. Most of the scientists involved with Unit 731 escaped trial and entered mainstream society at the end of the war due to an agreement with Allied commanders, but a few are speaking of the horrors they committed in their old age.
I’m seeing at least a three-picture deal.
Maternal Politics
Norway is still the best country in which to be a mom. The U.S. clocks in at #25. Via Gawker.
