January 2012
75 posts
World welcomes 2012 with cheers, celebrations →
In many parts of the world, 2012 has already begun. CNN has a roundup of the festivities in New York, London, Sydney, and other major cities around the world.
December 2011
63 posts
Ha, ha: Copyright troll’s domain name auctioned to... →
Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that attempted to extort money from bloggers who were simply exercising their fair use rights, is now losing its domain name after failing to pay legal fees. The domain is being sold at auction to the highest bidder. The proceeds from the auction will go to compensate the attorney of one of the defendants in Righthaven’s lawsuits.
“Who is going to try to tack on a fee next for using a credit card? Is it the...”
– Edgar Dworsky, founder of ConsumerWorld.org, reacting to the news that Verizon Wireless has dropped plans to impose a $2 surcharge on one-time payments made with plastic.
Roger Ebert: I'll tell you why movie revenue is... →
Roger Ebert explains why movie studios are not making as much money from theatrical releases as they have in the past. And the cause has nothing to do with online file sharing.
Verizon Wireless to customers: Set up auto bill... →
Verizon Wireless is (appropriately) getting hit hard on social media after announcing that it plans to charge customers $2 for one-time bill payments made with credit or debit cards. The fees won’t apply to customers who are enrolled in auto-bill pay… but many customers are not, for good reasons.
“Since the dragnet spying program first came to light, we have been fighting for...”
– Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn, responding to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to deny the federal government’s attempt to squash its lawsuit against the NSA for its warantless wiretapping program.
International politics is dominated by oil... and... →
The New York Times reports than Iran is threatening to retaliate against the United States if President Obama signs legislation intended to limit the flow of oil money to the Iranian regime. Interestingly, the legislation has an out clause which allows the White House to suspend sanctions if they cause the price of oil to rise.
Ten problems that Tumblr needs to fix
We began using Tumblr to publish In Brief more than two and a half years ago. In that time, Tumblr’s popularity has increased on a massive scale, but the company has not innovated as we hoped it would when we began this microblog.
What follows is a list of ten major problems we’d like Tumblr to fix in 2012 so it can be a better blogging platform.
Problem Number One: Tumblr is prone...
“[T]he convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives...”
– Michael Thomas, contending that Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America. Years ago, Thomas was a partner at investment bank Lehman Brothers, before becoming a full time writer and journalist.
No, Virginia, there is no Newt Gingrich →
Meg Lanker schools the Gingrich campaign:
Newt Gingrich’s foray into the presidential race was almost adorable at first, but now, he’s just grating, particularly after today’s whining about not being on the primary ballot in his home state of Virginia. His campaign failed to meet the requirement of 10,000 valid signatures with His campaign failed to meet the requirement of 10,000 valid...
Bruce Forbes on Christmas history →
Did you know that St. Nicholas was a 4th century bishop in what is now Turkey? That Puritans tried to outlaw Christmas? Or Tiny Tim was originally Little Fred? In an interview with Bruce Forbes, The Browser looks at Christmas past and present.
“Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this...”
– Passage from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2011 Christmas homily, delivered at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Online gift from the Northwest Progressive... →
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer covers the launch of Version 5.0 of NPI’s Pacific NW Portal… a celebrity-gossip free newsreader for the civic-minded. Codenamed “Newport”, Version 5.0 easily ranks as the most significant overhaul Pacific NW Portal has yet undergone.
What a shame! Republican Party of Minnesota in... →
A series of scandals and blunders have left the Minnesota Republican Party in pretty bad shape, the Associated Press’ Patrick Condon reports.
Newsrooms were hit hard by cost-cutting in 2011,... →
Bad news from the Paper Cuts project, which tracks U.S. newspaper layoffs and buyouts: The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from 2010.
Survey: What was the top privacy story of 2011? →
Privacy was in the news a lot in 2011. After asking for suggestions at the Twitter Privacy Chat, on Google+ and Facebook, and on a couple of mailing lists, PrivacyCamp has succeeded in assemblinh a list of the top privacy stories of 2011.
“The people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they...”
– Paul Krugman, denouncing the Tampa Bay Times’ “Politifact” project for deciding to make a truthful Democratic claim about Republicans’ nefarious plans for Medicare its “Lie of the Year”.
“I’m not going to get into the back-and-forth on the congressional...”
– Mitt Romney, attempting to avoid getting swept up in the payroll tax break extension controversy. Romney will probably have a different stance in a matter of hours.
National Defense Authorization Act FAQ: A guide... →
Two somewhat conservative Brookings Institution fellows attempt to demystify the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a spending authorization bill for the U.S. military for fiscal year 2012 that is more than one thousand pages in length. The portion of the bill titled “Counterterrorism” has been the subject of much controversy and justified criticism from progressives.
“Newt’s been on the inside… He’s practically the grandfather of earmarks.”
– Rick Perry, trying to play up his own candidacy in Iowa, where Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are said to be the leading candidates.
Don't break the Internet →
Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post urge the rejection of the “Stop Online Piracy Act” and “Protect IP Act” in an eloquently written essay for the Stanford Law Review.
Web-style surveillance makes its way into... →
Retailers are linking security cameras with software to track consumer behavior, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably...”
– Roger Ballentine, who served as climate adviser to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Young environmentalists are leading the way in helping reinvigorate a movement that has made little to no headway during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Keystone XL: Good for the dirty fossil fuels... →
The Center for American Progress’ Kate Gordon and Daniel J. Weiss lay out the case against the Keystone XL pipeline, which TransCanada wants to use to transport oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta south to Houston, Texas.
100 reasons why you should start putting signs on... →
A veteran progressive activist, who has put up thousands of signs along the highways of California since the mid-2000s, explains why “highway blogging” is rewarding and meaningful.
“We don’t understand why they are spending so much money here. It is just a...”
– Pedro Rios of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, criticizing the federal government’s plans to build a huge, ugly, imposing fence right into the Pacific Ocean on the border with Mexico.
Justice Department find Seattle Police have... →
The Washington Bus’ Devin Glaser analyzes the report released by the U.S. Department of Justice on the Seattle Police Department’s use of force. Progressive community activists have long complained that Seattle police officers do not consistently exercise restraint when dealing with suspected lawbreakers.
Elapsed Time: "I'd love if tech writing as a whole... →
Hunter Walk talks to some of the Web’s best known tech journalists about the quality of technology reporting today.
“I don’t tweet, I don’t go on Facebook. I think there’s too...”
– Actor George Clooney, on continuing his public life and maintaining privacy at the same time, in an interview with Parade published in September 2011.
Justice Department investigation confirms that Joe... →
The New York Times reports that after an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the sheriff’s office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that...
Herman Cain tells Barbara Walters he'd like to be...
BARBARA WALTERS: What kind of cabinet position might you like, if it were possible?
HERMAN CAIN: We are speaking totally, totally hypothetically, right?
BARBARA WALTERS: Yeah. Okay.
HERMAN CAIN: Department of Defense.
BARBARA WALTERS: What!?
“He’s a wealthy man - a very wealthy man. If you have a...”
– First class hypocrite Mitt Romney, assailing his Republican rival Newt Gingrich for being… wait for it!… too rich. (And no, we’re not making this up. Romney actually said this. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction).
Robert Reich makes an offer to the President →
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich asks President Obama to commit to progressive tax reform in exchange for a commitment from supporters to invest time, energy, and money in his campaign.
“I am very disappointed in what the speaker has done to his payroll tax proposal...”
– Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, decrying the House’s passage of H.R. 3630. The bill was opposed by nearly the entire House Democratic caucus.
The Facebook resisters →
Not everyone is interested in belonging to the world’s largest social network, The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham reports.
Tunnels: Seattle's boring past filled with thrills →
Lynda Mapes provides a lively, colorfully written history of tunneling in Seattle, from the Great Northern Tunnel to the current drilling and digging boom Seattle is undergoing. If only we could replace the Seattle Times’ editorial page with more articles like this…
“If you feed the children three square meals a day during the school year - how...”
– Rush Limbaugh, putting down poor kids (who he later disparaged as “wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the state” during his radio show earlier today.
Russian protesters mock Putin's claim that Hillary...
As protests in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia escalate, protesters are having some fun with Vladimir Putin’s ridiculous claim that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent comments about the Russian elections sparked the demonstrations.
The New York Times has the story:
“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin said. “They...
Surprise! EPA says hydraulic fracturing - or... →
Chemicals used to hydraulically fracture rocks in drilling for natural gas in a remote valley in central Wyoming are the likely cause of contaminated local water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has acknowledged. The contamination of groundwater as a result of fracking was the subject of a groundbreaking documentary, Gasland, last year.
“We have a Congress right now, Republicans in Congress right now, who seem to...”
– President Obama, urging the Senate to confirm Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
Occupiers crash Chamber Of Commerce holiday party... →
ThinkProgress reports that several dozen Occupy DC protesters rolled out the human red carpet for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s holiday party at their Washington, DC headquarters this evening. The Chamber is the nation’s largest corporate lobby group. As guests entered, protesters shouted, “You walk on our rights, now walk on us!” encouraging attendees to trample on the activists laying...
“We don’t kill our people … no government in the world kills its...”
– Syrian President Bashar Assad, speaking to ABC News’ Barbara Walters in an interview that aired across several ABC shows on December 7th, 2011.
Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed →
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitable zone” around a star not unlike our own. The BBC has more.
“We feel really lucky and fortunate that, after a nearly perfect safety record...”
– Adam Savage, co-host of the popular television series Mythbusters, after an experiment being conducted at a Bay Area bomb range involving a cannon went awry and caused property damage to a home in Dublin.