Author: mongreldogs
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Seconded…
This piece from the Atlantic captures my feeling pretty close to exactly, re: the recent Rand Paul flap on the Civil Rights Act and his alleged “courage”. In particular, the conclusion: Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that…
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Stabilizing US Debt
Everyone says they could balance the budget if they were in charge. Few understand what would be involved. I just played a neat simulator that actually allowed me to explore what different policies would do. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to post the results, but I did a screen-capture hatchet job:…
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Brilliant remix of the Dark Knight Trailer…
… using footage from — amazingly! — the Toy Story franchise! via Ezra Klein
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Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy
This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.
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Facebook’s vanishing privacy
The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook. It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense. These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over…
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A fantastic visual response to “Show us your papers” in AZ…
From the cartoonist Lee Judge ( http://media.kansascity.com/images/cartoons/judge/04-2010/judge_04272010_700.jpg)
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How to Lie with the Truth — and how to counter it
A meme spreading like wildfire throughout the rabid right is that “47% of Americans don’t even pay federal income tax.” Clearly it’s time for another tax cut for the uber-wealthy in the interest of “fairness”. David Leonhardt wrote a piece in today’s New York Times exploring this. Short version: The number is true… and meaningless. …
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16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie
Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act? They made it up. Really. It came from nowhere. In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all. …
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Deep pondering
Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)? Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being…