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I don’t quite like him, but it looks like Glenn Beck got the last laugh.
Van Jones, President Barack Obama’s adviser on “green jobs,” resigned his post overnight, after a series of controversial comments came to light triggering withering attacks from conservatives.
How much you want to bet they’ll be dying to influence the ‘death panels’? Wonder what the anti-health care reformers will say to this? Oh, wait. Aren’t most investment bankers Republicans?
After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.
After decades of pursuing lock-’em-up policies, states are scrambling to reduce their prison populations in the face of tight budgets, making fundamental changes to their criminal justice systems as they try to save money.
Some states are revising mandatory-sentencing laws that locked up nonviolent offenders; others are recalculating the way prison time is counted.
Maybe they shouldn’t have locked them in the first place.
Something I’m starting to notice, and I’m wondering what are you guys’ opinion on this, that politicians that had a job before becoming politicians are much honest and actually trying to solve problems.
This is Rep. Baron Hill from Indiana. “And you’re not going to tell me how to run my Congressional office. Now, the reason why I don’t allow filming is that usually the films that are done end up on YouTube in a compromising position.”
While the Dems have more than a few things to answer for, the actions of many Repubs is beyond belief. Of course if your heroes are the seemingly clinically insane Bachman and Beck and — by comparison, normal — Rush, you have to expect wacko actions.
So, y’all remember that email that went around years ago called “Things Only a Republican Could Believe”? I’m pretty sure there was a Democratic variant as well. Well, I’ve put together a new and updated list and wanted to run it by you. […] Satire is an effective weapon against craziness!
I make no apologies if you consider yourself a Republican. I am a registered Independent and have voted Republican at various levels of government, but the current crop of Republicans at the national level are off the reservation. To call them bat shit crazy would be an insult to bat shit.
Parents who don’t want their children to pray in school are Anti-American zealots — parents who don’t want their children to listen to a speech by the President of the United States telling them to work hard and get good grades are noble patriots. Peacefully demonstrating against the country starting an international war is treason — showing up with automatic weapons to protest healthcare reform is democracy at its finest. Any government official with a desk job should have every action scrutinized — any government official with a badge and a gun should never be questioned or disrespected. At all. Ever. Questioning the legitimacy of an election because the “winner” was selected by the Supreme Court is sour grapes — questioning the legitimacy of an election because the winner (by the largest number of votes in American history) is really a Kenyan born Muslim despite all evidence to the contrary is being a vigilant American. Lying about a blowjob is an impeachable offense — lying about a war is no big deal, really. Believing that human activity could impact the global environment is crazy talk — believing that an invisible man in the sky personally told George Bush to invade Iraq to fulfill Biblical prophecy is logically sound.
To add one from the comments to the list in reddit: “You haven’t been REALLY confused until you hear someone call you a ‘Communist Fascist Progressive’.”
Brownie, a 4-year-old cat who has drifted away from his home, returned to the delight but then horror of his owners. Glad to have him back, they were in turn horrified that he had a 13-inch arrow stuck through his head. Luckily the arrow had only skimmed the skull and the little guy is expected to make a full recovery.
The local Humane Associate in Bloomington, Indiana is offering a $500 reward for any information leading to the arrest of whoever did this.
1 down and 8 to go.
Rep. Mike Pence, the no. 3 Republican in the House, is calling on Obama green jobs czar Van Jones to resign.
This sort of thing would usually be laughed off by Democrats — a conservative Republican telling a Democratic appointee to quit.
But the Obama team isn’t exactly jumping to back Jones today in wake of revelations that in the past he signed on to one of the “truther” groups that claimed 9/11 was an inside job. Oh, and he called Republicans a**holes in a video earlier this year before he was appointed.
Asked about Jones’ affiliations with the 9/11 group at the daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs would only say: “It’s not something that the president agrees with.” And then Gibbs referred other questions to a statement Thursday by the Council on Environmental Quality in which Jones said he never backed any of these 9/11 conspiracy groups.
A little misguided maybe… but racist? Sorry, I don’t hear it. Howeve, the accusation that “only the white kids do mass murderer” brings up at least two incidents that I can think of… the DC Killings and Va. Tech.
Last week I posted the inspirational story of 80’s rapper Roxanne Shante. She claimed to have earned her PhD, and if that wasn’t cool enough, she made her former label Warner Music pay for it. She claimed that her contract with Warner contained a clause that it would pay for her education for life.
I have to admit as a lawyer I was suspicious. I know that the vast majority of artists who sign with major labels never have any success. It seemed odd to me that Warner would obligate itself to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a 14 year old who in all likelihood would never earn the company a dime.
Still, the original article had quotes from real people who claimed the contract existed and that Warner paid out on it. So I bought into it.
Fortunately, others did not buy into it. From exposés at Techdirt and Slate we learn that Shante has been lying about being a real PhD for quite a while. Heck, even the original writer of the story, Walter Dawkins, refuses to talk on the record about it. I wonder what he’s hiding?
In a nutshell, Warner denies ever directly having a contract with Shante. It admits that she was signed to a subsidiary of Warner, but that that contract contains no such education for life clause.
The original attorney who drafted that contract states that he would never have put such a clause in a contract.
There is no evidence that Shante ever attended Cornell University.
She did take one semester of classes at Marymount Manhattan College, but never graduated.
After being confronted with evidence that she never obtained a PhD, she claimed to have earned her masters.
After being confronted with evidence that she never obtained her masters, she claimed to have earn her bachelors.
After being confronted with evidence that she never obtained her bachelors, she claimed she earned it under a different name. (I’ve never been to a school where I got to pick my own name. I was forced to use whatever name was tied to my social security number. Mmm…)
We also learn that she’s been calling herself a “doctor” for quite a while. Here’s a link to an old interview with VH1 where she claimed to have earned her doctorate and made Warner pay for it.
Click pic to embiggen.
Drinking beer at a Labor Day party is as American as… drinking beer. And what better way to do it than with a pimped out kegerator which is a custom fridge w/tap for your keg. Lots of people have created pimped out versions for your drinking pleasure.
This is the story of Beer Robot, an ugly old fridge that grew into a super geeky kegerator.
It started out innocently enough. After work one day at the local brewpub, three Wired.com staffers had a revelation: “What our office really needs is a kegerator!”
We didn’t know this passing idea, the kind you often have after several beers but never follow up on (”Dude, we should totally road trip to Jazzfest this year!”), would culminate in a keg party at that same brewpub to celebrate the public debut of Beer Robot.
The how-to video to be watched with beer in hand:
On Wednesday — 9/9/09 — remastered versions of the Beatles catalogue will be released, giving listeners what the remaining members of “The Fab Four” say is the closest reproduction ever of how their music sounded in the studio.
The same day, the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” is set to be released by Harmonix. Modeled after the already popular “Rock Band” game, and closely supervised by The Beatles and their estates, the game lets players sing and strum along on a huge list of Beatles classics over scenes ranging from Liverpool’s Cavern Club to their final performance on a London rooftop.
And on top of that, there’s rampant speculation that a planned “music-themed” announcement by Apple Inc., also scheduled on 9/9/09, could involve the supergroup.
In an apology, Amazon has offered to redeliver copies of George Orwell novels that were mistakenly deleted from Kindle owners’ libraries, or provide a gift certificate or check for $30.
In July, Amazon received a torrent of criticism–not to mention a lawsuit–over its decision to delete copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” from Kindles after it discovered that certain versions of those e-books were added to the Kindle library by an unauthorized publisher. However, the move to erase lawfully purchased copies of books written about the overreaching hand of a central authoritarian government struck some as funny, and others as outrageous.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the move in an e-mail to Kindle owners on Thursday, a copy of which was provided to CNET News by a reader.
It’s about time… what took so long?
TV Makers Pushing 3-D at Home – C-Net
I have a PS3 and I would be interested in 3-D.
Many of the biggest names in consumer technology are pushing not only 3D cinema, but watching 3D movies and playing 3D games at home.
Earlier this week, Sony CEO Howard Stringer promised Blu-ray players, PlayStation 3, and laptops that will be “3D compatible” next year. Panasonic used the upcoming James Cameron flick “Avatar” to push its “Full HD 3D” idea, and Nvidia and JVC are also showing off monitors and TVs that will make even PC video game playing three-dimensional.
But most of all, the companies that make consumer electronics see it as something else to sell that will distinguish their brand from the rest of the pack and from what they currently have at home. Blu-ray prices are coming down and the format is now solidly successful. And HDTVs, which became a must-have item, are becoming a commodity as well. Manufacturers are always on the lookout for some new twist that will compel users to upgrade, and for now, that appears to be 3D in the home.
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