The online retailer stuns Wall Street with explosive earnings, despite the weak economy.
Term Limits Good, when Democrat's control congress.
Term Limits Bad, when Repug's control congress.
Filibuster is a necessary tool of democracy, when Repug's do it.
Filibuster is being "obstructionist", when Democrat's do it.
Special Prosecutor Statute Good, when Democrat is in the White House.
Special Prosecutor Statute Bad, when Repug is in the White House.
Polls mean something, when Repug numbers are up
Polls are "fixed", when Repug numbers are down.
Violating UN resolutions is justification for action, when they are our enemy.
Violating UN resolutions is only ignoring a bad resolution, when they are our ally.
Exit Strategy Good, when Democrat is Commander in Chief.
Exit Strategy Bad, when Repug is Commander in Chief.
Polls mean something, when Democrat numbers are down.
Polls are "fixed", when Democrat numbers are up.
"The courts have ruled", when they agree with the ruling.
The courts are "legislating from the bench", when they disagree with the ruling.
Over-site Good, when Democrat is in the White House.
Over-site Bad, when Repug is in the White House.
Deficit spending good, when Repugs do it.
Deficit spending bad, when Democrats do it.
Dismissing drug use Good, when a Repug does it.
Dismissing drug use Bad, when a Democrat does it.
Dismissing sex acts Good, when it's a Repug.
Dismissing sex acts Bad, when it's a Democrat.
Hypocrisy Good, when engaged in by a Repug.
Hypocrisy Bad, when engaged in by a Democrat.
Medical bankruptcies are an epidemic in the United States. Nearly 62 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies
in 2007 were due to health care costs - and 78 percent of medical bankrupt people had insurance.
~ Zaid Jilani, ( Link)
U.S. Sen. John McCain, r-Ariz, is leading a charge against “Net neutrality” favored by the Obama administration.
Implementing these cost-efficient fixes will prepare your home for chilly weather.
A college freshman accidentally scores the game-winner from the opposite end of the field.
A rookie Dallas cop cites a woman for a nonexistent law during a routine stop.
Giving baby girls trendy, "masculine" names just might help boost their careers, study claims.
For those who like renting movies, Hollywood may soon have a message: Prepare to wait.
Just a reminder that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Highly flammable women's robes sold by Blair are now linked to nine deaths, and the company is expanding a recall to include more products imported from the Pakistani manufacturer.
America's strongest economies boast steady home prices and other key advantages.
The Obama administration said Thursday it is designating more than 200,000 square miles in Alaska and off its coast as "critical habitat" for polar bears, an action that could add restrictions to future offshore drilling for oil and gas.
Federal law prohibits agencies from taking actions that may adversely affect critical habitat and interfere with polar bear recovery.
On July 22, 1941, a young girl watches from the window of her parent’s apartment as her neighbors – he in a top hat, she clutching a bouquet – leave for their honeymoon. The video was shot, of course, to capture a special moment in the lives of the neighbors. But it is significant now because of that little girl - Anne Frank, about a year before her family went into hiding.A previously unknown photo of Abraham Lincoln arriving to give the Gettysburg Address.
For years, a photo of the crowd at the Gettyburg Address stagnated at the Library of Congress’ website, until an amateur Civil War historian stumbled across it and noticed a minute detail – what appeared to be a bearded man, wearing a stovepipe hat, arriving on horseback. The image above doesn’t provide as much detail as this slideshow zooming in on the scene, but the idea that one of only two photos of Lincoln on that day may have been discovered by the fortuitous combination of available historical documents and an interested observer speaks volumes.
Lost color photos of Hitler.
From the Telegraph’s write-up of this discovery:
A set of photographs showing the private side of Adolf Hitler have been published for the first time. The colour pictures come from the collection of Hugo Jaeger, Hitler’s personal photographer, who captured him on camera him from 1936 to the final days of his rule in 1945. Jaeger hid thousands of transparencies in a leather suitcase at the end of the war. The case was found by six US soldiers as they searched a house near Munich where he was staying but they were more interested in a bottle of cognac he had also slipped inside.
The accompanying 19-photo gallery shows the somewhat-dishevelled German leader, his apartment and his environs, capturing a ground-level view of life in World War II Germany. (You’ve probably also already seen the album of personal photos taken by officers at Auschwitz, now part of the Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
Teddy Roosevelt, heard and seen.
Two of the most interesting recent discoveries surround the 26th President of the United States.
First, recordings of his voice, captured through Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder system in 1919 and put online by UC Santa Barbara. Roosevelt’s voice is somewhat nasally, a bit high-pitched – but impressively articulate and accented as one might expect of an upper class, turn-of-the-century New Yorker. These are not the earliest examples of his voice, to be sure – but the vintage and recording method of these speeches is remarkable.
Perhaps the most stunning discovery, though, is this photo, taken during Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession through New York in 1865.
The boxed window shows the apartment of Roosevelt’s grandfather, Cornelius, near New York’s Union Square. The two tiny faces (which you can see better here) are supposedly Teddy and his brother Elliott (Eleanor Roosevelt’s father). The idea that a seven year-old future President was captured observing Lincoln’s 1865 funeral is stunning – and knocks the famous Clinton-Kennedy photo down a peg or two.
For historians, amateur and otherwise, these are exciting discoveries – and the future offers many more of similar provenance. Maybe.
The Anne Frank video was saved purely by chance. According to CNN, the honeymooning couple gave the footage to Frank’s father after the war, understanding how much he’d lost. It survived sixty intervening years, in remarkable quality – but that someone in 1941 had access to a personal camera to document important life moments was an exception itself.
Now, of course, everyone has a camera, video and still, and captures the world around for moments of far less significance. Every day, future leaders, Presidents, criminals, geniuses and inventors are being photographed and videotaped. But with this surfeit of recordings, many now deemed useless will be lost.
There’s another problem, one raised by the always-thoughtful (and polarizing) Internet guru Dave Winer following the recent death of his father. What happens, he asks, when the owner of content dies? How can his media last forever? Where is the company providing eternal online hosting?
Imagine if there were an easy way for digital media to be preserved indefinitely for nearly no cost. What gems might future hobbyists and historians uncover, digging through an infinitely large pile of images at a point when they become publicly available? Especially if the tagging systems of social networks like Facebook travel along with them?
The Second Dark Ages (that of pre-Internet information gathering) has come to an end. We’re discovering, every day, works of cultural art from a time before the possibility of cataloguing existed. We’ve yet to build a system to allow such discoveries more easily in the future – but it will come.
The picture you take on your iPhone today may be of the next Roosevelt or Lincoln – or, God forbid, the next Frank or Hitler. But we’ll only know if that picture can be re-considered in 100 years.
The Pirate Party, which holds a seat in the European Parliament, proposed legislation that said, essentially, that no one could be disconnected from the Internet without a fair trial. When the proposal when to the European Commission (a group of powerful, unelected bureaucrats who have been heavily lobbied by the entertainment industry), they rewrote it so that disconnection can take place without trial or other due process.
On the national level, France's Constitutional Court have approved the latest version of the French 3-strikes rule, HADOPI, which has created a kind of grudging, joke oversight by the courts (before your family's Internet connection is taken away, a judge gives the order 1-2 minutes' worth of review, and you aren't entitled to counsel and the rules of evidence don't apply -- the NYT called it similar to "traffic court"). Under this rule, there is now a national list of French people who are not allowed to be connected to the Internet; providing them with connectivity is a crime.
The only bright light is that this will play very badly in the national elections coming up in many European jurisdictions; the Swedes, in particular, are likely to kick the hell out of the MPs who voted for criminal sanctions for downloading and replace them with Pirate Party candidates, Greens, and members of other parties with a liberal stance on copyright.
Bruce Sheiman doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in religion.
Setting aside the question of whether God exists, it’s clear that the benefits of faith far outweigh its costs, he argues in his new book, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It.
“I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to convince me that God exists,” Sheiman said in an interview, “but they can convince me that religion has intrinsic value.”
The old atheists said there was no God. The so-called “New Atheists” said there was no God, and they were vocally vicious about it. Now, the new “New Atheists” — call it Atheism 3.0 — say there’s still no God, but maybe religion isn’t all that bad.
Faith provides meaning and purpose for millions of believers, inspires people to tend to each other and build communities, gives them a sense of union with a transcendent force, and provides numerous health benefits, Sheiman says. Moreover, the galvanizing force behind many achievements in Western civilization has been faith, Sheiman argues, while conceding that he limits his analysis, for the most part, to modern Western religion.
Maddow: one specific vote on one specific part of the giant legislation that funds the defense department is turning into a real political problem for 30 republican senators.
In Idaho, the "Lewiston Morning Tribune" called out its two senators in an editorial titled, "Senators Crapo and Risch cast an inexplicable vote."
In Mississippi, "The Clarion Ledger" editorialized, quote, "Senators Cochran and Wicker voted to protect corporations, not victims, and they should own up to that."
An opinion piece in the "Osawatomie Graphic" was titled simply, "Kansas senators are disappointing." In Tennessee, a "Crossville Chronicle" writers asked, "Whose side are our senators on?"
The "Athens Banner Herald" in Georgia headlined a letter quote, "Georgia senators embarrass state." and in Louisiana, a "Shreveport Times" writer asks, quote, "What exactly is sen. David Vitter's problem with women."
When republicans are getting called out in Mississippi, Kansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Georgia, something big is going on politically. This all began when 30 senate republicans voted against an amendment by Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota.
The amendment said that the government shouldn't give defense contracts to companies if those companies prevent their employees who have been raped or discriminated against from suing in court.
Multiple sources have told the Huffington post that senator Dan Inouye, a longtime democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Senator Al Franken (Democrat-Minnesota) and passed by the senate several weeks ago.
Inouye's office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up. The senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.
"The defense contractors have been storming his office," said a source with knowledge of the situation. "Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR's (or other contractors') own terms -- with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The house seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely."
It's time to wise up to the ecological pawprint of your furry friend – it may be doing more environmental damage than an SUV.
The Federal Reserve wants to be able to review and veto banks' pay policies to discourage recklessness.
These simple strategies can help you relieve the strain of your job without losing focus.
A midflight emergency turns into a cause for celebration as a baby is born 2,000 feet in the air.
The greatest of all animal battles, "the humpback whale heat run", is filmed in its entirety for the first time by a BBC crew.  | | An undercover investigation by an environmental campaign group reveals the continuing trade in tiger skins in China. |
Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, has died. He was 83.
Bands lead a charge to uncover how songs were used in Guantanamo Bay interrogations.
