“TV News Search & Borrow.”

The good folks at the Internet Archive have put together a brilliant, hugely valuable service—a searchable video archive of 350,000 news programs from the past three years from national broadcasts, using closed captioning transcripts as the search data. These sort of indices exist (it’s how The Daily Show does such great research), but access to …

Sweet land of liberty.

I just discovered NPR’s “Americandy: Sweet Land of Liberty,” a series of stories about regional candies from around the U.S. Some obvious ones make the cut—GooGoo Clusters, Valomilk, Idaho Spud, Cherry Mash, Nut Goodie, Rocky Road—but I’m excited to learn about a bunch of others that I’d never heard of. Chukar Cherries, Chewie Pecan Praline, …

Bush White House actively ignored September 11 warnings.

In an op-ed in the New York Times a couple of days ago, Kurt Eichenwald claims to have seen excerpts from presidential daily briefs from throughout 2001, and says that the lone declassified one (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) is nothing compared to those in the months beforehand. He says that the White …

OpenCourt Wins Legal Battle Over Streaming Proceedings

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled in favor of allowing OpenCourt to expand their streaming video feeds of court proceedings beyond Quincy District Court. The WBUR project has been running since last year, allowing anybody to watch what’s going on in the courtroom. It’s been a success by any measure, but when they tried to …

63% of Republicans still think that Iraq had WMD in 2003 and that the president is not an American.

This should be a wake-up call to the grown-ups in the Republican Party. Fetishizing ignorance and demonizing education has led to two-thirds of the party’s members being morons. I can understand why some people are confused about global climate change and evolution—there’s been a well organized attempt to spread misinformation on these scientifici topics. But …

Muller concludes that humans are behind climate change.

Physicist Richard A. Muller was in the news last year after his Koch-funded study of global climate change concluded that it’s real, surely to the Koch brothers’ dismay. Now he’s penned an on-ed for the New York Times in which he says that his ongoing research has led him to the same conclusion as 99.9% …

43% of Philadelphia voters lack photo ID.

Approximately 437,237 Philadelphia residents will not be able to vote under Pennsylvania’s controversial new voter ID law. Statewide, it’s 1.6M people, or one in five voters. This law was pushed strongly by Republicans and—damnest thing—it’s mostly Democrats who are disenfranchised by this law. It’s no wonder that the U.S. Attorney General is investigating whether the …

There is no voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is defending their voter ID law in court, and they’ve just dealt themselves a serious blow. In a filing, they’ve admitted that there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” as …

Unsurprisingly, Medicaid helps people.

Some conservatives have long argued that Medicaid doesn’t actually help people—that private charity is sufficient and, anyway, most doctors don’t accept Medicaid. Many others, of course, argue that privacy charity is far from sufficient, and people fare much worse without health insurance. Oregon accidentally provided the first test of this with a control group, for …