Bloomberg: Obama Lawyers Signal Likely Supreme Court Appeal on Health CareThe White House wants to end the federal appeals court rulings on the president's health care reform, and for the Supreme Court to take up the case. That's likely to bring a decision in June, in the middle of the presidential campaign. "President Barack Obama …
Tag Archives: history
“Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.”
There was a moment in an episode of The Simpsons (“Mountain of Madness”), that aired back in 1997, that I’ve mentally revisited every so often over the past decade: In transcript form: Homer: So, Mr. Burns is gonna make us all go on a stupid corporate retreat up in the mountains to learn about teamwork. …
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Links for September 12th
Wikipedia: Avondale Mine DisasterOne hundred and ten workers died in this Pennsylvania mine fire in 1869. The mine owner wouldn't allow but one tunnel to be constructed, so when the fire started, anybody below that point in the mine was trapped and suffocated. The result was that the Pennsylvania General Assembly created the nation's first …
Links for August 30th
W3C: Personal names around the worldThe World Wide Web Consortium has put together this great document about how people's names differ globally, and the implications of those differences on website and database development. I've long preferred simply providing a "name" field—none of this "first name" "last name" business—and this reassures me that this is the …
Links for August 17th
Physorg: Human precursors went to sea, team says130,000 year-old stone tools have been found on Crete. What with being an island, that means that hominids that predate homo sapiens managed to cross open water. That was an ability that researchers had long chalked up to being one of those things that makes us special, but …
Links for August 11th
Wikipedia: Ellis IslandThe waters around the Statue of Liberty are owned by New Jersey, but the land on which the statute sits is owned by New York. The adjacent Ellis Island is largely owned by New Jersey, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 has the right to all parts of the island that were …
Links for August 4th
journoterrorist: How to Build a Newsroom Time MachineThis group of college journalism students were assigned the task of producing a publication using only thirty-year-old technology. They learned a lot. MSNBC: Firm gives $1 million to pro-Romney group, dissolvesW Spann LLC was formed in March, gave a million dollars to a pro-Romney super PAC, and then …
Links for July 25th
New York Times: Policy Changes Under Two PresidentsThis chart of new costs versus savings under Presidents Bush and Obama is really striking. The total cost of Obama's new policies comes to $1.44T. Bush's? $5.07T. Just his tax cuts alone cost more than Obama's policies, at $1.8T. Once you figure in two wars, TARP, and the …
Links for July 14th
Reuters: How I misread News Corp’s taxesPulitzer-prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston broke a story earlier this week about how News Corp had received $4.8B in income tax refunds over the past four years, while paying nothing. Turns out he was entirely wrong. What he'd written was the opposite of the truth. News Corp changed …
Links for July 8th
Wikipedia: The National RoadOne of the first highways in the country was the aptly named "National Road," running from Cumberland, Maryland to south-central Illinois, the road was to continue clear to Missouri, but the project ran out of cash. Construction of the 620-mile road ran from 1811–1838, having been authorized five years prior by President …