• DIRECT Ezine for Democrats

  A weekly must read.



• Clevertium … « Grammar Police a.k.a. GrammarCops


• Think Progress » Washington Post reportedly selling health care lobbyists and CEOs access to its journalists, Obama officials.

  Money, money, money, the world is full of greedy fucks.



• 'Family': Fundamentalism, Friends In High Places : NPR

  tip to Patrick



• Mooney and Kirshenbaum: Atheists turn Americans from science, strangle puppies « Why Evolution Is True


• Hiking the Euphemistic Trail : Evasive Maneuvers : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus


• Childcare: Fiction: The New Yorker

  A new story by Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite writers.



• Science-Based Medicine » Chiropractic - A Brief Overview, Part II


• PLoS ONE: Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research

• The Satirical Political Report - An Offbeat Look at the Hot-Button Issues of the Day » GOP Leaders Claim Al Franken Not Fit to Serve, Based on Poor Senate Attendance Record


• Are We Alone? Science radio for thinking species

  tip to Richard



• On the Tendency of Skeptics to form Circles; and on the Perpetuation of Circles and Skeptics by Natural Means of Selection (Skeptics' Circle 114) | Homologous Legs


• Welcome | Wordnik


• Language Log » Doing stupid


• Confirmed: God is slightly gay / Just ask the animals. As soon as they stop having all that homosexual sex


• Wall Street and the Third World | vanityfair.com


• 'Unbelievable? PZ Myers and Denis Alexander on Faith and Science' by Premier.org.uk - RichardDawkins.net


• Frog dozes in mud for years without food, water - LiveScience- msnbc.com


• DON'T GET THAT COLLEGE DEGREE! - New York Post


• Ode to Mark “Sweet Talker” Sanford « Mad Kane’s Political Madness

“The Minnesota Supreme Court has just issued its long-awaited judgment in the Senate race, declaring that Democrat Al Franken is the winner.

The 32-page unanimous decision by the state’s highest court was released after a seven-months long battle over the seat formerly held by Norm Coleman. On every ground, the judicial panel rejected Mr. Coleman’s claims of trial errors or constitutional violations, and decided that Mr. Franken’s election should be certified by the state as valid.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty had indicated as late as Monday that he was willing to certify Mr. Franken as the winner once the state’s highest court decided the recount and Mr. Coleman’s battle. On CNN on Sunday, Mr. Pawlenty said: “I’m prepared to sign it as soon as they give the green light.””

Update: Coleman concedes

Musical Minds premiers tonight on PBS 8:00 p.m. Here is a preview

• FT.com / Columnists / Clive Crook - Obama is choosing to be weak

  The president has cast himself not as a leader of reform, but as a cheerleader for “reform” – meaning anything, really, that can plausibly be called reform, however flawed. He has defined success down so far that many kinds of failure now qualify.

  tip to pedantsareus



• Scalia breaks ranks, slams Bush officials on bank regulation | McClatchy

  WASHINGTON — In a rebuke of the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that a federal bank regulator erred in quashing efforts by New York state to combat the kind of predatory mortgage lending that triggered the nation's financial crisis.

  The 5-4 ruling by the high court was unusual. Justice Antonin Scalia, arguably the most conservative jurist, wrote the majority's opinion and was joined by the court's four liberal judges.

  The five justices held that contrary to what the Bush administration had argued, states can enforce their own laws on matters such as discrimination and predatory lending, even if that crosses into areas under federal regulation.



• Help vaccinate Las Vegas! : Respectful Insolence


• De-Moralized? « Mad Kane’s Political Madness


• Stop the Cap! » Blog Archive » The AT&T Huge Bill Problem (Again): Credit for One, Overcharges for Everyone Else

  In between the wall-to-wall coverage of the passing of Michael Jackson last week, Stop the Cap! reader Lou discovered Twitter was all-a-tweet about yet another person who got stuck with an enormous mobile data bill from AT&T Mobility. This time it was Mythbusters’ Adam Savage, who spent five days in Montreal and discovered the most expensive part of the trip was the $11,000 bill from AT&T.

  The story here isn’t really about AT&T’s math, or the remarkably expensive Canadian data roaming rate of $0.015 per kilobyte, it’s the fact AT&T will let your bill run into the ionosphere before alerting you, or giving you the option to automatically shut yourself off before you go over a plan limit.



• 'Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: what I have against religion' by Effect Mesure - ScienceBlogs - RichardDawkins.net

• Accommodationism: onward and downward « Why Evolution Is True

  Well, God may have rested on Sundays, but atheists don’t. A mini-kerfuffle has begun with yesterday’s posting of science postdoc John Wilkins at his website Evolving Thoughts. Wilkins listed six “points” for discussion, these being reasons why accommodationism is the proper strategy for addressing the faith/science dichotomy. They are the usual mix of I-am-a-nice-guyness, religion-and-science-both-find-truth-ness, and the-atheists-are-so-uncivil-ness.

• Skepchick » Selling (Bullshit) with Science in 5 Easy Steps!
• Myths about Canadian healthcare - Boing Boing
• BBC NEWS | Health | Doctors want right to talk faith
• Taking the naturopathic option : Respectful Insolence
• 'Satellite interview with Richard Dawkins' by Royal Society of New Zealand - RichardDawkins.net


• The Washington Monthly

  THIS WEEK IN GOD.... First up from the God Machine this week is the resolution of a recent controversy involving the late Jerry Falwell's college in Virginia, which no longer wanted to allow its students to organize an official Democratic student group on campus.



• Clever New Caledonian crows use one tool to acquire another : Not Exactly Rocket Science

  I know, I've linked to similar articles in the past. I can't help myself, crows are so cool.



• Jesus Freak


• Sanford: King David Didn't Resign, So Why Should I? | TPMMuckraker


• Financial shenanigans wiped out all productivity gains from digital technology - Boing Boing

  The new report from the Deloitte Center for the Edge says that, "return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity." Jon Taplin explains, "any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt. To understand this, it's important to grasp the difference between return on equity (the classic Wall Street measurement) and return on assets...By masking their absolutely dismal performance in the last 40 years in ROA, by taking on more and more debt to juice ROE, both Wall Street and America's corporate elite are engaged in a massive shell game, in which the average investor is the mark."



• ' The Saturday Interview: A caveman's logic' by Mary Vallis, National Post - RichardDawkins.net
• Confidence

  More on Chris Mooney and his straw men.

tip to pedantsareus