Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Not Enough Inflation (New York Times)
… large parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years; this debt burden is arguably the main thing holding private spending back and perpetuating the slump. Modest inflation would, however, reduce that overhang - by eroding the real value of that debt - and help promote the private-sector recovery we need. Meanwhile, other parts of the private sector (like much of corporate America) are sitting on large hoards of cash; the prospect of moderate inflation would make letting the cash just sit there less attractive, acting as a spur to investment - again, helping to promote overall recovery.
Connie Schultz: Bilingual Superiority (Creators Syndicate)
In the past decade or so, I've interviewed countless immigrants who speak to me in English and then translate for others or chastise their children in Russian, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Arabic - you name it, I probably have heard it here in wildly diverse Cleveland. So often, I drive away from these interviews marveling at how smart they have to be to build a life in this country.
Suzanne Moore: Gove is so busy trying to recreate the narrow education of the past that he's blind to the future (Guardian)
Encouraging pupils to think outside the box is hardly likely when the box itself is idolized.
JAMIE SCHRAM, LIZ SADLER and BILL SANDERSON: Super dog! Takes a bullet to save SI rob victim (New York Post)
This Staten Island pooch took a bullet to the head to save his owner - and lived to bark about it.
Laurie Penny: Ryan Gosling Saved Me From a Speeding Car But There's War In the Middle East So Everyone Calm Down (Gawker)
Everybody needs to calm down about Ryan Gosling saving me from a speeding car.
Seven rounds with Aki Kaurismäki (Guardian)
He thinks his own films are dreadful, Scorsese's worse, and despairs of mankind in general. Director Aki Kaurismäki tells Simon Hattenstone why only love, mushrooms and drinking on set keep him going.
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Michelangelo Signorile: Was Jesus a Homophobe? (Huffington Post)
It all began when Maverick Couch, a high school student in Waynesville, Ohio, wore a T-shirt that says "Jesus Is Not a Homophobe." The school principal at Waynesville High School, Randy Gebhardt, summoned the young man to his office and ordered him to turn the T-shirt inside out.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from MAM
An Easter Picture
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and quite warm.
Old-Fashioned Hollywood Hustlers
Talk Radio Hosts
Does Rush Limbaugh defend the Heritage Foundation's unfortunate dabbling in a health care reform in the 1990s because he truly believes the think tank is "the gold standard" or because the organization sponsors his show for $2 million a year? Product placement is tricky in a non-visual medium like radio, and even trickier when your product is a series of abstract ideas and policy proposals. But some right-leaning think tanks have found a way to do that, by paying conservative talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck for "embedded ads," which seamlessly weave endorsements of their institution into what sounds like regular content, Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel and Lucy McCalmont report. Heritage paid about $1.3 million last year to sponsor Sean Hannity's show; FreedomWorks has a $1.4 million with Beck. Americans for Prosperity wouldn't offer details on the deal it's had with Levin since last summer.
Radio hosts have long had deals to endorse some product or another, but there's something slightly less unsettling about a maybe-maybe-not paid for statement like "I love Diet Coke" than "I support the this specific tax proposal." There's no chance that a soda endorsement will trickle up through the national debate and result in some kind of soda regulation. Beck himself showed a bit of discomfort with the deal, it seems, during this segment from earlier this year:
"This is a new thing from FreedomWorks and by the way, they are sponsor of this program and I have a commercial to do for them in, well, in just a few minutes. I don't think they're going to get one because this is pretty much it... But it is something that I believe in, I'm not saying this because they're paying me to do a commercial in a couple of minutes. This is something that I think is absolutely critical."
Heritage pioneered the strategy in 2008; the think tanks say it's a way to reach out to their core audience, Politico reports. But the radio hosts are not the only ones who've put their endorsements up for sale. Last week, Politico's Ben Smith reported that Human Events Group sent out an email advertising RedState blogger Erick Erickson's as available for endorsements. The email read, "Erick Erickson's reputation along with his rising profile, combine to make RedState the most influential conservative blog on Capitol Hill and across America... Why not put Erick's influence to work for your organization?" It offered features like "Erick's Video Endorsement (subject to final approval by Erick)." Erickson pushed back on RedState, writing, "No, my endorsements are not for sale."
Talk Radio Hosts
Crisis Is Looming
US Science
The United States is at risk of ceding its leadership in science, a number of physicists agreed Monday (April 2), though there was less of a consensus on a clear solution to the problem.
Five physicists shared their worries about America's scientific future during a panel discussion at the April 2012 meeting of the American Physics Society, saying that governmental funding for science research is in crisis, and not enough U.S. students graduate with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.
"There are some facts and figures that are very disturbing, which show the United States might be losing ground in science and discovery, whereas other countries are gaining," Pushpa Bhat, a physicist at Illinois' Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory (Fermilab), said at a press conference preceding the panel. "We can't sit back and watch."
Bhat lamented the lack of cutting-edge physics facilities in this country. While many of the world's best instruments and experiments, such as Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator, used to be housed here, that frontier has moved elsewhere. For example, the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is located at the CERN lab in Switzerland, while Illinois' Tevatron has shut down.
"There are things that the country will miss out on if we don't have such facilities here," Bhat said.
US Science
Arizona Lawmakers Gifted
Knitted Uteri
Critics of an Arizona proposal to limit birth control coverage have given a personalized gift to more than a dozen state lawmakers - a fuzzy, knitted uterus with googly eyes.
The packages were delivered Thursday, each in a clear plastic bag labeled with a legislator's name and containing a letter from a woman opposing the measure.
Supporters say it's needed to protect the rights of employers with religious or moral objections to contraception.
Critics have objected to the possible loss of coverage and to provisions they say violate women's rights to privacy, requiring some who want contraception for medical purposes other than birth control to provide evidence of that.
Knitted Uteri
Breaks Seasonal Snow Record
Anchorage
A spring snowfall has broken the nearly 60-year-old seasonal snow record of Alaska's largest city.
Inundated with nearly double the snow they're used to, Anchorage residents have been expecting to see this season's snowfall surpass the record of 132.6 inches set in the winter of 1954-55.
The 3.4 inches that fell by Saturday afternoon brings the total to 133.6 inches. National Weather Service meteorologist Shaun Baines said forecasters don't expect more than an inch of additional accumulation.
Before a dumping of wet snow Friday, none had fallen since mid-March, and the seasonal measure hovered at 129.4 inches, or nearly 11 feet. The halt gave residents a chance to clear their snow-laden roofs and city crews an opportunity to widen streets squeezed by mountains of snow.
Anchorage
National Review Fires
John Derbyshire
The National Review has fired columnist John Derbyshire over a web posting in which he wrote that black people are hostile to whites and that white people should stay out of black neighborhoods and away from black crowds.
The magazine on Saturday night disavowed Derbyshire's "nasty and indefensible" posting - which ran on a website unrelated to the National Review - and said it amounted to a "letter of resignation" by the columnist.
"We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer," editor Rich Lowry said in a posting on the magazine's website.
"Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we'd never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways," Lowry said.
John Derbyshire
Fires Producer
NBC
NBC News has fired a producer following a probe into its broadcasting of a misleading edit of an audio clip of a 911 emergency response call during coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, two sources at the network said.
The producer, who was not identified by the sources, is Miami-based. NBC News declined to comment when asked about the dismissal, which the sources said took place on Thursday.
NBC News executives interviewed more than half a dozen employees during their investigation of the network's editing of the tape of the 911 call placed by George Zimmerman before he shot the unarmed Florida teenager, sources at the network had said on Thursday.
The edit made it appear as though Zimmerman told police that Martin was black without being prompted, when, in fact, the full tape reveals that the neighborhood watch captain only did so when responding to a question asked by the dispatcher.
Sources at the network said on Thursday that NBC News executives did not know the 911 call was misleadingly edited until news reports surfaced days later on right-leaning blogs includingNewsbusters.org and Breitbart.com.
NBC
Stolen From UK Museum
Artifacts
Two Chinese artifacts with an estimated combined value of 2 million pounds ($3.2 million) have been stolen from a British museum, authorities said Saturday.
Two men and a woman from the West Midlands area have been arrested in connection with the Thursday night theft at Durham University's Oriental Museum, but the items had not yet been recovered, police said.
The northern England-based university confirmed that two "priceless" artifacts were stolen when thieves broke into a ground-floor gallery at the museum: a large jade bowl with a Chinese poem written inside that dates back to 1769, and a Dehua porcelain sculpture.
The university said police and security guards were alerted immediately by alarms, but declined to comment further on its security systems.
Artifacts
Wants to Challenge Pigboy
Huckabee
Mike Huckabee is looking to provide a nicer alternative - "conservatism with a smile" - to Rush Limbaugh's brash, louder, confrontational radio style. Huckabee will debut a new radio show on Monday that will directly challenge Limbaugh from noon-to-3 p.m., Politico reports. Rush's behaviour often gets him into trouble, his most recent storm being the one over remarks he made about contraception activist Sandra Fluke. Rush weathered that storm, and after being on the air for nearly three decades he's weathered new competitors before, too.
Huckabee hopes his new show will catch on with the conservative set who don't want to listen to Rush get into another shouting match, either with his guest or himself. "I'm going to treat every guest with respect and civility. Nobody is going to come on and get into a shouting match with me. That's just not my style," Huckabee explained to Politico.
A Republican strategist thinks Huckabee's nice guy style will help him gain an audience, possibly outside of the typical Republican talk radio circles. "[Rush] is a polarizing figure in the larger culture. [Huckabee] is conservatism with a smile, which is a big difference in a party where the message is so often delivered angrily., said Steve Schmidt, a former aide for John McCain. Schmidt also thinks Huckabee's uncertain political future might help his ratings.
As Politico points out, this isn't the first high-profile member of the conservative media to offer themselves up against Limbaugh in the afternoon slot. Fred Thompson's show lasted from 2009 to 2011 before he stopped. Before Thompson it was Bill O'Reilly, whose style isn't so far off from Rush's, who could only get to number two on the radio charts behind Rush's juggernaut program.
Huckabee
Oaksterdam Raid Rattles Crusader
Richard Lee
Richard Lee, one of the highest profile marijuana activists in America, has announced he plans to give up ownership of his marijuana businesses in Oakland, Calif.
The man who opened Oaksterdam University, the nation's first college to teach students about the cannabis industry, and who bankrolled a failed ballot initiative to legalize the adult use of marijuana, says a federal raid this week has convinced him it's time to step aside. The raid seized his assets, plants, bank accounts, records, and computers.
His decision marks an important moment for the medical-marijuana industry. While Mr. Lee says he will continue to be an outspoken advocate of marijuana, his step back threatens to create a void in the leadership of the movement. Moreover, the federal raid that hit his operations Monday is a sign that the Drug Enforcement Administration is ramping up its crackdown on California's medical-marijuana dispensaries.
"This is a clear statement to California that the DEA is becoming more aggressive in this area, despite California's Compassionate Use Act" - the state's first-in-the-nation ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in 1996, says Joan Smyth of Kaufman Dolowich Voluck & Gonzo, a national law firm, via e-mail.
In the past, the DEA has assisted local authorities in shutting down individual dispensaries based on zoning laws. But in Oakland, where the medical-marijuana zoning laws "are virtually nonexistent, and there have not been local efforts to shut the dispensaries down," Ms. Smyth says, the DEA is now taking the lead.
Richard Lee
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