I’ve been involved in the design world for 15-plus years, and one of the more difficult aspects of this work has always been developing user interface concepts for clients that convey the general concept of the product without getting too mired in the specifics of layout, color and design.

The original practice was to build storyboards: just make them as rough as possible, and flip through them to demonstrate the scope of the product. But as web sites (and later, mobile apps) became more complex), this was no longer a feasible or financially viable way to work.

So a few years ago, I started playing around with a couple different online wireframing and mock-up tools that started springing up around the web. There is one that I’ve found to have particular staying power (and that has helped me and my clients work together quite effectively): FlairBuilder.

While you can get all the nitty-gritty details about FlairBuilder from the product’s site, I’ll summarize what I love about it in a few words:

• It’s intuitive to use, manage projects, import assets and export finished work to and from;
• It’s stable and dependable;
• The feature set has worked for virtually every project I’ve thrown at it, whether large corporate website; spec mobile app; collaborative project; personal effort; anything;
• The collaboration features (as well as the nifty free viewer) allow me and my clients to avoid virtually any platform/browser/environment hassles that would have previously hampered communication and/or approvals in the past;
• The developer is extremely responsive, both in terms of new releases and for support issues (which is all that matters when deadlines are looming);

The company has put a nice video out that demonstrates some of the tool’s best features, which you can watch below. There’s a free trial available, but once you use it you’ll find that the paid version is really priced just right.

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The Vatican has published a gorgeous interactive virtual Sistine Chapel, allowing online visitors to enjoy a truly remarkable experience: zoom in on the ornate detail of just about any corner of the room, or pan around to take in the immensity of the space. This is a terrific example of how new media can expand our awareness of the world around us.

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This morning, I received what looks like a robo-response email from Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in response to a letter I sent two days ago urging her to vote NO on SOPA and NO on PIPA.

I appreciate the prompt reply from her staff (and the robot responder in her office), but unfortunately it appears from her email that BOTH senators from my state, Minnesota, are still using language that supports the interests behind both bills.

We made ourselves known to the world and Congress…
I guess we need to turn the volume up even higher.

Here’s the text of the letter
SENATOR AMY KLOBUCHAR sent me this morning:

January 20, 2012

Dear Jonathan:

Thank you for contacting me about the Protect IP Act. I appreciate hearing from you and especially appreciate hearing the concerns you have raised.

On January 20th, 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced an indefinite postponement of the scheduled Senate vote on the Protect IP Act.  As Congress continues to consider this issue, please know that I will work to make sure your concerns are addressed.

The internet has dramatically altered the manner in which we communicate, conduct business, seek entertainment and find information.  It is vital to ensure that online innovation and openness are preserved so the American people can continue to freely to express themselves and pursue personal and economic endeavors over the internet.

It is also important that foreign criminals not be allowed to steal the property of others without consequence.  The pirating of intellectual property is not a victimless crime.  Rather, it threatens the jobs and livelihoods of millions of middle class American workers and businesses.  However, we must seek ways to protect people from online piracy, particularly foreign piracy, without limiting web-based innovation or a free exchange of ideas.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.  One of the most important parts of my job is listening to what the people of Minnesota have to say to me.  I am here in our nation’s capital to do the public’s business and to serve the people of our state.  I hope you will contact me again about matters of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar

United States Senator

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• Proof we do not need SOPA. – Tea Party Nation (gds44.wordpress.com)
• Let’s bury SOPA and PIPA (piedtype.com)
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• Dropping Support for PIPA and SOPA (netsecurityit.wordpress.com)
• Senator Amy Klobuchar to Keynote ERA Government Affairs Fly-In (prweb.com)
• A Run-Down on SOPA and PIPA [Video] Why It Matters (chrisdrinkut.wordpress.com)
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• Tell Congress to vote NO on SOPA and PIPA! (feministconscience.wordpress.com)
• Find Out Who Is Supporting SOPA/PIPA (eoghann.com)

The STOP SOPA / NO on SOPA / NO on PIPA movement has become an unprecedented online show of solidarity, demonstrating to Congress that individuals working together are just as influential as well-funded corporate interests when we put our minds to it.

If you know about SOPA or PIPA but don’t know how you can make a difference, or want to learn why the SOPA and PIPA legislation is bad for online innovation and fundamental First Amendment freedom of expression by users like you, I’ve put together this post with information and links to help you BE INFORMED and GET INVOLVED:

SUMMARY OF THE ‘STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT’ (SOPA):

Summary courtesy OpenCongress.org:
This bill would establish a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright infringment.

The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against any site they deem to have “only limited purpose or use other than infringement,” and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site. It would also make unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty up to five years in prison. This bill combines two separate Senate bills – S.968 and S.978 – into one big House bill.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ‘STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT’ (SOPA):

• SOPA Infographic: A graphic demonstration of SOPA’s impact
  
• Infographic: What SOPA means to business & innovation
  
• Read the text of SOPA (H.R. 3261)
  Includes official summary of the bill as presently drafted
• Who in Congress supports SOPA?
  ProPublica breaks down SOPA-supporting House and Senate members by party, state, their age, donations received from pro-SOPA corporations and frequently updated news including statements from members of Congress regarding their (evolving) positions on SOPA
• How will SOPA affect you?
  CNET.com offers an insightful look at SOPA’s impact on the average Internet user, and answers questions about the things we do online and the ways SOPA might interfere with our lives online
• Companies/corporations that support SOPA
  PDF document listing companies whose position is pro-SOPA
• An analysis of SOPA: Tech Law & Policy
  How the House took the Senate’s bad Internet Piracy bill and managed to make it even worse… (courtesy Arstechnica)
• A Legis Memo by Lawrence H. Tribe on SOPA 1st Amendment violations
  Laurence H. Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968. Tribe has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court). He wrote this memo in opposition to the SOPA legislation as drafted. 

TAKE ACTION: WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP SOPA

• Automatically send your US Senators and US Representative an email
  This site automatically drafts a NO ON SOPA email for you to customize, looks up your representatives in Congress based on your Zip Code, and sends everything off with a single click in a shockingly short amount of time. Courtesy of OpenCongress.org

• Complete the Take Action Checklist to Stop Censorship
  This resource has many action-items to help us stay involved, and is updated as new opportunities to act become available.
• Add the following banners to your Twitter pic: 
  “CENSORED”: http://t.co/Ie9Bz4L2
  “STOP SOPA”: http://t.co/vlaSE7je
• Join and follow the STOP SOPA group on Google+ 
  There are many groups and resources dedicated to stopping SOPA around the web; this is one available on Google+ that has members with excellent information, up-to-the-minute news and diverse resources for virtually every aspect of NO on SOPA, NO on PIPA and the ensuing debate…
• Be active on social networks like Google+, Twitter and Facebook:
  Post links to articles, resources and general information to let people in your social network know that you oppose SOPA. Include hashtags: #nosopa #stopsopa #nopipa #sopa #pipa in Twitter messages, Google+ posts and other stuff you share online. Let friends and family know about NO on SOPA, and let them know how they can help STOP SOPA & STOP PIPA.

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• BlackoutSOPA.org – Change your profile picture to protest SOPA! (darioalvarez.net)
• SOPA/PIPA Protests Bring the Web to a Halt (mossandfog.com)
• Sign the petition to Stop SOPA & PIPA (radiopd.wordpress.com)
• What is SOPA? What is PROTECT IP? How SOPA and PIPA might affect you? (socialnetworkinglab.com)
• Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation – Stop #SOPA #PIPA (adafruit.com)
• SOPA / PIPA Blackout (secondmode.wordpress.com)
• Support the SOPA, PIPA Protest (securityskeptic.typepad.com)
• How SOPA and PIPA would Censor the Internet (connectwithyourteens.net)
• Stop SOPA (dontleavetowngavin.com)
• Stop Sopa (downtownlocal.me)
• Sopa & Pipa (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)
• SOPA and PIPA (blogs.discovermagazine.com)

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

The website Royal Pingdom has posted answers to these questions and many more, providing a veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data about the state of the Internet in 2011.

Some of Royal Pingdom’s stats for the Internet in 2011:

Websites

• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
• 300 million – Added websites in 2011.

Read the full article with all the numbers on Royal Pingdom…

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The Atlantic unearthed a picture of Newt Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, posing arm in arm in front of Auschwitz. “Newt is wearing his default smirk,” the magazine observes, and says “there is something distinctly off about these tourist-style shots in front of the Nazi death-camp.”

It’s not actually that strange: exhaustive research reveals that the Gingrichs often pose—in the same outfits and with these same facial expressions, in fact!—at the sites of many of the world’s great tragedies:

Gingrich couple smiling at Chernobyl Disaster

Or..

Gingrich couple smiling at Sinking of Titanic

Read the articles at Vanity Fair.com and The Atlantic.com…

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In this letter, I am asking Senator Franken to withdraw his support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). 

Senator Franken,

My name is Jonathan Bates. In 2008 I was precinct captain at the DFL caucus in Upper Lowry Hill in Minneapolis, and from the day following our success in securing your nomination as Minnesota’s DFL candidate for Senate, my fiance and I were tireless in working to ensure that you would become our senator.

Why did we sacrifice all of those hours hosting ‘cell phone parties’ to shore up support for your campaign during the general election? What led us to participate in your campaign at a level far more passionately than we had previously?

Because the constant that came through in all your books, in your Air America radio show, and during your campaign, was integrity and a disdain for those who parsed or finessed the facts. You told us that you would go to Washington not only with your moral compass intact, but with the intent of continuing the mission of Paul Wellstone.

Senator Franken, with all due respect: in light of your recent support for SOPA, PIPA and your bizarre willingness to allow pizza to be substituted for vegetables in our public school lunchrooms, I’m seeing less of Paul Wellstone’s vision and integrity and more of Norm Coleman’s politics-as-usual being channeled through your actions as our senator.

Even from a thousand-plus miles away, I cannot imagine the toxic and difficult environment you must work in every day; I realize the GOP has made it their stated mission to prevent Democrats from achieving anything in Washington, and being at the center of the ‘Storm of No’ must be disheartening at best.

Nonetheless, you are a leader and you are our senator. Your election was a mutual contract based on a promise you made to stand up for what was right, do what best served all Minnesotans, and demonstrate that decent and good people *can* go to Washington without falling prey to corruption, cynicism, apathy or greed.

Remember Paul Wellstone, Senator Franken. Think what he would do, then go to the Senate floor and withdraw your support for SOPA and PIPA.

If your conscience tells you Paul would have differed on other policy matters as well, know that there are thousands of Minnesotans who will support you for doing what you know to be the morally and just thing to do.

Your constituent, respectfully,

Jonathan Bates

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This solution does three things:

1. It registers you as publisher of your blog for Google+. This means that any visitors who ‘+1′ or share your blog, posts or comments using the Google+ button anywhere on the web will be ‘credited’ to you. This in turn will improve the page rank of your blog in Google’s search results;
2. It adds a ‘+1′ button to your blog. This is in addition to the +1 feature provided by WordPress in the Tools>Sharing section of your Administration area. Having this also improves your Google+ publisher compliance, which in turn gives you an edge in Google search result page ranking;
3. It provides a ‘badge’ to connect your blog back to your Google+ profile.This not only fortifies the connection between your blog and your Google+ presence (and completes your G+ publisher compliance), but also provides visitors with a single-click means to get to your posts and content on Google+. Since you’ll have a built-in audience on G+ and a significant amount of posted content available there, the opportunities for cross-traffic are obvious.

The code I wrote below has been implemented on my WordPress.com blogs and is WP-compliant. You can see it in action at momfy.wordpress.com in the upper-right column of the page.

INSTRUCTIONS

In the WordPress Administration area of the blog you want to connect with your Google+ profile:

1. Create a WordPress Text Widget and past the code below into the text area (without the CODE tags).
2. In a new browser window, go to your Google+ profile page. The URL will look like this:
   https://plus.google.com/117182699411387789980/posts
3. From the URL, copy the long string of numbers. That’s your Google+ profile ID.
4. Return to your Text Widget; in the code you previously pasted, look for the string of numbers similar to those you just copied. Delete the old numbers and paste the string from your Google+ profile.
5. In the code text below, the name ‘Jonathan Bates‘ (my name) appears. Delete and replace with your name.
6. Save the widget and close.
7. Open your blog and confirm that you see a Google ‘+1′ button and beneath it, {your name} on {google+ image}.
8. That’s it. You’re done.

Note: The Google ‘+1′ button may take a moment to appear, and may not show up until the rest of your blog has already rendered. That’s normal.

Click for the code for the WordPress Text Widget.



jonathan bateson

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“Republicans complaining about the households not paying enough who also want to cut taxes overall are asking the poor to subsidize a tax cut for the rich…”

Here’s a fresh quote from the latest non-Romney front-runner in the GOP presidential race: “This dividing of America [between] 99-1,” Rick Santorum said this morning in New Hampshire, “It’s anybody that makes money and pays taxes and everybody who doesn’t. That’s the 99-1.”

Santorum (like Michele Bachmann before him) is picking a fight with the millions of Americans who make money and don’t pay federal income taxes. For the last few years, this group represents about half of the country.

Indeed the statistic inspired a website,  “We Are the 53 Percent,” which called out the 47% (or more) of households who owed no federal income tax in 2010 and again in 2011, because their credits and deductions wiped out their liability.

Since 2000, the poorest 40% of households have averaged a federal income tax rate below zero. The graph below shows federal income taxes since 1979, from the lowest quintile (on the bottom) to the top 1% (at the top). The big picture is that we have a progressive tax system where federal income tax rates have fallen slightly for every class of taxpayers:

FEDERAL INCOME TAX RATES

But federal income tax isn’t the only tax out there. In fact, FIT accounts for only 40 percent of total government revenue. Another 40ish percent comes from payroll taxes, which all working families pay up to about $107,000. The rest comes from corporate income taxes and excise taxes on things like gas.

When you add all of those taxes together, you get the overall tax burden that economists call the “effective tax rate.” Here is the graph of effective federal taxes for the same groups as above (it’s a similar story of gradually falling rates for every group, with some jumpiness at the top):

TOTAL EFFECTIVE TAX RATES

Three big points, here. First, the fact that all the lines in the second graph are above zero suggest that the vast majority of households that don’t pay federal income taxes do pay federal taxes. (The few that don’t might still owe local and state taxes.)

Second, the reason most poor families don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans and Democrats keep cutting their taxes.

Third, just about everybody has shared in the tax cut parade of the last 30 years. We haven’t shared equally, but we’ve all gotten a break.

According to Santorum’s quote, the most important class division in America is between income tax payers and non-income tax payers. This is a weird fight to pick for the Republican party, and particularly for Santorum, whose tax scheme would probably increase the number of households who owe no federal income tax.

Read the rest of this article at The Atlantic Online…

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Punishment Just Teaches Kids To Be Better Liars

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Many people, young and old, complain about how technology is doing this or that to their lives. Writers bemoan the loss of real connections, or whatever they think people did before phones/the Internet/computers ruined everything.

Last weekend, for example, the New York Times ran three separate articles on getting away from the plague of always-on communications, as Atlantic contributor Nathan Jurgenson noted.

“In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time,” Pico Iyer wrote. “The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.”

For the past couple of days, a great example of this kind of thinking has been making its way around the Tumblr ecosystem. A San Francisco dancer named Brian ‘Lil B’ Perez and his friends came up with a game to constrain their cellphone use when they’re out having dinner.

Here are the simple rules:

Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends

The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check. Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from Twitter/Facebook/texting and to encourage conversations.

Rules of the Game:

1. The game starts after everyone has ordered.
2. Everybody places their phone on the table face down.
3. The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.
4. Loser of the game pays for the bill.
   
5. If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.

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I’m not sure if Eminem has yet managed to escape the grasp of the Illuminati—the secret society of string pullers whose ranks he joined years ago in exchange for wealth, fame, and power—but I know he’s been trying very hard.

Numerous people online tell me so. There is, for starters, a Yahoo Answers page that poses the question “Is Eminem trying to break free from the Illuminati?” and offers spirited excavation and analysis of the hidden anti-Illuminati messages Eminem embedded in his song “Not Afraid.” There is a four-page message-board thread titled “Is Eminem an Illuminati slave?”

A YouTube video called “Eminem vs. Illuminati” explains, via solemn text and creepy music, that when the Detroit M.C. titled a song “Cinderella Man,” it was not because the redemptive plot of the 2005 Ron Howard film Cinderella Man echoes Eminem’s own comeback from drug addiction, but rather because, like Cinderella with her wicked stepsisters, Eminem was “forced to do the chores for the Illuminati by sending subliminal messages through his music.”

Ignore any comment-section sheep who bah that this is ridiculous: When that video ends, the hunt for truth has only just begun.

From a list of suggested related videos, you can choose “Eminem: His illuminati sacrifice Part 1”; “Eminem Fights Back Against The illuminati”; “Eminem against illuminati 2011!”; “Eminem My Darling Illuminati” and on and on. Some of the Eminem/Illuminati videos have been viewed 5,000 times. Others, close to 300,000…

Read the complete article at Slate.com from Jonah Weiner…

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According to the British Heart Foundation, more than a quarter of teenagers make assumptions about the harm of cigarettes from the wrapping.

---

Heart health campaigners urged the British government Thursday to follow Australia’s lead and ban all eye-catching designs and branding from cigarette packs to stop young people being lured into smoking. Australia is preparing to become the first nation to introduce so-called “plain” packaging on tobacco products by the end of 2012. The packs will show graphic health warnings about smoking but banish attractive colors and logos.

A survey by the British Heart Foundation charity released on Thursday found that more than a quarter of young people make assumptions about the relative harm of cigarettes based on the packaging alone.

The survey, which collated responses from more than 2,700 16 to 25 year-old smokers and non-smokers, found that three quarters of those who responded thought selling cigarettes in packs with no colorful brands or logos, and larger health warnings, would make it easier for people to smoke less or quit.

One in six, or 16 percent, said they would consider the pack design when deciding which cigarettes to buy, and 12 percent said they would choose a brand because it was considered ‘cool.’

Read the rest of this article at The Atlantic Online…

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From the December 15th Washington Post Online:

Christopher Hitchens, a sharp-witted provocateur who used his formidable learning, biting wit and muscular prose style to skewer what he considered high-placed hypocrites, craven lackeys of the right and left, “Islamic fascists” and religious faith of any kind, died Thursday “from pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer,” according to Vanity Fair, the magazine for which Mr. Hitchens worked. He was 62.

Mr. Hitchens, an English-born writer who had lived in Washington since 1982, was a tireless master of the persuasive essay, which he wrote with an indefatigable energy and venomous glee. He often wrote about the masters of English literature, but he was better known for his lifelong engagement with politics, with subtly nuanced views that did not fit comfortably with the conventional right or left.

In his tartly worded essays, books and television appearances, Mr. Hitchens was a self-styled contrarian who often challenged political and moral orthodoxy. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, savaged Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, ridiculed both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, then became an outspoken opponent of terrorism against the West from the Muslim world.

In 2007, Mr. Hitchens aimed his vitriol even higher, writing a best-selling book that disputed the existence of God, then enthusiastically took on anyone — including his own brother — who wanted to argue the matter.

His supporters praised Mr. Hitchens as a truth-telling literary master who, in the words of the Village Voice, was “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” Writer Christopher Buckley has called him “the greatest living essayist in the English language.”

Enemies vilified Mr. Hitchens as a godless malcontent. His onetime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, called him “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic [and] cynical.”

Mr. Hitchens was a raffish character who constantly smoked and drank, yet managed to meet every obligation of a frenetic professional and social schedule. A writer for the Observer newspaper in Britain described him as “at once resolute and dissolute.”

Friends and enemies alike marveled at how the hedonistic Mr. Hitchens, after a full evening of drinking and talking, could then sit down and casually produce sparkling essays for Vanity Fair, the Nation, the Atlantic, Slate.com and many other publications without missing a deadline.

“Writing is recreational for me,” he said in 2002. “I’m unhappy when I’m not doing it.”

He seldom produced an uninteresting sentence while writing with authority on a dizzying array of subjects, including books on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and the Elgin Marbles. Besides his political essays — usually about international affairs, seldom about domestic U.S. policy — Mr. Hitchens also wrote about strictly literary subjects, including authors Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.

The writer he was most identified with, though, was George Orwell, the British essayist and author of “1984.” His bracing moral courage and brisk prose were among Mr. Hitchens’s ideal models.

Read the complete article at the Washington Post Online…

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Conservative opinion writers are competing in something of an arms race to see who can describe Newt Gingrich, whom most of them despise, in the most apocalyptic terms. Here’s a list, from The New Yorker, of ten of the most over-the-top takedowns from the right of the former Speaker of the House and current Republican Presidential frontrunner:

1. George Will: “Gingrich … embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive…. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, ‘If you want to put people in jail,’ look at ‘the politicians who profited from’ Washington’s environment.”
2. Michael Gershon: “As president, Gingrich would be forced to repudiate his previous views out of strategic necessity. But those views demonstrate a disturbing tendency: the passionate embrace of shallow ideas.”
3. Kathleen Parker: “[N]o one other than Callista Gingrich thinks her husband can prevail in a general election. No. One…. Instead of rallying to support him, former colleagues are going out of their way to politely say, ‘He can’t lead.’…. Another insider speaking to me privately was blunter: ‘He’s unstable, and everybody knows it, but no one wants to say it.’”
4. Quin Hillyer: “[T]he power of the Gingrich surge does show, again, a lesson taught well by neo-Nazi David Duke when Duke was ascendant in Louisiana politics two decades ago. When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.”
5. Jonah Goldberg: “The other night while having drinks with some prominent conservatives, I said I thought there was a significant chance that Gingrich will not only win the nomination but that he might be the next president. Going by their expressions, I might as well have said I put a slow-acting poison in their cocktails.”
6. David Brooks: “[Gingrich] has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.
   “As nearly everyone who has ever worked with him knows, he would severely damage conservatism and the Republican Party if nominated. He would severely damage the Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt strain in American life.”
7. Ramesh Ponnuru: “[Gingrich] is still erratic…. He still has the same old grandiosity…. He still has the same need to justify his every petty move by reference to some grand theory…. He still has a casual relationship with the truth…. He still has the same penchant for sharing whatever revelation has just struck him….”
8. Jennifer Rubin: “The warnings and criticisms [from conservatives] fell into four distinct categories. The first is that Gingrich isn’t a staunch conservative but an opportunist who will gladly stab the right in the back for personal gain. The second is that his character is so flawed that he’s not fit to hold the presidency. (Only one issue concerns his serial infidelity….) The third is that he’s not the new Newt at all and continues to dissemble on everything from his lobbying work to his undermining of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The fourth is that he made millions lobbying (yes, lobbying) for big government on behalf of clients opposed to conservative principles.”
9. Mona Charen: “Newt Gingrich is a bad bet because he will embarrass the Republican party. He will do so through things he has already said and done, and in ways we cannot predict except to be sure—because character will out—that they will happen.”
10. Joe Scarborough: “He is not a nice human being. He is a bad person when it comes to demonizing opponents. When he puts on his political helmet he is a terrible person…. Let me tell you something: the Republican establishment will never make peace with Newt Gingrich. They just won’t. They won’t. This is an important point. Because the Republicans I talk to say he cannot win the nomination at any cost. He will destroy our party. He will re-elect Barack Obama, and we’ll be ruined.”

Read the full article at The New Yorker Online…

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Ask the regulation-hater to imagine him- or herself on the 20th floor of a building, standing before two elevators.

The elevator on the left was built using parts and designs that conform to federal and state fire codes, emergency safety standards and uniform quality control standards; it has been installed and maintained according to long-standing state and federal building codes, including fail-safe operation in case of cable failure; and it is inspected throughout the year through local and state building code, National Fire Protection Association standards for Electrical, Fire Sprinklers and Fire Alarms, Plumbing codes, and HVAC codes.

The elevator on the right, in this scenario, was designed, built and installed without any interference from government regulators. The free market and an individual manufacturer designed and built the elevator according to their own standards. Parts were sourced on the open market. Installation was done on a low-bid basis. The building management is responsible for keeping the elevator operating, and is free to choose anyone from its superintendent to a third-party contractor (or no one at all) to provide maintenance according to whatever standard it deems proper.

Knowing all the information presented above, the question to the anti-regulator is this:

“Which elevator would they rather take?”

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The phrase is one attorney Joseph Amendola says he has used for years to mean “get a life,” but the phone number is that of a sex line for gay and bi-curious men.

Amendola’s quip came Tuesday after his client Jerry Sandusky stunned a packed courtroom and backed out of a preliminary hearing at the last minute, avoiding a face-to-face confrontation with accusers who the lawyer said were just trying to cash in by making up stories of child sex abuse. The remark outraged some of the accusers and advocates for victims of abuse and created a huge stir online.

Amendola, during his lengthy comments to reporters outside the courthouse, said that if former Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary had witnessed a 10-year-old boy being sexually assaulted in a campus shower and had told the head football coach, the athletic director, a university vice president and the university president and “their response was simply to tell Jerry Sandusky that ‘Don’t go into the shower anymore with kids,’ I suggest you dial 1-800-REALITY because that makes absolutely no sense.”

He later said he has been using the remark “when people have said things that make no sense.”

Read the full story at the Chicago Sun Times online…

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‘Rich people create the jobs.’

Specifically, entrepreneurs and investors, when incented by low taxes, build companies and create millions of jobs.

And these entrepreneurs and investors, therefore, the argument goes, can solve our nation’s huge unemployment problem — if only we cut taxes and regulations so they can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.

In other words, by even considering raising taxes on “the 1%,” we are considering destroying the very mechanism that makes our economy the strongest and biggest in the world: The incentive for entrepreneurs nd investors to build companies in the hope of getting rich and, in the process, creating millions of jobs.

Now, there have long been many problems with this argument, starting with:

1. Taxes on rich people (capital gains and income) are, relative to history, low, so raising them would only begin to bring them back in line with prior prosperous periods, and
2. Dozens of rich entrepreneurs have already gone on record confirming that a modest hike in capital gains and income taxes would not have the slightest impact on their desire to create companies and jobs, given that tax rates are historically low.

So this argument, which many people regard as fact, is already flawed.

But now a super-rich and super-successful American has explained the most important reason the theory is absurd, while calling for higher taxes on himself and people like him.

What creates the jobs, Hanauer astutely observes, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company’s customers.

Read the rest of this story at BusinessInsider Online…

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Artist Ian Wojtowicz created this map by mashing together two existing portrayals of the world, NASA’s The Earth at Night and Facebook’s Friendship Map. By “subtracting” the Facebook map (blacked out areas) from the NASA map, Wojtowicz reveals the parts of the world that are lit up at night but are not linked in to the global social network of Facebook. They appear in bright yellow, in places such as Russia, the Northeast of Brazil, China, Japan, and parts of the Middle East.

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This is crazy. New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes. Is this a military experiment?

Some unidentified agency, company or person has been ordering hundreds of photographs of this area since 2004. Check out that story here.

They seem to be wide lines drawn with some white material. Or maybe the dust have been dug by machinery.

It’s located in Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Gansu, north of the Shule River, which crosses the Tibetan Plateau to the west into the Kumtag Desert. It covers an area approximately one mile long by more than 3,000 feet wide.

The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit.

Perhaps it’s some kind of targeting or calibrating grid for Chinese spy satellites? Maybe it’s a QR code for aliens? Nobody really knows.

You can check it out yourself in Google Maps here.

Read the full article (with more images and links to Google Maps) at Gizmodo…

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Hatching eggs, scratching around the coop and roosting on a beam with the rest of the hens are great habits for chickens, but rather unusual for an eight month old male rabbit.

The confused bunny came as a free gift to Ville Kuusinen’s home, when he bought nine Silkie hens and a rooster from a farm.

The Kuusinens and their three children live on a small island in Velkua some 210 km (130 miles) northwest of Helsinki.

“When I went to the hen house, I noticed he was sitting on the eggs. Later I watched through the window how he jumped on the beam, failed, tried again and with a lot of practice eventually he stayed up there,” Kuusinen told Reuters.

Otto does not like to sit on laps or eat carrots like most pet rabbits. The rabbit, who has lived with chickens all his life prefers chicken feed and runs with the chickens outdoors and sometimes plays with them by jumping over them.

“For the chickens he is one of them. He often sits on the beam between the hens and under their wings’,” Kuusinen said.

But he said Otto’s rabbity instincts still take over when a visitor steps into the hen house. He runs away and hides, but can be lured out with raisin buns.

Read the full article at Reuters.com…

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A passenger on a US Airways flight said he was forced to stand for seven hours after he was squeezed out of his seat by an obese man sitting next to him.

“I didn’t fly from Alaska to Philadelphia on Flight 901,” Arthur Berkowitz told Christopher Elliott, a consumer advocate who operates elliott.org. “I stood.”

“His size required both armrests to be raised up and allowed for his body to cover half of my seat,” Berkowitz said. “It did not allow me to use my seatbelt during takeoff and landing as well as required me to stand in the aisle and galley area for most of the seven-hour-plus flight.”

The incident occurred on July 29 and was first reported by Elliott on Tuesday.

Berkowitz said he alerted flight attendants to the problem, but they were unable to accommodate him, according to his account on elliott.org. “They were sympathetic, but they could not do anything. No other seats existed on plane. They would not permit me to sit in their jump seats, and fully acknowledged the mistake by their gate agent, in allowing this individual on plane without requiring him to purchase and occupy two seats,” he said.

Liz Landau, a spokesperson for US Airways, confirmed that Berkowitz was inconvenienced by a passenger of size and told msnbc.com “it was his choice to stand.”

“His seatmate had the same right to his seat as Mr. Berkowitz did to his. So here’s where the diplomacy and cooperation of all passengers comes into play,” the airline said in a statement.

Berkowitz was unhappy with the $200 voucher the airline offered him for his experience, at which point he contacted Elliott.

“We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns,” the airline statement said, “but offering increasing amounts of compensation based on a threat of a safety violation isn’t really fair — especially when the passenger himself said he didn’t follow crew members’ instructions and fasten his seatbelt.

“The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”

Read more on msnbc.com…

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Michele Bachmann is a candidate of whopping internal contradictions.

Earlier this month, I heard the Minnesota congresswoman give her Christian testimony at a church service in Osceola, Iowa. She told the story of her father leaving her mother, of the economic struggles her family faced, and of the encounter with God she experienced as a teenager. Her tone was direct, non-political and obviously sincere.

A few days later, at a campaign stop in Iowa, Bachmann was asked by a Latino college student what she would do to help the children of undocumented immigrants.

The presidential candidate responded: “Their parents are the ones who brought them here… They did not have the legal right to come to the United States. We do not owe people who broke our laws to come into the country. We don’t owe them anything.”

Bachmann is not just making a political point but a moral argument. She asserts that children — who have committed no crime themselves — should be denied assistance because of the legal status of their parents. Her point is made without qualification. It doesn’t matter whether the children of illegal immigrants are hungry or sick. This standard rules out everything from emergency room treatment to elementary school education to prenatal care for the unborn. Bachmann’s pro-life convictions, evidently, only apply to children covered by a green card.

It is difficult to determine what tradition of moral reasoning Bachmann is drawing upon. Her argument seems to involve a mix of extreme nationalism and utilitarian lifeboat ethics. Christian morality, in contrast, affirms that human worth is intrinsic and universal. Men and women are created in God’s image, which is equally present in every tribe, race and nationality. Governments have a responsibility to honor human dignity in the application of law, even when it comes to noncitizens. Children, along with others who are particularly vulnerable, have a particularly urgent claim to care and protection.

These beliefs do not translate easily or directly into specific immigration policies. Nations have the right to control their borders and enforce their laws. But when it comes to human beings — and especially when it comes to children — it is never permissible to say, “We don’t owe them anything.”

Bachmann’s candidacy represents a digression in the quality and seriousness of evangelical political engagement. It is difficult to imagine Mike Huckabee boasting of his indifference to the health and welfare of children, whatever their background. Even Pat Robertson, running for president in 1988, would have balked at such callousness.

Both men would have been too conscious of the warnings found in Matthew 25, where Christianity’s founder defines the proper Christian attitude toward the hungry, the sick, the prisoner and the stranger. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,” he said, “you did not do for me.”

Bachmann holds her faith deeply and understands its political implications poorly. Her campaign is increasingly discrediting to causes — including the pro-life cause — she seeks to serve.

Read more from Michael Gershon at The Washington Post Online…

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A central Texas gun dealer ran radio ads advising “Socialist” liberals, those who voted for President Barack Obama, Arabs and Muslims that they need not apply for his concealed gun license class.

Crockett Keller, who owns Keller’s Riverside Store, ran the ads on the radio station in his rural hometown of Mason, Texas, which is 120 miles west of the state capital of Austin.

“If you are a Socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class,” Keller said in the ad. “You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law.”

“Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab, or Muslim, I will not teach you the class,” Keller said in the radio ad.

Keller said he is simply exercising his freedom to teach concealed handgun license classes to whomever he wants. He said he has received “hundreds” of calls from Americans who support his stance.

“I should have had the class next week instead of this week, I could have had 500 people in it,” Keller said on Friday.

He said he was not joking when he put the lines about socialists in his commercial, because he knows some socialist liberals and did not want them to enroll in the class.

“I didn’t want them to show up and have to tell them no,” he said.

Read the full article on Reuters…

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