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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Arizona's White Supremacist Problem - The Daily Beast

The new face of the white supremacist isn’t the guy with a sheet and a burning cross, it is the more highly educated person with a professed focus on family values, national identity, and border security.

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Friday, July 30, 2010

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer Hates Her State - The Daily Beast

She’s either a liar or she’s hopelessly ignorant,” says Linda Ronstadt, the Tucson-born singer and lefty political activist. “Either of those scenarios.

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Border States Boast Low Crime - The Daily Beast

The reasoning behind Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s controversial immigration bill was simple: illegal immigrants make border states dangerous, so Arizona must crack down on illegal immigrants. The biggest problem, however, is that border states are some of the safest in the country.

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Thursday, July 29, 2010

What's the Best Graphics Card for StarCraft II?

The gang over at TechSpot loaded up the newly-released StarCraft II on what seems like a hundred different PC setups to determine what the best hardware setup for the insanely popular real-time strategy game is.

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Oil Spill Threatens Lake Michigan - The Daily Beast

Just how often, exactly, are these things supposed to happen?

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AZ Sheriff Preps Immigration 'Sweep' - The Daily Beast

A judge’s order that banned the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration law isn’t going to be the final word on the issue in the state: The infamous sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arapaio, is now planning an immigration “sweep” in which his deputies will go into Latino neighborhoods, stop people for minor violations, and then check their immigration status.

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Arizona Immigration Ruling Warns Other States - The Daily Beast

Wednesday's ruling on immigration in Arizona has a large impact beyond the Southwestern state's borders because a federal judge's decision to block the most austere portions of a new law could give the federal government the upper hand in future contests with individual states.

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Insurers Cheat Dead Soldiers' Families - The Daily Beast

When an American soldier dies in combat, his family benefits from a $400,000 life insurance policy. Unless the insurer handling the policy is one of the companies—Prudential Financial, Metlife—who offer bereaved families a “checkbook” for a secure account holding the money that will earn interest (called a “retained-asset account). What the companies don’t say is that there’s no special account for each family: the money is held in a general corporate account, unguaranteed by the FDIC.

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Missing Ship Found 150 Years Later - The Daily Beast

The old saying “nothing is ever lost” was proven true Wednesday when a team of Canadian archaeologists found a missing British ship—150 years after it went missing in the icy Canadian Arctic waters.

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Target's Political Agenda? - The Daily Beast

Is the $10 you spend on a shirt at Target going toward anti-gay groups? Target gave $150,000 to MN Forward, a political group that has endorsed and pays for ads for Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, a fervent opponent of gay marriage.

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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

You Can’t Spell ‘Racist’ Without T!

Electoral College Ditched by Massachusetts Voters - The Daily Beast

The Massachusetts Legislature has voted for legislation aimed at ensuring the winner of the popular vote wins presidential elections, making the Electoral College irrelevant; under the new law, Massachusetts will give its 12 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

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Economists Say Stimulus Worked - The Daily Beast

Someone tell Republicans to pull their fingers out of their ears: Alan Blinder, a Princeton professor and a former Federal Reserve official, and Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, argue in a new paper based on an economic model that, without the Wall Street bailout and the economic-stimulus package, the national GDP would be 6.5 percent lower this year.

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Judge Blocks AZ Immigration Law - The Daily Beast

This is probably going to get ugly quickly: A federal judge has blocked controversial elements of Arizona’s new immigration law that would have required police to question a suspect's immigration status. The judge also blocked provisions that would have required immigrants to carry their papers at all times and forbade illegal immigrants from seeking work in public places. The law will still take effect on Thursday, but without the blocked provisions.

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Elisabeth Hasselbeck Insults Lesbians - The Daily Beast

...Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of The View, said on Wednesday that older women are coming out as lesbians because “older men are going for younger women, leaving the women with no one.” Joy Behar quickly set her straight: "I don't think that you suddenly wake up and say, 'You know, I think I want to do that.' You wanted to do it; you were just trapped in a system that said 'get married.'"

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Stubbornella » Blog Archive » Woman in technology

Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to attend JSConf. As a woman who is often the only-woman-in-the-room, I want people to know it isn’t always easy. I was a bit shocked by the blatant failure to empathize.

Excellent piece. Unfortunately, I despair of people who refuse to see discrimination ever changing their mind. However, there are still the undecided who can be swayed to see things differently, so for everyone who cares about equality, let's keep the dialogue going.

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How the Anchoring Effect Messes Up Your Purchases and Estimates

...David McRaney runs the excellent You Are No So Smart blog, but in earlier days, he sold leather coats that, while seemingly priced at around $1,000, he'd offer "on sale" for $400 and quickly move out the door. That's the anchoring effect—someone suggests a number, then gives you another number to consider, and you can't help but base your opinion of the second number on the first.

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Make Homemade Pickles in One Hour

Know what's even better than buying a jar of Vlasic and calling it a day? Making them yourself after only an hour's time.

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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Ansel Adams Photos Found at Garage Sale - The Daily Beast

Someone’s due for an early retirement

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On Piracy and Copyrights: The Stupidity of Delay and Denial | Gear Diary

Do I think their should be reasonable restrictions on things like copyright renewal?  Absolutely.  Should George Orwell’s grandchildren (and their publishers!) be making profits off Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm decades after Orwell’s death?  No, I don’t

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Did the Stimulus Help or Hurt the Economy? - The Daily Beast

Whether the stimulus actually helped the economy is impossible to know for sure, as economists can’t observe some kind of alternate-universe America in which the measure never passed. Congress will have to act long before the debate is settled.

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Karl Rove, Fiscal Sociopath: Paul Begala On Bush’s Financial Legacy - The Daily Beast

Karl Rove lecturing Barack Obama about fiscal responsibility is like Lizzy Borden campaigning against elder abuse.

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The GOP’s Fiscal Nihilism - The Daily Beast

Martin Wolf has a must-read piece on the state of American politics on the Financial Times’ website: He calls the invention of supply-side economics “the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy" because it allowed Republicans to promise a “free lunch”—lower taxes, lower deficits, and essentially unchanged spending. The theory was bunk—the federal-debt-to-GDP ratios ballooned under Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush, and W. Bush—but Wolf says the adoption of supply-side economics as a party platform “transformed Republicans from a minority party into a majority party.

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