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Is "Green" Al Gore Back? In a NY Times Op-ed he slams the Bush "energy policy": "Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the environmental and energy policies of our government are completely dominated by a group of current and former oil and chemical company executives who are trying to dismantle America's ability to force them to reduce the extremely dangerous levels of pollution in the earth's atmosphere."
comment posted at 4:27 PM on Apr-21-02

Sacre Bleu! The French presidential election run-off will be between the conservative Chirac and the extreme-right Le Pen. What's a French liberal to do?
comment posted at 1:44 PM on Apr-21-02
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Apr-21-02
comment posted at 4:03 PM on Apr-23-02

America Can Persuade Israel to Make a Just Peace An op-ed piece by former president Jimmy Carter that is going to get a lot of play in the media. Unfortunately, Mr. Carter seems to suggest a rather easy solution: give back the Palestinian lands and have the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist. Put the pressure on Israel by withhold financial aid till they do as we bid. Problem: Palestinians being subsidized by Iraq, Iran, EU and Syria. What about pressure on them? And: Palelstinian issues still in need of resolving: capital and Right of Return....with this left out, we are still not going to get peace. Does Carter simplify or is he on target? reg reqd.
comment posted at 11:59 AM on Apr-21-02
comment posted at 12:06 PM on Apr-21-02

As late as July 4, the US State Department described Malaysia's Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial as preventing people from "exercising internationally recognised rights of free speech, political expression and assembly" and therefore (more diplomatically-speaking) a cause for concern. Yet when it was recently used to detain those connected to terrorism, Bush decides to invite the Prime Minister of Malaysia to thank him for a 'stirring response' in combating terrorism. Eh?
comment posted at 10:06 PM on Apr-20-02

THESE PAGES ARE EMBARGOED UNTIL REAGAN'S DEATH. Like looking into the future, Scripps Howard News Service has produced a 12 page newspaper insert that serves as a touching tribute to Ronald Reagan. Promise not to read any of it until he's really dead, okay?
comment posted at 10:27 PM on Apr-20-02
comment posted at 2:11 AM on Apr-21-02
comment posted at 11:18 AM on Apr-21-02
comment posted at 12:04 PM on Apr-21-02

The Name-O-Meter: How's Your Name Been Doing Since 1900? How does it rank in the Top 1000? Is its popularity waning or increasing? Disappointed either way? Look up what your name means to help find out why.[From Parenting.com, via top-ranking Nutcote. More Inside.]
comment posted at 7:11 PM on Apr-20-02

The Agitator prepares for a big day today. "My first anarcho-enviromentalist-anticapitalist protest. I sprang awake at 6:30am." Per Google, this is only the second thread in which an agitator has appeared.
comment posted at 7:01 PM on Apr-20-02

Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio and other fat cats in Denver skyscraper evacuated! The workaday stiffs on the lower floors weren't informed of threat.

The decision not to evacuate the building completely, he says, was driven by the late hour of the day because many occupants had already left the building. "The big part of the reason was to avoid a mass panic," he said.

Is this also how they issue earnings reports?
comment posted at 9:11 PM on Apr-19-02

A bit of a sea change at CNN.com: the "War on Terror" news heading, which has been part of the right column of CNN's home page since late September 2001, is gone, and not coincidentally, the massive non-news of the arrest of actor Robert Blake is the lead story. Not the growing world outrage over the Israel action in Jenin, nor the death of four Canadian soldiers by an errant US bomb.
comment posted at 8:47 AM on Apr-19-02
comment posted at 5:02 PM on Apr-19-02
comment posted at 2:21 AM on Apr-20-02

Senate blocks attempt to open Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The vote was, it sounds, an attempt to end a democrat-led filibuster that has kept the proposed energy bill on the Senate floor for five weeks.
comment posted at 8:57 AM on Apr-19-02
comment posted at 11:15 AM on Apr-19-02

One Hundred and One Things I would put into Room 101 -- Stu from Feeling Listless has compiled a list of all the things he would put into Room 101 (which contained 'the worst thing in the world' according to George Orwell). So what would you put in your own personal Room 101?
comment posted at 11:50 AM on Apr-19-02

A small plane has ran into a skyscraper in Milan.  CNN is reporting that a small plane has struck the 25th floor of the Pirelli building. The skyscraper apparently houses government offices. Details are still coming in.
comment posted at 9:50 AM on Apr-18-02

Highlight Word Bookmarklet allows you to highlight any word in your browser window and get a dictionary definition. Neat. (via Zeldman)
comment posted at 9:09 AM on Apr-18-02
comment posted at 10:35 AM on Apr-18-02

Has Abercrombie and Fitch gone too far?
comment posted at 9:12 AM on Apr-18-02

Yahoo! Tracking Users Across Partner Sites By now, I think most people have probably heard about Yahoo!'s decision to opt everybody into their marketing options [relevant MeFi Thread], but this is the first I'd heard of Yahoo! using "web beacons" to aggregate user information across sites outside the Yahoo! network Doublclick style. [via: MacInTouch]
comment posted at 8:36 PM on Apr-17-02

John McCain: Switching teams, or a look into the future of the Republican Party?
comment posted at 8:22 PM on Apr-17-02

The thorn in Ari Fleischer's side. Russell Mokhiber, writer for Multinational Monitor, consistently asks questions at press briefings which cause Ari Fleischer to create new and strange forms of rhetorical yoga, when Fleischer doesn't avoid answering altogether.
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Apr-16-02

MANties, any one? Female underwear for MEN. Gosh, that's one cool idea.
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Apr-16-02

<Jaws theme> Legislating a sin tax on soda </Jaws theme> California state Senate Bill 1520 would impose an excise tax on sweetened beverages sold to retail dealers after July 1, 2003. Sen. Deborah V. Ortiz, the bill’s author, anticipates that pop distributors would pass the cost along to consumers. Just let me keep buying Entenmann's crumb cake, ok?
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Apr-15-02

Right-Wing Bullies Caught in Crossfire "No doubt all of the above qualities irritate the conservatives who follow party instructions to shun Crossfire. What has shocked them is that the new hosts don’t quite fit TV’s stereotypical 97-pound liberal, ready to be worked over like a talking speedbag. Mr. Carville is a tall, rangy Marine veteran, sports fanatic and jock; Mr. Begala is a born-and-bred Texan who grew up with guns and still likes to hunt. Both have expressed their powerful distaste for the Democratic tendency to wilt under attack."
comment posted at 11:46 AM on Apr-14-02

Bipartisan group of House Representatives takes Bush to task: "Aiming bipartisan fire at what it described as the Bush administration's alarming penchant for secrecy, a group of House Republicans and Democrats yesterday introduced legislation to cancel President Bush's executive order restricting the release of presidential records".
comment posted at 2:19 PM on Apr-13-02
comment posted at 11:56 AM on Apr-14-02

I expect crackpot theories about Sept. 11 from the French and the Middle East. But when a U.S. House Representative starts peddling one, that's depressing. (Note the smug, carefully worded "I don't have any evidence but an investigation might find some" call for a fishing expedition.) I value healthy skepticism, but this sounds to me more like grandstanding for attention.
comment posted at 8:49 AM on Apr-12-02
comment posted at 9:48 AM on Apr-12-02

Time to stop the war on terrorism says Jonah Goldberg of the National Review.
comment posted at 7:05 PM on Apr-11-02

Google opens SOAP interface. I'm not sure what's coolest about this. That Google can be used in all kinds of applications, or that it's free up to 1000 hits a day so the independent developers will get a good crack at it, or that's it the first step of Level 2 of the www arriving in a cascading recombinance of web services and scripting glue.
comment posted at 11:55 PM on Apr-11-02

The International Criminal Court is now a reality after a group of 10 countries signed the treaty at a ceremony at the U.N. today, bringing the number of signatories to 66. According to Kofi Annan "the missing link in the international justice system is now in place," but without the participation of the U.S., Russia or China, how effective can it be?
comment posted at 8:53 AM on Apr-12-02

Move over, Jared... there's going to be a hot new way to lose weight. Scientists have "found the chemical pathways that muscle cells use to build strength and endurance," making it possible to have a fitness pill.
comment posted at 7:50 AM on Apr-11-02

The phrase "Let's Roll" has now been trademarked by quite a few companies. We touched on this once before in the State of the Union thread, but the current list of trademark's goes far beyond what was previously discused. You can now get all manner of brickabrack emblazoned with a "Let's Roll" logo. Is it patriotism, or profiterring?
comment posted at 4:10 PM on Apr-10-02

Anthrax and the Agency "Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially put the anthrax investigation on a back burner, it is time for Americans to think the unthinkable: that the FBI has never been keen to identify the perpetrator because that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S. Government itself. Evidence is mounting that the source of the anthrax was a top secret U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and that the perpetrators involve high-level officials in the U.S. military and intelligence infrastructure." Granted, there's more than a few blips on the radar screen these days, but...whatever happened to this investigation? I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the case laid out in this piece gives me pause. Any other good theories out there?
comment posted at 3:58 PM on Apr-10-02

Time Warner/AOL to charge more for cable bandwidth hogs. No idea exactly what the bandwidth limits will be, but, according to this article, a tiered pricing structure is in the works. Grrr...
comment posted at 12:12 PM on Apr-10-02

"Choose Life" license tag gets tentative nod from Kansas House. You pay an extra $25 for the tag when you register (hopefully it's optional), and the money goes to "crisis preganancy centers." Isn't this a bizarre, and rather vague, way to advance the cause?
comment posted at 11:57 PM on Apr-8-02

David Brock's book "Blinded by the Right" chronicles the laundry list of illegality he took part in as a part of the conservative machine, smearing both Anita Hill and Bill Clinton during the 1990's. He claims all the ridiculous things you've heard about "vast right-wing conspiracies" were true, and that it's time the truth come out. Is this guy for real, or blowing smoke up our collective asses?
comment posted at 11:27 PM on Apr-8-02
comment posted at 12:17 AM on Apr-9-02
comment posted at 12:32 AM on Apr-9-02
comment posted at 1:21 AM on Apr-9-02

Major muckraking - Greg Palast on C-Span. God I love C-Span, sitting here in the UK with a broadband connection, going thru the archive. You'd never see an anti-corporate author given a polite 50 minutes to explain his book in Britain. I'm only wondering when the Homeland Security hawks will get round to rapping the knuckles of Mr. Lamb's outstanding operation.
comment posted at 12:48 PM on Apr-8-02
comment posted at 2:08 PM on Apr-8-02

What's the oldest MP3 on the web? Not the first MP3 created by the Fraunhofer Institute, but the oldest recorded sound that's been turned into an MP3? Audio restorer Art Shifrin has a 1931 detective show; PBS offers some early recordings, including a 1919 track by Earl Fuller's Famous Jazz Band; but the reigning champeen seems to be Tinfoil.com, a website dedicated to early recordings, which features a largely unintelligible recording ripped from an 1878 "talking clock" recording.
comment posted at 11:45 AM on Apr-8-02
comment posted at 12:10 PM on Apr-8-02