June 2012
92 posts
“I think that keeping yourself fresh is a difficult thing in the aging process, and finding things that are hard for you is something that you have to do, or else you just repeat yourself.”
—Nora Ephron
LIVE CHAT: How does the war on drugs play into Mexico's presidential election? →
to.pbs.org
Here’s a chat you don’t want to miss: 3 p.m. Twitter. #mxdrugwar.
Health Care Reform: Four questions for SCOTUS
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Does an 1867 law, the Anti-Injunction Act, prevent the Supreme Court from reviewing and deciding the health care law challenge? The act bars pre-enforcement challenges to taxes. The penalty in the health care law for failure to purchase minimum insurance will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service, but will not appear on a taxpayer’s tax return until 2015.
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Is the so-called individual mandate to purchase health insurance constitutional?
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If the mandate is unconstitutional, can it be severed from the rest of the law or must the entire law fall?
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Does the expansion of Medicaid coverage for the poor and disabled unconstitutionally coerce the states into participating, because if they do not participate, they risk losing federal money in the federal-state funded program?
Need a last-minute refresher on the SCOTUS health reform case?
“If you put all the viruses in the ocean on a scale, they would equal the weight of 75 million blue whales. And if you lined up all those viruses end to end, “they would stretch out past the nearest 60 galaxies.”
—Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses
“I think a misconception is that Hispanics wake up in the morning and think about immigration.”
—Florida Sen. Marco Rubio
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In retrospect, it seems perfectly obvious that everyone should have known what was coming, that this was, after all, the rise of the biggest evil mankind had ever seen.
But when you put yourself in the shoes of these diplomats, journalists, writers, casual visitors, as I did, it paints a very different picture. History is always perfect in hindsight. It’s not perfect at the time. So I wanted to know, what did they know, when did they know it, and what did they get wrong, and why did they get it wrong?
Why Are Poland Spring Bottles So Crinkly?
Also: how great a word is “crinkly”?
REALLY great!
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Don’t just say that black unemployment is four times that of whites. Say that black businesses only get 2 percent of the $1 trillion of black buying power, and then say that black businesses are the greatest private employer of black people.
Then you might be able to say, wow, if there were more support of black businesses, if maybe a little more of that $1 trillion got to those businesses, unemployment wouldn’t be so high.
Fred de Sam Lazaro on Rio+20 Conference:
The number of people living in absolute poverty (at or below $1.25 per day) has declined substantially and per capita gross domestic product grew 75 percent between 1992 and 2005. However, the gains have been geographically lopsided, with China and distantly second India accounting substantially for them. Hunger has actually increased — particularly in sub Saharan Africa — due to poor access to food and increasing prices, while environmental degradation imperils future food production. Globally, there is growing inequality between haves and have-nots.
