fascism fail

ORLY tries his hand at Nazi analogies... FAIL. KO takes him down (via Kos). From the transcript:

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Churchill actually wanted to use poison gas on the Germans, in violation of the Geneva Convention, but was stopped by the British war cabinet. The Royal Air Force killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians by targeting non-military sites. And the British operated a number of interrogation centers during and after World War II, including one called the London Cage, where German prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death.

Another center was opened in Bad Nenndorf, on German soil, after Churchill left power. It was almost like a concentration camp.

President Obama’s British example was wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Nope. Sorry. If that were a high school history paper, it would have earned its author a nice round F. It makes Michele Bachmann’s Hoot Smalley spooner-ism from last week look good.

Pretty good, possible use in class for the "how to analogize with history" unit.

(recent) history of american journalism

Walter Pincus calls out colleagues/the industry on failures since Watergate. A good history.

"Newspaper Narcissism" in Columbia Journalism Review.

born to run

Evolutionary bio and marathon running, at Seed magazine.

We know that roughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. Lieberman believes they ran their prey to death, often called “persistence hunting.”

Interesting and usable.

gay agenda

Some recent stories on upcoming legislative issues:

Box Turtle Bulletin points to story in The Blade: Congress Ready to Move on Gay Rights Bills. (Hate crimes, ENDA, DADT)

speaking of falsified memoirs

Sparky the Pengiun had one too.

not-so-hidden signals

Post quoted in entirety from The Slog, since I don't have time right now to be fancy:

In this week's web-only Constant Reader, I join Barack Obama's book club and discover that there might be a secret message or two involved.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin's story of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies author Derek Walcott's marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a (admittedly smaller) bump in the book's sales. Even people who don't generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit around if he doesn't want to, it's enough to make one wonder whether Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children. The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another's lips in reference to the fact that Obama wasn't going to have a cabinet of yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct, what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

We learn a lot about FDR, including his weird feelings about the Irish and Catholics, too. I hope you'll give it a read.

Nice.

this is why you don't give cameras...

...to 24-year old soldiers, or inbred royal twits. Prince Harry strikes again.