Former Bush speechwriter David Frum says it’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the GOP disaster. And he blames this “most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s” on conservatives and Republicans: At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s...

Joe Ades passed in February of last year. This morning CBS Sunday Morning looked at the double-life of Ades: Street vendor by day, Park Avenue bon vivant by night. I’d link or embed their story, but CBS & Viacom apparently have a 20th century video game going: It’s not available for embed. Or link. Instead, I link my YouTube video. The CBS producer who did the segment emailed a few weeks back about using my footage in the piece. Alas, at VGA 640×480, it is not “broadcast...

If health care reform passes today, I’m giving some of the credit to this: No, I’m not referring to a backlash reaction to the circus atmosphere and offensive epithets that we have learned do characterize Tea Party protests. I’m pointing to New Left Media… Chase Whiteside, Erick Stoll, and a camera. We are currently students at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Better even than the celebrity commentators found on cable and broadcast TV (and an attractive, grass-roots,...

While in DC we’ve got THE TEA PARTY & THE CIRCUS, in other news… The NYTimes reports on a real problem that needs to be addressed, not criminalized: In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come. But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws...

I’ve been trying to call my Georgia Blue Dog representative, John Barrow, all morning. Busy. Busy. Busy. When, finally, I got through his voice mail apologized that there was no one there to take my call, but invited me to leave a message. When I got the beep, the invite was rescinded. His voice mailbox is full. I called back. Again. This time I got an answer. I told the man who answered that the voice mail was full. He said that he was not surprised. I said that I was calling to argue that...

We’re watching the first season of Mad Men, having seen all the others. A cigarette in every shot. With that in mind, I happened upon 10Steps.SG’s 50 Most Creative Anti-Smoking Advertisements: Many anti-smoking ads in the past are rather gruesome with rotten body parts that terrified people. Those messages are straight forward in showing the final consequences if continue to smoke. Now these ads have gone into a different approach where they are creative and inspiring to look at. In...

The Apple patent infringement suit against HTC, the Taiwan-based manufacturer of smartphones including the Eris and Nexus One, is widely seen as an escalation of the gritty battle royale over the future of mobile computing. In that battle, Silicon Alley’s Business Insider reports, Apple Is Armed To The Teeth With Patents: Apple is suing HTC for violating some 20 patents — many in reference to Google’s Android operating system, which HTC uses. Between 2004 and 2007, when Apple...

The Women’s Reservation Bill, introduced in 1996, was passed in India’s upper house of parliament last Wednesday, March 10, 2010. That was the first of four steps the bill must go through, and it needs the ceremonial president’s signature. The NYTimes reports today on the Uproar in India Over Female Lawmaker Quota: The upper house of India’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday that would amend the Constitution to reserve one-third of the seats in India’s national and state legislatures...

Google, Intel and Sony plan to bring the Web into your living room through a set-top box called Google TV. Logitech will build the remote and peripherals. The NYTimes: Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones. Google is expected to deliver a toolkit to outside programmers within the next...

It’s a tough time to be a Catholic. Today 60 leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 nuns sent a letter to lawmakers in opposition to bishops claiming the health care bill leaves loopholes for government funded abortions. The Catholic Health Association backs the bill so is siding with the nuns. As for the other denominations, a group of 25 “pro-life Catholic theologians and Evangelical leaders” also sent Congress letters supporting the bill. NPR had 2 terrific stories on that...

Picking up where Paparazzi left off, Lady GaGa’s new Telephone video featuring Beyoncé was released late last week. The official explicit version will pass 20 million views today. It opens in a women’s prison as lady Gaga is led to her cell by a pair of butch prison guards. Thus begins her reappropriation of the women-in-prison “lezploitation” genre: The genre’s two high points were the early 1950s and early 1970s, and it is no coincidence these golden eras followed...

Suspending the priest at the center of a German church sex-abuse scandal more than 30 years after the church first heard of the child molestation allegations hardly ends the scandal that is enveloping Pope Benedict XVI: In 1980, Benedict, then archbishop there, approved Father Hullermann’s move to Munich after he was accused of sexually abusing boys in the Diocese of Essen, though on Friday a deputy took full responsibility for allowing the priest to return to full pastoral duties shortly thereafter....

The title is from danah boyd’s SXSW Keynote yesterday. “One of the the world’s foremost authorities on social networks,” Boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Known for her academic work and commentary on teens and social networking sites, she posted today: My talk was about privacy and publicity and I spent a lot of time pushing back against the notion that “privacy is...

Today is 3.14, Pi Day. To celebrate, Science Blogs is having a Pi Day Bake-off together with Serious Eats. And Google has a special doodle logo… New Scientist has five tasty facts about the famous ratio. From the third: Pi is the only number to have inspired a literary genre In his upcoming book Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, journalist Alex Bellos describes how pi has inspired a particularly tricky form of creative “constrained” writing called Pilish. These are poems –...

The other day NPR noted that abolitionist John Brown’s farm is among those state parks and historic sites that New York Gov. David Paterson may close due to the budget crisis. With only 60,000 visitors last year, the state could decide it’s not worth maintaining the Civil War-era farm and burial site that has been a symbol of freedom for more than 150 years. So who is John Brown anyway? NPR’s story explains that he “led the raid on Harpers Ferry, which helped spark the Civil...

I’ve been tuning in to the conversation going on around Jeremy Rifkin’s latest book, The Empathic Civilization. In it Rifkin argues that technology is ushering in a new, empathic, model of society. The modern age is coming to an end; the future belongs to the connected, empathic, global citizen. In a recent interview with Moira Gunn, Rifkin says that for America to retain its global position in this fast-changing world, it must “rethink the narrative.” He goes on: The real...

Google has extended the same “statistical machine learning” it so successfully uses for spelling — the did you mean… functionality — to language translation. With that comes a different path to AI: Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries. But...

You may remember Wendell Potter, the former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the largest health insurance companies in the US. Now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, he gave senate testimony as a whistleblower last year against the HMO industry. I quoted him then from an interview on Bill Moyers Journal about that testimony. He was on Moyers’ program again this weekend. From the transcript: BILL MOYERS: So I hear Wendell Potter saying that if he were...

Their new video, “This Too Shall Pass,” debuted Monday night at Ignite LA, the O’Reilly Media-founded lecture series celebrating passion and innovation. In the 2 days since, the video has taken the web by storm gathering an impressive 1,379,047 views. Watch in 1080p HD. Or here… Why the unconventional premiere? NewTeeVee: The reason is that Adam Sadowsky of Syyn Labs was there to show off the results of several months of building, testing and development: An epic four-minute-long...

That’s exponential growth: About one year ago Twitter reached a huge milestone: one billion tweets. Four months ago, 5 billion tweets were served. And now, in about one day, Twitter should reach another very important milestone: 10 billion tweets. [...] Counting tweets is actually quite easy: just look at the URL of any tweet. The number at the end of the URL seems to be the number of that tweet, and at this moment the number of one of the latest tweets is 9917803012. If this seems like a long...

We had a friend over for dinner Saturday and afterward watched a series of YouTube videos late into the night. We watched on the large living room screen with home theater sound via TiVo. Logged in to YouTube on both TiVo and my laptop, I would favorite the video we wanted to watch on the laptop and it immediately appeared in My Favorites on TiVo. Not too difficult. Still, I’m guessing not a lot of people do that. Sadly, the TiVo subscriber base fell by 21 percent last year, to 2.7 million,...

UPDATE @TheNote 4 min ago, “Rangel plot thickens. asked by reporters if he will remain chairman, Rangel said: ‘You bet your life.’” MSNBC: But sources indicated Tuesday to NBC that Rangel has been encouraged to step aside before the House votes on a bill to strip him of his chairmanship. “We don’t have the votes to save him,” one Democratic member said of Rangel. The morning shows sure ought to be interesting tomorrow. ++++++++++++ Busy night. NBC, in a...

UPDATE, WaPo, 9:14 PM, “The Senate approved the measure 78 to 19.” ———– AP reports that Kentucky Republican Sen. Jim Bunning has relented. The vote on 30 day stopgap legislation to extend help for the jobless and get federal highway dollars flowing again will come tonight. Roll Call: In the end Bunning agreed to a deal allowing him one vote on an amendment to pay for the bill’s $10 billion cost. That proposal was offered by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)...

When Roger Ebert appears on Oprah tomorrow (Tuesday) he’ll be using software to find the voice he lost to cancer. Ebert tells the tale on his blog: One day I was moseying around the Web and found the name of a company in Edinburgh named CereProc. They claimed they could build voices for specific customers. They had demos of the voices of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. … I had an idea. Before I lost my voice due to cancer-related surgery, I’d recorded commentary tracks...

That line is not mine (but it got your attention). It’s from Nicholas Kristof’s column. Kristof says, “If liberals were less snooty and evangelicals less sanctimonious, what a team!” On the latter: A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,”...