The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report today on the effects we can expect that global climate change will have on the United States. Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States draws material from 13 US government science agencies. Ten key findings: Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase Climate...

How surprising. A leak. Politico: Reacting to a rising tide of anger from gay and lesbian supporters at a series of slights and deferred promises, President Obama will tomorrow sign an executive order extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. The move, which mirrors the policy of many large corporations, will have an immediate effect for many workers, but it is a deeply reactive response to a core Democratic group whose concerns have been festering for six months. The executive...

UPDATE: In comments, Twitter is down for maintenance. 1:30 am in Iran, they delayed to minimize the impact there. ++++++++++++++++ Both CNN and Reuters are reporting that the Obama administration asked Twitter to delay going down for scheduled maintenance last night to ensure Iranians could continue using the service to communicate to each other and the outside world. Twitter rescheduled. But some folks are worried that the Iranian government might view users’ profiles to find and punish them...

Check it out. Following up on this morning’s post, it looks like a perfect storm is brewing.

The NYTimes editorial today on the recent Department of Justice brief defending DOMA: The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction...

Taxes are the means through which we pay for the infrastructure of civilization. While I can’t exactly say I’m happy to pay them, I understand, expect and accept that I will always pay a big chunk of my wages out in taxes each year. I believe in community, taxes come with it. Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has a piece on the NYTimes’ Economix blog that makes a bunch of great points. Here are a few I particularly like: We live in...

Yesterday Fred Wilson proposed we give bing a chance. He set his default search to Bing and promised his reaction to it in the coming days. Later TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reminds us that back in the 90s he was something of a Microsoft fanboy before going on to admit: I mocked Bing from the second I heard its name, as basically a non-starter. But here we are a few weeks later, and I’m still hearing a significant number of people talking about it when I go various places. At the very least,...

Max Cleland ended a seven year hiatus from public life this month when he attended the D-Day ceremony on the cliffs of Normandy. The former Georgia senator was named secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission by President Obama in May. In that capacity he served as the official escort of the president and First Lady at Normandy. American news outlets largely ignored Cleland. If a forthcoming book is as juicy as The Hill suggested this week (their piece was headlined, “Cleland’s...

“It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ” – Robert Kenner, Director, “Food, inc.” The NYTimes: Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding...

They learned to be players all right. From the ESPN story: Think a wrestling singlet is revealing? The photos and video of [University of Nebraska wrestler Paul] Donahoe on Fratmen.tv left nothing to the imagination… The Web site’s producers masked the tattoo of his real last name on his torso. But that didn’t keep Nebraska wrestling coach Mark Manning from recognizing Donahoe when the images reached his desk. On Aug. 12, 2008, Manning kicked his national champion off the team. He...

The NYTimes’ story makes it sound like the legislation is some draconian new regualtion of the tobacco companies: More than four decades after the surgeon general declared smoking a health hazard, the Senate on Thursday cleared the final hurdle to empowering federal officials to regulate cigarettes and other forms of tobacco for the first time. The legislation, which the White House said President Obama would sign as soon as it reached his desk, will enable the Food and Drug Administration...

I could not agree more: The traditional TV industry–cable companies, networks, and broadcasters–is where the newspaper industry was about five years ago: In denial. [...] Specifically, the TV industry’s attitude is the same as the newspaper industry’s attitude was circa 2002-2003: Stop calling us dinosaurs: We get digital; We’re growing our digital businesses; We’re investing in digital platforms; People still recall ads even when they fast-foward through them...

I got mine! From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like “id=592952074.” That [changed at midnight ET]. [Facebook...

Stephen H. Miller points to Maura Flynn who makes The Republican Case for Gay Marriage at Big Hollywood: The Republican Party has made a huge mistake in advocating a kind of Cafeteria Constitutionalism. (I’ll take some guns, no helmet laws, please, a free market, and…yuck, hold the gay marriage!). One can’t legitimately invoke the Constitution to oppose federally mandated sex education, and then use the federal government to impose school prayer. Leave that fair-weather-federalism to the Left. It’s...

I had never heard the term before the WaPo’s Jose Antonio Vargas credited it with swinging the Virginia Democratic primary for governor in favor of Creigh Deeds: Starting at 3 p.m EST Monday, hours before polls opened across Virginia, Deeds’s campaign bought what’s called a “Google blast.” Or, more appropriately, a Google attack. If you live in Northern Virginia (or, like many voters, work in D.C. but live in NoVa), Deeds has been almost inescapable on highly-trafficked...

TMZ broke the story this afternoon: We’ve learned “biblically correct” Carrie Prejean will lose her Miss California USA crown today because she doesn’t play well with others. … Carrie is getting her walking papers this afternoon. They were right. Donald Trump is quoted in the NYTimes story: I told Carrie she needed to get back to work and honor her contract The National Organization for Marriage stands by their spokesmodel: “Hollywood hates Carrie. First they abuse...

Now that Adam Lambert’s made it official, it’s looking like the traditional media may move on to fretting over how his drug admissions will influence our children. A child of the sixties myself, you won’t find me concerned with that. Instead, I will revel in how much America loves their Idol runner up. Here are two takes on the Kris Allen/Adam Lambert bromance. Both were written prior to Lambert’s Rolling Stone admissions. First, from Ken Tucker on Fresh Air : [Adam Lambert]...

The BBC Headline, Twitter hype punctured by study: Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found. Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network. However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days. And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found. The Chronicle’s...

Brilliant! A win for Colbert. A win for the troops. A win for Obama. Sincerely Stephen: Mr. Colbert’s entire career is based on being gleefully insincere, a man who literally wraps himself in the flag to the screaming of majestic computer-generated eagles. On the other hand he is unquestionably a real supporter of the troops, raising money through donorschoose.org for school supplies for children of soldiers, through his WristStrong bracelets for the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps injured veterans,...

WCVB-TV: The Boston Newspaper Guild rejected the contract negotiated after the Globe’s parent company, the New York Times Co., said it needed $20 million in annual savings from Globe unions – half of that from the Guild – to avoid shutting down the 137-year-old newspaper. The Times Co. had said if the contract were rejected, it would try to impose a 23 percent wage cut. It also could follow through on its threat to close the Globe, which would require giving 60 days notice to the...

The NYTimes alert: In a stunning reversal, the Democratic majority in the New York State Senate appeared to lose control of the chamber Monday afternoon when two senators broke party ranks to back a Republican motion to displace the Democrats as the party in control. The motion appeared to pass, 32-30, despite procedural moves to block it. The NYTimes City Room blog fills in details of a raucous leadership fight that erupted on the floor of the state Senate around 3 p.m. after the two New York City...

Bloomberg: The rebuff spares President Barack Obama’s administration from the awkward task of mounting a legal defense for a policy the president says should be repealed. In urging the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal, administration lawyers said a lower court was correct to uphold the policy. The high court case stemmed from a lawsuit by 12 former service members who were discharged because of their sexual orientation. A federal appeals court in Boston threw out the suit, disagreeing with...

NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a piece tonight about the Gay Marriage battle in Washington, D.C.,  where the city council passed a measure that would allow the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Supporters are hoping the council will pass new legislation allowing same-sex marriage in the district. Meanwhile, somewhat incongruously, in the Weddings/Celebration section of today’s NYTimes there’s a discussion of same sex divorce. Not all that...

KevinMD: How are American doctors fighting medical tourism trend? Cardiologist DrRich’s latest post details the concern the American College of Surgeons have for the burgeoning medical tourism industry, and how they are using malpractice as a reason not to travel overseas for your procedure. “Indeed, the potential difficulty in suing foreign doctors appears to be the chief differentiator, and the primary argument in favor of good-old-American-surgery,” DrRich write. “The surgeons, in essence,...

Yesterday afternoon Jason Bellini of The Daily Beast said that gay rights leaders had made a deal to wait on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. He said that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “let slip” to a number of gay leaders that the Human Rights Campaign told him that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not the White House’s priority: Last night Andy Towle got another statement from HRC denying the report: “This story is not only an outright lie, it...