Joe Miller sure stirred up a media meme-fest when his private security guards handcuffed a local reporter. First up, must see video from the Anchorage Daily News reporter Richard Mauer shot just moments after Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed and detained: Meanwhile, it turns out that during the event Miller praised East German border control in response to a question on illegal immigration: “East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow” from one side of the...

Sasha Abramsky reports on new research demonstrating precisely how the prison-to-poverty cycle works: In devastating detail in Daedalus [the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences], the sociologists Bruce Western of Harvard and Becky Pettit of the University of Washington have shown how poverty creates prisoners and how prisons in turn fuel poverty, not just for individuals but for entire demographic groups. Crunching the numbers, they concluded that once a person has been incarcerated,...

Jacob Weisberg may not believe that (I do) but he calls Thiel out on this: The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions...

Columbia University historian Eric Foner was a guest this week on Fresh Air. He discussed his new book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Towards the end of the interview Terry Gross asked his opinion of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution: The originalists try to go back to the original Constitution, but they have little to say about the Civil War amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th, which actually fundamentally changed the Constitution by wrenching slavery out of...

Rich Benjamin, a senior fellow at Demos, writing in USA Today: Every spring I pay a visit to Howard Carlin, my tax accountant, to settle my dues. Howard’s upbeat personality, peppered with quirky quips, lightens the proceedings. Click, click, click, go his rapid-motion fingers. The numbers whir on screen like a digital slot machine. Up pops a figure. “See?” Howard chimes. “That’s your tax burden.” I wrinkle my nose. This faux disgust is just a ceremonial knee-jerk...

He’s exactly right when he observes that the Right is better at it than the left — “see Matt Drudge, aggregation; Rush Limbaugh, talk radio; Sarah Palin, Twitter” — and that the policing of disinformation should serve as a strong model of journalism. But when he observes that “recent disturbances in politics and the media feel like symptoms of a larger epistemological, even civilizational, rot” it’s worth remembering that feelings, ahem, aren’t...

That’s the name of a bill that would extend copyright to fashion. Law professor Susan Scafidi, who helped to draft the bill, did a nice job defending it on On The Media. Here she explains some of the ways it differs from copyright laws protecting music and movies: One is the very short three-year duration. The other is that it only protects things that are substantially identical to the original. So if you copyright a book, you also have rights to the movie. If you protect a fashion design...

The limits of the tech fix exposed: “At 0729 Mountain Time [1429 GMT] on 5 October, BI Incorporated experienced a problem with one of its offender monitoring servers that caused this server’s automatic notification system to be temporarily disabled, resulting in delayed notifications to customers. The issue was resolved approximately 12 hours later at 1925 [0229 GMT Wednesday],” BI said in a statement. Tracking devices continued to record movement and gather information, but corrections...

John Gruber, again, this time on the bureaucratic language Microsoft used to announce the Windows Phone 7 today, “Who talks like this? This bureaucrat-ese is intended, I suppose, to sound serious. But it just sounds like bull$#@t.” The press release is titled, “Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun” An excerpt: The goal...

It looks like femiphobia, “man’s fear of becoming a woman,” exacerbated the homophobic hate in the story of those nine young men who lured a gay man to a party that was instead a night of torture that NYC police call the worst antigay attack in recent memory. From the NYTimes follow-up: Mr. Mendez, who the police said was the ringleader and was known by the street name “Cheto,” lived several miles away from the crime scene, in Bedford Park. Neighbors on his block, marred by graffiti and...

And they drove it from Mountain View, CA, to Hollywood Boulevard. Google says their self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles: Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain. Mashable: This...

John Gruber and Dan Benjamin diss the name Windows Phone 7: Benjamin: Most absurd name for a device ever… Gruber: They should not have called it Windows, It’s as if they called the iPhone the Mac phone… I think it’s stupid. Benjamin: It’s a mistake. Their marketing critique sent me back to the now classic video, Microsoft designs the iPod package: It turned out the video was produced by Microsoft as “an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team]...

ReadWriteWeb Biz points to Mike Blumenthal, a blogger who specializes in local search, on Google’s poor Better Business Bureau rating: The bulk of the issue apparently is the fact that Google has not responded at all to 47 complaints. They were not judged on whether they satisfied the complaint, not whether they complied with their agreements… to a large degree, just whether they have responded…. Google has made a science out of making it difficult to get a problem looked at let alone...

That’s the headline from a story on the front page of the NYTimes this morning. So graphic it’s hard to read, we’re moving closer to calling hate what it is: HATE. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped. All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay. There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling...

A Google tribute in the UK on the occasion of what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. RELATED: The NYTimes Critic’s Notebook, Long After Death, Lennon Remains a Powerful Presence. Still controversial, The F.B.I. confiscated a 1976 John Lennon fingerprint card before it went up for auction in Manhattan. And if you’re following Joshua Wolf Shenk’s series on Creative Pairs, you might remember part 3, Inside the Lennon/McCartney Connection.

More on tolerance v. liberty and justice for all. From the ABA Journal: The American Civil Liberties Union has sued a school board in North Carolina over its suspension of a teenage student for having a peridot stud in a nose-piercing. Because Ariana Iacono belongs, along with her mother, to the Church of Body Modification, the suit contends the suspension violates her constitutional right to freedom of religion, reports the Associated Press. Her mother and the family’s minister has tried to...

Daniel Pink points us to the Population Reference Bureau where they did some census number crunching and came up with a rather shocking statistical nugget: For the first time in U.S. history, the number of young adults (those between 25 and 34) who have never been married exceeds those who are married. Pink wonders if this is part of the weaker demand in the housing market, “It’s harder to buy a house with one income than two, and tougher to commit to a gigantic purchase if you’re living...

In a most powerful piece that should be read in its entirety by everyone who cares about artists and copyright, Cory Doctorow responds in the Guardian to a piece by Helienne Lindvall on the cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (Doctorow included) “charge hefty fees to speak at events.” I understand perfectly well what you’re saying in your column: people who give away some of their creative output for free...

Tectonic shifts among the tech giants… Miguel Heft says The iPhone Has a Real Fight on Its Hands: Phones powered by Google’s Android operating system are now the most popular among smartphones in the United States, according to new data released by Nielsen. In the six months ending August 10, Android phones accounted for 32 percent of the smartphones sold, Nielsen said. By comparison, iPhones accounted for 25 percent of devices sold and BlackBerry handsets for 26 percent. A month earlier,...

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates delivered a lecture at Duke University last week on the all-volunteer force. The separation between the “narrow sliver of our population” that serves and the rest of us is growing: We should not ignore the broader, long-term consequences of waging these protracted military campaigns employing – and re-employing – such a small portion of our society in the effort…. [W]hatever their fond sentiments for men and women in uniform, for...

Before this most recent spate of media attention to anti-gay bullying, Dan Savage set up a YouTube channel aimed at young lgbt people. The It Gets Better project invites anyone with a YouTube account who wants to share their experiences in order to give hope to teens facing discrimination and bullying. Dan and his husband shared their own experiences in the first video… Yesterday Savage posted a video from Christian writer, blogger, and ordained Baptist minister Cody J. Sanders. He quotes...

“The Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.” – George Washington What’s happened to good citizenship lately? Andrew Shirvell, a paid state official during off hours, calls a gay student body president a racist elitist liar who is Satan’s representative. He doctors a photo to put a swastika over a gay flag next...

Via John Gruber but it’s absolutely everywhere on the internets right now! How long it will stay is anyone’s guess. Watch… From RebelliousPixels.com: This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers...

The Tea Party fetishisizes and cherry-picks the constitution (Fourteenth Amendment anyone?) the way the Religious Right fetishizes and cherry-picks the Bible (Adultery? Pork? Money lenders?). Here some originalism I’d like to see the Tea Party embrace: John Adams’ very first political essay was an attack on the Stamp Act. Now, when I was a kid, they taught me the Stamp Act was bad because it was taxation without representation. But Adams never talks about that. What he talks about is this...

CHAMBLISS: “Joe, I don’t know if you’re Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, but none of that should matter. Because what was said on your blog by someone from my office is just not acceptable, no matter who is saying it and who it’s being said to. I just want to offer my sincerest apologies. There has been some talk about how long it’s taking to find the person behind this, but we just wanted to be very careful and handed this off to the Senate Sergeant...