At Saturday morning breakfast for the Cherokee County GOP, Georgia Congressman and republican gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal was explaining his insistence in a legislative provision demanding proof of citizenship for federal or state health care benefits. opposition campaign video cameras rolling when he said: We got all the complaints of the ghetto grandmothers who didn’t have birth certificates and all that. We wrote some very liberal language as to how you can verify it. My mother was...

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely got a golf company to send out e-mails surveys to their users. 17,000 people to responded. On Marketplace yesterday he discussed his findings: First of all, it turns out that people in the pharmaceutical industry cheated a lot, but they also said their industry is the most honest that there is. There are some other interesting comparisons. For example, if you look at law enforcement, education and government, people in those three industries basically cheat on average,...

Following up on On Racism: Unconscious & Reverse, last night Larry Wilmore, The Daily Show’s Senior Black Correspondent, had segment showing white people his trick for how to play the race card. Apparently white people are doing OK without instruction. Fox News dominated the cable 3Q ratings: Fox News has pulled off another dominant quarter, claiming the top 10 cable news programs in 3Q 2009 and growing against 3Q 2008, while CNN and MSNBC lost substantial portions of their election-boom...

SearchEngineLand, Mashable & TechCrunch note Google’s celebration of today’s 57th anniversary of the first patent (No. 2,612,994) on the barcode. Meanwhile Stan Schroeder wonders, does anyone even go to Google.com anymore? I’m not asking whether you’re using Google; I’m asking whether you actually open the Google homepage, and search from there. Because I don’t. Until a while ago, occasionally – perhaps out of habit – I’d open it and search...

Lady Gaga, “…Hello SNL…” Madonna showed up for a surprise visit to ‘Deep House Dish‘ on SNL. To mixed reviews. But Lady GaGa, dressed as a sexy gyroscope in the video medley above, stole the show. After being signed to and quickly dropped from Def Jam Records at age 19, she began performing in the rock music scene of New York City’s Lower East Side. During this time, she was also working at Interscope Records as a songwriter for several established acts, including...

Mashable: The TED 5000 from Energy Inc. is a real-time electricity usage monitor that you can purchase and install yourself, with packages starting around $200. It can run the free Google PowerMeter tool, allowing you to check on your personal home energy data from any device that can access the web. The TED 5000 is Google’s first official device partner for PowerMeter, but the company indicates they plan to work with more providers who make energy monitors to get PowerMeter support built-in....

Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, walks us through the definitions of several of the more commonly cited types of racism and offers his opinion as to whether they deserve the label. I picked two to quote: Unconscious racismHarvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji has developed a test designed to smoke out unconscious racial bias. The test requires the subject, under intensive time pressure, to...

The FTC published final guidelines governing endorsements, and testimonials today: The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify...

There’s lots of pundit chatter on the topic these days… Steven F. Hayward remembers William F. Buckley Jr. and wonders is conservatism brain-dead? Today…the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter,...

More likely than not, that single hamburger patty or package you bought from the supermarket, restaurant or fast food joint contains “meat product” from hundreds of slaughtered cows gathered from around the world. One result of that practice is that major Class 1 (you could die) ground beef recalls are on the rise. Just this past August 825,769 pounds of Salmonella contaminated beef was recalled from Arizona, California, Colorado & Utah. Taking a page from Michael Pollan’s...

A long and interesting weekend read from SearchEngineLand, an interview with Eric Schmidt. I’m not through it yet. Here, some of Schmidt on newspapers: The number of readers for newspapers is declining. The market is becoming more specialized. There will always be a market for people who read the newspaper on a train going into New York City. There will always be a market for people who sit in in the afternoon in a cafe in the city and read the newspaper in the sunshine. The term “killing”...

Col. Om Prakash, author of The Efficacy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, published in Joint Force Quarterly, an official Department of Defense journal published by the Chair of the Joint Chiefs: The law as it currently stands does not prohibit homosexuals from serving in the military as long as they keep it secret. This has led to an uncomfortable value disconnect as homosexuals serving, estimated to be over 65,000, must compromise personal integrity. Given the growing gap between social...

Jim Marone is chairman of the political science department at Brown and author, with David Blumenthal of the Harvard Medical School, of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office. He was a guest this week on Radio Open Source: Health policy, Marone argues persuasively, lays bare the soul as well as the working temperament of presidents as almost nothing else does. Our presidents tend to be “sick men,” he writes, with complex medical histories and poorer health than American males...

The video: And extortion: A CBS News employee is under arrest for trying to extort $2 million from David Letterman, forcing the late-night host to admit in an extraordinary monologue before millions of viewers that he had sexual relationships with female employees. And arrest: In a statement late Thursday, the network said: “CBS was made aware of an ongoing police investigation involving David Letterman and an employee at ‘48 Hours,’ who was subsequently arrested earlier today...

Another Republican in the news for a tawdry affair. This one a retread: In acknowledging the affair [last June], Mr. Ensign cast it as a personal transgression, not a professional one. But an examination of his conduct shows that in trying to clean up the mess from the illicit relationship and distance himself from the Hamptons, he entangled political supporters, staff members and Senate colleagues, some of whom say they now feel he betrayed them. This major NYTimes investigation goes on for nearly...

I’m an American who didn’t brush his teeth until his late teens. And then only occasionally. I don’t remember using a toothbrush as a child. I do remember my parents bragging that my childhood dentist did not like kids; he took my siblings and me as a favor. That was no favor to me for that dentist did not believe in novocaine; and my parents did not believe in fluoride (they thought it was a communist plot). My reaction to his loud and slow dental drill leaves little wonder as...

Daniel Engber: Being fat can make you poor, and being poor can make you sick, which means that being fat can make you sick irrespective of any weight-related diseases. Fatness (or the lifestyle associated with obesity) also creates its own health problems, regardless of how much money you have—and health problems tend to make people poor, through hospital bills and missed days of work. So fat can be impoverishing irrespective of any weight-related discrimination. The point here is that sickness,...

Maybe Schiller got out just in time. John Koblin in the NYObserver: On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Arthur Sulzberger will host his annual “State of The Times” meeting for Times employees, which is generally a sleepy and awkward affair with lots of corporate cheerleading. (Last year, Mr. Sulzberger started the proceedings by playing a slideshow touting all of the paper’s accomplishments with Coldplay’s “Clocks” playing in the background. When the song ended, in lieu of applause, there was a deadly...

Yesterday I linked, in passing, to the Espresso Book Machine (video). The University of Missouri installed one last week. This week they’re reporting it raises copyright issues: The machine, which is not yet open to the public, is capable of printing any PDF file provided by the customer. This enables customers to print anything they desire, regardless of whether it is copyrighted. But there are parameters in place to avoid copyright infringement. “We will check everything submitted,”...

Lynn Sherr interviews Vivian Schiller, the first woman CEO of National Public Radio, at More.com (a site “celebrating women 40+”). Schiller’s been around — tour guide in the former Soviet Union, programming at TBS, documentary production at CNN and the head of NYTimes.com. Today, she says: I have the best job in the world. I’ve been in four positions since 1988, and each job I’ve had, I’ve thought, this is the best job ever. I’ve left each one reluctantly, only...

In last night’s hilarious piece on taser abuses, Stephen Colbert looks at the cases of a 76-year-old man driving a tractor in a Wyoming town parade who was tased five times for arguing over where the parade route ended (the officers were fired); a soccer mom tased in front of her kids for driving 50 in a 45 mph zone; and the “revolutionary new multi-shot” Taser X3 (”turn up your speakers,” the tacky Taser International website suggests). More seriously, Electronic Village...

The rejection adds to the litany of complaints against Apple’s incredibly successful third-party market for its popular smartphone: Apple rejected a free iPhone application that advocated a single-payer health system, calling the application “politically charged,” according to the app’s developer. Red Daly, a 22 year-old computer science grad student at Stanford, submitted his iSinglePayer iPhone app for Apple’s approval on Aug. 21. A little more than a month later Apple...

Tina Brown wants to speed up the publishing cycle of books: The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books. On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected...

Really??? The trucking industry says these devices can be used safely, posing less of a distraction than BlackBerrys, iPhones and similar gadgets, and therefore should be exempted from legislation that would ban texting while driving. “We think that’s overkill,” Clayton Boyce, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, said of a federal bill that would force states to ban texting while driving if they want to keep receiving federal highway money. The public wants a ban: Ninety percent...

My friend Sam, who lives around the corner, wrote earlier in the week, “Saturday night Babs Streisand is giving a one time only night at the Village Vangard where she got her start. Can you imagine?” It was her first time back to the club in 48 years: Max Gordon, late owner of the Village Vanguard, liked to tell the possibly exaggerated story of the “little pisher” who hung around the club in 1961, pestering him for a chance to perform. He flicked her away for weeks, but when his...