UPDATE: AP’s Jim Kennedy emails: The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers — large and small — in the news conversation of the day… Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but… There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers. Full text here. Headline corrected for clarity (added “Retort”). Original post begins here… Worth...

Theda Skocpol asks, Will White Feminists Speak up for Michelle Obama? The attacks gathering on her are scurrilous, profoundly sexist and racist. Will prominent white feminists and female pundits and officials — including Congressional Republican women — speak up forcefully against slurs on Michelle Obama? It will be a strong test of their good faith. Do they care about fairness to all women involved in public life, or are they just whining for Hillary or maneuvering for her voters? Pam...

There’s been lots of good discussion surrounding David Mark’s piece noting Sen. Jim Webb’s affinity for the cause of the Confederacy: Webb is no mere student of the Civil War era. He’s an author, too, and he’s left a trail of writings and statements about one of the rawest and most sensitive topics in American history. He has suggested many times that while the Confederacy is a symbol to many of the racist legacy of slavery and segregation, for others it simply reflects Southern...

Yesterday I quoted Stephen J. Dubner’s criticism of Michael Pollan and the local food movement and concluded, generously, that “Dubner’s contribution to the [food] debate is to keep it real.” Then I listened to his appearance (mp3) on The Takeaway. Dubner apparently hardly even bothered to prepare for the show. Said he, straight off, when the interviewer assumed he had “actually been investigating the impulse…to grow it yourself and you’ve come up with some hard...

Stephen J. Dubner wonders, do we really need a few billion locavores? And with that wonder he skewers the notion that the local food movement can really enhance the economic, environmental and social health of our planet as much as some Michael Pollan adherents might hope. His piece starts out with this anecdote: We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It...

Yesterday Matt Stoller posted an analysis of Obama’s Raleigh speech on the economy. Stoller says Obama’s economic philosophy is a “split between a neoliberal Rubin-type policy tone and an embrace of behavioral economics, a new school of thought popularized by books like The Tipping Point, Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational.” The move towards behavioral economics was also noted by The New York Review of Books in its piece, Economics: Which Way for Obama? If Obama isn’t...

The NY Times today: The stereotype for same-sex relationships is that they do not last. But that may be due, in large part, to the lack of legal and social recognition given to same-sex couples. Studies of dissolution rates vary widely. After Vermont legalized same-sex civil unions in 2000, researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 couples, including same-sex couples and their heterosexual married siblings. The focus was on how the relationships were affected by common causes of marital strife like housework,...

So says Jeff Jarvis in the NY Post today: The white spaces are the spectrum that will be freed up when TV broadcasters finish switching to wavelengths reserved for digital transmission in 2009. Google wants the spectrum liberated so any of us can freely use it, as we do now with wi-fi frequencies. Google cofounder Larry Page made a rare appearance in Washington recently to push the point, arguing that unlicensed white spaces could turn into “wi-fi on steroids.” Proponents say this would...

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 keynote begins at 10am Pacific today, June 9th, 2008. It is universally believed that the new 3G iPhone with (most likely) GPS will be unveiled there. For a roundup of the best of the rest of the rumors, click here. In anticipation of the occasion Salon’s Farhad Manjoo chatted with Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve’s Brain, a book about Apple’s rebirth under Jobs: You spend a lot of time describing how they come up with these products....

Consumer credit card agreements these days typically include clauses requiring binding arbitration and stipulating which arbitration firm is used. More often than not that firm is The National Arbitration Forum (NAF). They control the market to the tune of nearly 99% of consumer credit card contracts. “Millions of credit-card accounts mandate the use of arbitration by NAF.”So says Business Week in an investigative piece by Robert Berner and Brian Grow in this week’s issue. Berner...

Jonathan Singer at MyDD and Matt Yglesias offer up some terrific commentary on Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny’s look at Obama’s plans for a nationwide push into GOP strongholds in the next few weeks. Georgia promises to be a particularly interesting case. Popular (in Georgia) former Republican Congressman Bob Barr is now the Libertarian presidential candidate, with early polls showing him taking enough votes to give Democrats a shot here. And we’ve got a large African American population...

His speech at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform yesterday is burning up the Internets (though I have Joe to thank for directing me to it). In the speech Moyers says: Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists, no one can eliminate their prejudices. Just recognize them. Here is my bias. Extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a truly just society. Capitalism breeds great inequality that is destructive unless tempered by an intuition for equality which is the heart...

NYTimes: Live TV advertisements have been making a comeback in the United States, usually with the host of a late-night program promoting the virtues of a specific product — for instance, Jimmy Kimmel and a sidekick doing a skit about Quiznos subs. The idea is to reach people who normally fast-forward through commercials, and at the same time to have the host’s popularity rub off on the brand. Honda Motor, the Japanese automaker, has gone to particularly great lengths with its skydiving stunt...

Raw Story: The 56th Bilderberg Meeting, an annual conference of influential politicians and businessmen, began Thursday in Chantilly, Virgina, according to a press release from the organization. The Conference will end Sunday and deals mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran. According to the press release, the meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion. About 140 participants...

Matthew Yglesias comments on Douglas Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II: …what’s really striking about the subject is that despite how central the story of racial conflict is to the story of America, and despite how well-known certain key episodes in that history are, the shocking story that Blackmon has to tell here is virtually unknown. I assume that this kind of thing forms part of the basis of black-white...

Techdirt: Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made a statement at a conference that I think we can all agree with: “If someone told me when I retired from court that I’d be talking at a conference about digital gaming, I’d think they’d had one drink too many.” However, not only did she talk at a conference about digital gaming, she’s working on a project to create a video game about the court system, to try to make students more informed about...

Stephen asks Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr if he’s afraid the government will make him register his mustache. And here’s a little something to look forward to from Stephen’s fans: John McCain’s Green Screen Challenge. It will be interesting to see if this turns into anything like some of the previous greenscreen challenges. I’ve been watching for the fun mashups of the three speeches from the other night that are bound to come. If someone spots a good...

So the big news today is the California court’s rejection of a stay of last month’s ruling on gay marriage. (See also Patrick Edaburn below.) Chris Crain warns, “Better buckle up, fellas. It’s going to be a bumpy ride…the justices were unanimous.” Emphasis his. Here’s the 1 page ruling (pdf). Also in the news today, a USAToday poll showing that 63% of adults say same-sex marriage is “strictly a private decision” between two people. And Tim Rutten...

I keep saying that we’re not as racist as we’re afraid we are and that when we do find instances of overt racism we have the capacity to cope and to act. Georgia is now confronted with just such an instance. As the AJC is reporting that Curtis Osborne’s final meal tonight will be a cheeseburger, Alan Berlow writing in Slate wonders do defendants in Georgia have any right at all to competent representation? During his five years as a justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, four of...

Former Georgia senator Sam Nunn was a major player foiling President Bill Clinton’s effort to lift the ban on gays in the military in 1993. He helped push through the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law that lesbian and gay servicemembers have suffered under since. As a consequence, he is universally reviled in the gay community. Times change. Today in Atlanta: “I think [when] 15 years go by on any personnel policy, it’s appropriate to take another look at it — see how...

Salon convened a podcast round table discussion to ask “one uncomfortable, unavoidable, and inexhaustible” question: What role did race play in the voting behavior of white Democrats in 2008? It’s a terrific read. The panel — Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian; Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution; and Tom Schaller of the University of Maryland — does an excellent job of putting this contest into a historical perspective. They...

I said I’d comment after reading Bill Clinton’s 2,500 word critique of Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair piece. I haven’t read it. Yet. Slate’s Jack Shafer has: “A tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece,” the critique seethed, one that “repeats many past attacks on him, ignores much prior positive coverage, includes numerous errors, and ultimately breaks no new ground. It is, in short, journalism of personal destruction at its worst.” Shafer agrees...

I don’t know how many of us here at TMV are Apple aficionados (here’s the latest iPhone rumor) but for those who are (and to those who aren’t, Apple is the tech news story of the early 21st century so you may want to read on) there’s a rumor going ’round that the overpriced under-performing .Mac service that people like me pay a $100 for year after year thinking maybe one day it will amount to something — it now includes e-mail, online hosting, backup, photo sharing,...

John Gray, author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, reviews David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions in the Globe and Mail Saturday: The idea that the practice of science is at odds with religious commitment has long been part of conventional wisdom. In the 18th century, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment argued that science is the voice of reason while religion is little more than blind faith. Only by embracing...

Chris Matthews’ “Big Question” this morning was, will Hillary lead her army into the cause of Barack Obama? His panel all agreed she would, reluctantly, but Howard Fineman was noteworthy for his emphasis on Bill: The key for Barack Obama is to win back Bill Clinton… [he has] to tell Bill Clinton, “You’re the man again. You’re back. Come back. You’ve been resurrected. You’re no longer the anti-guy… You’re the first black president all...