WSJ Online: Sony Corp. and six of the biggest U.S. cable operators announced an agreement to create digital televisions capable of receiving cable service without a set-top box. Sony signed a pact with Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications, Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks to develop technology that will allow consumers to eliminate set-top boxes, yet still receive basic as well as advanced cable services, such as pay-per-view movies. The...

Doug Carlson sees a firestorm unleashed by the California court’s marriage ruling. Me too. But I see the fire burning in a totally different direction than Doug. What got me going in Doug’s post, though, was his use of quotation marks around the word “marriage.” Yesterday on Fresh Air linguit Geoff Nunberg had a stirring essay on just that topic. I urge you to listen in its entirety. To entice you I quote extensively from it here. It’s titled, Love and Marriage: Still...

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins went on The Colbert Report Tuesday to discuss his book, Personal Faith, Public Policy, as well as, of course, the California Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling.PageOneQ: “I’ve read the constitution forwards and backwards,” Colbert continued, “and I see nothing in there that protects gays. “Why,” he asks Perkins, “do these judges keep seeing gay things in the Constitution?” “They’re afforded...

A sea change? Some think maybe so… The San Francisco Chronicle: In a dramatic reversal of decades of public opinion, California voters agree by a slim majority that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, according to a Field Poll released today. By 51-42 percent, registered voters said they believed same-sex marriage should be legal in California. Only 28 percent favored gay marriage in 1977, when the Field Poll first asked that question, said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director. “This...

The LATimes reports that network TV just ain’t what it used to be… Broadcast networks under siege: Like the networks themselves, though, the quarterly sweeps — which some stations still use to set local ad rates — have fallen on hard times. For the May sweep that ended last Wednesday, NBC couldn’t be bothered to make the earth move. Among the network’s prime-time offerings as the period drew to a close: repeats of “The Office,” “Law & Order:...

AP: A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said. Google’s lawyers made the claim in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as the company responded to Viacom Inc.’s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement”...

AP: The Libertarian Party on Sunday picked former Republican Rep. Bob Barr to be its presidential candidate after six rounds of balloting. Barr beat research scientist Mary Ruwart, who was the party’s presidential nominee in 1983 and vice presidential candidate in 1992, by a vote of 324-276 on the final ballot. Barr endorsed Wayne Allyn Root, who was eliminated in the fifth round, to be his vice-presidential nominee. David Weigel @ Reason Magazine has been live blogging all day and summarizes...

The NYTimes Sunday Magazine Cover Story, Exposed, by Emily Gould on her life as a professional blogger, has been roundly trashed — see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here, more thoughtful takes here and here — even as it was a most emailed story and made Memorandum. While I agree with my colleagues that it was fairly frothy, I’m not so sure we’re the best judges. And I’d like to find someone among us who might better explore the truths that lurk in passages...

Err, that’s the headline. But I’d like to think of it more as “we know better what we want these days”… BBC News: Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research. The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online. Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them...

Gas isn’t the only thing that’s costing more these days. The NYTimes reports that… Cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996, roughly double the rate of inflation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month. Cable customers, who typically pay at least $60 a month, watch only a fraction of what they pay for — on average, a mere 13 percent of the 118 channels available to them. And the number of subscribers keeps growing. [...] The industry says the digital era has brought...

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate comparing the Texas raid on the FLDS Church Community with the initial situation in Guantanamo Bay in 2002: For those of you who haven’t been following the many legal twists and turns of the Texas polygamy story, today’s news of a state appellate court ruling that child welfare officials impermissibly seized hundreds of children from a polygamist ranch over three days in April will be shocking. It seemed an open-and-shut case of child abuse, right? Young girls...

More cool interchange photos. And so the holiday travel season begins… James Joyner points to Kevin Drum on the unfriendly skies and the $15 bag checking fee. Last week Fresh Air had an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Scott McCartney who writes their “The Middle Seat” column. He warns us to watch out when we reach into those seat back pocket pouches on airplanes: Mr. McCARTNEY: You know, I think this has been an issue that’s been simmering out there for a while....

Amply demonstrating why she will be missed at the NYTimes (she accepted a buyout earlier this year and will be succeeded by national legal correspondent Adam Liptak) Linda Greenhouse wonders why so few 5-to-4 Supreme Court rulings this term: Something is happening, clearly. The question is what. The caveats against drawing any hard conclusions at this stage are obvious. For one thing, the term is functionally only half over, with 35 cases down and 32 to come. And it is common for the hardest-fought...

The New Yorker has a piece on Katie Couric’s ill-fated voyage with CBS: I don’t think that people want less news; they want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina, and they want anchors to go deep into issues. I would more than happily watch Brian Williams do an hour of news every night (and that’s not, I should say, because a member of my family works for NBC News). Who knows, young people might turn on their...

The news coming out of the Republican bastion state of Georgia these days isn’t so good for the GOP. Earlier this week Matt Towery and his InsiderAdvantage unveiled a statewide poll that suggested Bob Barr could put Georgia in play, and the Obama campaign knows it (that latter, btw, echoing something close to what Marc Ambinder said last week). Then today comes a memo from two Republican strategists, David Johnson of Strategic Vision in Atlanta and Holly Robichaud of Tuesday Associates in Boston,...

Stephen Bright, President and Senior Counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, on the death penalty in decline (via TalkLeft): Although public opinion polls continue to show support for the death penalty, imposition of the death penalty is down by more than 50% over 10 years. In the late 1990s, around 280-300 people were being sentenced to death a year. In the last 5 years, it’s been around 125 to 150 a year. No one has noticed this. But it is significant that a country this large with...

Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, spoke last month at Google. In his talk and in his book, Ford argues that we should think of racism not as a crime, like murder, where we have to find bad people and fix them, but rather as a social problem that we can come together to work on and fix, “kind of like air pollution.” He disputes the notion that Americans don’t like to talk...

And now for something completely different: A flying….ahem…human member. NO JOKE. The video is here. (WARNING: ADULT MATERIAL.) Unconventional chopper targets Putin critic: Former World Chess Champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov has been attacked by radio-controlled penis during a meeting of opposition activists. Around 700 opponents of the Kremlin were attending Kasparov’s address in Moscow at the weekend. Pro-Kremlin demonstrators decided to interrupt Kasparov’s address,...

Yesterday Bill Kristol opined that despite the fact that “the Republican Party is clearly in bad shape,” Gay Marriage is a promising development for McCain. Today Georgia Congressman Paul Broun took the bait, announcing that he will introduce a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage: “Marriage as an institution exists solely between one man and one woman. Americans have traditionally recognized this definition as being the most beneficial arrangement for the creation of stable...

NPR’s News & Notes recently had a segment addressing the harsh reality of rape in prison. In it host Farai Chideya spoke with a victim of prison rape, Keith Deblasio: [W]hat tends to occur a lot of times in the prison environment is individuals who use threats, coercion to continue an assault relationship. In other words, it’s not quite what we see on “Oz,” where there’s a one-time. Those situations occur, but more common is the person who is in fear of their life...

A couple new books are looking at behavioral economics and challenging the received wisdom of the market in ways that may actually break into our popular consciousness. The Boston Globe: Near the beginning of “The Hidden Persuaders” (1957), Vance Packard quoted from Advertising Age magazine the first principle of the new science of motivation research: “In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do.” Fifty years later, this astounding...

I can have some real compassion for Huckabee’s gaffe. I appreciate a politician willing to speak off the cuff. I was impressed, for example, when Huckabee was able to call on his southern roots, to remember growing up “in a very segregated South,” in order to speak against the tide in support of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment, and you have to just say, ‘I probably would, too.’” Still, the bottom line is...

Bill Cosby has famously accused blacks of spend money unwisely, buying expensive sneakers rather than investing in their kids’ education and thereby reinforcing harmful stereotypes. Research by Wharton’s Nikolai Roussanov, and Erik Hurst and Kerwin Charles of the University of Chicago has shown that what they’re doing is we all do — black, white, and hispanic — it’s called status signaling. Knowledge@Wharton: What really matters, Roussanov, Charles and Hurst found,...

Have I mentioned that in my rural Georgia town we have six state prisons? We call it economic development. I’m on the advisory board of one of them. NYTimes:  Today, Kansas is a leader in a spreading national effort to make parole more effective and useful — to reduce violations and reincarcerations as it protects the public and seeks to help more offenders go straight. Mr. Kemp’s parole officer is keeping close tabs on him, but instead of sending him for a punitive stretch behind bars,...

He’s White: Joshua Packwood knows what it’s like to be a minority. This weekend he’ll be the first white valedictorian to graduate from the historically black, all male Morehouse College in the school’s 141-year history. Morehouse, in Atlanta, Georgia, is one the nation’s most prestigious universities of its kind. For more than a century, the school has prided itself on personifying the dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the school’s most notable...