In a piece asking, Did the stimulus bill fail?, Dave Weigel finds a comparison in the Bush tax cuts: Did the stimulus do less than President Obama said it would? Absolutely… At his most optimistic, he said the stimulus would be a success if it “created or saved” 4 million jobs. It fell far short of that. But ambitious, expensive bills have fallen short before, and it hasn’t discredited their reasons to exist. George W. Bush’s tax cuts were supposed to balance the budget...

On the eve of talks with with President Obama, Speaker John Boehner is pulling out of negotiations for a large-scale deficit reduction plan. His statement: “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.” His new goal, $2 trillion in spending cuts.

Twitter reaction to the verdict is stark. Just one percent agree with it. Casey could be set free today. This John Adams quote is worth remembering: It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself...

On a NY ride with 550 other motorcycles, he fishtailed and flipped over the handlebars of his 1983 Harley Davidson. His head hit the pavement: “The medical expert we discussed the case with who pronounced him deceased stated that he would’ve no doubt survived the accident had he been wearing a helmet,” state Trooper Jack Keller told ABC News 9 in Syracuse. James Joyner is “skeptical about both helmet and seatbelt laws, given that the negative externalities are incredibly limited.” Susie...

Not good. Robin Wauters at TechCrunch: [S]ome stupid kids – actual age unknown – have taken over the (verified) @FoxNewPolitics Twitter account and posted a series of messages declaring U.S. President Barack Obama dead on the eve of the Fourth of July, the national day of the United States. The ‘hackers’ appear to have taken over the account around 2 AM Eastern time, and went on to claim President Obama was shot twice at an Iowa restaurant, that he passed away soon thereafter, and that the...

For the 4th of July weekend, On Being’s Krista Tippett replayed a 2003 interview with author and philosopher Jacob Needleman. They discussed his book, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. The program was titled, The Inward Work of Democracy. From the transcript: Mr. Jacob Needleman: What’s interesting about [Frederick] Douglass, why he should be an icon for all Americans, is that he saw, more clearly than any of us could, the evils of slavery since he was a slave,...

John Gray reviews David Brooks’, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. He doesn’t much like it: The core of Brooks’s argument is his claim that the forces controlling human behavior are not just nonrational, they are unconscious—and can be controlled. As he puts it, “The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most.” Significantly, Sigmund Freud appears hardly at all in the four hundred or so pages of this treatise on the...

So says Comedy Central in a press release: “The Daily Show” Earns Its First Adult 18-49 Crown For A Full Quarter Breaking “The Tonight Show’s” 40+ Quarter Victory Streak Dating Back To At Least 1Q 2000 “The Daily Show” And “The Colbert Report” End The Quarter As The Most-Watched Late Night Talk Shows In All Of Television Among Adults 18-34, Adults 18-24, Men 18-34 And Men 18-24 Not so fast, says NBC: A spokesperson for the network says that Comedy...

Fareed Zakaria his updated his 2008 bestseller and dubbed it The Post-American World: Release 2.0. He was a guest this week on Fresh Air in an interview that was so good I listened twice. Some highlights: [T}he tallest building in the world is now in Dubai. The biggest factory in the world is in China...The largest oil refinery in the world is in India. The largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi. And the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore. And needless to say, 25 years...

So beautifully shot and edited it’s hard to believe this short film was shot entirely on a cell phone. The video won the Nokia Shorts 2011 mini-movie contest, and earned director JW Griffiths a $10,000 prize. See also, The Making Of…

Narrowly. The vote was 5 to 1 in favor, but the ads can run only during his show. Colbert’s is the nation’s 114th SuperPAC. So what’s a SuperPAC? It’s a consequence of the “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision which gave corporations, unions and individuals the right to give unlimited cash to outside groups to campaign for or against candidates. With it Colbert can: Take in unlimited donations from nearly any source, other than foreign nationals and government...

”HB 87 is state regulation of immigration. Section 8 attempts an end-run – not around federal criminal law – but around federal statutes defining the role of state and local officers in immigration enforcement….[B]oth the United States government and several foreign nations have expressed concern about the international relations impact of HB 87. “In reference to HB 87, the President of the United States stated that “[i]t is a mistake for states to try to do this piecemeal. We...

Burning up the internets this morning, Chris Wallace asking Michele Bachmann, “Are you a flake?” Bachmann calls the question “insulting,” she’s “a serious person.” Wallace apologized but Bachmann’s apparently not accepting. This following on the heels of the week-long aftermath of Wallace’s Jon Stewart interview. In that interview Stewart said that Wallace stands out among Fox News journalists for his seriousness. I think not. While he may not reflect...

With same sex marriage legal in NY (gay couples can marry there beginning on July 24) it’s worth revisiting what happened in Massachusetts. From the November 3, 2005 Daily Show. BRIAN CAMENKER, anti-gay-marriage activist: I could sit here and I could probably, you know, find some way of connecting the dots to gay marriage to all of these [adverse effects] if I had enough time and I did some research. HELMS: Yeah, why take time to do the research, when saying it is so much faster? Besides,...

Everything is a Remix. Don’t try telling that to famed photographer Jay Maisel. When Andy Baio released a chiptunes tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Kind of Bloop, he used a pixellated re-creation of the original’s Maisel cover photo. Maisel, who lives in a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot lower Manhattan Beaux Arts Gilded Age mansion (for $5,000 you can go inside for a Jay Maisel workshop), felt violated: “He is a purist when it comes to his photography,”...

How? They were ready to flick the switch because the lights had been changed or installed more than six months ago when the building was last seen sporting that fabulous purple and red glow. Not for Gay Pride, which is celebrated in June across the United States, but for a Further show, according to Phish message boards. A rock band founded in 2009 by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, members of the Grateful Dead, Further played at the Madison Square Garden in November of last year. The Empire State Building...

Poytner: At least 50,000 people watched the vote via live stream from the Senate, according to a tweet from the legislature’s account. Brian Stelter tweeted: “For the record, per TVEyes: NY same-sex marriage vote was covered for 60+ mins by MSNBC & CNN. It was covered for 2 min by Fox News.” As gathered by Poytner from the Newseum: Several New York papers — including The Wall Street Journal weekend edition, the Poughkeepsie Journal, and the Adirondack Daily Enterprise...

I’m overjoyed this historic Saturday morning; sad only not to be in NYC for Pride weekend. Some other reaction… Steve Benen, the arc of history bends towards justice in N.Y.: The political twists of this process were rather unusual. When Democrats ran the state Senate in the last session, infighting doomed a similar proposal. Now, there’s a Republican majority in the same chamber, and it passed. Indeed, the real oddity of last night’s debate was watching the two highest-profile...

Andy Towle talked to Mike Long, chairman of the NY Conservative Party, earlier this evening: “I’m sorry to say that the bill’s going to pass,” Long told me in a phone interview minutes ago. He said that the recently released religious liberty amendment would serve as an “excuse for some Sepublican senators to hang their hat on.” “I know they’ve got the 32nd vote, and I think they’ve muscled two more people” to give the vote some cushion. “Hopefuly...

Slowly but surely our governmental bodies are moving towards acceptance of what has already been culturally recognized: It’s okay to be gay. New York is one vote away from legally recognizing same sex marriage. There are widespread expectations that the legislation will pass next week. Last week a federal judge upheld the ruling striking down California’s Proposition 8 and a U.S. Bankruptcy Court held that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. In the face of...

If you missed it (Sunday night, CBS) you missed an amazing show. Thankfully, this year CBS allowed lots of clips on the web. 1 million views and counting for the opening number, Broadway isn’t just for gays anymore! A Hugh Jackman & Neil Patrick Harris dance-off – Dueling Hosts. A mere 427,000 views: Neil Patrick Harris gives a closing rap. Only 9,000 views? No doubt because the making of video Writing rap –Backstage at the Tonys: Glee brings the Broadway musical to television....

Robert X. Cringely wonders why data security systems are proprietary and secret. If 1024- or 2048-bit codes take a thousand years to crack, isn’t encryption, combined with a limit on login attempts, good enough? He suggests it’s the U.S. government that doesn’t want us to have really secure networks: The government is more interested in snooping in on the rest of the world’s insecure networks. The U.S. consumer can take the occasional security hit, our spy chiefs rationalize, if it...

I believed Anthony Weiner even as everyone else saw through his whopper of a lie. Now we can all agree that his actions were smarmy. The emerging consensus is he should resign or he’ll be redistricted out even as we must also know that on the scale of slimy behavior by politicians, Weiner’s offenses are no greater — or even far less offensive — than those of Arnold, John, Dominique, Silvio, Eliot, John, David or Bill, to name only a few. Why is that? If you answer, “it’s...

You will want to watch tonight’s Tony Aawards (8 P.M., CBS). This will be the second time Neil Patrick Harris is hosting. He won an Emmy for the last time (and another for a guest appearance on Glee). He’s also hosted Spike’s Video Game Awards, the TV Land Awards and the Emmys. And he showed up in the opening number of the Oscars. On June 23, he will host at the LGBT Leadership Gala with President Obama. That event will be the first time a sitting president has done an LGBT fundraiser...

Everyone knows about cocaine and Coca Cola. But are we equally aware of the history of lithium in 7-Up? Seth Fletcher, author of, “Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy,” fills us in: [Lithium] was used as sort of a curative in the late 19th century. I mean, it was a mineral water. And it was added to soft drinks. Actually, 7-Up was originally a lithiated beverage, and it was marketed as a hangover cure…it was sort of a faddish curative towards...