I posted with the headline, Will Michael Vick Get The Real 60 Minutes Treatment? Not 5 minutes later: Quarterback Michael Vick has signed a two-year deal with the Philadelphia Eagles, his agent, Joel Segal, confirmed to ESPN.com. Vick arrived in Philadelphia Tuesday morning and remained there Wednesday evening. The Eagles will hold a news conference on Friday morning to announce his signing. The first year of the deal is for $1.6 million deal with an option for the second year at $5.2 million, FoxSports.com...

Fum kicks off his NewMajority piece with a look at the Right/Left food divide: Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney often joked during the primaries: “Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” Try that joke the other way around, and it doesn’t work, does it? Meat-eating is right-wing, everybody knows that! We even describe a rip-roaring conservative speech as “red-meat.” Crunchy granola is correspondingly left-wing....

Yesterday I said I believe internet porn is fueled by old guys who are addicted to the new plethora of pornographic options. What’s worse, I think, is our collective cultural guilt for all that porn — that and how we sexualize, fetishize, and ogle our young people in advertising, movies, and on television — has us criminalizing kids for those very same things we did when we were young. We blame them and want to lock them up for our own sins of desire. Kids don’t need us to leer at...

Google’s just released opt-out feature — it protects users’ privacy by moving them to a remote 22-acre village — is getting all the buzz but the real story is this item buried in the news crawl, “Obama to slip universal health care into iTunes user agreement.” Via @AmandaFrench.

The LATimes finds the porn industry in a tech-induced slump: Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply… At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users...

If so, it’s not clear yet how they’ll be called to account for it. Forty years after Stonewall: Fort Worth cops raid a gay bar and put one customer in intensive care. Seven men were arrested. The police chief says that the violence of the cops was because – wait for it – the cops were hit on [link]: “You’re touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that’s offensive,” he said. “I’m happy with the restraint used when they...

Here in Milledgeville, GA, our local Walgreens has a “Back to School Special” on At Home Marijuana Tests. The times sure are a-changin’. Meanwhile, AOL’s MomLogic — “Real Stories. Real Advice. Real Moms” — looks at parents who say smoking pot is better than drinking: “I want my children to grow up to believe that laws are just and rational, and if there’s injustice, they should fight it,” said Jessica Peck Corry, a Denver-based...

Stuck in customs was nearly stuck in jail for taking a photo with a tripod in Atlanta’s Olympic Park: I set up my tripod to take a photo of downtown and the Coke Museum was in the middle of the shot. A female cop of came over and told me I had to take down the tripod because I looked like a professional. Coke does not allow that, so she said. I said I’m a blogger with expensive toys and hardly a threat. Then she got quite huffy and agitated before telling me if I did not take down the tripod...

Rumors started early this morning and the sale has now been confirmed. Bret Taylor on the Friendfeed blog: FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates. The Facebook press release. Michael Arrington has the first post-sale interview with Friendfeed cofounder...

In Puberty on the Scale of a Planet, Dot Earth’s Andrew C. Revkin posits we are a teenage species at this moment. He asks, what do we want to be when we grow up? 9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ? At a quickening pace, humanity is etching its signature across the Earth, diverting waterways and downing forests, spreading pythons to the Everglades and American bullfrogs to Bordeaux, extracting minerals used in cellphones from a last patch of gorilla habitat, altering the atmosphere, knitting the...

On Weekend Edition Saturday, New Yorkers get a taste of Doug Quint’s Big Gay Ice Cream Truck: “If I weren’t gay, I wouldn’t call it the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. And if I weren’t happy, I wouldn’t have the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. It would just be the big crabby ice cream truck,” Quint says. Quint, who is a classically trained bassoonist, has only been in the ice cream business for a few months. The ice cream truck is just a summer gig while most orchestras...

Silicon Alley Insider: One of Microsoft’s biggest challenges with Windows 7 is an easy upgrade path for consumers and corporations. As this chart illustrates, it’s a mess: Only a few upgrade paths qualify for an “in-place upgrade,” which means you can keep “files, settings, and programs intact from your current Windows version.” Most will require a “custom install,” which WSJ gadget guru Walt Mossberg describes as “a tedious, painful process”...

And the target was a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia. So says one researcher in a story getting lots of traction: According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn’t the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu. As spam goes, the emails...

In Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, Michael Pollan asks, What is wrong with this picture? Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great...

NYTimes Bits Blog: Twitter, the popular microblogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack. The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack. [...] Other sites reported that they were targets of denial-of-service attacks as well. The social-networking site Facebook said access to its site was impaired for some users for a short...

Chris Albrecht, cross-posting on Business Week, wonders Will Viral Video Kill the Music Video? Historically, music videos were promotional vehicles that ran on outlets such as MTV. Big budgets were spent on lavish productions meant to captivate watchers, prodding them into buying the single or album the song was on. But while music videos have proven enormously popular on YouTube, earlier this year the video-sharing giant got embroiled in skirmishes with the record labels and rights holders over...

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks. Wired’s Danger Room: “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information...

Obama Foodorama’s Eddie Gehman Kohan is downright giddy over the first lady’s impact on food: The White House Kitchen Garden was the start of an unprecedented paradigm shift in our national conversation on children’s nutrition and health, on food and agriculture, on the role of cooking and nutrition education; and it’s a signpost for the Obama administration’s approach to these issues. Never before have we had a First Lady with a food policy agenda, and never before...

TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid: My, how the tables have turned. Earlier this week, we learned that Apple had suddenly begun to pull third party iPhone applications for Google Voice, citing the unconvincing rationale that they “duplicated” some of the iPhone’s functionality. We then broke the news that Apple had also rejected Google’s own official Google Voice application submitted six weeks prior, sparking a din of complaints from developers and users alike over the arbitrary...

Bob Drogin and John M. Glionna of the LATimes: Corazon C. Aquino, the unassuming housewife who toppled a dictator and restored democracy to the Philippines as its 11th president, has died. She was 76. The elegant democracy icon, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2008, was admitted to a hospital intensive care unit in late June after she stopped eating. Aquino served six turbulent years as president of the Philippines after helping lead hundreds of thousands in a “people power” revolution...

Madonna writes of her spiritual awakening to the teachings of Kabbalah in today’s edition of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s leading tabloid daily: “I started seeing that being rich and famous isn’t the end of the road, but the beginning of it,” she writes. In the highest tradition of eyewitness reporting, she reveals: “Countless times I’ve travelled the world, performed in soccer stadiums, acted in films, dined with world leaders, I’ve achieved what’s...

I finished the Open Yale Course on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 today. From the last of the 27 lectures, Legacies of the Civil War: Everything in history has a legacy. We use the term all the time, the legacies of this; the legacies of that; the legacies of that event; what are the legacies of World War Two? What are the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement? But what is a legacy? … Let me attempt a definition… It can be simply another word for historical memory, of...

Legal briefs… Overlawyered’s Walter Olson: Former tenant Amanda Bonnen had just 22 followers on Twitter when she commented in a strongly negative way about Horizon Realty of Chicago. And here’s what a spokesman for Horizon is quoted as saying about its lawsuit: We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. ArsTechnica has more on that. And this: A high school cheerleader claims a coach forced her to give up her Facebook account login information, only to see her...

As expected, Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an internet search deal: Microsoft and Yahoo, whose talks about a merger failed last year, on Wednesday announced a 10-year collaboration in Web search and advertising. Under the agreement, which both companies hope will allow them to compete better with Google, Microsoft will power Yahoo’s Web search while Yahoo will become the exclusive sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Microsoft’s Bing service, which it recently...

No one is more media savvy than Bill Kristol (even if he did land a big belly-flop at the NYTimes). Last night he was Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show: Bill Kristol bets that Sarah Palin will come on The Daily Show and admits the government can provide first-class health care. The televised interview was cut. Here, then, the unedited version: Think Progress watches and finds Kristol saying that the government can run a first-class health care system, “sure it can.” And that...