A local newspaper, the Press-Register, has the story:

The Ohio Supreme Court handed down a decision today in McFee v. Nursing Care Management of America, Inc. that holds that, “…it’s not gender discrimination for employers to require a minimum tenure for employees to take an extended leave for any purpose, pregnancy included.” (See this Columbus Dispatch blog post.) What’s the problem? Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice...

Or maybe “terrorist organization” is too strong. Maybe “criminal gang” would be better:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is making it clear he considers Republican Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to British Petroleum and charge that the $20 billion damage-mitigation escrow account was the result of a White House “shakedown” to be a political gift that will keep on giving. His comments on ABC News’ The Week come amid a slew of mainstream prominent pundits who had been supportive...

Steven Berlin Johnson answers Nick Carr’s supposition that the distracting links and brevity of modern reading are undermining the deep and immersive focus that is the defining benefit of the book: The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of...

My partner over at Newshoggers, Ken Anderson, told us about a worse case scenario here but is there an even worse worse case scenario?  At Energy and Capitol Christian A. DeHaemer presents us with one. The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano. I recently heard...

Given the weeping and wailing that has been going on among some in Congress and in blogtopia regarding the threat to BP’s solvency posed by having to set up a $20 billion escrow fund, this post, which I came across via Memeorandum, is a tonic. After noting Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s publicly expressed anxiety about BP’s ability to “make the income that they need to pay us”...

Late last night YouTube released an online video editor through TestTube, their ideas incubator: Without installing any software, it allows you to: Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos  Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish...

Well, that didn’t take long. Amid signs of consternation from Republican House members who hadn’t listened to some talk radio hosts and callers who had already picked up what they thought was an emerging party line, Rep. Joe Barton has apologized for apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward for what Barton called a White House “shakedown” of the company in getting BP to agree to a $20 billion...

Bill Schorr, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to apppear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Republican Rep. Joe Barton at today’s hearing has said he is “ashamed” that the White House did a “shakedown” of BP yesterday by getting a pledge from the oil company to set up a $20 billion escrow fund. Do I hear a collective AWWWWWWWWW from most readers? So here it is: the real victim in all of this is BP. Watch Barton: UPDATE 2 Barton has apologized for apologizing to BP. UPDATED1:...

BP CEO Tony Hayward is testifying before a Congressional panel. Here is a live video feed: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We have been writing about those “newly discovered” mineral riches in Afghanistan ad nauseam. We have been asking—and hypothesizing about—how this find will affect Afghanistan, its people, the war… We have been speculating as to whether these newly found riches will enrich the Afghan people, or central government officials, or provincial and tribal leaders, or the Taliban, or foreign countries, or… To...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson who notes something that several commentators on the left and right have noted: Barack Obama and his administration seem fixated on hyping a cabinet member’s credentials in talking about the Gulf Oil spill – and those credentials a)are not important to the people, environment and wildlife threatened by the oil...

The end of email conversation got going again this week when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference that only 11% of teens email daily: “E-mail–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away,” she said. With that I remember the 2006 prediction of the end of the wristwatch: Have you looked at any kids lately? I mean really...

In the Oil Spill, the President is sounding like Ishmael but Americans want him to act more like Ahab. “My power is not limitless,” he told Gulf residents before The Speech last night. “I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.” That exasperation is reflected in postmortems of his attempt to take political charge of an unmanageable mess that has inspired...

Numerous commentaries have already appeared on the recent announcement that Afghanistan may have as much as $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including at TMV—here, here, here and here. In my post, I asked the question, “Will the minerals discovery in Afghanistan alter the course of the war?” Of course no one can answer that question with any degree of certainty or accuracy. Even the experts on such matters...

President Barack Obama in a nationally televised speech Tuesday night on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill accused BP of “recklessness.” We knew that. “We will make BP pay,” he said. How much, he didn’t say. He announced still another presidential commission. He called it the Gulf Coast Restoration Plan. It will be headed by former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus working in conjunction with...

What follows is live blogging of President Barack Obama’s Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill, the government’s response to it, plans for dealing with the worst oil spill in U.S. history, what is expected of British Petroleum and the larger context of America’s energy policy. Note that these are quick first impressions — and in future analysis, upon reflection, I may reach a different...

From Gizmodo: AT&T’s online ordering system collapsed today, with Apple and AT&T sales folks reverting to tried-and-true technology: paper. They had to write down pre-order requests. I corroborated the collapse of the online ordering system, by logging in to my AT&T account and attempting to negotiate the pre-order option. Note that AT&T is providing a telephone number for “non iPhone...

What does President Obama need to do to emerge politically alive after the worst environmental crisis in American history? According to this editorial from Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, ‘it’s either Obama or BP’ – and if the president fails to get the job done, ‘a reputation for being an indecisive dreamer will stick to Obama permanently.’ The Financial Times...

Here’s what I don’t want to hear from President Obama in his Tuesday night address to the nation on the BP oil spill, the worst accidental environmental disaster in U.S. history. That is, the government will “leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.” That’s poppycock, Mr. President, in all due respect. I don’t believe it. Shrimp and oyster fisherman don’t...

Per a report in today’s NYT … The News Corporation took several significant steps on Monday toward preparing to charge readers for access to its content online. The company said that it had acquired an electronic reading platform called Skiff and had made an investment in a company that was developing pay models for newspapers and magazines. In other words: It’s the beginning of the end...

Big Changes Needed to Reach Full Employment by Tom Gibson Who has responsibility for guiding our country toward full employment? Who’s in charge of analyzing the information collected and determining which policies are helping and which are hindering the building of an economy where everyone who wants to work can find a job? Our political and business leaders don’t talk about it so perhaps they don’t...

I was annoyed at the headlines last week that blamed Apple for AT&T’s lax web security regarding iPad owner emails. I was even more annoyed Sunday when I read AT&T’s “explanation” to customers, where it not only disavowed responsibility for the exploit, reported Wednesday, but said that the really bad guys were the people who identified their security hole. Here’s what AT&T...