Links of the Day, December 21

News

• Senate Democrats unite for a momentous health care vote!!
• Iranian reformist Ayatollah Montazeri passes away. His funeral is an occasion for more protests.
• Copenhagen gets mixed reviews.

Miscellaneous

• A heart-warming Christmas tale: a woman abandoned as a baby twenty years ago finds the people who found her.

Links of the Day, December 18

News

• Barack arrives in Copenhagen and calls for an agreement to be reached.

Miscellaneous

• (Perennial) U.S. Senate candidate Andy Martin "outs" Wikipedia as pro-Obama, protosocialist and a tax-exempt scam. Stranger than fiction.
• Photo enhancement: mundane in TV shows and movies but sort of impossible in real life:
  

Links of the Day, December 17

News

• Expectations in Copenhagen are muted.
• The labor market is slow to heal.
• The House passes a jobs bill. Just.

Miscellaneous

• Jon Stewart blasts a tea party rally … incidentally, I walked past this rally.

Links of the Day, December 15

Apologies for skipping yesterday–we’re heading into the holiday season and things are getting BUSY at work!

News

• Some Guantanamo inmates will be moved to a near-empty prison in Illinois, marking a significant step toward shutting down the camp at Guantanamo Bay.
• Televangelist Oral Roberts, loved by some, scorned by others, passed away, aged 91.
• Mike Huckabee is one of several conservatives to praise Barack’s Nobel Peace Prize speech. (I find it interesting that so many people are surprised … must be too busy projecting their own issues onto the President to really hear what he’s been saying all this time.)
• David Brooks writes about Obama and Christian realism.

Green

• Hip-hop goes green in California.
• Did you know that the New York Times has a "Learning Network"? Because they do; and here’s their page on global warming.

Miscellaneous

• An oil lobby photoshops diversity into its ad.
• Marvel meets Disney:
  

Links of the Day, December 8

For those of you who missed the last couple Links, apologies–I was in New York City for the weekend. Pics to come soon.

News

• More bombings in Iraq.
• Ambassador Eikenberry and General McChrystal endorse the President’s approach to Afghanistan.
• Google launches real-time search data.

Green

• The UN declares the last decade the warmest on record.
• The EPA declares that greenhouse gases threaten human health, paving the way for regulation.
• Considering clean coal.

Miscellaneous

• A few days after JFK’s assassination, Jackie wrote a letter to LBJ.

(EDIT: Apparently, Esquire is now waiting on further legal notice.)

Links of the Day, December 2

For those who love This is Spinal Tap:

News

• The President orders 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. More thoughts to come.
• Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo is the new President of Honduras.

Green

• Boing Boing helps with energy literacy: climate change.

Links of the Day, December 1

It’s World AIDS Day. Watch this vid:

Iron Man 2:


News

• Barack will make an address tonight on Afghanistan, with preliminary reports suggesting a rapid deployment of an additional 30-35,000 troops.
• The proposed Comcast-NBC merger would be the largest media merger in recent history.
• South Africa vows to treat all HIV-positive babies (which is a big change of direction post-Mbeki).

Health care

• Latino voters see health care as the overwhelming priority.

Green

• The folks over at Treehugger debunk the global-warming-conspiracy conspiracy and critique the whole Climategate fallacy.

Finance reform

• The House is moving forward on financial regulation reform; the Senate is sluggish … very sluggish.

Miscellaneous

• My good friend Ziya looks at the different perceptions of beauty.
• Is Lasik worth thousands of dollars?