Mother Jones reporter was close at hand, and got disturbing photos and video of Oakland Police officers tackling a girl on a bike who didn’t seem to be doing anything provocative. He then got a nice taste of OPD attitude: “Fuck, I just got teargassed,” he tweeted. The video clips are about halfway down, but lots of good photos and bicoastal coverage, too.
View Link [motherjones.com]
So Forbes.com recently published an op-ed from this inexplicably pro-atrazine guy named Jon Entine bashing Mother Jones’ (rather awesome) story “The Frog of War,” by freelancer Dashka Slater—a profile of the rapping, atrazine-hating, Syngenta-dissing UC-Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes. Entine had some ties to agribusiness, but claimed in a followup post by our food politics blogger Tom Philpott that he’s not on anyone’s payroll. Which Tom points out is pretty weird:So this guy, just because he cares so deeply, goes around defending a problematic pesticide that contaminates a good deal of America’s drinking water? Anyway, the other day, Entine posts a new piece on Forbes claiming to have a leaked internal NRDC memo in which a staffer is saying that Bisphenol A, the controversial plastic additive, has been exonerated by scientists but that the NRDC needs to go after it anyway. Entine says the post, which Forbes had to yank after the NRDC hit them with a cease-and-desist order, was satire. While I would agree that the memo was not particularly believable, the whole thing was executed poorly enough to make it ambiguous, especially to the sort of folks who still claim Obama is a Muslim (as in about half of GOP voters in the deep South, according to a recent polls). Entine’s response to the NRDC: Drop dead. Anyway, it’s a bizarre little affair.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Yeah, this is totally Cosmo and all, but this week, with the whole Rush Limbaugh/contraception/apology scandal, it’s politics! So…Mother Jones DC reporter Tim Murphy and crack coder Ben Breedlove put together this pretty hilarious and also rather snarky interactive flowchart. Bonus: Cute kittens!
View Link [motherjones.com]
Mother Jones policy blogger Kevin Drum breaks out with some astute Star Wars economic analysis.
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There’s something about this freaky South African “zef” rap crew that inspires the hell out of visual artists. Sure, a million kids have probably sketched that one photo of Jim Morrison, and there’ve been countless portraits of Hendrix, etc., but Die Antwoord has been on the scene a relatively short while and has already inspired a prodigious pile of fan artwork ranging from napkin sketches to surrealistic paintings to spray-can murals. “It’s fuckin’ cool and super unexpected,” Ninja told me in an email on Saturday. “We were thinking about this today. It’s kinda beserk that our fans bust out so psycho. We obviously love it. It’s such fierce interaction we got going.”
View Link [motherjones.com]
In 2008, Maggie Anderson was doing pretty well. She had a successful career in business consulting, a loving family, a house in the same trendy Chicago suburb where the Obamas lived. But looking around at her mostly white neighbors, she couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that she’d left her people behind. A key source of economic disparity, she realized, was that most businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods weren’t owned by African Americans—and money spent there went elsewhere come closing time. So she persuaded her family to take up a challenge: For a full year, they would attempt to spend their cash exclusively at black-owned businesses. The quest became a book, Our Black Year, which comes out today. Tim McDonnell chats with Anderson about the logistics, being accused of racism, and the fact that you won’t find many black-made productsl at Walmart.
View Link [motherjones.com]
I was actually amazed how poorly I did on Mother Jones’ quiz comparing the character Dwight Schrute from The Office with Newt Gingrich from Georgia. Apparently a lot of people in DC have been taking the quiz, and not doing so well either.
View Link [motherjones.com]
From the piece: Three Girl Scout troops in Louisiana won’t be hawking Thin Mints this year. They’ve disbanded in protest after the Girl Scouts of Colorado accepted seven-year-old transgender child Bobby Montoya as a member. Montoya was born a boy but has considered herself a girl since she was two years old…Right-wing groups and some conservative parents and scouts have posted to a site called Honest Girl Scouts, YouTube, and Facebook pages—including one called “Make Girl Scouts Clean Again”—urging Girl Scouts everywhere to go on strike from selling cookies, and their parents to stop buying them. They want Girl Scouts USA to officially bans transgender children from membership, and kick out any known transgender scouts “hiding” in the troops.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Mother Jones social media intern Nicole Pasulka checks out the phenom of deaf fans (and orgs) remaking popular music videos for the hard of hearing. Some are kinda schlocky. But I love the guy who does his own inspired take on Marilyn Manson, along with a disclaimer that basically makes the point that deaf people have as much right as hearing people to enjoy twisted art.
View Link [motherjones.com]
So who the hell is this oddball pol who came in a close third in Iowa, and where does he fall on the left-right-libertarian spectrum? Voila! Venn diagram!
View Link [motherjones.com]
Okay, sure, it’s a gimmick, since in order to make “Olive,” the first film to be shot entirely on a phone–a Nokia N8–Hooman Khalili had to rig up some serious accessories, not to mention a talented cast and crew, all of which cost nearly half a million clams. But still, it’s pretty nifty, and the quality is right up there. (Check out the trailer.) Liz Gettelmen of Mother Jones downloaded Khalili on how he did it.
View Link [motherjones.com]
“They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: They rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake DeGroot told Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson shortly before the reaseannouncement went out. “How could we not go and take it?”
View Link [motherjones.com]
This fun little flowchart by Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy guides you painlessly through the campaign-finance alphabet soup of 527s, 501(c)(4)s, Super-PACs, and so on. Because even if you don’t fully grasp it, the 1% and its lawyers sure do.
View Link [motherjones.com]
For troop morale and recruiting purposes, the US Army deploys more than 100 “popular music elements” or “music support teams” (what we civilians call rock bands) with names like SkArmy, Recoil, and Burned Aftermath. Choose your genre, and these patriots will provide. Mother Jones’ Dave Gilson dug up these 10 videos. Priceless: The roomful of camo-clad guys singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
View Link [motherjones.com]
Andrew Marantz wondered how BPOs train Indians who have never even known a Westerner to sound and act like one. Since the call centers wouldn’t let a journalist in to their culture-training sessions, Marantz decided to become a trainee himself. The resulting article from Mother Jones magazine is alternatively funny, sad, and thought-provoking.
View Link [motherjones.com]
More than a decade ago, Chester Brown decided he was through with romance–the insecurity, the jealously, the fights. But not the physical part. As the award-winning Canadian cartoonist explains to an ex at the beginning of his new comic memoir, Paying For It, “I’ve got two competing desires–the desire to have sex, versus the desire to not have a girlfriend.” Dave Gilson chats with Brown about becoming a serial john.
View Link [motherjones.com]
A slideshow of some of the photos that convinced the California Supreme Court to order the corrections department to unload some 30,000 of its prisoners.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Eight side-by-side comparisons.
View Link [motherjones.com]
What if your favorite rock album was a book? Christophe Gowans was wondering the same thing. “I got to thinking, well, what would those records look like if they actually were books, if the name of the album was actually the title of a novel or reference book?” Gowans, a graphic designer who lives in London, did just that, reimagining everything from Air to Zeppelin as something you might find on your shelf or in a used bookstore.
View Link [motherjones.com]
That’s the $64,000 question from a third-grade homework assignment in Duluth, Georgia.
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No doubt this is an interdisciplinary exercise as they’re reading Kafka in English class.
I came across this 2008 ad, in which Newt Gingrich, who wrote a 2007 book called “A Contract With The Earth” call for action on climate change. Kind of surreal, since the GOP is right now trying to eliminate the EPA’s ability to regulate air pollution (read carbon emissions), and presidential candidate Gingrich is calling for abolition of the EPA.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Should have noted: The ad features Gingrich and Pelosi together.
Journalist Jim Rendon got fantastic access to former CBS anchor Dan Rather and flamboyant billionaire Mark Cuban to suss out their odd-bedfellows relationship and ask what this lion of broadcast news, a man who once had 18 million nightly viewers, is doing on Cuban’s obscure cable channel sandwiched between mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, and hot chicks in bikinis.
View Link [motherjones.com]
A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. Check out these charts Mother Jones’ Dave Gilson put together.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Yesterday at CPAC, an annual DC shindig for right wingers, the lawyer behind Arizona’s notorious “ID ‘em” law announced a new effort to deny citizenship to immigrant children born on US soil. He told the crowd that rather than try to change the Constitution, he and his buddies were going to use legal tricks state by state to try and subvert that constitutional guarantee.
View Link [motherjones.com]
Dave Gilson of Mother Jones deconstructs gaming guru Jane McGonnigal’s new book on the social benefits of video games.
View Link [mojo.ly]
Antinous / Moderator is discussing. 
mmechanic is discussing.
Antinous / Moderator 2:07 pm on 05/26/2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Mark interviewed him and blogged it a couple of weeks ago.