Noising for the presidency, Mike Huckabee trumpets:

“Kennedy would have been told to go home to take pain pills and die during his last year of life.” [link]

Sharon Begley studies the 5 Biggest Republican Health Care Lies.

When fear and loathing hijack the brain, lies take on a patina of credibility.

Pure methane, bubbling up, from a lake, Mackenzie River Delta, Canada.

The latest advancements in chip design, fabrication techniques, and surveillance!

Microbots, soon the size of a flea.

I-SWARM, intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation, surveillance, medicine, cleaning and more.

Thomas Edison, 1931

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!

“I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Edison, godfather of electricity-intensive living, was also an unlikely green pioneer whose ideas about renewable power still resonate today.

At the turn of the 20th century, when Edison was at the height of his career, the notion that buildings, which now account for more than a third of all energy consumed in the United States, would someday require large amounts of power was only just coming into focus.

Where that power would come from — central generating stations or in-home plants; fossil fuels or renewable resources — was still very much up for debate.

Johann Hari:

Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult…

An arising American Taliban?

Sen. John McCain insisted on Face The Nation that the use of torture on terrorism suspects violated international law, didn’t work, and actually helped al Qaeda recruit additional members. [story]

History’s most severe job losses under Republican domination and G. W. Bush.

George Washington’s weblog: People forget that the worst unemployment numbers during the Great Depression did not occur until years after the initial 1929 crash.

How Bad Will It Get, And What Can We Do?

Stanford’s Andrea Lunsford:

Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”

From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.

James Kwak:

I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that a huge debt-financed bubble was a bad, bad thing. I still think, as you might predict, that the nature of our particular financial system both made the bubble larger than it might otherwise have been, and made its collapse more spectacular than it had to be.

An important chart to remind us precisely about the whom and when of ‘huge debt’.

None of the networks, no government.
It’s the ACLU that’s funding these released [sic] files on torture.