by Ann Patchett

ok y'all - wtf??? rt @kcornwall You're gonna hate this one

arghh!

With some shabby sleight of hand, Congress has begun tapping into the food stamp program for the hungriest Americans to help pay for lawmakers’ higher election-year priorities. The Senate approved two important measures this week — the $26 billion state-aid bill and the $4.5 billion school nutrition program — in part by shaving food stamp funds as a target of least resistance.

LOL "why are there so few girl engineers?" /via @geekgirldiva

A proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean as early as this summer received initial permits from the Minerals Management Service office in Alaska at the same time federal auditors were questioning the office about its environmental review process.

The approvals also came after many of the agency’s most experienced scientists had left, frustrated that their concerns over environmental threats from drilling had been ignored.

“I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant,” she said. “They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.”

on the closing of the Cactus

Republicans may live in the past, but most of them think it only reaches back 10,000 years. Gallup Poll: http://j.mp/9hLmjC

$26 Software Is Used to Breach Key Weapons in Iraq; Iranian Backing Suspected

Yahoo blames Act of God for hiring lap-dancers to perform at Hack Day http://tinyurl.com/ygb3ohg

...To those of us who actually live here, however, the news is even worse. We're in a place we haven't been since the Depression: Our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal.

Thirty Republicans who like corporations more than rape victims: http://j.mp/3hJV3Q

Lap Dances at Yahoo’s Hack Days? A Lesson in Monitoring a Global Brand http://bit.ly/4Bm1FT - #FastCompany

information re: compiling mysql from source for snow leopard

rms, fsf

shades of the gogaruco ruckus...

Judge Rules Telecoms Have Immunity Under Unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act

Dozens of boxes with thousands of patients' personal information and medical histories was dumped in a recycling bin outside the a Goodwill store in Cedar Park

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey... People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.

Texas leads the nation in spending for abstinence-only programs. It also has one of the highest teen birthrates in the country. Those two sentences together sound like the basis for a logic question on the SAT, but a really easy one.

v. useful

autocomplete upgrade notes

...that is exactly what happened to John McCain at a fundraising dinner in Arizona a decade ago. "Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?" he told a handful of big Republican funders. "Because Janet Reno is her father." The remark packed into its 15 words several layers of misogyny. It disparaged the looks of Chelsea, then 18 and barely out of high school; it portrayed Reno as a man at a time when she was serving as the first female US attorney general; and it implied that Hillary Clinton was engaged in a lesbian affair while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was blazing. Not bad going, Senator McCain. Any one of those elements would seem potentially terminal for a public figure. Yet here he is 10 years later presenting himself as a champion of feminism by appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate.