Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Barber Wants Obama Investigated for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” – And if the GOP takes one or both houses of Congress next week, I’m sure there will be just enough Republicans to go along with Mr Barber’s suggestion.
- Barton: God Will Hold You Accountable For How You Vote – “For Christians, voting is not a right, it’s a duty. It’s a stewardship that we owe to God and it’s a stewardship for which we’ll answer directly to him. One day we’ll stand before him and he’ll say ‘what did you do with that vote I gave you?’ And we’ll have to answer.” Actually, I agree with him fully on that one. Voting is an act of engagement with the people around us, and we are called to the touchstones of loving God and loving our neighbors through voting as much as with any other action. Of course, I suspect my conclusions of how my religious values guides me to vote will be a bit different from Barton’s.
- Ohio McDonald’s Tells Employees To Vote Republican If They Want To Continue Receiving Raises And Benefits: Tanya Somanader
- Relatives Says Man Arrested For Threatening Democratic Senator Was ‘Under The Spell That Glenn Beck Cast’ – Is Beck legally culpable? No, and I’d defend him against any such charge. Is he ethically culpable, though? That’s another question.
- What Conservatives Have Taught Me This Election Season: James Frye
- Stranded, Stubborn Mars Rover Actually Makes a Big Discovery [MarsRover] – Go, Spirit, go! (In a metaphorical, “do great stuff” sense, of course.)
- Southwest Airlines $5 Bucks for WiFi onboard Flights – A price I would very seriously consider indulging in on some flights.
- Watch Five Minutes of ‘The Walking Dead’ and the Real Opening Title Sequence – Everything I’ve seen and heard about this indicates it’s going to be awesome.
- The boiling, erupting Sun – “… The mornin’ sun is shinin’ like a red rubber ball …”
- Drug Wars – While there’s certainly cocaine involved, note the several pictures of hundreds of metric TONS of marijuana. That’s a huge cash crop for the drug lords, reason enough for all the violence, and it’s something we could trivially deprive them of if US drug policy were rationally administered.
- Indiana suggests leaving disabled family members at homeless shelters – “Are there no workhouses …?” Welcome to yet another face of cheap-labor conservatism and taxed-enough-already partygoing. Is this the America the electorate is looking for? Because it’s where we’re headed.
- Karl Rove And Sarah Palin Going To War? – Given the number of comments Rove has had to dial back in the past months, I don’t see him standing up to much criticism if Palin and her variety of supporters decide to fire back.
- Dean Kamen unveils revamped bionic arm and water machine, LED light bulb powered by Cree – Many levels of coolness here.
- Government Withholds Records on Need for Expanded Surveillance Law – “A mandate requiring an easy-to-open ‘back door’ to electronic communications is an idea that was proposed and rejected over fifteen years ago because it would be ineffective, cause security vulnerabilities, and hurt American business — on top of the damage it would do to Americans’ privacy and free speech rights. Any attempt to require the same mandate today should start with a concrete and realistic evaluation of how often the government investigations are stymied by the lack of a ‘back door.’ Anything less than that is asking the public to blindly rubber stamp a flawed plan at a very high cost to Americans and American business.”
- The Message of Firesheep: “Baaaad Websites, Implement Sitewide HTTPS Now!” – Unfortunately, per EFF’s efforts, there’s not a trivial way to do this for IE or Chrome. I have implemented this on my various machine this week (esp. ones I travel with) with, so far, no harm.
- Climate change facts, for what that’s worth – “But do not always expect facts to convince. Someone who has arrived at their current stance due to something other than facts will not likely be persuaded to budge from it due to the facts. Some small percentage, some few, are honestly misinformed, and for them facts and information will be persuasive and liberating. They will be grateful for the link. But for most the problem is not simply one of a lack of accurate information. For them, finding their way back to the truth will require retracing the steps that led them away from it — a path that had little to do with information or facts.”
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