02 February, 2010
The Slatest
14 Killed at Mexican Student Party
Armed gunman left 13 dead and more than 20 wounded after opening fire on a high school party in the Mexican border city of Juarez over the weekend, the Associated Press reports. The attack took place on Saturday, and witnesses say that the shooting—which was thought to be carried out by cartel members—may have been fueled by false information. “It must have been a huge mistake,” a neighbor told the AP. None of the victims, who were all between 15 and 20, are thought to have had any connections to drug cartels. According to eyewitnesses, at least fifteen men pulled up to the Juarez housing complex in SUVs and began shooting, killing ten people instantly and leaving three more to die in hospitals later. Since last year, the Mexican government has deployed 45,000 troops to Juarez crack down on drug-related violence.
Source: Associated Press
Obama Holds YouTube Town Hall
After unveiling the 2011 budget on Monday, Obama spent the afternoon fielding questions from the public via a newcomer on the political media scene—YouTube. Shortly before 2 this afternoon, Obama sat with YouTube political director Steve Grove in the White House library and responded to questions posed by YouTube users. (More than 630,000 YouTubers voted on the best questions among the over 11,000 submitted). This is the first time a president has ever fielded budget questions on the same day that the document was released, the Christian Science Monitorsays, even though from the questions, it didn’t seem as if the budget was on too many peoples’ minds. Obama pretty much stuck to script, the Washington Post reports, although some questioners did challenge the president on clean energy and health care reform. While the talk wasn’t particularly interesting in its content, Politico points out that the decision to hold the Q&A on YouTube is in keeping with the administration’s goal of moving beyond mainstream media and blogs and instead controlling its own content. In an interview with Politico, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer describes the administration’s “iPod theory” of news, which caters to people who “are beginning to treat their news like they treat their iPod — they consume it on demand, in segments.”
Source: Politico
“Calvin and Hobbes” Creator Grants Rare Interview
To mark the 15th anniversary of “Calvin and Hobbes’” retirement from the funny pages, famously reclusive cartoonist Bill Watterson granted his first interview since 1989 to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the interview, Watterson says he never figured out why the strip took off—”the only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip”—and defends his decision to pull the comic from the papers. “I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it,” Watterson told the Dealer. In response to a question about his celebrity, Watterson commented that “an artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that, and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life.” “Calvin and Hobbes” ran from 1985 to 1995 in more than 2,400 newspapers across the country. This summer, the Postal Service will issue commemorative “Calvin and Hobbes” stamps.
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
Who Benefits From the 2011 Budget?
Obama unveiled his 2011 budget on Monday, and pundits are already at work figuring out who will come out on top when the dust settles. Via the Atlantic, here’s a quick partial roundup: $6 billion previously allocated for oil and gas companies will go to clean energy technologies; public schools will receive an addition $3 billion, and an extra $17 billion will go to Pell grants. Low income families will continue to benefit from stimulus-driven tax breaks, and families making more than $250,000 a year will face higher taxes. Hedge fund employees will be more heavily taxed, and some of NASA’s most popular space exploration programs are on the chopping block. (No more astronauts on the moon!) Matt Yglesias adds that The Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program will also be axed (at a projected saving of $9 million a year) as will a program that subsidizes worsted wool production. Even though the deficit is expected to balloon, small cuts like these are a major part of the administration’s attempt to demonstrate that the budget actually shows fiscal restraint. Butdespite media frenzy over the budget, the Atlantic’s Chris Good argues that ultimately, it’s not really that important. The budget that came out today probably won’t bear much resemblance to the one that claws its way out of Congress, Good says, citing Bush’s last budget as evidence. Finally, the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein points out that although everybody is tagging the budget as Obama’s, it’s actually a reflection of inherited circumstances. “Commentary on this budget will focus on Obama and ‘his’ deficits,” Klein says, “but the reality is that the vast majority of this budget is ours, and the story it tells is only about Obama on the margins.”
Source: The Atlantic
Sarah Palin is Her Own Biggest Fan
Sarah Palin’s political action committee spent more than $63,000 to send copies of Palin’s memoir “Going Rogue” to donors, ABC News reports. According to newly released campaign finance records, SarahPAC spent $63,000 on “books for fundraising donor fulfillment” as well as an additional $8,000 on bookmarks and $20,000 for a personal photographer to follow her on the book tour. This is significantly more than SarahPAC ever spent on donations to political candidates, the National Journal points out, calculating that only $43,000 went to campaign contributions last year. SarahPAC, however, certainly has the means to fund its own book club. The Daily Caller reports that the organization brought in $1.4 million over the last six months of 2009. Because Palin is not currently in office, SarahPAC is legally permitted to buy and distribute as many copies of the book as it wants.
Source: ABC News
Budget Targets NASA Moon Missions
Obama’s proposed budget would increase NASA’s funding over the next five years, but it comes with a catch—it would also end a prized program to send manned missions to the moon by 2020. Under the new budget, more money would be directed towards science and research initiatives, and less would go to space exploration, a major focus of the Bush administration. The budget’s biggest victims would be the Constellation program—a Bush-era initiative to return men to the moon—and the Ares cargo rockets, which are designed to carry supplies and fuel. The government has already spent $9 billion on the Constellation program (which is way past schedule), and according to Reuters, will likely have to spend millions more in coming years to cancel the contracts. In the wake of these programs, Obama has proposed spending $6 million over a five-year period on “space taxis”—commercial spacecraft that would shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Administration officials say that the program would create new jobs and benefit from the innovation of the private sector, but analysts are skeptical. “One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,” a former NASA official told the Washington Post. ”It’s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn’t flown the Atlantic, and they’re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.”
Arrested Baptists May Face U.S. Trial
Lacking a working judicial system to try them, Haitian authorities may send the ten American Baptists arrested for child trafficking last week to face trial in the U.S. The Baptists were arrested last Friday after they attempted to move a group of 33 Haitian children to a beachside resort in the Dominican Republic. The operation—nicknamed “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission”—was part of a larger plan to place as many as 100 orphans in the hotel and eventually pair them with adoptive Christian parents in the U.S. The group was stopped at the border when it became clear that they lacked proper paperwork for the children.CBS News reports that some of the children were not actually orphans, and that many Haitian parents have begun handing their kids over to foreigners in order to provide them with a better future. Haiti has a long history of sex trafficking, and the government has cracked down on adoptions and foreign travel since the earthquake struck.
Source: CBS News
Highway Robberies on the Rise
Over the past year, reported incidents of cargo theft have surged across the country as more robbers target big rigs responsible for hauling thousands of dollars worth of goods. In 2009, an estimated 859 truckloads were hijacked, totaling over $487 million worth of cargo. Authorities say that most of the robberies are nonviolent—instead of holding up drivers at gunpoint, thieves simply wait for truckers to take a break before driving the unattended vehicle away, or hitching the trailer up to their own trucks. Unlike the organized crime rings that terrorized truckers in the 1960s, officials suspect that many of today’s thieves are amateurs. In order to ensure that they’re targeting goods worth stealing—usually electronics, pharmaceuticals and clothes— thieves often trail drivers after they leave their plants, and wait for them to pull into a rest stop. The robberies are “directly related to the economy,” the head of Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation told the Wall Street Journal. “People are stealing things that they can get rid of quickly, and consumers are looking for a deal.”
Source: Wall Street Journal
Traffic Plane Lands on New Jersey Turnpike, Snarling Traffic
A traffic plane caused a traffic jam Monday when it landed on the New Jersey Turnpike. The pilot guided the single-engine plane to a turnpike touchdown after the plane’s low oil pressure indicator came on. An FAA spokesman called the decision to bring the plane down “precautionary.” No one was injured, but the rush-hour landing snarled traffic in the Cherry Hill area, where the plane had been doing traffic reports for Philadelphia radio and TV stations.
Source: The Associated Press
Kristol: Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Would Be “Reckless”
Pentagon officials are still preparing for their appearance on Capitol Hill Tuesday, but the rhetorical battle over a potential repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is already heating up. Proponents of repeal are dismayed that journalists say the White House is telling them the repeal process will take more than a year. Queerty wonders whether “it’s too soon to call Obama’s promise to repeal DADT an empty gesture.” On the other hand, ThinkProgress believes the newly-elected Republican senator from Massachusetts might support a repeal (he told Barbara Walters he wants to talk to “generals on the ground” first), which could speed things along in the Senate. And there’s growing public support for such a measure. On Monday, newspapers from San Diego to Washingon ran editorials calling for a DADT repeal. The Washington Post’seditorial claims that 69 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, would support a repeal. That makes William Kristol’s assertion that a DADT repeal “isn’t a change an appreciable number of Americans are clamoring for,” seem rather odd. In a withering Weekly Standard feature, Kristol accuses Obama of foolishly tampering with a revered American institution because of some “sincerely held if abstractly formed views” about right and wrong. He argues that it would be “reckless” to force the military through a “major sociological change” in the midst of two wars, especially considering that “there is no basic right to serve in the military.”
Source: The Weekly Standard
White House Pushes Q&A Instead of SOTU
President Obama’s communications team had planned for the State of the Union address to be the most talked-about political event of the week. But sometimes things don’t go according to plan. When video of the president’s Q&A session with House Republicans started gathering steam online Friday night, Democrats switched gears and started pushing that instead. They got to show off video of Obama taking Republicans to task for describing health care reform as a “Bolshevik plot” and challenging them to stop just saying “no” all the time. It was a remarkable stroke of good luck for the White House, which wasn’t even sure the event would be broadcast in full until a few hours before it started. David Axelrod crowed to recipients on a White House e-mail list that “something remarkable happened – with much less fanfare.” Organizing for America director Mitch Stewart said “You have to see this,” and e-mailed the video to more than 13 million people. Even Republicans publicly praised the president’s spirited exchange with the House GOP, but Luke Russert says some of them were quietly kicking themselves for letting the cameras in at all.
Source: Talking Points Memo
Late Night Humor
The Jay Leno Show
In London, a $500,000,000 British-American backed fund was proposed to pay the Taliban to stop fighting. The good news is, America is creating jobs. Sure, they’re all for terrorists, but we’re making jobs.
Osama bin Laden has released another tape today blaming the United States for global warming. You can tell he’s running out of ideas if that’s the best he’s got. Even the United States blames the Unites States for global warming. Sounds like he wants to quit al-Qaida and join Al Gore.
Scientist at UCLA have announced that they’ve found the lowest form of life: John Edwards.
Elizabeth Edwards announced that she and John have separated. So it looks like it’s not just Nancy Pelosi that’s going to lose the house this year.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
A new poll says that Oprah Winfrey is today’s No. 1 TV personality, followed by Glenn Beck. Further down the list is me, between David Hasselhoff and the ShamWow.
I don’t mean the guy from the ShamWow commercial, I mean the ShamWow itself beat me. I wasn’t quite as absorbent.
Scientists say that we’re running out of places to go where its quiet. They say that soon there will be no place left where people can find complete silence. I think they’re wrong. They should come here most nights during the monologue.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
I want to wish a very happy Oprah’s birthday to you and your families.
Tonight is the brightest full moon of the year. Strange things happen on the full moon. Humans transform into werewolves, iPhones transform into iPads.
L.A. has got so many cupcake stores these days. When did we start eating so many cupcakes? Also, there are about 10,000 medical marijuana dispensaries in L.A., so maybe that’s got something to do with it.
____________
• In the United States, 87.3 percent of “pigs in a blanket” are consumed between Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday.
• The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is the world’s tallest building, used more sand in its concrete than is on all the beaches in Massachusettes.
• Adam Sandler derives more income from royalties on his Hanukkah Song than on residuals from his television performances.
• Four months after his death, Senator Edward Kennedy’s Senate email address recieved an average of 1276 emails per day.
• As of 2010, no U.S. President had ever worn dental braces as a child.
• December 31 is the only day of the year during which there are more people on the island of Manhattan between 6:00 and 11:59 PM than between noon and 6:00 PM.
• Each year, more champagne is consumed to celebrate weddings than to celebrate the New Year.
• The portion of the population that is awake at 12:01 AM increases approximately 3.8 percent over the norm on New Year’s Day. The portion of the population that is awake at 1:00 AM decreases approximately 18 percent over the norm on New Years day.
• In much of Indochina, it is considered bad luck to kiss anyone between sundown and midnight on December 31st.
• Approximately 14 percent of the population makes one or more New Year’s resolutions. Approximately 98 percent of those resolutions are not kept for more than three weeks.
• The park benches in New York City’s Central Park are the most heavily-used benches in the world. The average bench is used by 8.12 people per day with the average person using the bench for 28 minutes.
• The famous electronic “zipper” that presents news, sports and weather in New York City’s Times Square, shows an average of 11,123 different news items per year.
• The island of Manhattan in New York City grew in size by 5.02 percent between 1888 and 2008 due to landfill projects that extended the landmass into the surrounding rivers and bay.
• As of 2007, if all the buildings in Manhattan were stacked on top of one another, they would reach a height of 73.196 kilometers.
• As of 2003, the deepest sub-basement in Manhattan was 89.3 feet below grade level.
• As of 2009 Pahrump, Nevada has the most world record holders per capita of any city in the world, with 38 such records held among the total of its roughly 40,000 residents.
• One in three cars has a dent or scratch longer than two inches.
• Restaurant chain Legal Seafoods draws its name from its Prohibitionary status as a mafia front, shut down by the authorities. Shortly after the restaurant was reopened, this time without its mafia backing, it was quickly dubbed “Legal Seafoods”, and the name persisted.
• There are 984 towns or cities in the United States that do not have at least one Main Street.
• A 2008 study by the Association of American Fence and Netting Manufacturers found that fully one third of fences purporting to be electrified are in fact non-electrified. (Of that third, 90 percent of non-electrification was due to power or maintenance issues, and ten percent due to the sign placer’s intent to deceive.)
• In New York City the cost to move one passenger up or down one floor by elevator is 0.874 cents.
• Until 1938 it was against regulations for a West Point cadet to swim in the Hudson River unless he was naked.
• Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong each have more honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters from colleges and universities than Bill Gates.
• In the United States twice as much marital infidelity occurs south of the Mason Dixon line than north of it.
• The Government Accounting Office has determined that the primary activity of 47 percent of student-run high school clubs is conducting bake sales.
• As of 2009, eight percent of web pages that display a copyright date automatically show the current year.
• Among GPS owners in North America, ninety-one percent say they never take a car trip without their unit.
• In the United States, 47 percent of cabbage is consumed in cole slaw, when measured by weight.
• In 2007, 84 percent of Americans attended at least one religious service.
• November is the busiest month of the year for American barbers
Late Night Humor
The Jay Leno Show
In London, a $500,000,000 British-American backed fund was proposed to pay the Taliban to stop fighting. The good news is, America is creating jobs. Sure, they’re all for terrorists, but we’re making jobs.
Osama bin Laden has released another tape today blaming the United States for global warming. You can tell he’s running out of ideas if that’s the best he’s got. Even the United States blames the Unites States for global warming. Sounds like he wants to quit al-Qaida and join Al Gore.
Scientist at UCLA have announced that they’ve found the lowest form of life: John Edwards.
Elizabeth Edwards announced that she and John have separated. So it looks like it’s not just Nancy Pelosi that’s going to lose the house this year.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
A new poll says that Oprah Winfrey is today’s No. 1 TV personality, followed by Glenn Beck. Further down the list is me, between David Hasselhoff and the ShamWow.
I don’t mean the guy from the ShamWow commercial, I mean the ShamWow itself beat me. I wasn’t quite as absorbent.
Scientists say that we’re running out of places to go where its quiet. They say that soon there will be no place left where people can find complete silence. I think they’re wrong. They should come here most nights during the monologue.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
I want to wish a very happy Oprah’s birthday to you and your families.
Tonight is the brightest full moon of the year. Strange things happen on the full moon. Humans transform into werewolves, iPhones transform into iPads.
L.A. has got so many cupcake stores these days. When did we start eating so many cupcakes? Also, there are about 10,000 medical marijuana dispensaries in L.A., so maybe that’s got something to do with it.
____________
Headlines
We Blame Global Warming
“Chicago Cools to Barack Obama, Its Hometown Boy”–headline, Sunday Times (London), Jan. 31
We Blame George W. Bush
“Old Age or Cold Snap to Blame for Croc’s Death”–headline, Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 29
An Insult to Bill Clinton and Poor People
“John Edwards–the Poor Man’s Bill Clinton”–headline, FoxNews.com, Feb. 1
The High Cost of Maternity Wear
“Ex-Edwards Aide: $1 Million Spent to Cover Up Pregnant Mistress”–headline, ABCNews.com, Jan. 29
Doesn’t He Have a Colander?
“Florida Governor: McCollum Holds Stable Lead Over Sink”–headline, Rasmussen Reports Web site, Jan. 29
The End Is Nigh
“Davos Forum Considers World Economy on Last Day”–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 31
Better to Do It for Money or Fame
“Scientists Say Crack HIV/AIDS Puzzle for Drugs”–headline, Reuters, Jan. 31
___________________
• Each year spam email costs nine times more in lost bandwidth capability than the value of postage paid for all unsolicited “junk” mail worldwide.
• When the first pencil with an eraser was introduced in 1858, the New York Times decried it as “yet another hallmark of the steady decline of our once noble age.”
• The first official international weight standard set for softballs was based on the weight of a grapefruit from the family farm of Bakir Dzananovic, one of the game’s creators.
• In 2008, “rubber-necking” at blimps was responsible for at least 38 automotive accidents, six of them fatal.
• There are at least nine locations in the United States that claim to be haunted by the ghost of John Wilkes Booth.
• The human eye reaches its full size by one year of age.
• Soft drink Dr Pepper’s namesake, Charles T. Pepper, wasn’t a “real” doctor; he had a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Virginia.
• As described in Dreams from My Father, President Obama’s favorite toy as a child was his extensive collection of Matchbox cars.
• Archeologists have determined that toast was invented in Mesopotamia in approximately 1225 BCE.
• More than 90 percent of the beer consumed in the United States can not be legally called ‘beer’ in Germany.
• As of October 1, 2009, the Library of Congress had 5,867 books that started “Once upon a time”
• Forty percent of Americans who consume alcoholic beverages consume at least forty percent of the beverages outside of their home.
• The number of applications submitted to four year colleges and universities quadrupled between 1989 and 2009.
