If we “get our laws from the Ten Commandments”, why are only 3 out of 10 actually against the law? Murder, theft, and perjury, that’s it.

Easy fix to CA budget mess : Get rid of the 2/3 rule to stop gerrymander-safe Republicans from holding the state hostage.

I wonder how many of the tea-baggin’, Galt-goers who recently discovered Thomas Paine have gotten around to reading The Age of Reason.

Increased fuel efficiency standards and credit card regulation on the same day? We’ve come a long way since “outrage overload”.

Twitter’s 140-character limit isn’t “minimalist” or “zen-like”, it’s arbitrarily built on a telecom industry scam. http://bit.ly/Si3Bm

It sure would be nice if The Beatles would announce how much their remastered box sets will be. I’d like to know how poor I’ll be on 9/10.

If Obama wants to move beyond torture, why keep the story alive by releasing new memos every other day? I’d punt it to a truth commission.

I hope Wolfram Alpha eventually lives up to its promise. Right now, it kinda blows.

Wow. The Rumsfeld intelligence briefing cover sheets are as disturbing as the Abu Ghraib photos : http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

Markos has a great takedown of a Washington Post article begging for new laws that would supposedly “maintain the viability of journalism as it evolves online”. I can’t help but notice the irony in this industry suggestion :

Federalize the “hot news” doctrine. This doctrine protects against types of poaching that copyright might not cover — the stealing of information not by direct copying but simply by taking the guts of the content. While the Internet has made news vulnerable to pilfering because of the ease of linking from one site to the next, the hot-news doctrine has limited use because it is only recognized in a few states.

Y’know, outlawing the “types of poaching that copyright might not cover” is a two-way street. I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time I read an article in a major newspaper that was lifted from a indie newspaper (even going as far as re-creating the story from scratch by re-interviewing everyone from the original article), local interest blog (using small blogs as a canary-in-the-coalmine to get leads), or online journalist like Joshua Marshall or Marcy Wheeler (stealing scoops without citation). In fact, I’ve noticed these sorts of “coincidences” at the L.A. Times a lot more than I’ve seen the online “pilfering” that’s such a concern. Even the lamest right-wing blogs (who entertain the notion that blogging as a medium will magically replace the “dead tree” media) have enough integrity to link back to the sources they’re quoting and commenting upon. Maybe if the newspapers would be more honest about their habit of crowdsourcing story ideas, they could develop a less hostile attitude toward the internet and actually come up with a business model that works.

I can understand why the Pope would be uncomfortable about his past, but this is ridiculous :

The Vatican defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday as a man of strong anti-Nazi credentials, and backtracked over an earlier claim that he had never been a member of the Hitler Youth in his native Germany, which had contradicted statements by the pontiff himself.

A Vatican spokesman at first flatly denied that Benedict, 82, was ever in the Nazi youth movement. But when reporters noted the pope himself spoke of his membership in a 1996 book, he revised the statement to say: “He was enrolled involuntarily into the Hitler Youth but he had no active participation.”
. . .

The Vatican spokesman made a distinction between convinced Hitler Youth activists and members of the anti-aircraft units, omitting the category of involuntary Hitler Youth members to which Benedict has been quoted as saying he belonged.

“The Hitler Youth was a corps of volunteers, fanatically, ideologically for the Nazis,” Lombardi said.

The anti-aircraft auxiliary corps the pope was enrolled in towards the end of the war “had absolutely nothing to do with the Hitler Youth and the Nazis and Nazi ideology”, he added.

Yeah, the Pope used to be a Nazi, but he wasn’t a Nazi-Nazi. He was more like one of those loveable, doesn’t hate the Jews, Hogan’s Heroes sorta Nazis. And yeah… he was part of a German anti-aircraft unit during WW2, but that was completely unrelated to the Nazis. They were just shooting down Allied planes on their own, independent of what Hitler was doing, and they had no idea there was a war going on.

Interesting article via a Facebook friend on the economic consequences of marriage inequality :

The cost of love isn’t an abstract concept in my household: It’s precisely $1,820 per year. That’s the “gay tax” we shell out for me to be on my wife’s health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income.
. . .
Consider the cost to Randy Lewis-Kendall, who lost his husband, Rob, to colon cancer in 2007, their 30th year together. He is about to be denied the $1,161 per month he would have collected in Social Security survivor benefits had his marriage been federally recognized. He could use it, too. The two men owned a small gift shop in Harwich on Cape Cod together, and Randy has been struggling to pay the bills since Rob’s death and the economic downturn.

That price my wife and I pay for the depraved thrill of being two middle-aged women with a joint checking account? It’s a drop in the bucket compared with what love is costing Melba Abreu and Beatrice Hernandez. They’ve been together for 32 years and have paid nearly $20,000 more in taxes since their 2004 marriage than if they had been able to file a joint federal return.

DOMA doesn’t just hurt our pride: It undermines our ability to take care of one another. Neither Joan nor I have the right to take family medical leave from our jobs in the event that one of us becomes seriously ill. In couples where one spouse is a U.S. citizen and the other is not, the citizen cannot obtain a visa for the noncitizen or sponsor him or her for citizenship. And forget about inheritance. If you’re in a same-sex marriage and your spouse leaves her estate to you — for example, the house you shared — you’ll be forced to pony up as much as 50 percent of her estate’s value in taxes. Price tag for federally recognized married couples? Zero.

Something to mention the next time one of your family members talks about “protecting” marriage.