October 2011
20 posts
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Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Arkansas legislators last night had the opportunity to tour Crystal Bridges. Just seventeen days away from its opening on November 11, there remains considerable work to be done, but the museum, its campus, and its collection are amazing. I can’t wait to return on November 9 for another preview.
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Obama for America: Hi, Tumblr. →
barackobama:
It’s nice to meet you.
There are lots of reasons we’re excited to be launching the Obama 2012 campaign’s new Tumblr today. But mostly it’s because we’re looking at this as an opportunity to create something that’s not just ours, but yours, too.
We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge…
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The Steve Jobs Act: Why It's Time to Invest in... →
From The Atlantic:
The eulogies and encomiums delivered to Apple founder Steve Jobs seemed to capture some of this longing. They were celebrations of greatness and vision in a middling, small moment. At the end of a decade that saw Iraq, Katrina, and Lehman Brothers become watchwords of American weakness, they were paeans to someone who believed, with Thomas Paine, that we had it “in our...
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Will Dropouts Save America? →
From The New York Times:
In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”
Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups...
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The Paradox of the New Elite →
From The New York Times:
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the income of the less affluent Americans grew more quickly than that of their wealthier neighbors, and the richest 1 percent saw its share of the national income shrink to 8.9 percent in the mid-1970s, from 23.9 percent in 1928. That share is now back up to more than 20 percent, its level before the Depression.
Inequality has traditionally...
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National Miscellany →
From Public Policy Polling:
Americans think the new Republican majority in the House has done a worse job than the previous Democratic regime. And they hate John Boehner. Only 32% of voters think House Republicans have been an improvement, while 45% think things were better during the Pelosi years. Those feelings are particularly strong among the independents whose votes fueled the GOP taking...
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No Jobs Bill, and No Ideas →
From The New York Times:
It was all predicted, but the unanimous decision by Senate Republicans on Tuesday to filibuster and thus kill President Obama’s jobs bill was still a breathtaking act of economic vandalism. There are 14 million people out of work, wages are falling, poverty is rising, and a second recession may be blowing in, but not a single Republican would even allow debate on a sound...
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Ten Years
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.
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The Creative Class Is Alive →
From The Atlantic Cities:
As bad as the overall economic situation may be, the creative class has in fact gotten off comparatively lightly. The creative class added nearly three million jobs between 2001 through 2010, growing jobs at a seven percent clip. And the sub-group of the creative class that spans arts and media grew at nearly double that rate (13.8 percent) over the same period. Average...
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Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for... →
From the New York Times:
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in...
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Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth →
From Mother Jones:
So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy’s income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent. In one case study, Berg looked at Latin America, which is historically much more economically stratified than emerging Asia and also has shorter periods of growth. He found that closing half of the...
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Alabama’s Shame →
From the New York Times:
The law went into effect over the weekend, after being largely upheld by a federal district judge. Volunteers on an immigrant-rights group’s hot line said that since then they have received more than 1,000 calls from pregnant women afraid to go to the hospital, crime victims afraid to go the police, parents afraid to send their children to school.
School superintendents...
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New State Rules Raising Hurdles at Voting Booth →
From the New York Times:
Since Republicans won control of many statehouses last November, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.
With a presidential campaign swinging into high gear, the question being asked is how much of an impact all of these...
September 2011
20 posts
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I was elected House Chair of the Legislative Task Force on Sustainable Building Design and Practices at the group’s first meeting of the new biennium yesterday. We elected Sen. David Johnson (D-Little Rock) to serve as Senate Chair. I was also recently named to serve the newly-created position of Communications Chair for the House Democratic Caucus.
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Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World →
From the New York Times:
People with autism, whose unusual behaviors are believed to stem from variations in early brain development, typically disappear from public view after they leave school. As few as one in 10 hold even part-time jobs. Some live in state-supported group homes; even those who attend college often end up unemployed and isolated, living with parents.
But Justin is among the...
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Official: Ark. natural gas regulations sufficient →
A joint session of Agriculture, Forestry, and Economic Development spent nearly seven hours Tuesday discussing a package of Interim Study Proposals concerning natural gas production in Arkansas. The proposals, two of which I’m sponsoring, were first introduced during the 2011 legislation session. Since we met strong opposition, we sent the bills to study. Tuesday’s meeting marked the...
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Mississippi River Forum
I’m in New Orleans for the Mississippi River Forum hosted by the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators (NCEL). Follow @g on Twitter for live updates.
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Super PAC Plans Major Primary Campaign for Perry →
From The New York Times:
A new Super PAC with close ties to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is laying plans to spend as much as $55 million to help him win the Republican presidential nomination, a sign that outside groups are likely to play a pivotal role in the party’s selection of its candidate.
The group, Make Us Great Again, was formed in late July by a group of Texas political operatives and...
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Smallest Electrical Motor Now Just a Nanometer... →
smarterplanet:
Way back in the early days of 2011, the world’s smallest electric motor was so…big. At 200 nanometers wide, it was a whopping 1/300th the size of a human hair.
Now, chemists at Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences have smashed that record, which was set in 2005, with this weekend’s unveiling of their single-molecule electric motor, which at 1 nanometer wide could be...
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Public disapproves of Obama on economy, but... →
From The Washington Post:
Here’s a striking disconnect that speaks volumes about Obama’s political problem right now: In the new NBC/WSJ poll, Americans express strong disapproval of Obama’s performance on the economy, and express low confidence that Obama has the right set of ideas to improve it.
And then, later in the very same poll, Americans are asked whether they support a range of...
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The Limping Middle Class →
From The New York Times:
THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal.
When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without...
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Why the gender gap won’t go away. Ever: Women... →
From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
It’s not at all clear how to solve this problem or even if there is a solution, but one thing is clear: the wage-gap debate ought to begin with the mommy track, not with proofy statistics.
There’s not much worth quoting from this piece, so I’ve left you with Ms. Hymowitz’s closing statement. If you’d care to submit a letter to the...
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Millions Are Starving in the Horn of Africa, but... →
From Mother Jones:
The United Nations has called the ongoing drought and famine in Somalia the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world. It’s going to get worse in the coming months. Yet a new Pew Research Center study released on Thursday shows that news outlets have barely noticed: “In July and August the food crisis has accounted for just 0.7 percent of the newshole....
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“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be...”
– a Navy SEAL describing his unit, in this latest update to The Washington Post’s investigation Top Secret America. (via washingtonpoststyle)
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August 2011
36 posts
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Where Pay for Chiefs Outstrips U.S. Taxes →
From The New York Times:
At least 25 top United States companies paid more to their chief executives in 2010 than they did to the federal government in taxes, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The companies — which include household names like eBay, Boeing, General Electric and Verizon — averaged $1.9 billion each in profits, according to the study by the Institute for Policy Studies,...
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The New Resentment of the Poor →
From The New York Times:
Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.”
This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even...
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Designers vs Coding
viafrank:
“Do I need to know how to code?” is a question that comes up with sure-fire consistency in design circles. I’ve seen it asked by so many, from uncertain design students in classrooms worried about their chances of landing a job, to seasoned professionals at conferences seeing their pool of print projects slowly evaporate. The question is being asked with even greater frequency as of...
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Republicans Against Science →
From The New York Times:
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.
To see what...
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The Nation's Cruelest Immigration Law →
From The New York Times:
The Alabama Legislature opened its session on March 1 on a note of humility and compassion. In the Senate, a Christian pastor asked God to grant members “wisdom and discernment” to do what is right. “Not what’s right in their own eyes,” he said, “but what’s right according to your word.” Soon after, both houses passed, and the governor signed, the country’s cruelest,...
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“For ****’s sake, the South pretty much taught us all to cook. They know what...”
– Anthony Bourdain
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The Fall This Summer →
From The New York Times:
The numbers were awful. The numbers are awful. Just last week the Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment would stay above 8 percent until at least 2014. It has been almost consistently above 9 percent for more than two years now. The budget office also projected a $1.3 trillion budget deficit for 2011 and a growth in G.D.P. of just 2.3 percent.
That’s a...
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A Poll Tax by Another Name →
From The New York Times:
Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by...