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...