Politics. Quantum Computing project. Fiber Optics project. Solar Power reseach project. Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now. Even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, American presidents cannot pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign.
Here's why. Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment. As Mario Cuomo famously observed, candidates campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Still, Obama supporters have been asked to swallow some painfully "prosaic" compromises. In order to pass his healthcare legislation, for instance, Obama was required to specifically repudiate his pledge to prochoice voters to "make preserving women's rights under Roe v.
About the Author Eric Alterman Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of... Also by the Author Eric with the latest reviews and Reed on Al Jazeera America.
Help. MOVIES. GAMING. READING. HISTORY. COMPUTING. PTHOTOGRAPHY. SPORTS. INFRASTRUCTURE. The Creativity Crisis. On Education - A Popular Principal, Wounded by Good Intentions. As Internet influence has grown, students less aware of plagiarizing. Trip Gabriel, New York Times At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a website's frequently asked questions page about homelessness -- and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive -- he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black. How Should Schools Handle Cyberbullying? Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge.
But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges. Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry, alarmed by recent adolescent suicides linked to bullying. Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself. The Stupidity Of Liberal Apathy. Activists at last week’s Netroots Nation talked about disappointment and disillusionment.
The polls show a slow, steady decline in support for the president among Democrats. Neither sample captures perfectly the state of the liberal mind this summer, but you’d have to be pretty oblivious not to see that President Obama, and the Democrats, are losing the love of their base. It’s a somewhat predictable decline, given lofty expectations for the Obama presidency and the stubbornly slow recovery.
For Arab Nations, the Threat of a Nuclear Iran Puts Israel in a New Light. China Passes Japan to Become No. 2 Economy. How the internet is changing language. 16 August 2010Last updated at 10:01 By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News 'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang.
But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed? The web is a hub of neologisms In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room. Your Brain on Computers - Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity. For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr.
Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says. It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. America: Land of Loners? by Daniel Akst. Science-fiction writers make the best seers.
In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. Daniel Wagner: The Philippine Bus and Miss Universe. This week two noteworthy events involving the Philippines made headlines: the botched rescue of Chinese tourists taken hostage by a disgruntled former policeman, and a botched response to a question by Miss Philippines in the finals for the Miss Universe contest.
You might ask, what do these two things have in common? Separately, not much, but taken together, they represent both the peril and promise of the Philippines today. For many years pundits have commented that the Philippines appears to be heading backwards economically and politically, while many parts of Asia barrel toward middle income status and have maturing democracies. Yes, other countries have disputed elections, other countries' leaders do questionable things, and other developing countries struggle to achieve sustainable economic growth.
And, yes, there are recent examples of fresh political turmoil and economic hardship not only in Asia, but throughout the world. Roger Ebert on Food - Still Cooking. Blogging the Periodic Table: Aluminum. (1) - By Sam Kean.
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