Think Obama’s a huge spender? Then you need to see these two charts. On Tuesday, Kevin Drum posted this chart showing the growth in total government spending -- that means federal, state and local -- adjusted by population ("per capita"). Kevin Drum, Mother Jones The takeaway, Drum says, is that "total government spending didn't go up much during the Clinton era, and it's actually declined during under President Obama. In the last two decades, it's only gone up significantly during the Bush era, the same era in which taxes were cut dramatically.
" But some said Drum's chart was a trick, as it looked at total government spending rather than just federal spending. So on Wednesday, he posted a second chart. This one only included federal spending and it didn't adjust for population growth. Of the two charts, the second is considerably more misleading. But even accounting for that, Drum writes, "it's safe to say that even by 2016 the biggest increase in spending, by far, will have come during the Bush years.
" President Obama and the Magic Dime. Gun-death tally: Every American gun death since Newtown Sandy Hook shooting (INTERACTIVE) The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive).
But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. Update, Dec. 31, 2013: After a year of gun deaths, Slate is retiring this project. Click a marker below to filter incidents by that location. . © OpenStreetMap contributors Any Age Group Adult Teen Child Matched Deaths: 12,042 or more between Newtown and Dec. 31, 2013 Fetching latest data Show Methodology Each person under 13 years of age is designated "child"; from 13 to 17: "teen"; 18 and older: "adult. " The same icons used to represent males is also used to represent individuals of unknown gender.
—Dan Kois, senior editor, Slate. Gun Industry Spends Millions to Get Children Into Guns. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images With the declining popularity of shooting sports, the firearms industry has come up with a way to make sure it still has customers in the future: Appeal to children. The New York Times’ Mike McIntire takes a detailed look at how around five years ago, the industry ratcheted up a campaign to market its products to younger and younger children through a variety of nonprofit groups it directly finances. These groups sometimes give money and ammunition to youth groups, sponsor handgun competitions for children, and develop video games that directly promote certain brands of weapons.
Meanwhile, they lobby lawmakers to weaken any age restrictions that may exist on hunting and shooting sports in general. Even though the NRA has long supported youth shooting programs, those types of activities were usually confined to using single-shot rifles. The newer efforts introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns. Ilona Szwarc: American Girls and their owners (PHOTOS). Ilona Szwac. Ilona Szwarc’s initial contact with the American Girl doll happened during a period of shooting street photography. Intrigued by the seemingly endless parade of real-life girls and their versions of a “mini-me,” Szwarc approached the girls and their parents to see if she could document them. American Girl dolls have been a perennially popular toy for nearly three decades, and the franchise includes several styles of doll, flagship stores, and even a magazine.
An 18-inch doll runs around $100, which doesn’t include all the outfit changes and a multitude of accessories. Some of the dolls focus on American history, but Szwarc focused on the more popular “contemporary” versions. Ilona Szwarc. Szwarc quickly realized casual portraiture wasn’t the best avenue for the project. Szwarc calls the project “American Girls,”and for more than two years she has worked on it, traveling across the country and photographing roughly 100 girls. Ilona Szwarc. Sarah Palin and Fox News Part Ways, Showing how Star Power has Faded. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images Sarah Palin and Fox News are parting ways.
Real Clear Politics was first to hear word from a source close to the former governor that Palin had decided not to renew her contract at Fox News. The cable channel later confirmed the news with the New York Times saying that several sources had described the split as amicable. It turns out that while Fox News did offer Palin a new contract to keep the former vice-presidential candidate on staff, “it would be hard to describe it as a generous contract,” reports the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz. Although Kurtz doesn’t go into details, he says the new contract would have provided “only a fraction of the million-dollar-a-year salary” that she had been receiving. When Fox News snapped up Palin in 2009 she was a great commodity. Palin’s fundamental problem may be that she simply never adapted to a shifting political climate that included a change in atmosphere at Fox News as well.
To Barack Obama on the Eve of His Second Term: Time to Acknowledge Climate Change, Globalization, and Genetic Engineering. In the three or four decades after 1490, the human experience on planet Earth arguably changed more than it had since the Year One. Voyages of discovery transformed a world of isolated societies and sent potatoes and tomatoes sailing from the New World to Ireland and Italy, and horses and apples from Europe to the Americas in return. Trade became truly global, and cross-cultural exchange the norm. The invention of movable type and the printing press fostered popular literacy. In the West, the Reformation broke the stranglehold of a single system of religious belief. Gunpowder destroyed feudalism and sustained large standing armies and robust nation-states. At the time of Columbus’s first voyage, direct trade and communication between Europe and East Asia was mostly blocked by the Islamic regimes that lay between them.
Now fast-forward. Today we know almost everything, but can’t seem to act on the knowledge or even take it seriously. Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address. The 8 Greatest Wars Ever Fought by Fox News. #4. Obama's Gay War on Marriage In May of last year, the worst conservative fears had come true -- our president announced that he didn't care if gay people got married. You or I might call that apathy, or maybe basic human decency. Fox News, of course, called it a War on Marriage. There's no real cute way to break down the main conservative argument -- that same-sex unions somehow cloud the concept of traditional marriage.
Conservatives have proud traditions in this country that they "fight" to protect, and what that basically means is that they think they can still be racist and homophobic if they do it carefully. I don't want this article to spark a lot of shallow political arguments. . #3. In the War on Fossil Fuels, it was easy for Fox News to pick sides. Yes. Their War on Meat proved that no matter who they are fighting, Fox News always sides with sandwiches. Calling healthy eating a war is stupidly crazy, but is there any hidden wisdom to be found in these right wing tantrums? #2. The war on men. The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.
Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t. The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. [pullquote] As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles.
Women aren’t women anymore. To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. In a nutshell, women are angry. Now the men have nowhere to go. You’ll never hear that in the media. It’s the women who lose. Guess which North American country produces the most garbage. Wrong! Despite how demure its citizens are, Canada sometimes feels a little insecure about always being promoted as second-fiddle to the United States. There is a famous T-shirt which suggests that Canada is America’s hat; while this is largely true, Canada yearns to occasionally suggest that the U.S. is Canada’s boxer shorts. (Your Florida is hanging out.) In one thing, though, Canada emerges victorious: garbage production. From the CBC: The Conference Board of Canada gave Canada a C grade on Thursday and ranked it in 15th place among 17 developed nations studied across a host of environmental-efficiency metrics. …While Canada earned a few A grades in categories such as water quality, endangered species and the use of forest resources, overall the country scored a D average.
This is what happens when you have a ton of extra space — it fills up with junk you don’t need to keep. So congratulations to our head-warming neighbors to the north. On nearly every other factor studied, though: