Big bang

~ susie

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Cool!

Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.

It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.

The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.

“This is spectacular,” commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.

“I’ve seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know,” he told BBC News.

The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.

If he’s running, he should go

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

joe

Joe Scarborough was just speaking at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in New Hampshire. His name was included in the presidential straw poll until MSNBC talked the organizers into taking it off.

At least theoretically, the media is supposed to serve as a watchdog. If Scarborough’s going to be running around the country making noises about running, he needs to resign from his morning show. You can’t leave a presidential candidate in charge of a highly-rated political show, where he has the power to make or break other candidates. Even in these amoral times, that stinks to high heaven. So MSNBC, you need to make him put up or shut up:

The audience seems to like his speech, and there is a long line of people waiting to buy his book. But it’s not exactly a “run, Joe, run” groundswell. A dozen attendees tell me they’ve heard no talk of a Scarborough candidacy and find the idea implausible on its face. Linda Paul, a homemaker from Bedford, New Hampshire, tells me she “won’t even turn on MSNBC,” and while she was impressed with Scarborough’s remarks, she’d like to see a presidential candidate with a more recent record in elected office.

Others were not on board with Scarborough’s plea for party unity. “He hasn’t always been kind to the Republican Party,” says Kris Hammond, an attorney from Washington. “RINO stands for Republican In Name Only, and that means you’re not really a Republican. We need to hold the line on what we believe in.”

“I watch his show,” says former Representative Frank Guinta, who’s running again for his old seat in New Hampshire. “Sometimes I’m yelling at the TV because he’s not tough enough on Mika.”

Scarborough tells me that whether he plunges back into politics will depend on how the 2016 field takes shape. There are, he believes, two candidates who could plausibly capture the hearts of Wall Street and the GOP establishment: Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. Of Christie, he says, “If he comes out of all these investigations unscathed, I think Chris’ll be a really strong candidate in 2016.” Of Bush: “He was a great governor and I think he’d be a great candidate, but there’s an awful lot of questions about whether Americans want another Bush.”
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NSA about attorney-client privilege concerns: We’ll probably grab your communications but we’ll try not to ‘listen in’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment
NSA About Attorney-Client Privilege Concerns: We’ll Probably Grab Your Communications But We’ll Try Not To ‘Listen In’ (via Techdirt)

A couple of weeks back we covered the American Bar Association asking for assurance from the NSA that attorney-client communications, even those involving foreign clients, would remain out of the agency’s reach. This was prompted by a leak that showed…

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Bill Maher on Meet the Press

~ susie ~ 2 Comments
Watch Bill Maher Pulverize GOP Apologist David Gregory On Meet The Press! (Video) (via Americans Against The Tea Party)

NBC’s Meet the Press has seen better days. The longest-running series in American television history is struggling in the ratings. In fact, it came in third last quarter behind ABC’s This Week and CBS’s Face the Nation. Things have gotten so…

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Pitchfork time

~ susie

LCC - Teaser

What can you do when the oligarchs and the politicians in their pockets are completely shameless?

Harry Reid said the billionaire Koch brothers’ influence extends so far into national affairs that the Kochs are blocking a bill to aid Ukraine.

Democratic leaders alleged on Thursday that GOP House and Senate leaders want to trade a delay in IRS rules changes affecting the political activities of nonprofits for passage of a broad Ukraine aid package including controversial International Monetary Fund reforms. Those IRS rules could affect the Koch-backed Super PAC Americans for Prosperity, which is running millions of dollars of attack ads against incumbent Democratic senators.

Sens. Reid, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) all said that Republicans are more interested in protecting conservative-leaning outside groups than in aiding an embattled country.

“The Koch brothers continue to hold up the situation we have in Ukraine,” Reid said, part of another day-long offensive against the brothers.

Irish amnesia

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Irish Famine

Man, this Timothy Egan piece in yesterday’s Times is right on the money:

IN advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

Go read the rest.