“For some in the industry, [The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision] has been a definite boon,” said Dale Emmons, president of the American Association of Political Consultants. “This election appears to have set a new benchmark on the amount of money that could be spent, because there were no limits on what could be spent.”
Public Integrity
(Reuters) - U.S. safety regulators are nowhere near finishing an investigation into a battery fire on the Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner, a top official said on Thursday, raising the prospect of a prolonged grounding for the aircraft.
Vice President Joe Biden, responding to a question about the need for assault weapons for protection -- say, in the wake of a natural disaster like an earthquake -- said there's a better weapon for that.
"Guess what? A shotgun will keep you a lot safer…
Politico
Muscovites woke up and found their cars, driveways and houses buried under a thick layer of snow, with city workers unable to get to smaller streets.
Awesome photos.
It's not known how many defense contractors have secret indemnification agreements with the government. While most federal agencies are not allowed to enter open-ended indemnification agreements, the Pentagon is exempt under an executive order signed by President Richard Nixon in 1971.…
"It is not possible to determine the actual or estimated cost to the Government as a result of the use of an indemnification clause since the liability of the Government, if any, will depend upon the occurrence of an incident related to the performance of the contract," White wrote. The agreement was necessary to "facilitate the national defense," he said.
Huffington Post
PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.
Guardian
Sam Smith - When I started out covering Washington, journalists used to report on what politicians actually did. These days they seem obsessed with what they say.…
Thus, the hysterically positive reaction to Obama's inaugural speech wasn't all that surprising, which doesn't mean, however, that it wasn't also misleading.
UNDERNEWS
The Gangster Squad was formed in 1946 to keep East Coast Mafia out of L.A. Its 'anything goes' approach endured through the 1950s in an era when justice was found far from the courthouse.…
"We did a lot of things that we'd get indicted for today," said Sgt. Jack O'Mara.
If you think of all the information encoded in the universe from your genome to the furthest star, from the information that's already there, codified or un-codified, to the information pregnant in every interaction, "big" has become the measure of data. And our capacity to produce and collect Big Data in the digital age is very big indeed. Every day, we produce 2.5 exabytes of information…
The Awl
In the best tradition of skulduggery, claim and counterclaim, foosball (or table football), that simple game of bouncing little wooden soccer players back and forth on springy metal bars across something that looks like a mini pool table, has the roots of its conception mired in confusion.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Murky-History-of-Foosball-185686041.html#ixzz2IXHURfO8
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
While Subway acknowledged that the undersized bread "is not baked to our standards," it goes on to claim that there really is no such thing as "undersized bread" because "footlong" is just a word.
"With regards to the size of the bread and calling it a footlong, 'SUBWAY FOOTLONG' is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length."
UNDERNEWS(Emphasis added.)
