boston:

Photo of protest confrontation prompts Boston Police review

- Boston Police are reviewing officers’ response to a protest rally Sunday on Boston Common after a photo appeared to show an officer with his hand around a protester’s neck.

theatlantic:

Occupy Wall Street Now Has a Super PAC

Embracing Occupy Wall Street means embracing the language of the 99 percent—even when you’re filing for a super PAC. Today, an election lawyer tipped us off to a Federal Election Commission filing for a brand new super PAC: The Occupy Wall Street Political Action Committee. It’s the type of document that’s typically stuffy and technical, but less so when the treasurer of the super PAC is an Occupy organizer. Note the mailing address.

It looks like a high school prank but the committee’s treasurer John Paul Thornton promises us it’s anything but. ”We’re utterly serious,” he says. A data technician in Decator, Alabama, Thornton says he’s an active member in his state’s Occupy movement, contacting state representatives and city council-members, participating in weekly general assembly meetings, and saying active in his local branch’s private and public online forums.

Read more. [Image: FEC/Flickr/Vectorportal]

columnfive:

(via One Block Off the Grid: The Smart New Way to Go Solar | Infographic: How Much Does Solar Cost?)

source2012:

Meet the bundlers … where you can

A new infographic by the Center for Responsive Politics reflects the latest information about the elite fundraisers collecting millions of dollars for presidential candidates.

On the Democratic side, we know that 444 bundlers have collected at least $72.4 million for President Barack Obama. On the GOP end, we don’t know much. That’s because no Republican candidates have volunteered any information about their bundlers beyond what they have to.

Fore more information on presidential bundlers, visit the OpenSecrets Blog. 

shortformblog:

U.S. Supreme Court paves way for Citizens United rematch

Time for Citizens United: Round 2? Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the Montana Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the state’s longstanding campaign finance laws banning corporate political spending, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock. The decision came after American Tradition Partnership and two Montana businesses filed an application asking the Court to strike down the Montana Supreme Court’s decision. ATP now has until the end of March to formally request that the Court review the Montana Supreme Court’s decision. If they don’t, Montana’s decision would stand, but should they file the request, it would pave the way for a full review of the controversial Citizens United decision. (photo courtesy of flickr user kenudigit)  source

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think-progress:

Virginia is poised to pass legislation that would require women to endure this invasive ultrasound, for no medical reason, before receiving an abortion. 

ikenbot:

Crab Nebula’s Pulsar May Be Fast Particle Accelerator

Image: Crab Nebula gets the “Blues” by Danny Lacrue via HubbleSite

The Crab Nebula (also designated M1 or NGC 1952) is visible through small telescopes, which has allowed astronomers to observe its growth and evolution since the supernovae that created it became visible in 1054 CE. A pulsar was found in the center of the Crab in 1968.

This rapidly rotating neutron star is the core of the star that went supernova to make the nebula. In the intervening decades, x-ray, gamma ray, and radio observations have mapped the region of the nebula closest to the pulsar. During that mapping, it became apparent that the Crab pulsar is one of the brightest sources of gamma rays observable from Earth.

Despite all of those observations, we still don’t fully understand the Crab’s precise gamma ray spectrum, particularly recently observed pulses of intense gamma radiation seen by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Existing models certainly do well at describing much of the complex interplay between the intense magnetic fields of the pulsar and the winds of charged particles flowing outward. But no single scheme seems sufficient to cover all the observed phenomena.

A potentially promising new model, proposed by F. A. Aharonian, S. V. Bogovalov, and D. Khangulyan, may fill in some of these blanks. It proposes that areas near the pulsar are acting as rapid particle accelerators, but don’t boost electrons and heavier particles to the same extent.

Pulsars are exceedingly small despite their high mass: According to typical neutron star models, the Crab pulsar is approximately 30 kilometers in diameter, but contains nearly double the mass of our Sun. The intense gravitational influence and rapid rotation of pulsars place them firmly in the realm of relativity, while intense magnetic fields carry the enormous amounts of energy we typically encounter in particle accelerators.

In the region immediately surrounding the Crab pulsar, there is enough energy to produce pairs of electrons and positrons, which flow outward into the surrounding gas. This total flow is the pulsar wind, a plasma (an electrically neutral substance consisting of separate positive and negative charges) that moves very close to the speed of light.

Read full story..

washingtonpoststyle:

The United States has fallen 27 places in the Press Freedom Index. The reason? The many arrests of journalists covering Occupy protests.

timemagazine:

Next week’s issue featuring The Power of Shyness will be on newsstands Friday.

quickhits:

Racist mayor flees from giant pile of tacos.

An update for those following the saga of East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo, America’s dumbest mayor.

Raw Story:

When recently asked about his support for Latino rights, the mayor of East Haven, Connecticut said that he “might have some tacos” for dinner. Little did he know, a local group of activists would be happy to take him up on that.

Days later, 500 tacos showed up at Mayor Joseph Maturo, Jr.’s office, courtesy of local activists with The Campaign to Reform Immigration for America. Sadly, he wasn’t there to receive them.

“When we delivered the tacos to [the] Mayor, he ran out the back door to avoid us,” the activists wrote on their blog, citing a report in local media. He allegedly had an important meeting to attend.

The group put out a call for concerned citizens to text them. For every text reading “taco” they received, they’d send a taco for the mayor. They got over 3,500 texts — which is a lot of tacos.

They didn’t go to waste though. According to the report, “While the group said they were disappointed that the mayor was not present to receive his tacos, they left one for him and donated the rest to feed the homeless.”

Making the best of a bad situation and turning a negative into a positive. Mayor Joe could learn something from his critics.

And weren’t we just talking about dumb racist conservatives? I believe we were.

theatlantic:

Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

President Obama’s State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: “Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there.”

It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years? Read more.

[Image: Brian McGill and Peter Bell/National Journal]

azipaybarah:

My interview with Jesse Jackson:

Rev. Jesse Jackson said the Republican presidential candidates “completely ignored the black community” and “ran a white primary” in South Carolina.

“Not one of them visited a church, a school, a neighborhood, and so there was no reach-out,” Jackson said, speaking to me at the Sheraton Hotel this morning, where he was hosting anannual meeting of his Rainbow PUSH coalition.

And:

“You get people like Colin Powell, [former Rep.] J.C. Watts,Congressman [Tim] Scott, I think, in South Carolina and [Rep.] Allen West in Florida, and Michael Steele, none of them played their role to expand the base,” Jackson said. “And in effect they ran a white primary. And all their ads and such, they were in a white primary. And so, essentially, in Florida, it’s 30-percent Hispanic vote and they’re trying to get it. It’s important and they should. Thirty percent of the vote is black in South Carolina, they didn’t try to get it. They’re running a really narrowly conceived campaign.”

And, for Gingrich:

“When Gingrich attacks food stamps, he won’t take that speech to Appalachia,” Jackson said. “He won’t take that to states in rural America because on food stamps, the first beneficiary is the farmer, then the trucker, the warehouse, the store and the recipient. So, it’s a whole infrastructure in the food-stamp business.

azspot:

The New American Divide