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The Rise of Digital Democracy Tuesday, April 12 at 6:30pm The National Constitution Center Admission: FREE A diverse range of panelists who will be discussing how social media was used to harness the democratic fervor in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and beyond, and how Facebook, Google, and Twitter are changing the global political landscape. The panelists include:   Tony Burman, Al Jazeera’s Head of Strategy for the Americas Charles Sennott, Executive Editor and co-founder of GlobalPost, an internet journalism site devoted to international newsgathering for the digital age Susannah Vila, Director of Content and Outreach for Movements.org,  a non-profit organization dedicated to identifying, connecting, and […]

RJ ESKROW: We’re being told we should celebrate a “compromise” in which Democrats gave up $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded. Okay, guys. You get an extra 20% — and not a penny more! MORE FACT: The agreed upon budget compromise calls for $38.5 billion in spending cuts. FACT: Canceling federal subsidies for the oil companies — roughly $4 billion a year — for the next 10 years would have cut $40 billion out […]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER A long, long time ago a guy named Paul wrote his pen pals the Corinthians asking: “Oh death, where is thy sting?” The answer, my friend, is blowing in the winding stanzas of a late-period Loudon Wainwright III song. For more than 40 years, Wainwright has earned his keep as a dark-but-folksy ironist, as funny as Mark Twain on a good day, troubadouring across the fruited plain, looking for and invariably finding the punch lines in the dashed hopes, thwarted dreams and doomed romance of this American life. Which is, admittedly, strikingly ironic for […]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Japan’s nuclear regulators raised the severity level of the crisis at a stricken nuclear plant Tuesday to rank it on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. An official with the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, speaking on national television, said the rating was being raised from 5 to 7 — the highest level on the international scale. The official, who was not named, said the amount of radiation leaking from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant was around 10 percent of the Chernobyl accident. The level 7 signifies a “major accident” with “wider consequences” than the previous level, according […]

  Garrison Keillor | Good Poems, American Places Monday, April 11, 2011 at 7:30PM Festival Main Stage Cost: $15 General Admission, $7 Students Buy tickets onlineHost and writer of Minnesota Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor is a storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and the author of more than a dozen books including Homegrown Democrat, Lake Wobegon Days, Pontoon, and Liberty. A poetry connoisseur, he is the editor of Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, and he hosts the American Public Media radio program and podcast The Writer’s Almanac, which features daily poetry readings. His new […]

WIKIPEDIA:  Middle Brother is an American rock band consisting of songwriters and musicians John J. McCauley III of Deer Tick, Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, and Matt Vasquez of Delta Spirit. They played their first show at the 2010 the SXSW film conference and festival at the Ale House in Austin, Texas, where they performed under the moniker “MG&V” in an unannounced appearance. Middle Brother released their self-titled debut album March 1, 2011. MORE

FRESH AIR The typical American uses 99 gallons of water a day for activities like washing clothes, bathing, toilet-flushing and cooking. But that amount doesn’t even come close to the amount of water used on a daily basis by electrical power plants. Each day, coal, nuclear and natural gas plants use about five times the amount of water used on a daily basis by all American households combined — including 250 gallons of water per American per day to generate our daily electricity usage. “So your flat-screen TV has a little hidden water spigot running to it,” says investigative reporter […]

FORBES: Drinking water from Philadelphia contained the highest levels of Iodine-131 from Japan yet detected by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to data released by EPA Saturday. The Philadelphia sample is below the EPA’s maximum contaminant level (MCL) for iodine-131. The EPA’s MCL for iodine-131 is 3 picoCuries per liter. Three drinking water samples collected in Philadelphia on April 4 contained Iodine-131, according to Saturday’s data release: A sample from the city’s Queen Lane Treatment Plant showed 2.2 picoCuries per liter—the highest concentration in EPA’s drinking water data so far. MORE RELATED: Every government agency involved in radiation monitoring—the EPA, […]

STUDY:  The emergent industry of indoor Cannabis production results in prodigious energy use, costs, and greenhouse-gas pollution.  Large-scale industrialized and highly energy-intensive indoor cultivation of Cannabis is driven by criminalization, pursuit of security, and the desire for greater process control and yields. The practice occurs across the United States and in many other countries. The analysis performed in this study finds that indoor Cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $5 billion each year, with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. homes. This corresponds to 1% of national electricity consumption or 2% of that in households. […]

BY LANCE DOILY Although our inner circle has become desensitized to such things over the years, I can see how it could be considered odd to an outsider that Smitty still shits in the woods. I’m not gonna get on my high horse and say we’re all “indoor plumbing or die” folk, but even Dusty, origins as primitive as his, stopped shitting in the woods when he turned 23. Yet barring the times where a link would ease itself out during a drunken slumber, Smitty has remained true to himself for every last one of his 46 years on this […]