Nice wallet, clever video.
I want that.
January 2013
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., says the NRA has become a captive of the firearms industry and is out of step with average Americans.
This disconnect from responsible gun owners may explain why the NRA’s long-heralded political power is significantly waning. In the 2012 election, the group put nearly all its resources into defeating President Barack Obama and focused on states with high gun ownership rates, like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. It lost, badly, in nearly every state and race in which the group invested. In fact, the NRA won only 20 percent of the Senate races in which it spent money in 2012. That’s a pretty miserable success rate for an organization that was once feared by Democrats and Republicans alike.
The NRA’s downright disturbing behavior since the Newtown, Conn., massacre can possibly be explained as a desperate defense mechanism of an organization that has lost step with average gun owners and lost sway with the swing electorate. The NRA must know, deep in the recesses of its Virginia headquarters, that Newtown was a breaking point in America’s relationship with guns. Ours will always be a nation that values the private right of citizens to bear arms, but after the tragedy at Sandy Hook, we will no longer tolerate the ease with which dangerous people can possess and dispatch weapons of mass violence.
The weatherman’s calling for snow tomorrow!
The weatherman’s calling for snow tomorrow!
Taking a page from Lance Armstrong’s playbook, some Republican state legislators are trying to tamper with the Electoral College to cement a permanent political advantage. They would do this by scrapping the winner-take-all rule and awarding electors by congressional district.
In practice, this would mean that a sparsely populated Republican district would have the same electoral clout as a densely populated Democratic district, so that a vote for a Republican would effectively be worth more than a vote for a Democrat.
Bloomberg’s Albert Hunt thinks the scheme is going to backfire.
The weather report’s calling for snow tomorrow!
Particularly Penn Jillete.
But I’m with Cord Jefferson on this one: Atheism can have the worst traits of religion.
I’m not religious (nor am I spiritual), but I’m not as confident (read: arrogant) as atheists like Jillete/Dawkins/Harris are.
Absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence, right?
“Masters of the universe” are bested by a cat:
The [Observer portfolio] challenge raised the question of whether the professionals, with their decades of knowledge, could outperform novice students of finance—or whether a random selection of stocks chosen by Orlando could perform just as well as experienced investors. …
The result indicates that the “random walk hypothesis”, popularised in economist Burton Malkiel’s book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, is perhaps truer than we thought. Burkiel’s book explores the idea that share prices move completely at random, making stock markets entirely unpredictable.
Investments: Orlando is the cat’s whiskers of stock picking | The Observer