Politics

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income…

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Intra-faith

The new face of Muslim American leadership by Hussein Rashid – Common Ground News Service

The new face of Muslim American leadership by Hussein Rashid – Common Ground News Service. Religious leaders must be able to speak in the language and culture of the people they represent. In America, that means tending to one of the most diverse Muslim populations in the world, especially as distinctions linked to ethnicity or sects within Islam become less and less important for the Muslim American community.

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Inter-faith

Was Columbus secretly a Jew? – CNN.com

There is an interesting thesis here and some suggestive evidence. Will have to look up some of the articles referenced. Was Columbus secretly a Jew? – CNN.com. Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.

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Inter-faith

Brad Hirschfield: My Neighbor’s Faith: The Rabbi And The Christian Cab Driver

Brad Hirschfield: My Neighbor’s Faith: The Rabbi And The Christian Cab Driver. I could feel how torn he was. His most important teacher had told him that he had a choice to make. He felt pulled in different directions by the two things that mattered most in his life: his wife and his faith. Nobody had told him that his wife could be completely with him on his journey even if they were never going to be in complete agreement. My teacher in Hebron, for whom any difference was an excuse for disconnection, expressed the same mind-set. Either the cause…

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Politics

Lakhdar Boumediene Starts Anew in France After Years at Guantánamo – NYTimes.com

Lakhdar Boumediene Starts Anew in France After Years at Guantánamo – NYTimes.com. The United States government has never acknowledged any error in detaining Mr. Boumediene, though a federal judge ordered his release, for lack of evidence, in 2008. The government did not appeal, a Defense Department spokesman noted, though he declined to answer further questions about Mr. Boumediene’s case. A State Department representative declined to discuss the case as well, except to point to a Justice Department statement announcing Mr. Boumediene’s transfer to France, in 2009.

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Uncategorized

‘Granddad, There’s a Head on the Beach’ and Other Summer Reads – NYTimes.com

So proud to know Willow. Looking forward to this book.  ‘Granddad, There’s a Head on the Beach’ and Other Summer Reads – NYTimes.com. But this year’s improbably charming book about hackers is “Alif the Unseen,” a novel prompted by its author’s frustration. G. Willow Wilson, admired for her graphic novels and memoir, says that she was sick of treating her readers as separate factions (“comic-book geeks, literary NPR types and Muslims”) and sick of assumptions that blogging and social media could not have political consequences.  So she conjured Alif, a young Arab-Indian hacker living in an unnamed Middle Eastern high-security…

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Web/Tech

Building A Better Bookstore – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

Great series of ideas for the future of the bookstore. I’m not sure we need the cultural loss of the bookstore as a place that brings the community together. Building A Better Bookstore – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast. Tony Sanfilippo reimagines the bookstore as a place with bestsellers up front, a print-on-demand machine in the middle, and a scale of pricing options for how to buy or rent the books in the rest of the store, including ebooks

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Web/Tech

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL | Bootstrap – CNET News

This is an awesome story. Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL | Bootstrap – CNET News. But unlike most people working at AOL’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He’d been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company’s food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over.

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