Real federal deficit dwarfs official tally By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY Updated The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.By Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty ImagesCongress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits.By Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty ImagesCongress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits.Sponsored LinksUnder those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.A U.S. household's median income is $49,445, the Census reports.The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress ... Continue reading →

Armed men detained and tortured Mohamed, including by applying burning metal to his skin © Amnesty International By Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Libya researcher It is no secret that beatings and torture are endemic in post-Gaddafi Libya. Since spring 2011, Amnesty International has met countless people who described being beaten, electrocuted, threatened with death and otherwise abused inside detention facilities manned by anti-Gaddafi armed militias. Yesterday, I met Mohamed (not his real name), who was arrested and tortured by militias from Misratah on 16 October 2011. Scars were still visible on his arms. Besides severely whipping him for about an hour and a half, the armed men applied a burning piece of metal to his skin. He was later shot in the legs and left ... Continue reading →

Back in November, I grappled with the fact that online display ads in general, and banner ads in particular, are clearly not working very well; my suggested alternative was for brand advertisers to embrace the power of the external link. That was one suggestion; there are many, many more. But what they all have in common is that they’re attempts to go beyond the ad, and to leverage the interactive power of the internet. Over at Tumblr, David Karp is being characteristically vague about what he’s offering to potential advertisers: all we know for the time being is that he “wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks”. Which sounds great, ... Continue reading →

Brian Beutler May 24, 2012, 5:12 AM If Congress passed legislation to fund the federal government for a year, then scattered to the four winds, the United States would find itself in recession sometime in 2013. That’s what the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded in a Tuesday report, meant to alert elected officials to the dangers of allowing the country to fall off the “fiscal cliff.” That’s shorthand for allowing all of the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax holiday, extended unemployment benefits, and Medicare physician reimbursement rates to expire; and to allow spending on domestic and defense programs to be cut indiscriminately. All of these things will happen automatically at the beginning of the year if Congress does nothing. Budget deficits would fall ... Continue reading →

Back in November, I grappled with the fact that online display ads in general, and banner ads in particular, are clearly not working very well; my suggested alternative was for brand advertisers to embrace the power of the external link. That was one suggestion; there are many, many more. But what they all have in common is that they’re attempts to go beyond the ad, and to leverage the interactive power of the internet. Over at Tumblr, David Karp is being characteristically vague about what he’s offering to potential advertisers: all we know for the time being is that he “wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks”. Which sounds great, ... Continue reading →

By Melissa C. Lott and Scott McNally According to Dr. James Hansen, developing Canada’s tar sands would mean “game over for the climate.” And, the current Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is disappointed with President Obama for not taking action to stop Canada from causing a climate change-induced apocalypse. But, what Dr. Hansen fails to acknowledge in his May 9th NY Times Op-Ed is that demand drives supply. The tar sands are not the climate endgame – we are. Hansen’s two main arguments, as presented in his NY Times article, are as follows: Developing Canada’s tar sands will release massive amounts of harmful greenhouse gases into the air. The President should take action to prevent the development of Canada’s tar sands, in ... Continue reading →