One of the more common points by global warming deniers is that there was allegedly a scientific consensus in the 1970s that we were about to experience global cooling.  According to these deniers, since this alleged consensus was completely wrong, we can safely ignore the current consensus that we're experiencing global warming.

Interestingly enough, the alleged consensus about global cooling in the 1970s didn't exist at all.

Some parts of Santa Clara County have run out of ballots:

The high voter turnout has already caused some precincts to run out of certain ballot types in the northern areas of Santa Clara County, including Palo Alto and Cupertino. If the high turnout trends continue, the Registrar’s Office expects that more precincts could be affected.

Planning to vote for Obama or Clinton?

You're wrong.

You need to vote for the other one.

The Democratic party has an important rule for delegate selection:

States shall allocate district-level delegates and alternates in proportion to the percentage of the primary or caucus vote won in that district by each preference, except that preferences falling below a fifteen percent (15%) threshold shall not be awarded any delegates

For potential Edwards voters in many areas, this matters.  A lot.

The whole telecom immunity thing has, in a way mystified me.  While I don't think it is a smart move for Congress to use legislation to grant immunity for past lawbreaking, the reality is that Bush has the power to do this without congressional approval.

Last night, there was a diary by LithiumCola which, for a while, made the recommended list.  The diary discussed the disappearance of a Los Angles Times article about the recent shooting of civilians by Blackwater employees in Iraq, and there was considerable speculation about why the article disappared.

To my surprise, Sunday's New York Times Magazine contains a call by Thomas Friedman for a massive society-wide effort to cut CO2 emissions:

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called "green."

During 2005, income inequality increased, with the top 1% increasing their share of income (excluding capital gains!) to 17.4%, more than at any time since 1936:

In the graph below, the red triangles represent the share of national income earned by the top 1%, the green triangles, the share earned by the next 4%, and the blue diamonds the share earned by the 5% below that:

It appears that the officer who was videotaped repeatedly tasering a student for being unable to stand up after being tasered has a history of inappropriately using excessive force:

In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity. Kente S. Scott alleged that Duren confronted him while he was walking on the street outside the Theta Xi fraternity house.

Scott sued the university, and according to court records, UCLA officials moved to have Duren dismissed from the police force. But after an independent administrative hearing, officials overturned the dismissal, suspending him for 90 days.
...
In October 2003, Duren shot and wounded a homeless man he encountered in Kerckhoff Hall. Duren chased the man into a bathroom, where they struggled and he fired two shots.

The big emphasis in the news this morning was how the percentage of Americans in poverty didn't increase this year, and how household income rose.

That's a very misleading emphasis.  As the current revision of the NYT article makes clear:

The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks -- in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.

While most electricity in the US today is generated from fossil fuels, it is in fact possible in many parts of the country to pay a modest premium (often 1¢/kwh to 2¢/kwh) to obtain electricity entirely from renewable sources.

If you've got a such a program in your community, signing up is simple — I joined some 14% of my neighbors last fall by filling out a form and signing up for Palo Alto Green.  Under the program, our municipal utility purchases electricity equal to Palo Alto Green participants consumption from a mix of wind and solar generators, and allows an outside group (green-e to perform an audit to verify compliance.

According to the Los Angeles Daily News, the Bush administration is hoping to roll out a national no-work list designed to prevent noncitizens without appropriate visas from working:

privacy experts are warning America to prepare for the "no-work" list.

Apparently, the immigration bills (eg: title VII of HR 4437) running through congress seem to be requiring the use of an existing database — one filled with data entry errors:

extrapolated over 54 million workers in a mandatory national system, that could result in more than 750,000 people wrongly being told each year they are ineligible to work.

One day, I looked up at a flagpole. What I saw wasn't what I expected, not the stars and stripes, not my state's flag, nor a city flag, but a company flag.

Needless to say, I got to wondering about what this meant, and could come to only one conclusion:

Fox "news", like the operator of many cable channels, gets paid if they are distributed to your home, even if you don't watch:

It wants an increase to $1 dollar per month per subscriber, from the 25 cent to 35 cent subscriber fee the network currently earns.

Since Fox is typically part of basic cable pacakges, this means that a whole lot of Kos readers are, through their cable payments, paying to run the Fox propaganda outfit.

Several members of the San Francisco Bay Area Kossacks list showed up at the "Welcoming" of Bush and Schwarzenegger in San Jose this afternoon.

Along with us, were assorted other groups, from a native american group, many of whom were using walkers or wheelchairs, concerned about the closure of a local health clinic, to a family from Iran:

On Friday, Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger will be visiting Cisco Systems in San Jose. Want to join your fellow Californians in telling Bush (and the press) that we don't like what they've been up to? Details below the flip.

In today's Wall Street Journal was this nugget:

In the period from 2001 to 2003, top-executive compensation amounted to 9.8% of the companies' net income, almost double the 5% in 1993 to 1995.

And, to quote a draft of the paper:

compensation levels in 2003 were much higher than they would have been had the relation of compensation to firm size, performance and industry remained the same as in 1993

Perchlorate, a chemical used in the production of flares, rocket fuel, and munitions, is found in large chunks of the drinking water supply for the western US, in large part because the Colorado river is contaminated.

Naturally, being tasked with regulating environmental safety, the EPA cooprated with industry to study just how risky perchlorate is. To their surprise, as perchlorate had been approved as a thyroid drug many years ago, they found that for newborn rats, there is no safe level of perchorate, and set a limit of one part per billion in drinking water.