…don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

- Robert Reich, The Final Health Care Vote and What it Really Means

Let’s be honest with ourselves: the American right has a deep-seated problem with political violence. It’s deep-seated; it’s recurrent and it’s real. And it endangers the country.

via Troubled History | TPM.

AP: Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote

Shortly after learning composer Maurice Jarre died, an Irish undergrad concocted a cheesy quote from the deceased, and posted it to Wikipedia. News outlets around the world cherry-picked the quote and ran it without first doing a fact-check.

What does it mean that Yahoo was willing to pay $3.5 billion for GeoCities, but not $3 billion a few years later for Google?

– Owen Thomas, “The Billion-Dollar Blackhole of Social Media”

We need to make the social norms clear: Twitter is where you talk about the consistency of your oatmeal. E-mail is for when you are running late for a meeting.

-Saul Hansen,  What Annoys Me About Twitter – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.