…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.

Kurt Cobain wouldn’t have killed himself if he had the sense of community that comes with joining a social network.

- Hipster Runoff: Nirvana wasn’t ‘that good’ nor were they very ‘influential.’.

iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England

The EFF’s Fred von Lohmann notes that the president’s gift of an iPod filled with showtunes to the Queen of England may have violated copyright laws.

Tweets are the blog posts you thought about writing, but didn’t feel they had enough substance

-Mark Cuban, Some Twitter Thoughts

Now at first, I have to confess, this struck me as kind of odd. Your spouse calls you to tell you about an earthquake at your house, a potentially catastrophic natural event, and the first thing you say is, “Was it on Twitter?”

Nicholas Carr: How many tweets does an earthquake make?.

But having spent some time using the service, it seems that 95% of all tweets on Twitter have to do with what the poster is currently watching on TV

-James Poniewozik , TV Critic Exposes His Twitter in Public