Get Rich-01: 2009

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Slate Magazine

Michele Bachmann invites tea partiers to Washington for another swig.
November 6, 2009 at 12:33 am

Whether it was billing the event as a "Super Bowl of Freedom" or challenging conservatives to "scare" members of Congress, it worked. Rep. Michele Bachmann got thousands of protesters to flood the lawn in front of the Capitol building Thursday afternoon, joining her for what was originally described as a "press conference" but turned out to be a full-blown rally against health care reform—a mini-sequel to the 9/12 protest of two months ago.

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Michele Bachmann - Health care - United States Congress - Washington - United States Capitol

Are shootings at military bases common, or was Fort Hood unusual?
November 5, 2009 at 11:28 pm

An Army psychiatrist who was about to deploy to Iraq went on a two-gun shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday afternoon. Twelve people died in the attack, and 31 were wounded. How often do soldiers commit crimes on their bases?

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Fort Hood - Texas - Iraq - Military base - United States

Sorry, I didn't like Precious.
November 5, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Harshing on Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lionsgate Films), the awkwardly titled Lee Daniels adaptation of an "urban fiction" bestseller, makes a critic feel almost as mean-spirited as Mary, the monstrously abusive mother of the film's eponymous heroine. Parked in front of the TV in the grim Harlem walkup they share, Mary (played with a fearsome lack of vanity by the standup comedian Mo'Nique) pelts her 16-year-old daughter, Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) with cruel insults, imperious commands, and, whenever possible, heavy airborne objects. "I ain't done nothin'!" Precious protests, and the movie is at pains to prove her right: for the first hour at least, Precious is less a person who does things than an object to which things are done. Her absentee father, seen only once in a nauseating flashback sequence, rapes her on a regular basis; at 16, she's pregnant with his second child. Her daughter, who has Down's syndrome, lives with a coldly disapproving grandmother; their visits last just long enough to fool the welfare inspector into issuing Mary's next check. In addition to being obese, unloved and dirt-poor, Precious is also illiterate, though the public school she attends is so bad that she's managed to camouflage that fact through the eighth grade. In short, this girl's life is so abysmal that you feel the least you can do is like the movie she's in.

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Lee Daniels - Gabourey Sidibe - Precious - Mo'Nique - Harlem

Do wolves kill for sport?
November 5, 2009 at 9:55 pm

During this fall's inaugural wolf-hunting season in Montana, hunters killed the matriarch of a Yellowstone wolf pack that researchers had been studying for more than a decade. Park officials suspect that her mate and three other pack members were also killed. A Los Angeles Times story about the hunt claims that wolves are known to kill for "pure pleasure." Do wolves really attack their prey just for the fun of it?

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Montana - Gray Wolf - hunt - Yellowstone National Park - Los Angeles Times

President Obama on the Fort Hood shootings.
November 5, 2009 at 8:46 pm

AP Video: President Barack Obama comments on the tragic shooting at Fort Hood

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Barack Obama - Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008 - United States - Associated Press - Politics

An Explainer roundup on food contamination.
November 5, 2009 at 8:10 pm

Two people have died, and 28 have fallen sick, due to an E. coli outbreak in ground beef, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week. This latest scare follows an October New York Times article on pervasive flaws in the beef-inspection process, featuring a woman who became paralyzed after eating hamburgers tainted with E. coli in 2007. Panicked? Here's an Explainer roundup on food contamination.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Food - New York Times - Beef mince - Hamburger

Death is different, but is it all that different from life without parole?
November 5, 2009 at 8:02 pm

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case testing whether the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits sentencing a teen to life in prison without parole. Punishment is generally deemed "cruel" if it's more than "graduated and proportional." It is constitutionally "unusual" if imposed so infrequently "that a national consensus has developed against it." If those concepts sound squishy and vague to you, well, you can just imagine what Antonin Scalia is feeling right now.

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Antonin Scalia - Supreme Court of the United States - Cruel and unusual punishment - Supreme Court - Life imprisonment

On Denialism and the role of science in America.
November 5, 2009 at 7:43 pm

We need to remember that denialism kills people.

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Educational Resources - Technology - Science in Society - Publications - IdeumMtTable

Microsoft's Marketing Misfires
November 5, 2009 at 5:27 pm

A daily video from Slate V.

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Microsoft - Business - Microsoft Corporation - Companies - Monopolies and Oligopolies

Much of the current deficit debate is for the birds.
November 5, 2009 at 5:21 pm

A once-endangered species is staging a robust comeback: the deficit hawk. Hunted nearly to death during the Bush years, many varieties not seen in Washington in a decade are now perching on branches and dropping their wisdom. Look, there's the puff-chested congressional peacock hawk, frequently seen strutting about Sunday-morning-TV-show sets complaining about pork while emitting loud honks on the receipt of stimulus funds. The furrowed-brow warbler hawk (natural habitat: the op-ed pages) loathes deficit spending for the purpose of eliminating social injustice but loves it when the spending is used to finance military actions abroad. The blue-bellied partisan hawk nests in think tanks; it goes mute when members of its own party run the show but squawks loudly when opponents run up debt. On Nov. 3, birders sighted the rare skinny parrot hawk, which repeats back calls about fiscal probity. Said President Barack Obama on that date: "The government is going to have to get serious about reducing our debt levels."

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Barack Obama - Washington D.C. - Endangered species - Bird - Washington

Advertisement:
November 5, 2009 at 5:21 pm

The Political Gabfest for Nov. 6, 2009.
November 5, 2009 at 5:04 pm

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

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Facebook - Social Networking - Online Communities - United States - Government

On Denialism and the role of science in America.
November 5, 2009 at 3:14 pm

Are we anti-science, or are we inconsistent?

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Educational Resources - Denialism - Science in Society - Publications - Organizations

How the old-as-dirt New York Yankees won the 2009 World Series.
November 5, 2009 at 1:07 pm

What's the lesson of the 2009 New York Yankees? With the Bronx Bombers taking an early 7-1 lead in Game 6, we had more time than usual to bat around the clichés of sports championships to see which ones might fit. Had the Yankees redeemed the long suffering of their supporters? Did they stand for youthful vigor or quiet professionalism? Did they represent the idea that pride and excellence can't be bought and sold—or the exact opposite?

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New York Yankees - Sport - 2009 World Series - Baseball - PhiladelphiaPhillies

The unanswered phone calls and misunderstood memos that helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
November 5, 2009 at 10:01 am

Too often, we see history as inevitable. What was had to be, the culmination of seemingly tectonic forces. We tend to forget that history is also defined by the logic of human messiness. Happenstance, chance, even accident always loom large in grand events.

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Berlin Wall - Germany - Cold War - Berlin - History

I'm 16, and I want a vibrator.
November 5, 2009 at 10:01 am

Get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.) And become a fan of Prudie on the official Dear Prudence Facebook page.

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