interesting things
“What is being dripped on me? What kind of filth? Asbestos, rat droppings, God knows what.” — Rider on platform at the Seventh Avenue-53rd Street subway stop lamenting the dangerous frothy mixture dripping from overhead due to floodwaters.
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stand clear of the closing doors
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/straphanger-ponders-composition-of-overhead-drip.html
According to the Twitter government and politics team, President Obama set a Twitter political record by driving 52,757 tweets per minute during his 38-minute convention speech Thursday night. The team added that his line, “I’m no longer just the candidate, I’m the President,” spurred the second biggest TPM spike for Obama with 43,646 tweets-per-minute, while “I will never turn Medicare into a voucher” scored the third highest with 39,002 TPM. The peak figure translates to almost 880 tweets-per-second, or total nonsense if you don’t believe Twitter has a role in shaping people’s attitudes about political moments.
By comparison, the First Lady peaked at 28,003 tweets per minute during her speech, with Bill Clinton at 22,087, while Romney topped out at only 14,289 TPM during his acceptance.
The Obama campaign is certainly keyed into Twitter political chatter: The campaign noticed that users were mocking Joe Biden’s affection for the word “folks,” and abuse of the word “literally,” so they turned it into lemonade. The Washington Post reports that the campaign took out an ad on the word “literally,” causing a promoted @BarackObama tweet to appear when users searched the word.
Twitter has grown substantially since 2008 when Obama ran for and won the presidency. That year, users sent 300,000 tweets per day, according to the Telegraph. On the company’s sixth birthday this March, it announced that its 140 million active users dispatched an astonishing 340 million tweets a day. Some users much more often than others, like Alec Baldwin who opined on the state of the race on Twitter yesterday, writing, “If Obama was white, he’d be up by 17 points.”
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twitter
,barack obama
,politics
,twitter and often
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/obamas-speech-twitter-politics-record.html
CBS News reports that New York State is about to approve fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the practice of firing high-pressure liquids at rocks below Earth’s surface to fracture them and release natural gas. CBS doesn’t offer additional details, only that the state will “issue guidelines after Labor Day.” But there probably won’t be widespread fracking in New York, more likely a limited amount of possibly hazardous fracking near the Marcellus Shale Formation in counties along the Pennsylvania border. The Marcellus Shale Formation “may hold enough natural gas to supply the U.S. for two decades,” Penn State geosciences professor Terry Engelder told BusinessWeek. The Times reported in June that Governor Cuomo’s administration considered permitting fracking only in communities that expressed support for it, and with regulations requiring a buffer zone between water sources and drilling areas. And then when all those communities get rich, fracking will spread to the rest of the state, if we’re not all dead from contaminated water.
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fracking
,frack!
,new york state
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/report-prepare-for-some-fracking-new-york.html
The Ohio Senator and one of the frontrunners to become Mitt Romney’s running mate told a CNN reporter in Denver Wednesday night that he’ll probably stay in the Senate. Probably. Earlier this week ABC News’s Jon Karl reported that at least two potential Romney VP picks “have been told to stand ready for an announcement any day now that Romney has returned from his foreign trip.” The other being Tim Pawlenty. Perhaps just playing coy, Portman made the happy-where-I-am comment during his five-stop jaunt through the swing state as a Romney surrogate, adding, “I just got elected two years ago.” And Portman said about his current gig in Washington: “I think it’s a very important position right now,” explaining that there are pressing issues facing the nation, including the debt, the deficit, developing energy resources, and health care issues.
“And right now Congress is paralyzed,” Portman continued. “And we’re really in kind of a partisan gridlock. We need leadership, and that’s where I intend to stay. I think I can really help in there.”
Portman has held several fundraisers for the Romney campaign in his home state of Ohio and made sure to give the guy a vote of confidence as he added intrigue for the millions of people with Mitt’s VP app squeezing the shine off their smartphones. “We need Mitt Romney. And I will help him all I can. But I’ll probably stay in the United States Senate.”
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rob portman
,mitt romney
,veepstakes
,politics
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/portman-stay-in-senate-romney-vp.html
The New York Times reports that Twitter has complied with a Monday subpoena ordering the company to turn over data associated with the account @obamasmistress, whose owner posted a variety of violent and troll-like messages threatening an attack on a theater in New York and various celebrities. Twitter had initially declined to give out the information, which the NYPD asked for in an emergency request following posts about plans to attack the midtown theater where Mike Tyson is performing a one-man show. (“I’m serious, people are gonna die like Aurora,” the user wrote.) In an e-mail, the company said the tweets in question did not meet its criteria for disclosure “when it appears that a threat is present, specific and immediate.” However, the court order didn’t leave them much of a choice.
Police spokesman Paul Brown said, “We felt that a threat involving an identified location in the heart of the theater district merited immediate cooperation.” The police have not said whether they have found the person, who used the soon-to-be ironic name “Anonymous Celebrity” with the Twitter handle.
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how tweet it is
,twitter
,scary things
,nypd
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/twitter-turns-over-data-on-user-making-threats.html
Satwant Singh Kaleka, the president of the Sikh temple of Wisconsin where 40-year-old Wade Michael Page opened fire on Sunday, gave his own life to protect members of congregation. Sixty-five-year-old Kaleka had little time to act when Page burst into the Oak Creek temple with a 9mm handgun and several magazines, so he grabbed what The Raw Story described as a nearby “blunt ceremonial knife.” Kaleka attempted to stab Page before Page shot him twice in the hip or upper leg, his son Amardeep Kaleka said. But the brief conflict allowed women preparing food and children attending Sunday school downstairs to take shelter from the shooter’s rampage in a pantry.
“Your dad’s a hero,” Amardeep Kaleka said FBI agents told him Sunday. The elder Kaleka and six others died in the Sunday massacre, including Page.
Details of Page’s background continue to emerge in the wake of the shooting. Discharged from the Army in 1998 after a demotion, Page has been connected what civil rights groups term “two racist skinhead bands” — End Apathy and Definite Hate, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times adds that Page was also believed to have been a member of a national white supremacist group called the Hammerskins. Federal investigators had actually “looked at” Page “more than once” because of his connection to extremists and because he might have helped fund a domestic terrorist group, however officials did not have enough evidence to open an investigation, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.
Police in New York have boosted their presence at Sikh temples in response to the attack. “Since the incident happened yesterday, the NYPD came right over here and go over to all our other temples and we feel safe, we feel the confidence in our NYPD,” Gurdev Singh Kang, president of the Sikh Cultural Society in Richmond Hill, Queens, told NBC New York. “I appeal to our whole Sikh community, be peaceful.”
Police have yet to determine Page’s specific motive for his attack on the temple that Satwant Singh Kaleka devoted his life to building.
“As I saw the picture of the man who took away my father’s life — you look at his face and it’s full of hollow emptiness — a dark void,†said Kaleka‘s son Amandeep. “I feel a lot of sadness towards that individual… I’m not going to replace it with anger.â€
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sad things
,shootings
,wade michael page
,sikh temple shooting
,satwant singh kaleka
,crimes and misdemeanors
,wisconsin
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/sikh-temple-president-tried-to-take-down-shooter.html
Mitt Romney’s advisers kicked off a week of parading their candidate overseas to prove his aptitude for foreign relations matters by telling a London newspaper that Barack Obama’s White House doesn’t “fully appreciate” the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” shared by the United States and Britain. The full, profoundly articulate quote from the unnamed Romney adviser, who also said that Romney “would abandon Obama’s “Left-wing†coolness toward London: “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
It’s special! Don’t you get it, people!? Noting that some might construe the comment as racially insensitive, the Telegraph also writes that one Romney adviser said that the former Massachusetts Governor is “better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Obama.”
Perhaps the adviser went on to discuss Romney’s lineage, which traces to England, Scotland, and Germany. Maybe the adviser said that Romney’s family frequently dines at Medieval Times (of course they don’t). Absent greater context, the adviser seems to suggest by “better placed” that Obama, a black guy with a Kenyan father, is incapable of a Romney-level understanding of the U.S.-Britain Anglo-Saxon heritage.
To boot, the pair of advisers were unable to provide the Telegraph with “detailed examples of how policy towards Britain would differ under Romney.” Nevertheless, Romney would understand the heck out of shared problems and other Anglo-Saxon things.
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politics
,2012
,barack obama
,mitt romney
,anglo-saxon
,london
,stuck in the mittle
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/romney-advisers-anglo-saxon-heritage.html
Joe Williams, Politico’s White House Correspondent, made the remarks that resulted in his suspension during a panel discussion on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC show. Bashir suggested that Mitt Romney might be having trouble connecting with Hispanics because he rarely appears on television besides Fox. Williams responded:
Romney is very, very comfortable it seems with people who are like him. That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in some town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that. But when he comes on Fox and Friends, they’re like him, they’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.
Not helping matters: The joke Williams tweeted about Romney’s penis. Williams’s account is currently set to private, but the colorful 140-character dispatches are available on Breitbart.com.
Politico’s founding editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei addressed Williams’s suspension in a memo to staff about their journalists’ “clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias.” They explained:
Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams’s public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility. His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way.
Joe has acknowledged that his appearance reflected a poor choice of words. This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them. This is true for all POLITICO journalists, including an experienced and well-respected voice like Joe Williams.
Following discussion of this matter with editors, Joe has been suspended while we review the matter.
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politics
,video
,white people
,joe williams
,politico
,mitt romney
via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/politico-suspends-its-white-house-correspondent.html