WASHINGTON POST: So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every […]

SCIENCE BLOG: Marijuana is not a “gateway” drug that predicts or eventually leads to substance abuse, suggests a 12-year University of Pittsburgh study. Moreover, the study’s findings call into question the long-held belief that has shaped prevention efforts and governmental policy for six decades and caused many a parent to panic upon discovering a bag of pot in their child’s bedroom. The Pitt researchers tracked 214 boys beginning at ages 10-12, all of whom eventually used either legal or illegal drugs. When the boys reached age 22, they were categorized into three groups: those who used only alcohol or tobacco, […]

NEW YORK TIMES: Almost exactly two years after it embarked on what was the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the recession is ending and that it would take a step back toward normal policy. Though the central bank stopped well short of declaring victory, policy makers issued their most upbeat assessment in more than a year by saying that the downturn appears to have hit bottom and that consumer spending, financial markets and inventory-building by corporations all continued to stabilize. The central bank cautioned that the recovery would be slow and that […]

[via POLITIFACT] USA TODAY: Some August town hall meetings around the country have degenerated into furious shouting matches, driven by outrageous misinformation borne of many sources. The Internet spreads anonymous chain e-mails to a public that is both vulnerable and gullible. Groups with a financial or ideological interest give the rumors a boost. Talk radio provides an echo chamber for the demonizers. […] The distortions have become so numerous that they’ve often won Politifact.org’s “pants on fire” award (as in “liar, liar, pants on fire”). So in the interest of correcting some of the misinformation, here are a few truths […]

TALKING POINTS MEMO: It now looks like the forged “Kenyan” Obama birth certificate that was briefly promoted by the Birthers — actually an altered copy of a decades-old South Australian birth certificate — was deliberately designed as a prank on the Birther movement itself, Dave Weigel reports. An anonymous person has put up an Internet posting showing photos of the document, against a bedsheet background that matches the photo promoted by Orly Taitz. One of the photos shows a crumpled up certificate with the following message written on it: “YOU’VE BEEN PUNK’D!” MORE [via FEARLESS BLOGGING] Fine cotton business paper: […]

[Photo by ANDRES] THE GUARDIAN: For a time, Baitullah Mehsud [picutured, below right] appeared to have cloaked himself in the historical garb of the Faqir of Ipi, a militant cleric whom British colonial troops spent much of the 1930s and ’40s chasing through the mountain passes of Waziristan. “They sought him here, they sought him there, those columns sought him everywhere,” went an old British couplet that equally applied to Mehsud as he shrugged off efforts by Pakistani and, more recently, US forces to kill him. In June a CIA-operated drone fired a barrage of missiles at a funeral for […]