The tide comes in, the tide goes out....

We all came from primordial ooze.... Which might explain the Republicans' desire to return to simpler times...

"In the race to take on Obama, playing dumb about foreign affairs is the politically clever thing to do"

How Newt is channeling “The Producers”

One who takes issue with Naomi Wolf's article about the DHS and the mayors involved with a nation-wide crackdown of the OWS.

I think I like this new generation... teen tweeter won't apologize to Brownback.  Update:  Brownback backs down.

The NYTimes and LATimes both came out against SOPA and PIPA.

The Los Angeles Times endorses Obama

Oh my.

The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president.

Our nation has never before had a candidate like Obama, a man born in the 1960s, of black African and white heritage, raised and educated abroad as well as in the United States, and bringing with him a personal narrative that encompasses much of the American story but that, until now, has been reflected in little of its elected leadership. The excitement of Obama's early campaign was amplified by that newness. But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama's character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity.

I am very impressed. Go read for an interesting assessment of Obama's presidential qualities.

How about just reporting the truth?

Instead of cutting reporters and having an editorial board filled with rightwingers? I mean... The Los Angeles Times actually prints Jonah Goldberg's 'opinions'....

Los Angeles, California (AHN) - Top editor of a newspaper was fired over a dispute to order newsroom budget cuts up to $4 million.

James O'Shea, the Los Angeles Times editor, left after he rejected a management order, becoming the third editor within 1 and a half years who was fired over a confrontation with the top members of the newspaper.

The 64-year-old O'Shea, who had replaced Dean Baquet in November 2006, was fired by the Times Publisher David D. Hiller following a confrontation in between them.

O'Shea was the Chicago Tribune's managing editor before the Times following which the Times' parent, Chicago-based Tribune Co., was acquired by real estate magnate Sam Zell.

"All this other stuff that we talk about in terms of budgets and employees, those problems all emanate from declining readership," O'Shea told Chicago Tribune right after his appointment to the Times.

"Turn that around and all these other problems become easier to solve."

Baquet was also forced to resign from his position after he opposed further cuts to the newsroom budget in 2006.

I have been a subscriber to The Los Angeles Times for decades but will leave them in an instant if they tilt any more to the right. Declining readership isn't because of the net, it's because of the obvious catapulting of the White House propaganda and constrained journalism. Either understand your readers' expectations for unbiased reporting or lose subscribers. No one wants to read Fox News in print.

Excellent article in the Los Angeles Times about bees

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

According to the Apiary Inspectors of America, 24% of 384 beekeeping operations across the country lost more than 50% of their colonies from September to March. Some have lost 90%.

"I'm worried about the bees," said Dan Boyer, 52, owner of Ridgetop Orchards in Fishertown, Pa., which grows apples. "The more I learn about it, the more I think it is a national tragedy."

At Boyer's orchard, 400 acres of apple trees — McIntosh, Honey Crisp, Red Delicious and 11 other varieties — have just begun to bud white flowers.

Boyer's trees need to be pollinated. Incompletely pollinated blooms would still grow apples, he said, but the fruit would be small and misshapen, suitable only for low-profit juice.

This year, he will pay dearly for the precious bees — $13,000 for 200 hives, the same price that 300 hives cost him last year.

The scene is being repeated throughout the country, where honeybees, scientifically known as Apis mellifera, are required to pollinate a third of the nation's food crops, including almonds, cherries, blueberries, pears, strawberries and pumpkins.

[snip]

VanEngelsdorp, 37, quickly eliminated the most obvious suspects: Varroa and tracheal mites, which have occasionally wrought damage on hives since the 1980s.

At the state lab in Harrisburg, Pa., VanEngelsdorp checked bee samples from Pennsylvania and Georgia. He washed bees with soapy water to dislodge Varroa mites and cut the thorax of the bees to look for tracheal mites; he found that the number of mites was not unusually high.

His next guess was amoebic infection. He scanned the bees' kidneys for cysts and found a handful, but not enough to explain the population decline.

VanEngelsdorp dug through scientific literature looking for other mass disappearances.

He found the first reference in a 1869 federal report, detailing a mysterious bee disappearance. There was only speculation as to the cause — possibly poisonous honey or maybe a hot summer.

A 1923 handbook on bee culture noted that a "disappearing disease" went away in a short time without treatment. There was a reference to "fall dwindle" in a 1965 scientific article to describe sudden disappearances in Texas and Louisiana.

He found other references but no explanations.

[snip]

A number of the pollen samples went to Maryann Frazier, a honeybee specialist at Penn State who has been coordinating the pesticide investigation. Her group has been testing for 106 chemicals used to kill mites, funguses or other pests.

Scientists have focused on a new group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have spiked in popularity because they are safe for people, Frazier said. Studies have shown that these pesticides can kill bees and throw off their ability to learn and navigate, she said.

Researchers have yet to collect enough data to come to any conclusions, but the experience of French beekeepers casts doubt on the theory. France banned the most commonly used neonicotinoid in 1999 after complaints from beekeepers that it was killing their colonies. French hives, however, are doing no better now, experts said.

[snip]

If the cause is not a poison, it is most likely a parasite.

UC San Francisco researchers announced in April that they had found a single-celled protozoan called Nosema ceranae in bees from colonies with the collapse disorder.

Unfortunately, Bromenshenk said, "we see equal levels of Nosema in CCD colonies and healthy colonies."

[snip]

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The idea that a pathogen is involved is supported by recent experiments conducted by VanEngelsdorp and USDA entomologist Jeffrey S. Pettis.

One of the unusual features of the disorder is that the predators of abandoned beehives, such as hive beetles and wax moths, refuse to venture into infected hives for weeks or longer.

"It's as if there is something repellent or toxic about the colony," said Hayes, the Florida inspector.

[snip]

In the absence of knowledge, theories have proliferated, including one that Osama bin Laden has engineered the die-off to disrupt American agriculture.

One of the most pervasive theories is that cellphone transmissions are causing the disappearances — an idea that originated with a recent German study. Berenbaum called the theory "a complete figment of the imagination."

The German physicist who conducted the tiny study "disclaimed the connection to cellphones," she said. "What they put in the colony was a cordless phone. Whoever translated the story didn't know the difference."

Update June 16: University of Montana has an up-to-date Honey Bee CCD page.

For those who read the Los Angeles Times,

Rumsfeld is going to be involved with the paper:

....it's now Rumsfeldgate at the Los Angeles Times. I'm told that Donald Rumsfeld was asked to guest-edit the newspaper's "Current" opinion section which appears on Sundays. The ex-Defense Secretary is a long-time personal and professional friend of LA Times publisher David Hiller, who supervises the paper's editorial, Op-Ed and opinion pages. Rumsfeld also has strong ties to the LA Times' parent company since he was a member of Tribune Co.'s board of directors for years. Sources tell me that Rumsfeld's selection was suggested and approved by Hiller. The former Pentagon chief was expected to follow Hollywood producer Brian Grazer as a Current guest editor under the paper's new quarterly program. Grazer's special section was supposed to appear today but was killed by Hiller (photo below) on Thursday "to avoid even the appearance of conflict" after a newsroom uproar over editorial pages editor Andres Martinez dating a Hollywood publicist whose firm represents Grazer. Martinez resigned in protest. "I think it's fair to say that we got ourselves into a predicament and we should not have let it happen," Hiller said about Grazergate. "The trust our readers place in us, built over 125 years, is of the highest importance and we try never to do anything that would call that into question." But for the LA Times' editorial pages to even be talking to Rumsfeld about guest-editing Current much less offering him the gig, given the Hiller and Tribune Co. connections, is yet another wrinkle in this saga about journalism ethics: here's an even more clear impression of favoritism than Grazergate.

Update: John Amato at Crooks and Liars has more.