There’s a classic case with eyeglasses. You decide you’re going to go shopping for a new pair of eyeglasses, and you go into Lenscrafters. You say, I don’t like the prices here. So you go down the road to a place called Pearl Vision, you say, no, no I’m going to go to a cheaper place. So you go to Target Optical, or maybe Sears Optical, or maybe you go to Macy’s Optical. You go to Sunglass Hut. What you don’t realize, because you’re going to all these different branded stores, is that all these stores are all owned by Luxottica, an Italian eyewear Goliath.

A high school teacher of mine told the story of playing a trading game as part of teacher training on race and social issues. The kicker was that the game was rigged. My teacher wound up in the group the game was rigged against. A competitive guy, he grew increasingly frustrated, and eventually stood off to the side and asked others to play his turn for him. Throughout the game, the group the game was rigged for downplayed or outright denied their own advantage and that the game was unfair.

It's extremely unlikely that someone would catch Ebola from simply being on the same plane or in the same public space with someone who was affected. That's because Ebola doesn't tend to travel through the air like the flu and other respiratory illnesses.

Those two states are part of a nationwide drop in statehouse coverage. Since 2003, the number of full-time reporters covering state legislatures for daily newspapers has declined 35 percent, according to a new study published Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Less than one third of the 801 daily newspapers in the U.S. send a reporter — full-time or part-time — to state capitol buildings, Pew found, citing data from the Alliance of Audited Media.

Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, seeing its architects return to prime time to smugly slam President Obama while taking no responsibility for their own, far greater, failures is infuriating.

Good article explaining the "blue slip" tradition and how its been used and abused by republicans and occasionally conservative dems.

It should be said that, in its original use, the blue-slip was a simple note on the acceptability of the nominee....

In another dog bites man story, as I expected, Obama was lying when he posted new DOJ guidelines for dealing with federal marijuana crimes in states where it is legal.

The green-cross storefronts of medical marijuana dispensaries are common in much of Washington, and the state is plowing ahead with licensing people to grow and sell recreational pot to adults.

But a federal trial scheduled to begin in the coming weeks for five people in Spokane suggests not all is OK with weed in the state.

Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what is going on and what has been happening in the world over the past several decades. After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun.

The Republican-led House abruptly and unexpectedly passed a Medicare physician payment fix Thursday by an unrecorded voice vote, amid questions about whether the bill had the votes to clear the chamber.

Once again democrats help the republicans avoid taking a politically damaging vote. During the run up to the midterm elections when we should be doing everything we can to make sure voters know exactly where their representatives stand.

A couple months ago, a Gallup poll recorded a small uptick in the percentage of Americans who identify as “liberal” — to 23 percent, or what Gallup, eliding the margin of error in the poll, called a “new high.”  My Post colleague Chris Cillizza wondered if liberal was “no longer a dirty word.”

Boggs appears so out-of-step with Obama's past nominees because he is part of an all-or-nothing package of six judicial nominees agreed to by the president and Georgia's two Republican senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, months ago. Obama made some pretty big concessions: Four of the six nominees are GOP picks, and just one of the six is African American -- a lack of diversity that Georgia Democrats argue doesn't reflect the population those judges will oversee.

Lowery, for one, was so baffled by the president's choice that he said it must have been a staff error.

Online campaigns designed to punish particular people are called “lulz,” the phonetic version of the acronym “LOL,” meaning laugh out loud, which describes both the systematic process for chasing people off the Internet as well as the result (maximum amusement!). Lulz has “standard operating procedures” and the first of those procedures is trolling, or leaving a large volume of offensive comments on a person’s blog and tweeting hateful messages to them. Trolling is both a signal and a threat.

Capitalist economics is supposed to be a virtuous circle: companies generate profits which generate reinvestment, which generates employment, which boosts demand, which in turn generates higher profits. But what if profits don't generate reinvestment and companies simply hold onto the loot? What if "reinvestment" takes the form of financialization rather than real product development? What if boosting productivity means mechanization that leads to job losses, rather than job gains?

On June 25, a federal judge approved a subpoena, to be served by Chevron to Microsoft, granting the oil company private Internet and phone data related to 30 email addresses, including those related to environmental nonprofits, activists, journalists and lawyers.

In particular, the subpoena calls for the production of all documents related to “the identity of the users of the email addresses, including 'all names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, billing information, date of account creation, account information and all other identifying information.”

For those worried about privacy here is an anonymous search engine. Does not track or keep data on your searches.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Another irresponsible gun owner, this time a sheriff. Another death. I could post something like this every day. Why read one more article about one more "accidental" gun death. Its so common its back page news or not news at all. It doesn't get the views, it doesn't get the clicks, it doesn't make money. Why even put it on the web site.

Lest we forget.

A cookout in Tennessee ended in tragedy over the weekend when a 3-year-old child accidentally shot and killed the wife of a Wilson County sheriff’s deputy.

As he sold four handguns in a South Side parking lot last year, Levaine Tanksley boasted to his customer that there were plenty more illicit weapons available, investigators say.

"Twenty-five more in four hours," Tanksley told his customer, who was secretly working for law enforcement and recording the conversation. "Give me $5,000 and you can put your order in then. I'll get you whatever, give me a list."