If Glenn Beck had any marbles left, he's lost them now. Over at Vulture, Jerry Saltz asks, Is Glenn Beck's "Obama in Pee-Pee" Actually Art?

Ambling over to a tall pedestal, he lovingly cupped his hands around a jar filled with yellow liquid. He announced that he'd been drinking a lot of water all day, that this wasa jar of his own urine. He offered that this was his "yellow period," and told us it's "a warm piece of me," again seeming overinterested and excited, fondling the jar with both hands. Then he had an assistant bring him a little plastic figurine. It was a kind of dashboard Obama, maybe in a smock. Beck took the figure between his fingers, held it over the jar, and dropped it into the urine.

I've previously written about the evils of Amazon; here's another to add to the list. Martin Bekkelund reports on a woman who was Outlawed by Amazon DRM:

A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.

From the telekinetic facepalm department...io9 reports that
The CW is working on a sexed-up version of 70s British SF show The Tomorrow People:

More evidence (as if any was needed) that Obama is not a progressive: In Leaked Docs, Honeywell Cites Obama Ties As Key to Anti-Union Strategy

The third section, on Government Relations (GR), reveals Honeywell's hopes that its influence with the Obama administration can be leveraged to help combat union activity. Slide 18 of the confidential document states that Honeywell (HON) should “continue to grow positive relationships with elected officials, with federal agencies, focusing on local branches." These relationships, the document explains, "can be directed at union activity, if needed.” The plan suggests that Honeywell's Government Relations division can be used to “break up union cohesion across the country.” A picture of President Obama speaking at a Honeywell plant is included (see above), with a caption reading “HON has great relationships with Federal officials, focus is needed at the State and local levels."

Yet another reason to not store your data in "the cloud": CNET reports on a bill that would make data on servers wide open to federal regulatory agencies and state and local law enforcement: Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

Blogging at The Nation, Emily Douglas asks "Would Gay Voters Really Fall for a Pro-Marriage Equality GOP?" She points out,

Pro–marriage equality messages can veer dangerously close to implying that marriage is the only, or best, way for people to show commitment or protect their families. When people argue that same-sex marriage is necessary to access survivor benefits, private health insurance and housing, they are making a claim about fairness under the law. But they aren’t challenging the biggest assumptions about those laws: that private households, rather than an expanded welfare state, should be the main vehicle for guaranteeing a minimum level of security.

The New York Times crunches the numbers of who voted for whom in the Presidential race, and the trends those numbers reveal:
The Building Blocks of Re-Election.

Anyone watching the polls knew that Obama was going to win this election. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Electoral-vote.com and Nate Silver's Five-Thirty-Eight were on the mark, give or take a handful of points. How the hell did the GOP convince themselves this was a toss-up, or expect a Romney landslide? In These Times looks at The GOP’s Year of Magical Thinking

What follows is a sampling of commentary on the presidential race from conservative pundits. The majority of the items were among the most-read pieces on the conservative-leaning RealClearPolitics website, so they hardly represent fringe thinking. In fact, they were the Right’s mainstream thinking about the election. And that thinking was firmly and consistently at odds with the empirical evidence also available at the RCP site.

In These Times reports on a little noticed aspect of the corrupt revolving door between government and the corporate world: The Post-Election Politics Of The Revolving Door

The implications of all this should be self-evident. If, as a regulator, you know you can be paid better by working for companies you are regulating, you are more likely to go easier on those companies in hopes of landing that more lucrative job. Likewise, if you see managing campaigns as a gateway to a higher-paid post-election job in corporate PR, you are more likely to urge your political clients to pursue strategies that go easy on businesses you hope will soon be paying you a retainer. And if you are splitting time between advising candidates and shilling for special interests, your counsel will inevitably tilt towards those interests.

Hothardware.com reports on yet another reason to move to Free Software -- ads on your PC desktop. Microsoft's Big Hidden Windows 8 Feature: Built-In Advertising

Despite the fact that I've been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we're not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let's tackle this from a couple of different angles.