From BusinessWeek:

Call it an attempt to lock the barn door before the next group of horses escapes. Even as criticism has mounted that the Bush Administration has moved too slowly to stem the slide in housing and credit markets, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Mar. 13 announced a series of recommendations intended to prevent a recurrence of the lapses and errors that led to the meltdown in the first place.

"As we continue to address the current market stress, we must also examine the appropriate policy responses," Paulson said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. But he also sounded a note of caution aimed at heading off calls for more radical regulatory changes emanating from Congress, consumer groups, and others critical of the financial industry.

More here.

Nothing, aside from the panic that most older adults have that the Internet is turning their brains into gray goo.

From Salon.com:

The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature.

This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting "the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life," particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing's condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of "a fragmenting culture" in which "young men and women ... have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers."

More here.

From CrunchGear:

Remember the X-ray technology from Total Recall? A British company has developed what it calls “ThruVision” — a similar technology that “uses what it calls ‘passive imaging technology’ to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays — known as Terahertz or T-rays — that they emit,” according to Reuters. “Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.”

More here.

From People of the Web:

Walter Lewin is not merely dangling at the bottom of a 15-foot pendulum. He is swinging high and wide, his rapt audience of 300 counting off each cycle.

At 71, he's likely missed his window for a shot at Cirque du Soleil, but the Netherlands-born MIT physics professor seems happy with his own high wire act -- revealing to students, in the most unorthodox ways, the beauty of science.

More here.

From BoingBoing.com:

The Chinese government this week dispatched military troops and police to important monasteries in Tibet to crack down on the largest protests by ethnic Tibetan Buddhist monks in the Himalayan region in 20 years. Witnesses are reporting that trucks full of troops have surrounded Drepung monastery in Lhasa, as police surround nearby Sera monastery.

More here.

From the ACLU:

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported (warning: link is to a pdf document download) that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.

At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead.

More here.

Here's just a sampling of the names on that list (via the ACLU website):

Robert Johnson - 60 Minutes interviewed 12 men named Robert Johnson, all of whom reported being pulled aside and interrogated, sometimes for hours, nearly every time they go to the airport.
Alexandra Hay, a college student with a double major in French and English at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2004, when she joined an ACLU lawsuit due to problems she was having with the airline watch list.
Sarosh Syed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan working for the ACLU of Washington in Seattle also had problems flying. (Syed was also a plaintiff in the ACLU suit in 2004.)
9/11 Hijackers. While certainly these were individuals we all wish had been watched out for, they are, in fact, dead. Yet, the names of 14 of the 19 hijackers from 9/11 were on a copy of the list obtained by 60 Minutes . More evidence that the list is poorly maintained and full of junk names that will only serve to ensnare the innocent.
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. Name found on list obtained by 60 Minutes .
Saddam Hussein. Although he was imprisoned in Baghdad and in U.S. custody at the time, his name was also found in the database obtained by 60 Minutes. Again, this accomplishes nothing except ensnaring the innocent, diluting the list, and wasting the time of security workers.
Gary Smith. Another name that is extremely common in the United States, found on the no-fly list by 60 Minutes.
John Williams. Yet another common name found on the airline watch list by 60 Minutes.
U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D, Mass.) After repeated delays at airport security, the senator had trouble getting removed from the airline watch list despite calls to Homeland Security and eventually a personal conversation with the Secretary of DHS.
Representative John Lewis (D, Georgia). Being a hero of the Civil Rights Movement isn't enough to keep off the aviation watch lists, apparently.
Akif Rahman, founder of a computer consulting company from suburban Chicago, was detained and questioned for more than two hours by U.S. customs officials on four separate occasions when crossing the Canadian border. On one occasion he was held for 5 ½ hours, shackled to a chair, and physically searched. He was also separated from his wife and children (who were forced to wait in a small dirty public area without food or telephones). A U.S. citizen born in Springfield Illinois, Rahman is being represented by the ACLU of Illinois in a lawsuit over this treatment.
Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown was blocked from flying while on his way home from an 8-month deployment in Iraq. He was listed as a suspected terrorist due to a previous incident in which gunpowder was detected on his boots, most likely a residue of a previous tour in Iraq.
Asif Iqbal, a Rochester, NY, management consultant and University of Texas graduate who flies weekly to Syracuse for business, has been weekly detained and interrogated by local law enforcement because his name is shared by a former Guantánamo detainee (who was himself released from the extrajudicial detainment, presumably because of lack of evidence of terror involvement).
James Moore, author of a book critical of the Bush Administration, Bush's Brain ; problems flying.
Catherine ("Cat") Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens (R, Alaska). Problems flying.
Yusuf Islam, a singer and pop star formerly known as Cat Stevens. Author of song "Peace Train." His flight from London was diverted and forced to land in Maine once the government realized he was aboard, and he was barred from entering United States.
Major General Vernon Lewis (Ret.); a recipient of the Army's highest medal for service, the Distinguished Service Medal who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, Lewis had problems flying.

From CNBC:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should resign and the Fed should be abolished as a way to boost the falling dollar and speed up the recovery of the U.S. economy, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe Wednesday.

Asked what he would do if he were in Bernanke's shoes, Rogers, who slammed the Fed for pouring liquidity in the system and accepting mortgage-backed securities as guarantees, said: "I would abolish the Federal Reserve and I would resign."

More here.

From FoxNews.com:

Treffly Coyne was out of her car for just minutes and no more than 10 yards away.

But that was long and far enough to land her in court after a police officer spotted her sleeping 2-year-old daughter alone in the vehicle; Coyne had taken her two older daughters to pour $8.29 in coins into a Salvation Army kettle.

Minutes later, she was under arrest — the focus of both a police investigation and a probe by the state's child welfare agency. Now the case that has become an Internet flash point for people who either blast police for overstepping their authority or Coyne for putting a child in danger.

More here.

We have a new weekly segment here @ the Professor Politico Show which will focus on one subject each episode.

And here's our first subject:

Global Warming/Climate Change

From Cosmic Variance:

The widely accepted Global Warming Theory, is a pseudo science and must be abandoned. Here I explain what it is and why it is totally wrong.

The Global Warming Theory (GWT) believes that human activity considerably increased the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. As a result it leads to considerable warming up of the arth's surface. As a consequence it could leads to the melting of polar ice and cause raising sea level, and other catastrophies that would eventually render the planet earth un-inhabitable to human. Some GWT doomers even believe that we have passed a point of no return. i.e., the global warming cause by human is already so high it releases the methane gas frozen in the polar ice, and methane, being a more effective green house gas, causes more global warming, and it leads to to more green house gas being release and so it leads to run off global warming that destroys all life on earth.

More here.

And from Biology Cabinet:

Global Warming is not pseudoscience because it has always occurred cyclically in nature since the Earth was formed. However, the idea of an anthropogenic global warming is a pseudoscience. There is not convincing scientific support that human discharge of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the projected future, cause disastrous warming of the Earth's atmosphere and disturbance or change of the Earth's climate. There is considerable evidence that the current warming is entirely natural and obeys the periodical changes in the planetary system. The attribution of global warming to the CO2 generated from human activity is a fallacy.

More here.

Remember kids believe half of what you read and none of what you hear, especially when it comes to the mainstream media.

From Wired's Threat Level blog:

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, "Oops!!!", which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

More here.