You may have heard about the little back-and-forth between Senator Scott Brown and his likely general election opponent, Elizabeth Warren. Briefly, at a debate a questioner noted that Brown paid for college in part by posing nude in Cosmopolitan, then asked the Democratic candidates how they paid for college. Warren joked that she kept her clothes on, and later on a radio show, Brown responded to that by saying, "Thank God." People are understandably mad at him. But as Jon Cohn points out, what Brown said next is troubling in a different way:

Now that Sarah Palin has finally admitted what some of us understood a long time ago -- that she is not going to run for president in 2012 -- some liberals are less than entirely relieved. After all, she's only 47, so she could torment us with a potential presidential candidacy for a couple of decades to come. But I'm not worried. Maybe I'm seeing this particular glass as a bit too full, but it does seem that even in today's Republican Party, at least some measure of seriousness is required to get all the way to the finish line. Candidates who are absurdly unprepared or insanely radical (or both) can make a splash, but they have a lot of trouble putting together a campaign that can go the distance (see Bachmann, Michele).

It’s no exaggeration to say that before Steve Jobs and Apple, computers were esoteric machines for researchers and academics. Few people had a chance to interact with them, and their relevance to everyday life was marginal. This changed with the Apple II. Introduced in 1977, it was the first successful mainstream computer, and its follow-up, the Macintosh, was the first mass market-computer to feature a graphical user interface -- a radical change in how we used and interacted with computers.

I don’t think I’m alone in initially dismissing the Wall Street protesters as the same ill-informed, ideologues who protested the WTO and the imprisonment of Mumia in one pointless breath throughout the late '90s and early aughts. It was hard for me to take seriously the political sentiments of the mostly privileged college kids who wanted to smash in Starbucks' windows. That was especially true given that I had maxed out my Federal Work Study hours and had taken a part-time job at a local Starbucks. It was the highest paying job I’d ever had and the first one at which I was offered health insurance, despite my being only part-time, and I had a pretty good idea of who was going to have to clean up the messes those protesters made.

With the far right wing no longer satisfied by the spotlessness of Rick Perry's conservative record, Herman Cain has begun to rise as an alternative for movement conservatives. He won a decisive first place at the Florida GOP's straw poll two weeks ago, which was followed by a bump in his polls. One survey of national Republicans conducted last week put Cain in third, while, as Jamelle noted earlier, a new poll from this morning has Cain tied with Perry for second.