Want details quickly adjusted before you print a batch of near-perfect family photos? Or, need to adjust your company's logo to match seasonal festivities (like the upcoming Easter holiday)? Swiftly puts you in touch with a designer that will make it happen.
    
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Deep kitchen cabinet drawers are great for stashing your pots and pans away, but they can also easily turn into a mess. This DIY project brings order to that drawer, and the panels can be repositioned any way you like in the future.
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Bacon is delicious, and keeping it from shrinking when cooking is a popular topic . Instructables user craftclarity wanted a more scientific, rigorous approach to keeping bacon from shrinking, so he put a number of popular tricks to the test. Which was the best? The good old oven.
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When you want to quench your thirst on an airplane, make sure the water you get came from a bottle. As the Huffington Post notes, there's a strong likelihood you'll get some pretty bad stuff inside if it was obtained from the tap.
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We don't remember phone numbers too often nowadays because our smartphones remember them for us. But what about when you need to dial an extension, too? Rather than write it down in a note, Yahoo! Tech reveals a simple way to make your phone do the work for you.
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If you've ever owned an umbrella, you've probably also had to buy a replacement for said umbrella at some point. Because umbrellas all too often fail. Digg reveals why—and how to spot an umbrella that sucks a little less than average.
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The 19-year-old admitted to setting two fires in the store after midnight to serve as a diversion. Police say that she was visible on surveillance cameras setting a rack of jeans and some birdseed on fire.
Setting birdseed on fire is more complex than we would have thought: Walmart had to call in experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine which items on the animal-feed shelf were safe to sell.
Teen Charged With Setting 2 Fires In Walmart To Mask Shoplifting [CBS Minneapolis]
Our story doesn’t end with a shopping spree montage and slow motion footage of the man making it rain cash, however, but not for lack of trying: WGME.com says that a homeless man had filled up shopping bags full of cash from a glitchy ATM in Portland before police arrived and yes, made him give it back.
According to the police, a woman called the police at about 5:30 a.m. one morning to report that a man was spending a lot of time at the ATM while she was waiting to use it.
When police showed up at saw him stuffing cash into shopping bags, they realized it was the same man who’d been sleeping in the ATM vestibule earlier and had been told to move along.
Apparently the man had used his bank card to withdraw $140 and then decided to just keep going and take out more.
“And it gave it to him,” said a police lieutenant. The bank decided it was a glitch, and won’t be pressing charges. At least we got to keep the candy, so that story still wins.
ATM glitch gives homeless man $37,000 [WGME.com]
Surprise, y’all!
Uncle Bubba’s Seafood & Oyster House in Savannah, GA was the defendant in a lawsuit from employees claiming the restaurant fostered a racist environment. During the course of that suit, Deen, a co-owner along with her brother, the “Bubba” part of the equation, admitted to using racist language, and saw her business deals with retailers vanish as a result.
The restaurant is closed as of yesterday, it said in a statement.
“Since its opening in 2004, Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House has been a destination for residents and tourists in Savannah, offering the region’s freshest seafood and oysters. However, the restaurant’s owner and operator, Bubba Hiers, has made the decision to close the restaurant in order to explore development options for the waterfront property on which the restaurant is located. At this point, no specific plans have been announced and a range of uses are under consideration in order realize the highest and best use for the property.”
WSAV-TV spoke to several workers who say they didn’t get any formal notification that the restaurant had permanently closed, and others reportedly said as much on the restaurant’s Facebook page. That page is no longer up.
To that end, the Savannah Morning News says one such post from someone who said she’d worked there for seven years: “I’ve been water works all a.m. I’ve worked there since I was 16. I woke up this a.m. to no job and no forewarning.”
According to that media outlet, employees were collecting their severance checks in the restaurant’s parking lot yesterday morning.
Uncle Bubba’s, co-owned by Paula Deen and her brother, closes after 10 years [Savannah Morning News]
Uncle Bubba’s Seafood & Oyster House Closes it Doors [WSAV.com]
I braved the aisles of the world’s biggest Walmart in search of the cookies, but they weren’t available. Not among the half-dozen other exotic Oreo flavors, and not even on an endcap or other special display. We’ll have to depend on other sites’ reviews of them, then.
Junk Food Guy got hold of some, taking pictures to prove that they’re real and tasting them so the rest of us don’t have to. His verdict? The fruit punch flavor is powerful, sometimes veering into “cherry cough syrup territory.”
Like fruit punch, the creme is based on high fructose corn syrup, “natural and artificial flavors,” citric acid, and red food dye. We do not know whether those “natural flavors” include any fruit, but it seems unlikely.
The combination of fruit punch creme and the Golden Oreo cookie wafers have an unexpected overall effect, though. Junk Food Guy says that when you taste the creme alone, it’s like a cherry Starburst. The effect of the entire cookie, though, is like a cherry pie. That leaves us with the important question: why aren’t there cherry pie Oreos?
Review: Fruit Punch Oreos (Limited Edition) [Junk Food Guy]
This is not Crockett. But it’s really cute. (Ian.H)
A couple in England was worried when their cat Crockett went missing, right around the time they’d donated a couch to a local charity shop, reports The Daily Mail. He had been gone for five days without a trace, something that wasn’t like him, his owners say.
“We noticed Crockett was missing straight away but could not think where he might have gone,” the woman explained. “He doesn’t go anywhere so I was really worried.”
It wasn’t until the sofa’s new owners heard meowing inside the couch, days after it’d been picked up, taken to the shop to sit for a few days and resold, that Crockett’s presence was discovered.
The manager for the charity shop says it was a shock to hear a couch-and-cat-combo had been sold to customers.
“I couldn’t believe what I was told when a customer phoned to say that they had bought a sofa from our shop and that they were delighted with the purchase except for the fact it had a cat inside,” she said.
Crockett’s family thinks he crawled in when the couch was taken apart so it could be moved out of his owners’ house, making it a bit tricky to get him out again.
“In order to release the cat they had to rip the material under the sofa as Crockett had lodged himself well into the back,” the manager said.
Crockett’s accidental owners calmed him down, fed him and then called the shop to reunite him with his people. Then everyone gathered round to listen to the tale of Crockett’s Travels And The Evil, Cat-Eating Couch.
‘We gave our sofa to a charity shop – with our missing CAT hiding in it’ [Daily Mail]
Follow MBQ on Twitter to see if her cat ever gets stuck in a couch or just stuck on top of the refrigerator, again: @marybethquirk
Dear Lifehacker,
I want my kids to grow into happy, well-adjusted adults. When it comes to social skills, though, I'm at a loss. One of my kids seems lonely yet disinterested in others, while the other is the terror of the schoolyard. What can I do to help them develop the social skills they need for life?
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Google Drive, and the apps in it—Docs, Sheets, and Slides—are great for people looking for a simple Office suite. It's free, makes collaboration easy, and pretty much anyone can use it. But if you're used to something more traditional, like Microsoft Office, you may be hesitant to use it. Here's how to make Google Drive work more like the desktop suites you're used to.
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Looking to whip your money habits into shape, but don't know where to start? In honor of Financial Literacy Month, here are some free resources that'll help teach you to get a hold of your finances.
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Cooking soft-boiled eggs is usually a matter of careful timing and not too much heat. It can be hit-or-miss, so the folks at America's Test Kitchen wanted a more repeatable method that worked every time. The secret? Way less water than you think—about a half-inch, tops.
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There are lots of things people do to get a super flaky pie crust—using vodka instead of water , for example—but this trick is useful if you want a really flaky crust, or if you don't have a rolling pin. Just reach for a cheese grater, as this video explains—you'll get an even better, flakier crust.
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I've purchased a lot of used cars. Handfuls of used cars, if you want to get technical about it. So many used cars that I now consider myself, Doug DeMuro, to be a bona fide used car expert. This means that I am able to provide excellent used car tips to readers like you; truly informative tips such as: FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T BUY A F***ING USED CAR!
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After painting a room of your house, you might struggle to get rid of the unpleasant fumes. Not to worry! As the Huffington Post points out, you just need to cut up an onion.
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You're a good parent and you want to help your kids grow up to be happy and successful. So, when you notice them doing something right, you jump in with praise and encouragement. But is all that praise sending the right message?
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Pizza Hut is a global menace. They simply won’t stop stuffing terrifying and unusual things in their pizza crusts. While nothing will ever top the horror of the Marmite-stuffed crust, the new Flying Fish Roe Salmon Cream Cheese Pizza is even stranger to Americans: its crust is stuffed with salmon-flavored cream cheese dotted with salmon roe. Yep, fish eggs.
Here’s the TV ad for this limited-time monstrosity. Even if you don’t speak Cantonese, swirling fish eggs and pretty ladies are an international language that everyone understands.
The toppings themselves sound quite appealing. The fish egg pizza comes in two versions. There’s the Crayfish Seafood Deluxe, which features, as you might imagine, seafood. Toppings include crayfish, scallops, shrimp, clams, cherry tomatoes, peppers, red onions, and Thousand Island sauce. For people who want less fish on their fish egg pizzas, there’s the Sausage, Pepperoni & Pomelo. Pome-what?
A pomelo, as it turns out, is a very large pear-shaped citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia that tastes like a milder, less bitter version of a grapefruit. People do put them in salads, so it’s not a completely wacky pizza topping. that’s not the only fruit on this pizza: it also has sausage, pepperoni, cherry tomatoes, peaches, mushrooms, peppers, and berry sauce.
Around the World: Pizza Hut’s Latest in Hong Kong is Crust Stuffed with Fish Eggs [Brand Eating]
Specials [Pizza Hut Hong Kong]
He looks kind of sheepish, eh? (KCRG-TV)
A spokesman with the USPS tells KCRG-TV that officials had no choice but to stop bringing the mail to the block over safety concerns for the carrier.
“The dog has interfered, on a number of occasions, with the delivery of the mail in that particular neighborhood,” said a spokesman.
The tiny pooch’s intimidation tactics have some residents ticked off after the Post Office sent them letters saying that the mail is on hold and they’ll have to pick it up instead, after the mail carrier said he saw the dog off the leash for a fifth time.
“It’s a bunch of poop. I think it’s got stamps on it and it says to deliver it, they should deliver it,” said one neighbor.
The owner of the dog says sometimes it gets out but usually stays inside and is friendly, calling it a “nice dog” that plays with his kids. But one of his neighbors disagrees.
“We got chased a couple times just bringing groceries into our house in our own driveway. And then, we called Animal Control at that point and they did come and seize the dogs because it did not have its vaccines up to date,” the neighbor said. “Two weeks later my five-year-old was bit in the leg in the back of our own yard.”
Mail delivery is on hold until Cujo (not his real name) is contained, the spokesman says.
“Once we know that the dog owner has taken responsibility and make sure that dog is not running free in that neighborhood, the mail delivery will continue,” he said.
Dog Causes Mail Delivery Holdup [KCRG.com]
Follow MBQ on Twitter where she will never suspend mail delivery: @marybethquirk
It is both cynical and accurate for the Court to have acknowledged that money is the single most important part of our political system. Still — in the most immediate sense, a post-McCutcheon world might not seem different at all. The very wealthiest, most determined donors have long since become experts at finding ways to see money funneled to their candidates of choice. They simply may now act directly, rather than finding back doors through the process.
As the 2014 campaign season grows more heated heading into November’s midterm elections, though, we will probably see the ripple effects of today’s ruling start to spread out.
What changes with the ruling
The ruling lets stand existing Federal Election Commission limits on donations to individual candidates and political committees, but removes caps on the total amount a person could donate to all candidates and committees. Click for full-size chart.
Lifting the limit on total contributions allows an individual donor to spread the wealth, as it were, and spend his or her cash on many more candidates. That’s what McCutcheon, who filed the initial suit, wanted: to send contributions well under the limit ($1776, because of course) to a couple of dozen candidates during the same election cycle. Because of the aggregate limit, he couldn’t. Now he can.
How much money would a big donor donate if a big donor could donate money?
Mr. McCutcheon does not have many peers: in terms of specifically who can do specifically what with their money, today’s ruling affects a vanishingly small number of people.
The Center For Responsive Politics estimates that 0.4% of Americans ever donate more than $200 to political campaigns, and 0.1% of them ever give more than $2500 in a single donation. In the entire country, only 591 donors ran into the aggregate giving limit during the 2012 campaign season, “accounting for only $34.1 million of the estimated $3.1 billion” raised and spent.
The rest of that $3.1 billion didn’t exactly come from other, smaller-scale individual donors, though. Crowdfunding might be the major zeitgeist of 2014, but there’s only so far it can get you.
If 50,000 donors can find $10 each to give, that’s a huge number of donors! And it’s also only half a million dollars. A solid million donors giving $10 each is still only $10 million. Most of the big money comes from the business world and the people in it.
So if individual donations are just a (large) fraction of overall funds raised, why is McCutcheon such a big deal?
“The campaign” isn’t just the person running for office
The danger in the McCutcheon ruling lies not so much with the aggregate donations to particular candidates. In many races, $2600 is comparatively small potatoes and a few extra donations of that size scattered around probably won’t change the system all that much.
The danger comes from the other limit that was lifted: the cap of $74,600 in donations to the kind of political action committee that can give money to candidates. And there’s no secrecy there: if John Smith gives $5000 to the Political Party National Committee, everyone knows it. And when the Political Party National Committee then turns around and cuts a check for $5000 to the Jane Doe re-election campaign, most people can effectively connect the dots.
Now, without an annual limit, a donor can contribute to as many of these organizations as she or he wishes, just as that donor can contribute to more candidates. And that can have a much deeper or broader effect.
Chart explaining the multiplying effect, via OpenSecrets.org.
And now that a donor can cut $5000 checks to as many PACs as they can find, there’s no reason for there not to be a hundred different committees working specifically toward re-electing Jane Doe. The lucky fictitious Mr. Smith can now donate to them all.
Corruption is only corruption when you are very bad at it
The ludicrously wealthy don’t donate to political campaigns because they like someone’s tie collection. Those donations are an investment — one from which they expect a return.
If John Smith got rich running a logging business, he probably doesn’t want the law to change in favor of tree conservation. So he’s going to support candidates who don’t plan to focus on environmental regulation — and if there’s a candidate around who supports repealing environmental regulations, he thinks, even better!
Quid pro quo donations have been, and remain, strictly illegal. So even if he really wants to, John Smith can’t go to his incumbent representative and say, “I will give $1 million to PACs for your re-election campaign if you vote no on every environmental protection bill that comes up.”
He can, however, choose not to donate to the incumbent again if that representative does start voting in favor of environmental protection. And he can take that money that the incumbent was counting on and donate it to the primary in favor of the other guy instead. Campaigns are expensive; elected officials prefer to keep their biggest donors happy.
Of course, gentlemens’ unstated agreements are not against the law. They’re just “general influence,” and that was the driving force behind Chief Justice Robert’s opinion:
The only type of corruption that Congress may target is quid pro quo corruption. Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corruption. Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner “influence over or access to” elected officials or political parties. The line between quid pro quo corruption and general influence must be respected in order to safeguard basic First Amendment rights, and the Court must “err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.”
What This Means For The Rest Of Us
Every writer and commentator who has mentioned the McCutcheon ruling today has said “Citizens United” in the same breath, and with good reason. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in that case, anonymous corporate campaign contributions skyrocketed. When SCOTUS gives permission for more money to enter the political game, it happens. Immediately.
Five or six hundred individuals in the whole country got permission slips to change their behavior today. That’s not very many people at all. But what matters most is not just how many of them there are, but who they are, and how they act.
Behind every one of America’s worst companies stand many of America’s wealthiest men and women. And unlike John Smith above, they aren’t fictional. They have very real agendas they want to advance, to benefit both themselves and their businesses.
Comcast, for example, has already been greasing government palms ahead of pushing its merger with Time Warner Cable through the federal approval process. If high-ranking cable executives can slip a few hundred thousand or a few million here and there to their special friends in DC, now there’s no limit on their influence.
Or in other businesses: the Walton family still owns over 50% of Walmart, and Walmart has a vested interest in almost everything. They’re a key agitator for or against regulation in labor laws, building, manufacturing, imports, sales of items like guns and tobacco… they’re a behemoth. Surely, individual Waltons have bent more than a few individual ears in the House and Senate, and would undoubtedly like to develop even more influence with targeted lawmakers where possible.
In the end,the line between the regulators and the regulated is a thin and dotted one. Businessmen go into politics; politicians leave Washington and go back into business. Every last one of them wants to know who their friends are when rules need bending.
We all have the ability to contact our elected officials, but those whose speech is money shout the loudest. And that’s just the way it should be, Roberts said in his opinion:
We have consistently rejected attempts to suppress campaign speech based on other legislative objectives. No matter how desirable it may seem, it is not an acceptable governmental objective to “level the playing field,” or to “level electoral opportunities,” or to “equaliz[e] the financial resources of candidates.”
And what of the rest of us, who have to use our words instead of our wallets? In the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said, “[C]ampaign finance laws recognize that the First Amendment, which seeks to maintain a marketplace of political ideas and a ‘chain of communication between the people,’ and their representatives, cannot serve its purpose unless the public opinion it protects is able to influence government opinion.” He added:
Campaign finance laws recognize that large money contributions can break that chain. When money calls the tune, those ideas, representing the voices of the people, will not be heard.
