The Village Idiots—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine) – Yesterday at a Middle East Institute function, however, honesty appears to have gotten the better of professional courtesy. A panel of three Middle Eastern journalists were asked by ThinkProgress what they felt about the Washington press corps and their knowledge of Middle Eastern issues. Here’s the answer from Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for MBC, a satellite TV network in Dubai[.]
Study surveys 25,000 owners, reveals most highly recommended vehicles – "Typically, car buyers are very pleased when they first drive their new car off the dealer lot. But just as a vehicle's worth depreciates over time, some car owners' level of confidence depreciates," says George Peterson, president of AutoPacific. "We have quantified their level of confidence to see which new car owners will recommend their model most and this is information which will help new car shoppers make informed, confident buying decisions. While many owners can be happy with their new cars, it takes another level of confidence to recommend it."
Top 10 remodeling projects for resale (Page 1 of 5) – Here's the lowdown on the top 10 home improvement projects by resale value from this 19th annual report, which is based on e-mail surveys returned from 2,188 members of the National Association of Realtors. In calculating costs, the report authors considered complete cost-to-construct figures (including labor, material, subtrade contractors and gross profit).
Fimoculous.com – misc – 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008 – Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year[.]
Best of the Autoblog Speech Bubble Comics – Autoblog – Though the events of the day are serious matters, we had our fun and kept things light by using this image over and over again, each time adding different speech bubbles with what we thought each CEO was thinking. They were fun to create and we didn't expect it to turn into a "thing", but we've gotten so many requests to compile all of these speech bubble comics in one place that today we've decided to oblige.
Retailer Survival Tips – Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog – The holidays are going to stink. But I'm hopeful that the crisis will be cathartic for retailers, and that the smart ones will embark in 2009 on the true journeys of reinvention that, up to now, they've barely even recognized, let alone begun.
Philadelphia Will Do » Give This The Pulitzer – Does it get any better than these courtroom sketches of Rod Blagojevich? Why yes, yes it does, in the form of a Chicago Sun-Times story headlined, “Is Blago’s hair a sign of sickness?
Economist’s View: “Capitalist Fools” – Was there any single decision which, had it been reversed, would have changed the course of history? … The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. … The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.
The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words — Copyblogger – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride It may be inconceivable for you to misuse a word, but a quick look around the web reveals plenty of people doing it. And it’s all too easy when we hear or see others use words incorrectly and parrot them without knowing it’s wrong.
