The Stimulist

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with an easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

Twitter has done it again. In the same vein as the youtube wedding dance phenomenon, a 28-year-old living with his crass and cantankerous 73-year-old father has somehow amassed, with only 21 tweets, 148,333 followers. Yes: thousands of people tune in to hear embittered gems like "Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn't stand for sh*t. Just sat there. Big let down." Not exactly the subject of optimistic paternal encouragement, Justin of Sh*t My Dad Says, isn't bothered by his father telling him he amounts to nothing. Au contraire! Justin says of his father, "He is awesome. I just write down sh*t that he says."

In the event that you've made it out of your parents' house without an unreasonable amount of emotional scarring, don't assume you're in the clear--particularly if you've got an X chromosome--because pharmaceutical companies have news for you: You're dysfunctional, specifically sexually. That's the subject of Liz Canner's new "Orgasm Inc.," a documentary that scrapes up the dirt on pharmaceutical companies who, instead of remedying our illnesses, are inventing them. While the female orgasm might be an elusive creature, it is not, by any means, on the endangered species list. Female Sexual Dysfunction? It's nothing a little TLC can't fix. More

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with an easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking and generally optimistic stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. We want to know what you think! Send comments to feedback@takepart.com.

As the "birther conspiracy" continues to ignite debates--and sometimes screaming monologues--across the country, Eric Burns at The Stimulist says it's becoming increasingly clear that the Right is clinging to a life preserver of fear and hatred to stay afloat. And while some media figures have debunked the Right's fabrications and labeled them exactly what they are--xenophobia--we can't expect to hear the same kind of coverage from conservative media any day soon. At a time when the Right is passing off conspiracy theories as patriotic grassroots movements, it's dire that the media delivers the truth. Media Matters answered the call this week, challenging CNN to take a stand against Lou Dobbs' support of the birthers.

When they're not telling untruths, the Right is telling half truths, says The Stimulist's Sean Braswell.  The Right is drawing "real" people into their campaigns to represent the average American. The problem is that the line becomes blurred between reality and fiction. The Jessica Lynches and Joe the Plumbers of America are the contemporary versions of the "average citizen" actors that characterized attacks on Clinton's health care plan . The strategy smacks of disingenuity, but represents a practice that has been working to sway public opinion since the LBJ era. But attacking these (at least partly) fictional characters may not be in the best interest of Democrats. More

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with an easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking and generally optimistic stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. We're just getting the series started, and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad. Email feedback@takepart.com to let us know what you think.

While President Obama and the Democratic leadership look to embrace the race debate at this week's Beer Summit, the Republicans have come up with a strategy of their own--ignoring race entirely. GOP party chairman Michael Steele turned down a sterling opportunity to reach out to the Latino community at the National Council of La Raza this week, leading Alicia Menendez to ask, "if the GOP cannot get it together enough to send a high-profile representative to one of the largest gatherings of Latino leaders in the country, what should we expect when comprehensive immigration reform hits the House floor?" It's no secret that the GOP is not the favored party of the Latino community come election day, but they could at least show some effort to reach out to constituents during the other 364 days of the year. If not, says Menendez, a huge segment of the American population could go unnoticed--which is bad for Latinos and even worse for the American people. More

Even though President Obama has repeated in press conferences and town hall meetings that health care reform is not about him, the debate on the Hill undeniably is. The White House and the Democrats in Congress are looking to use Obama's popularity to propel a reform program 50 years in the making, while the Republicans--lacking the votes to filibuster any proposal--hope to play the "we told you so" card should the system fail.

Although the GOP has become the Party of No on the topic of health care, their heckling from the sidelines may be having some effect on public opinion, whether from the Red States or those pivotal Blue Dog Democrats. As the health care reform debate pushes on, it looks like Obama is losing some ground. More

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with an easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking and generally optimistic stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. We're just getting the series started, and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad. Email feedback@takepart.com to let us know what you think.

The twittersphere was buzzing this week with the $847 million sale of online shoe giant Zappos.com to online book giant Amazon.com. Thanks to Twitter-darling and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, the online shoe store has become one of the fastest growing online retailers since almost going the way of Pets.com on the cusp of the late-'90s dot-com bust. Hsieh's secret? A dedication to customer service (imagine that!) and a company culture that makes your office look like "Office Space" without Milton. Zappos offers free return shipping for a year, is known for surprising customers with next-day delivery upgrades, and features a round-the-clock staff of real, unscripted customer service agents. "It's clear that Amazon's purchase of Zappos wasn't about getting their warehouses or their stocks of shoes," quips The Stimulist's Josh Skolnick. "They paid millions to get Tony Hsieh to teach them how online customer service is done."

It seems Hsieh might be just as good at selling multimillion-dollar web companies as he is at hawking shoes. Before taking the helm at Zappos, Hsieh walked away from an fledgling web start-up with $265 million of Microsoft's money (which may be why he can afford to take home a paltry salary of $36,000 even as Zappos approaches $1 billion in sales). In Hsieh's case, quitters do win--and it's not all that uncommon if you ask Alicia Menendez. More

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with an easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking and generally optimistic stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. We're just getting the series started, and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad. Email feedback@takepart.com to let us know what you think.

The biggest news to come out of last week's G-8's conference was that there was no news at all. The world's most important powers bobbled international economic reform, failed to come to any agreement on Iran, and hit a dead end when it came to setting any meaningful climate change policy. Case in point: the REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) program. Having already received the UN go-ahead in 2007, the cap-and-trade-type scheme could put an immediate stop to deforestation and the millions of tons of carbon emissions that come with it. Despite REDD's obvious merits, concerns that it could provide Yucca Mountain-sized loopholes for exploitation by the biggest polluters have hindered its adoption by the international community.

Although the US cap-and-trade bill has had slightly more success, it's passage won't be an easy feat either. Environmentalists despise the bill because it codifies industrial pollution. Big business despises the bill because it regulates pollution in the first place. It'll take a not-so-desirable mess of compromises to get anything substantial passed, but, says Josh Skolnick, it's not like Congress hasn't been through this before. Looking back to the bygone days of acid rain along the Eastern Seaboard, Skolnick reminds us that the elder Bush's cap-and-trade policies were largely responsible for shrinking the sulfur dioxide cloud. More

Editor's note: With all the bad news out there, why not bid farewell to the week with a easy-to-digest roundup of our favorite forward looking and generally optimistic stories from the fine folks at The Stimulist. We're just getting the series started, and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad. Email feedback@takepart.com to let us know what you think.

While the world turned its eyes to the Staples Center for Tuesday's touching MJ sendoff (which was more spectacle than memorial if you ask Carlos Watson), you can bet that the Ayatollahs in Tehran were happy to be out of the spotlight. Despite a new round of Iranian protests and crackdowns, it doesn't look like the #iranelection Twitter revolution is going to result in a non-virtual one—for now. Revolutions are not built in a day, and Iran's last great revolution in 1979 took more than nine years to come to fruition.

Up north in Alaska, Sarah Palin was attempting a revolution of her own. The would-be vice president raised eyebrows by declaring her independence from the governor's mansion a day before the Fourth of July, leaving politicos to ponder her motives. Whether you think Palin is gunning for a 2012 presidential bid or a spot in the Conservative pantheon, there's no doubt that she's going to be making major bank with book deals and endorsements on the horizon, not to mention the estimated $1 million in lawyer fees she'll save by dodging the executive ethics lawsuits that were coming her way. More

Hoping to start a small-time bookstore revolution, a quaint Vermont bookery has taken a risk on new technology that it hopes will do for the the printed page what iTunes did for music.

The Northshire Bookstore in Machester Center, Vt. is the first independent bookseller in the nation to offer on-demand bookprinting, using an Espresso Book Machine or "Lurch," to crank out hard copies of digital selections from a massive online database of more than 85,000 titles.

Gone are the days of dusty, book-lined aisles and waiting for incoming book shipments. Customers at Northshire now have instant access to a catalog of books rivaling that of internet media giants like Amazon.com--without having to wait three to five days for the books to arrive in the mail. Customers now have a wider selection to choose from, and booksellers no longer have to keep huge warehouses of books, much of which ends up going to waste. More