Even the stuffy, ordered world of academia likes a little surprise now and then. And those eggheads at New York University have certainly surprised the city, nay the nation, with the news that Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former king and queen Bill and Hillary, is the co-founder and co-chair of some sort of thing called the Of Many Institute. This Institute, housed within NYU I suppose, is dedicated to “multifaith” studies, its mission to harbor, uh, multifaithism and create conversations, etc. etc. So it’s a little squishy, but whatever. Though NYU’s website put Clinton’s bio up on their website a while back, it remained otherwise mum about the news until now. Why? Oh probably so a multifaith institute would get some press. It’s a smart move. Who knows how much work this will actually involve for the busy Clinton, who already works as an assistant vice provost at the university, but it’s a feather in NYU’s cap and certainly good PR for Clinton. It’s amazing that she’s so young and she’s gotten all these gigs! She must be checking Craigslist and sending out cover letters like crazy. Good for her. Gotta respect her tenacity. Page Six is careful to point out that Clinton and her banker husband recently bought “a $10.5 million luxury apartment across the street from Madison Square Park,” so I guess it makes sense that Clinton is working several jobs. Mortgages don’t pay themselves! Work, Chelsea, work! [Page Six]

More: Chelsea Clinton’s Secret Job - Richard Lawson - the Atlantic Wire

Atlantic pulled this story from the New York Post

From Rawstory:

An elderly woman who thought she lost everything including her dog after a tornado wiped out much of an Oklahoma City suburb found a glimmer of hope on Monday during an interview with CBS News reporter Anna Werner.

“I never lost consciousness,” Barbara Garcia recalled, standing atop a pile of rubble that used to be her home. “And I hollered for my little dog and he didn’t answer. He didn’t come. So I know he’s in here somewhere.”

As the interview continued, someone off camera pointed out that the dog was trapped underneath a pile of nearby debris.

“Aw, oh, Cathy!” the woman exclaimed. “Bless your little bitty heart. Help me!”

With a little help from Werner, the dog was freed.

“I thought God just answered one prayer, to let me be okay,” Garcia explained. “He answered both of them. This was my second prayer.”

More: Smashing the Absurd Myth That More Guns Make Us Safer

Gun rights advocates are jumping at recent polls showing that gun violence has decreased, and the public is unaware of this phenomenon. Rush Limbaugh argues that, “as America arms up, gun violence goes down,” parroting the infamous book by Dr. John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime. Emily Miller argues in the Washington Times that, liberals have been “muzzled” by the news. But, in fact, research shows that those who oppose gun control ask the wrong questions.

Let’s begin with the question of declining violence and the public’s unawareness of this decline (which has been chalked up to the “liberal media”). It should be chalked up to “media.” As Steven Pinker notes in The Better Angels of Our Nature violence has been declining everywhere, and yet few people are aware because, as much as a despise cliché “if it bleeds, it leads.” People drastically overrate the possibility of their children being kidnapped, for example, because of prominent media coverage. They underrate their child’s chance of drowning in a pool. Sadly, since gun violence is still sexy, it will dwarf coverage of other deaths. All violence has declined, but gun violence still amounts to a good portion of it. And being an economist, it represents a sort of violence which is easy to decrease on the margin: something we can easily reduce without significant harm to society because nothing has addressed it as of yet.

But let’s dig deeper, into the assumption of the gun rights advocates. Do more guns mean less crime? Is the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun? As Jon Stewart brilliantly points out, identifying a bad guy is nearly impossible without gun control. Furthermore, much gun violence is committed by “normal guys” in a violent passion.

Read more at Alternet.

Yet another organization with a white supremacist agenda — this one packaged as a “white nationalist think tank” — has moved its operations to northwestern Montana, leaving Georgia to join a rag-tag collection of some of the country’s leading racists and extremists.

The National Policy Institute (NPI), which enjoys tax-exempt status, now lists a post office box in Whitefish, Mont., where, public records show, its new director Richard Bertroud Spencer lives in a $3 million home. Spencer moved NPI to Montana after the late 2011 death of chairman Louis R. Andrews, documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service reveal.

On those documents filed annually with the IRS, the white nationalist institute lists thousands of dollars in expenses for a conference, a book, an educational video and a website — all devoted to “subjects of the U.S. and international social and scientific issues.”

A franker description of NPI’s program can be found on its website, which talks openly about its aims and bears the motto, “Our People, Our Culture, Our Future.” “As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession,” Spencer says on his online recruiting video. “This is our challenge,” he says. “This is our calling. Won’t you join us?”

Spencer’s vision of whites being dispossessed has become a central idea of the white nationalist movement, first cogently expressed in a 1972 book by Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority. The reality, of course, is that whites have long enjoyed privileges not afforded to minorities, but Robertson and his white nationalist followers, including Spencer, have instead constructed a narrative in which whites are disingenuously pictured as the latest victims of social discrimination in America.

More: NPI ‘Think Tank’ Is Latest Racist Outfit to Move to NW Montana

Opponents of immigration reform legislation have been trying to steer clear of white nationalists lately, hoping to keep their opposition to citizenship for undocumented Latino immigrants free from the taint of racism.

But they just can’t seem to run fast enough.

Last week, a major Heritage Foundation report about the supposed costs of illegal immigration was pilloried after the revelation that one of its authors, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Jason Richwine, had earlier claimed that there are deep differences in intelligence among races (with Latinos toward the bottom). Richwine resigned from the conservative think tank amid the outcry.

Now, this week, we discover that ProEnglish, a group with white nationalist ties, has launched an ad campaign against immigration reform. The first target is Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, according to BuzzFeed. The group’s minute-long radio ad features a Spanish-speaking character, apparently representing an undocumented immigrant, thanking Graham “for not requiring him to learn English in exchange for amnesty.”

ProEnglish, founded in 1994, is part of the network of organizations founded by anti-immigrant movement architect John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who, over the years, has corresponded with white nationalists, eugenicists and Holocaust deniers, and written that in order to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority is required.”

Robert Vandervoort, executive director of ProEnglish, also has ties to white nationalist groups. He formerly ran the Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance, a group that supports white nationalist Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance. Taylor has claimed that any kind of civilization disappears when black people are left to their own devices. Vandervoort has also attended events held by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, which distributes books by the late Sam Francis, who was a resident scholar at the foundation and a leading figure among white nationalists who argued for “white racial consciousness.”

More: Once Again, White Nationalists Sully Immigration Debate

Several tornadoes slammed into an area west of the Dallas- Fort Worth region Wednesday night, causing at least six deaths and injuring several dozen.

Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds says one tornado touched down southeast of Granbury Wednesday night in the Rancho Brazos subdivision, destroying mobile homes and single-family homes. Deeds said at least six residents were reported killed and up to 100 injured, some critically. The injuries range from lost limbs to minor bumps and bruises, Deeds says.

Fourteen people are unaccounted for, but it was not immediately clear if they were missing or were away from the area for other reasons.

More: At Least 6 Killed, Up to 100 Injured by Texas Tornadoes

U.S. President Barack Obama moved to neutralize the stench of scandal swirling at the margins of his administration Wednesday night, firing the head of the IRS after the tax agency admitted its auditors unfairly targeted tea party groups.

Announcing the dismissal of Steven Miller as acting head of what is arguably the most detested branch of the U.S. government, a visibly angry Obama pledged further steps would follow to ensure the “inexcusable” breach of public trust would never happen again.

Miller learned last May of the probes of tax-exemption applications targeting a wide range of conservative political groups, but did not disclose the fact until last Friday, when he issued a public apology on behalf of the revenue agency.

The ensuing furor — coupled with rising Republican anger over the White House response to last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, and yet another scandal involving U.S. Justice Department snooping of The Associated Press — has the Obama administration on its heels.

Though the White House has maintained eye-rolling until now, accusing Republicans of seeking to attach the suffix “gate” to any moving object, the IRS story has now shifted to head-rolling, with Miller as the first casualty.

More: U.S. Politics: Angry Obama Abhors IRS Scandal, Dismisses Tax Agency’s Acting Chief

Guy Gives Abercrombie & Fitch A Brand Readjustment By Giving Their Clothes To The Homeless (VIDEO)

In response to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries not wanting “not so cool” kids or women who wear size large to wear his company’s clothes, Greg Karber has come up with a funny and creative way to readjust the Abercrombie & Fitch brand.

He’s giving their clothes to the homeless.

The IRS gave extra scrutiny to 298 groups applying for tax-exempt status, the Washington Post reported. Seventy-two of those groups had “tea party” in their title, 13 had “patriots,” and 11 had “9/12,” shorthand for the 9/12 movement started by conservative TV host Glenn Beck.

But IRS officials not only singled out tea party and liberty groups. They also looked for “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement,” according to the leaked timeline. This included groups that planned to focus on government debt and spending, taxes, or those trying to “make America a better place to live.” In June 2011, Lerner reportedly became aware of what was going on and directed staffers to change to how they vetted nonprofit applications.

By the spring of 2012, so many conservative groups had complained about the IRS harassing them that Republicans in Congress took notice. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) sent the IRS a letter asking why it was targeting tea partiers, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) held a hearing in which he grilled then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee, over the agency’s treatment of conservative groups. Shulman denied that his agency was targeting conservatives, and the controversy remained quiet until Lerner’s apology.

More: The IRS Tea Party Scandal, Explained

Since the recession ended four years ago, the federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion every year. But now the government’s annual deficit is shrinking far faster than anyone in Washington expected, and perhaps even faster than many economists think is advisable for the health of the economy.

That is the thrust of a new report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimating that the deficit for this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, will fall to about $642 billion, or 4 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, about $200 billion lower than the agency estimated just three months ago.

The agency forecast that the deficit, which topped 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, could shrink to as little as 2.1 percent of gross domestic product by 2015 — a level that most analysts say would be easily sustainable over the long run — before beginning to climb gradually through the rest of the decade.

More: US Budget Deficit Shrinks Far Faster Than Expected