Etc.

If a congressional bill has the title of something that seems to favor the average American, you can be rest assured its real intention is precisely the opposite:

Millions of people have been out of work for months and even years. Whatever jobs are available pay poverty-level wages. Thanks to the Obama administration, the profits of US corporations are at record highs. And behind the thin smokescreen of its “jobs” measures, the American political establishment is preparing the more serious task of launching a renewed assault on health care, pensions and social programs.

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If you have access to the New York Times, a nice obituary of Earl Scruggs is there:

With little else to do but chores on a Depression-era farm, he became obsessed with the banjo. He depended mainly on a two-fingered picking style until he was about 10. Then one day, alone in his bedroom and brooding about an argument he had just had with an older brother, he found himself picking a song called “Lonesome Reuben” (or “Reuben’s Train”) using three fingers instead of two — the thumb, index and middle finger. It was a style, indigenous to North Carolina, that he had been trying to learn.

By tuning his banjo in different keys, he found he could play any tune, but the notes sounded undifferentiated at first. “I can’t hear the melody,” his mother would tell him, he said. So he learned to emphasize melody by plucking it with his strong thumb in syncopation with harmonic notes picked with his first two fingers. The sound was like thumbtacks plinking rhythmically on a tin roof.

A good introduction to Scruggs' music is The Complete Mercury Sessions recorded during his early days with Lester Flatt and spanning the years 1948-1950.
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Speaking of obituaries, poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died of complications of rheumatoid arthritis:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

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Some good news for a change:

Scientists at the University of Guelph have found a way to successfully clone American elm trees that have survived repeated epidemics of their biggest killer — Dutch elm disease.

The breakthrough, published today in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, is the first known use of in vitro culture technology to clone buds of mature American elm trees.

“This research has the potential to bring back the beloved American elm population to North America,” said Prof. Praveen Saxena, a plant scientist who worked on the project with Professor Alan Sullivan. Both are from Guelph’s Department of Plant Agriculture.

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