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The satirical news outlet agrees it went too far when it posted a tweet that referred to the young actress with a highly offensive four-letter word.

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Barnes & Noble’s stock closed up over 10 percent Monday on news that the chairman of its board of directors, Leonard Riggio, wants to buy the company’s retail arm -- the stores and the website -- and take them private.

That would leave the company’s unprofitable Nook Media division public and on its own.

Given that ebooks are often heralded as the future of the publishing industry, this sale, if it goes through, prompts some questions:

Question #1: Why would anyone want to own a bookstore?

To start, after Borders closed, Barnes & Noble became the last man standing of the big, national booksellers.

That still has value, according to Michael Norris, a publishing industry analyst with Simba Information.

Norris says despite all the hype around ebooks, “people still buy print books and people who buy digital books, about 3 out of 4 still buy print.”

 Barnes & Noble's retail division still turns a profit.

Question #2:  Why not keep the digital side?

Barnes & Noble’s ereader, the Nook, runs in third place to Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. It would take a great deal of money and time to turn it from an “also-ran” to a real money maker.

“The devices are nice, they’re competitive,” says Peter Wahlstrom, a senior equity analyst with Morningstar. “The tough part is that the Nook is just not top of mind for consumers.”

Question #3: If Chairman Leonard Riggio takes the profitable bookstore business private, what’s left for investors?

In addition to the e-readers, Nook Media contains college bookstore and college marketing businesses.

“They are repackaging the bookstore into the college store and college stores don’t close down,” says  Al Greco, a marketing professor at Fordham University who specializes in the publishing industry. “This actually a very stable part of the market.”

Greco says all those students buying text books and T-shirts offer up nice, reliable chunk of change.

Question #4: Will it work?

The final question, Greco says, is whether that college business can support the Nook while it tries to turn a profit. And that one, he says, we can’t answer yet.

People who stuck with diets rich in olive oil and nuts had about a 30 percent lower risk of experiencing a major cardiovascular problem, such as a heart attack or stroke, than people who followed a low-fat diet.

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It seemed like such a good idea at the time: peruse listener comments and reactions to our fracking coverage, and respond. The benefits are obvious: Engage listeners. Lure web eyeballs. Pull back the Marketplace curtain, bring 'em into the kitchen. Learn what self-selected listeners think about an important issue.

The thing is, after this exercise, all I come away with is one image, from 10th grade psychology class. Remember this double image?

 

What do you see: an old hag, or a young lady? Every time I look, I see the young women looking off to the left. Then I blink, look away, refocus, and maybe I recognize that old woman looking down at her sizeable nose. We see what we see, the same way many see fracking. The Church of Always and the Church of Never look at the same exact thing, and see something entirely different. Not that anyone's surprised. That's how theology works.

COMMENT: YOUR EXPERT IS NO EXPERT

Steve Everley at Energy in Depth, representing gas drilling companies, frowned upon our coverage of fracking and dead cows. In a blogpost mentioning a real-life case of cows and spilled frac fluids in Louisiana, I linked to a Cornell study mentioning the incident. The study authors are Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. Everley writes in an email (cited with permission):

In response to the claim that shale development is killing cows, you write that it is “true” based primarily on the Bamberger/Oswald study from Cornell. I noticed that you did link to our rebuttal, but I think it’s worth noting that this isn’t just industry responding to it. The response itself is built off what credible experts said about the study, none more prominent than Dr. Ian Rae with the U.N. Chemicals Technical Options Committee. Rae said it was “an advocacy piece”   and “does not qualify as a scientific paper,” adding that the authors of the Cornell study “cannot be regarded as experts” in this subject they’re discussing.

Response: Attacking the expert, as we all know, is the Phillips-head screwdriver in the rhetorical toolbox. It’s used all the time. Often, whack-a-source works. Often it’s legitimate.

Bamberger and Oswald’s study references a fracking case in the public record, a documented incident. It happened. So the author’s qualifications under attack by EID are a bit of a sideshow. But let's go there anyway. The Bamberger/Oswald article is peer-reviewed, which according to the University of Texas Library means:

Peer Review is a process that journals use to ensure the articles they publish represent the best scholarship currently available. When an article is submitted to a peer reviewed journal, the editors send it out to other scholars in the same field (the author's peers) to get their opinion on the quality of the scholarship, its relevance to the field, its appropriateness for the journal, etc.

I reached out to the authors. Here is Robert Oswald’s response:

A peer reviewed paper is a paper that is sent to, in this case, a scientific journal. The journal then sends the paper out to two or three experts in the field (in our case three experts). They write detailed anonymous critiques of the paper and the paper is then sent back to the author. The reviewers can recommend that the paper be published without changes, that the paper be modified according to their suggestions, or rejected. In our case, three expert reviewers wrote detailed critiques and we modified the paper to address their concerns. The paper was then sent back to the reviewers for final approval.

And Oswald’s response to his critic, Dr. Rae:

Case studies have always been considered scientific papers rather than advocacy pieces, unless of course one considers case studies of a disease as advocating against the disease under study. He also notes that the study keeps the identity of the subjects confidential and mistakenly suggests that the lack of this information suggests that the refereeing process evidently was not very stringent. As Dr. Rae is clearly not an expert in medical research, he may not have known that this is common practice in the medical literature and that his point has no relevance to the high standards of peer review to which the paper was subjected. Dr. Rae does note that we are not experts in environmental science, which is absolutely true. Of course, the paper is not about environmental science but rather an analysis of veterinary cases, which we do know a bit more about. But of course, Dr. Raes critique has nothing to do with the main point to which the good people at Energy in Depth were responding. They were responding to the case in Louisiana. As it turns out, this case is very well documented and the references to the incident are included in our paper.  

One observation about industry spokespersons: EID's Everley notes a particular point is not their representation of reality; it's actual reality. I hear this all the time. Coordinated messaging campaign?

COMMENT: THAT FAUCET ON FIRE IS BOGUS, DUH

Here’s another missive from Steve Everley at EID, about a famous scene in the anti-fracking documentary Gasland: Water from a Colorado homeowner's faucet + cigarette lighter = very big flames. Everley writes:

Regarding the “tap water catching fire” in Gasland, you write that such a claim is “disputed” and that the industry has criticized it. Again, really appreciate you highlighting our response, but before we ever really gained much traction in a response, Colorado regulators  had already investigated the “flaming faucet” in Gasland and determined that it was “not related to oil and gas activity.” 

Response: Here we go, water on fire. A common refrain among drilling proponents is that flammable methane found in drinking water occurs naturally. It was there before the drillers came. Indeed, Colorado regulators found two of the three Weld County, Colo., homeowners profiled in Gasland indeed experienced water-on-fire problems unrelated to drilling, including the guy on film. So far, so good.

However. Behind Gasland door number 3 is Colorado homeowner Aimee Ellsworth. From the same exact report the industry group EID cited:

We concluded that Aimee Ellsworth’s well contained a mixture of biogenic and thermogenic methane that was in part attributable to oil and gas development. Amy Mall at the Natural Resources Defense Council points out regulators have uncovered other cases of non-naturally occuring flammable H2O. She cites this case and this one from Colorado, plus incidents in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

So, if we took all the documented cases and added them up, would that make for a scary risk? A trivial one? Looping back to the young lady/old hag painting, it likely depends on how you see fracking in the first place.

COMMENT:  ON FRAC FLUIDS POLLUTING WATER, "NOT YET" DOES NOT MEAN NO.

Web commentator Michaelmarketplace writes:

Scott, you asked, "Has frac fluid ever entered groundwater? No, said just-departed EPA head Lisa Jackson in April 2012." You then back this statement with a quote from Administrator Jackson: “In no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.” Saying that “In no case have we made a *definitive* determination that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater” is not to say that EPA has determined that frac fluid has not ever entered groundwater: it is only to say that it has not (yet?) drawn such a link definitively. In fact, EPA has an ongoing scientific study of the matter, and the results will not be known until 2014:
http://www.epa.gov/hfstudy/ http://1.usa.gov/XGfIzB

Response: Fair enough. We’ll make that change online.

COMMENT: YOU'RE BEING PAID OFF, I’M ONTO YOU

In my on-air review of Promised Land, I said: “But in many parts, industry has fracked without incident for decades." The line has listener Max Obuszewski steamed. He writes:

What is the basis for such a statement? What study has Tong examined? This report was so bad, American Public Media needs to ascertain whether or not Scott Tong has any kind of financial interest in fracking or "good old boy" corruption network interest in pushing disinformation upon the audience.

Response: Deep breath. I'm not sure Mr. Obuszewski actually seeks an answer on the financial interest issue, but here's mine. No industry links I know of, and I'll go so far as to check the kids' college funds in that regard. We on the editorial side are walled off from the corporate underwriting folks but I'll ask them, too. And, upon thinking about it, I can tell you I snagged a turkey sandwich from the American Petroleum Institute speech last month. So you got me.

As far as “the basis for the statement” on fracking incidents, i.e. Show Your Work, here's a bit of the editorial long division.

First off, fracking goes back at least to 1947.

And, by the Energy Department’s tally,  more than half a million Americans gas wells are producing, as of 2011.

In a separate study, MIT researchers counted 42 incidents of something going wrong, out of tens of thousands of wells drilled. Here’s visiting engineering professor Anthony Meggs, from the study press release:

Meggs said that in the small number of cases where there has been contamination, the problem has stemmed from improper cementing of the well casings. “The quality of that cementing is the area where the industry, frankly, has to do a better job,” he noted. But even so, he said, the study found only 42 documented incidents of such problems, out of tens of thousands of wells drilled. “It is not trivial,” he said, “but neither is it all-encompassing.”

At this point, let’s make one thing clear: the process of extracting unconventional gas or oil involves several stages and several verbs: drilling, casing, cementing, trucking, perfing, fracking, flowback(ing?), disposing. The MIT study examined the whole, multi-stage process.

If we isolate just the hydraulic fracturing stage, that is we define "fracking" narrowly, state oil and gas regulators put it this way:

There have been no documented cases of drinking water contamination that have resulted from hydraulic fracturing operations to stimulate oil and gas wells in the State of Alabama.  There have been no verified cases of harm to ground water in the State of Alaska as a result of hydraulic fracturing. To the knowledge of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission staff, there has been no verified instance of harm to groundwater caused by hydraulic fracturing in Colorado. There have been no instances where the Division of Oil and Gas has verified that harm to groundwater has ever been found to be the result of hydraulic fracturing in Indiana. In Kentucky, there have been alleged contaminations from citizen complaints but nothing that can be substantiated, in every case the well had surface casing cemented to surface and production casing cemented.

In that report you’ll find similarly worded statements from Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, South Dakota and Wyoming regulators.

Again, this is the fracking safety record, narrowly defined. To no one's surprise, drilling proponents trot out these statements -- knowing the information asymmetry they have over the public and reporters -- giving the impression the whole process is bulletproof. It’s a bit like saying the Washington Nationals have won the 7th inning of every game. It may be true. It may be relevant. But – sadly for Nats fans who recall a certain late-inning disaster from last fall – it’s just one stage of the process.

And finally, a word from the Department of Energy’s shale gas advisory board:

The Subcommittee shares the prevailing view that the risk of fracturing fluid leakage into drinking water sources through fractures made in deep shale reservoirs is remote.

Does this make the practice perfect? By no means. Are regulators considering updated rules for an updated technology? You bet. Is the EPA conducting a very thorough study of this? Uh-huh. Does Marketplace report on suspected frac fluid water pollution, quakes in frac zones, controversial fossil-fuel subsidies that speed up the return on drilling investment, fossil fuels and climate emissions, fears about the resource-curse? Yeah. Does the industry represent itself well in the public square? You make the call. The point is to put the relative risk of an industrial sector into some perspective.

COMMENT: YOU LEFT OUT THE INSIDIOUS OPEC INFLUENCE. HOW CONVENIENT

In a web comment, mlgore notes our coverage of the fracking film Promised Land starring Matt Damon left out a key point about one of the movie's financial partners:

Mr. Tong has done a disservice to this article and it's readers by failing to include the fact that Mr. Damon's new film was partially financed by Image Nation Abu Dhabi. And by the way, Image is wholly owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, a MAJOR oil producing OPEC member. So no matter what side of the fracking fence one's politics resides, a political film that attempts to discourage gas exploration, funded by OPEC, seems a tad bit ironic to me ... But that's just considering the facts

Response: The narrative of OPEC protecting its turf is a compelling one; Middle Eastern oil money up to no good. When news of Abu Dhabi money first broke, conservative political websites made hay,  perhaps to undercut the film at the box office. They didn't need to. It bombed on its own.

The problem with 3-4 minute public radio stories is, we have to leave a lot of information out. It's painful making cuts. In this case, though, it was not. In reporting the story, I ran the Image Nation Abu Dhabi question by Dubai-based energy analyst Robin Mills. He deemed it a non-issue. From his email:

I think this controversy overstates the degree of coordination between the different branches of government and state companies in the Gulf. Of course the national oil companies do the bidding of the state, but that doesn't mean that all parts of the government operate to some kind of master plan. The movie was always going to get made anyway, with a big name such as Matt Damon and a controversial topic. Abu Dhabi has used hydraulic fracturing recently in one of its own shale prospects. The UAE is a net importer of gas - not exporter - so it actually benefits from increased shale gas production around the world. And it has invested billions of dollars in its clean energy unit Masdar - solar, wind and so on - hardly the action of a state trying to keep the world hooked on hydrocarbons.

For more OPEC mythology, feel free to click our story here.

COMMENT: UM, WHERE’S YOUR BRAIN?

Ace Frahm shared this comment on our website:

If I knew nothing else about this situation, I could not help but notice this story seems to follow the common patterns of corrupted journalist seen today: 1. Lobbyist front group makes false claims to press. 2. "Journalist" asks no questions, challenges nothing, writes down claims as though he is just a stenographer. 3. "Journalist" presents industry's false claims as "fact" to large audience by repeating them without doing any research that could have disproven false claims.

Response: Given the charges, allow me to make three points:

1. Meow. Thanks for your comment.

2. As far as this "journalist" not doing research, Ace Frahm's mind clearly appears made up. Other listeners may choose to refer to the research citations in the above answer. As well as this and this and this and this and this and this.

3. Ace Frahm’s description of “false claims” by industry returns me to the old hag/young lady painting. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing. The disconnect here is, the scale and pace of fracking is outpacing the experts -- geologists, seismologists, hydrologists, regulators, financial analysts, economists and corporations -- and their ability to measure and monitor it, yet a number of our listeners on both sides have somehow figured out what's true and false.

We all know what's going on here. Think about your own reaction to: Israel, abortion, tax cuts, evolution, the New York Yankees. How many facts and figures will change your mind and mine? Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein offers a few fancy words to articulate some of this. First: "biased assimilation."

If the statement is in agreement with the individual’s bias, the individual finds validation and holds the belief even more strongly. If the statement disagrees with what he or she already believes to be true, studies have shown that generally the person will not change opinions, but rather will still find validation in his or her own belief, rejecting the statement as questionable for one rationalization or another.

Next up: I'll take "group polarization" for $200, Alex:

Corroboration: Most people start out tentative about facts, simply because they lack information. After affirmation from others, however, they become more confident.     Exchange of information: In any group with an antecedent position, most evidence will tend to support that position.

 

    Concern for reputation: People want to be held in esteem, and thus don’t want to be seen as more skeptical than the rest of the group. So, they adopt the strength of conviction of their peers

Trust me, the Nationals are making it to the World Series. And, for good measure, Sunstein describes "informational cascades":

“Early adopters” can have an undue influence over the public’s general acceptance or rejection of a statement of fact. He described a recent experiment in which nine different websites offered free downloads of songs by unknown bands. On eight of the nine websites, however, users were able to see the download preferences of the “previous users” in the worlds created those who were running the test. Overwhelmingly, usage patterns of the users aligned with the preferences of the previous users, and indeed, the users’ musical tastes were overwhelmingly shaped by the opinions with which they happened to be presented.

COMMENT: FRAC FLUIDS ARE SO NOT SECRET

In response to our animated schematic on fracking works, Matt Pitzarella of the gas-drilling firm Range Resources took exception to my description of frac fluids as “secret.” He writes:

I’m curious, if the cocktail is “secret” as your video says, what should we make of state regulations in Texas, Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that require full disclosure on a per well basis? That of course is on top of the Federal Worker’s Right to Know Act and the Community Right to Know Act, which also require disclosure. There’s also FracFocus.org which was set up by the Groundwater Protection Council and was developed in partnership with the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which is ran by state environmental regulators with involvement from the US DOE and EPA.

Response: Pitzarella has point, kind of. Yes, there are several levels of frac fluid disclosure on the books. I will change the wording of our animation to reflect that.

Having said that, the details do matter when having nothing to hide involves hiding. There are exemptions to disclosure, on grounds of corporate trade secrets. One ongoing legal study suggests disclosure rules are, at the very least, lacking when it comes to policing the exemptions. In advance of publication, an author of the upcoming legal study shares these points:

** Fracking occurs in 29 states. 17 have disclosure laws.

** FracFocus is a good first effort, but it’s not comprehensive. Nor is it a searchable database.

** No one independently reviews FracFocus submissions. And since there’s no public review of challenge process, it’s easy for companies to assert over-broad trade secrets.

** Companies fail to disclose chemicals 22% of the time, Bloomberg has found.

** 29% of the unique numeric chemical identifiers oil and gas companies reported to the Texas frac registry referred to chemicals that do not exist, according to a report from the Environmental Defense Fund.

COMMENT: DON’T CALL IT A FRAC “COCKTAIL” WHEN IT’S MOSTLY WATER

Pitzarella of Range Resources has another beef with my video – thanks, Matt, at least someone's seen it -- which refers to a frac fluid combination as a “cocktail”:

I take some issue with the video repeatedly calling it a cocktail, when even your story accurately describes it as water. Range for instance pumps 99.92% water and sand on average and 3 or 4 chemicals that are also used in drinking water treatment and infrastructure maintenance. People don’t call tap water a “secret cocktail,” do they?

Response: I started wondering if one drop of Tabasco sauce in a baby’s milk bottle might similarly be less than 1 percent as I dialed Kate Konschnik at Harvard Law’s environment program. First, Konschnik noted Range Resources is a leader in the industry as far as disclosure. Then she ran her own numbers, citing a GAO study finding the average hydraulic fracturing well uses 3 million to 5.6 million gallons of water. Konschnik writes:

If the average hydraulic fracturing fluid is only .08% by volume chemicals, that still means that in the Marcellus, on average, 4,480 gallons of chemicals are being injected into each well.  As to the nature of the chemicals being used, it is true that some of the chemicals used are the same chemicals used to treat drinking water.  As U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Minority Staff wrote in an April 2011 report on behalf of Reps. Waxman, Markey, and DeGette, “some of the hydraulic fracturing products were common and generally harmless.” However, the most widely used chemical, according to the disclosures made by 14 companies to the Congressmen, included methanol, which is a hazardous air pollutant and on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.  All told, “[b]etween 2005 and 2009, the oil and gas service companies used products containing 29 chemicals that are (1) known or possible human carcinogens, (2) regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act for their risks to human health, or (3) listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.  These 29 chemicals were components of more than 650 different products used in hydraulic fracturing.” 

All right, that's it for now. Stand by for updates and keep the hate mail coming. I know you will. For now, back to the stenography.

The court refused to hear the appeal, but Sotomayor took the opportunity for a lesson on racial prejudice in the justice system. Sotomayor issued a stinging statement, saying the attorney's words diminished the dignity of the justice system.

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Tuesday marks one year since the fatal shooting of unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin. The case has drawn a lot of national attention and polarized America on issues of race and self-defense. Host Michel Martin checks in again with Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton, and her attorney, Benjamin Crump.

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You may know Anna Deavere Smith from her roles on the West Wing and Nurse Jackie. She is also a major player in the theater and was just awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish prize — one of the most prestigious honors in the arts world. Host Michel Martin speaks with Deveare Smith about what the award means to her.

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From First Lady Michelle Obama handing out the Best Picture award to Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence taking a tumble, the 85th Academy Awards was full of surprises. Host Michel Martin recaps the evening with People magazine's movie critic, Alynda Wheat.

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Last week we mourned the death of inflation in an obituary, and some of you wrote in to say you saw inflation in your town. There are even rumors that inflation was seen riding shotgun in a white Cadillac driven by Elvis.

One of the comments we got was from Dennis Sedam in Walla Walla, Wash. He had this to say: “Anybody who thinks inflation is dead is living in a dream world and are certainly not living on a fixed income as I am. Someone needs to change the definition of inflation or the criteria for determining it because, believe me, inflation is alive and very well.”

So how can inflation be at zero percent when so many of us feel like our paychecks don’t go as far as they used to?

Mark Thoma is a professor of economics at the University of Oregon. When I told him about the comments from people who said  inflation is real for them, he said, “they’re probably right.”

Thoma points out that that some people’s individual inflation rate is not zero. The zero percent rate that was released last week is an average based on the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. The CPI is made up of thousands of different goods and services. But not everyone buys the same goods and services.

For example, take retiree Dennis Sedam. He was born in 1944, so he probably spends a larger percentage of his income on health care than the average person.

“Health care is very expensive,” says Thoma. “It’s rising way faster than the regular rate of inflation.”

So elderly people are going to have a personal rate of inflation that is higher than the national average. And even if you aren’t buying a lot of health care, everything you purchase affects your inflation rate.

Take, for instance, a gallon of milk -- one of the thousands of items in the CPI. That gallon of milk may not cost the same in Wisconsin as it does in Walla Walla. And for people who buy lot of milk where it’s expensive, “they will have a personal inflation rate that is not only those goods but local prices that they pay based on their suppliers,” says Pete Klenow, a professor of economics at Stanford.

In other words, just because inflation is at zero doesn’t mean the price of everything has stayed the same. It just means that for the things that have gone up in price, other items in the CPI have gone down to counterbalance the average.

And this doesn’t take into account wages. On average, wages do increase over time. But for many people, especially low-skilled workers and people on fixed incomes, their inflation rate feels very real and very much alive.

These days, the federal deficit and national debt seem to be the starting point for almost every conversation in Washington. But as the sequestration's automatic budget cuts loom, there are plenty of smart people who think politicians' priorities are wrong.

"I think it's this very, very perverse situation," says Dean Baker, who heads the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "We're focused on what's not the issue."

Thee recovery's not over, Baker says. Unemployment is still too high. Mary Kay Henry agrees with him. She's the president of the Service Employees International Union, or the SEIU.

"We need, as a nation, to understand that the debt issue, while important, is not Job One," she says.

The Tea Party is taking credit for this week's standoff, but the fixation on our debt? Jim Thurber teaches government at American University, and he says credit for that goes to a guy who was Commerce Secretary during the Nixon administration. "I think Pete Peterson certainly has helped push this onto the agenda," he says.

Pete Peterson ... and nearly half a billion dollars of his own money.

Peterson co-founded a private equity firm called the Blackstone Group, and he was chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers. Thurber says Peterson has been passionate about the debt and the deficit ... for decades.

"I think that he has focused on this issue in a singular way," Thurber says. "He has a clear strategy, theme and message of 'Let's fix the debt. Let's do something about the deficit.'"

And he's done that by giving money to a long list of think tanks and advocacy groups. He and his foundation commission studies and sponsors projects.

One of the best-known advocates for deficit reduction is Maya MacGuineas. She heads two groups Peterson supports, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and more recently, the Campaign to Fix the Debt. She hosted a kickoff event for the newest one last summer.

"The Campaign to Fix the Debt is going to bring together CFOs, business leaders, former members of congress, budget experts, economists, but most importantly, voters across the country," MacGuineas says.

Thurber, at American University, estimates it's already spent at least $25 million on ad campaigns and big events.

"Now, whether it will help resolve our situation or not is another question," he says. "That is about political will."

Peterson would agree it's about political will. And while his focus has been on the long-term, politics have led to this week's short-term fight over sequestration.

This Friday, $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts are scheduled to go into effect. The Obama administration has been all doom and gloom about the impact they'll have.

We've been presented with images of wretched travelers languishing in long airport security lines. Visitors barred from national parks, and meat shortages in the supermarket. It’s Washington’s version of a Frankenstein movie.

The Obama administration is ratcheting up the drama to convince Congress to delay the massive budget cuts, known in Washington as the sequester. The dire warnings would have us believe that the sequester monster will break out of its cage at the stroke of midnight on March 1st, and rampage through the federal government. But some Washington wonks think the monster won’t flex his muscles right away. And actually, may not have any muscles.

“The sequester is probably more like The Blob than Frankenstein," Jim Kessler, policy analyst at the Washington think tank Third Way, explains. “It’s not like you’re going to see rumbling earthquakes as Frankenstein walks down the street. It has a more subtle effect.”

Kessler says we won’t feel the brunt of the sequester’s wrath until late March or April because much of the budget-cutting will come in the form of unpaid leave for federal workers, and they have to have 30 days notice first. But, if Congress and the White House can’t come up with a deal to shove the sequester back in its cage before April, watch out.

Stan Collender is a budget expert, now at Qorvis Communications. He asks: Remember how the Frankenstein movies end?  “Once the sequester happens and the peasants start to storm the castle with pitchforks, the politics of this will change and the average member of Congress is going to get a lot of pressure to just stop it one way or another.”

And, Collender says, if the sequester monster isn’t stopped, the peasants just may turn their pitchforks on the politicians.

The reviews of the Family Guy bad boy's behavior as host of the Oscars are all over the place. We've got a sampling. Who's right and who's wrong?

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Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee, faces an uphill battle in her efforts to forge a new relationship with Pyongyang.

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The Swedish furniture giant has become the latest retailer swept up in Europe's widening horse meat scandal. The affected meatballs have been pulled from stores in more than a dozen countries.

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Trayvon Martin was killed last February. His death reignited the national debate about race relations. The Florida teenager's mother hopes his killer will be brought to justice, but also hopes his death will inspire changes in "stand your ground" laws.

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The sequester and its federal budget cuts are just four days away. If Congress and the White House don't act this week, $85 billion will be slashed from the federal budget on Friday. As the government gets closer to that deadline, the warnings about what the budget cuts would mean are getting louder.

Martha Stewart is back in court next week. She will be testifying in a lawsuit between Macy’s and JC Penney. The retail chains are battling over who has the right to carry Stewart’s line of products. Last year Martha Stewart renewed an agreement giving Macy's exclusive rights to sell her line of cookware, home décor and textiles. Under that agreement the only other place Stewart could sell those products is in her own stores. Stewart’s lawyers argue that she is simply doing what her contract allows -- selling her products in her own store. At issue is the location of the store.

When it comes to public sector corruption, which of the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- ranks the best and the worst?

The sequester and its federal budget cuts are just four days away. If Congress and the White House don't act this week, $85 billion will be slashed from the federal budget on Friday. As the government gets closer to that deadline, the warnings about what the budget cuts would mean are getting louder.

Martha Stewart is back in court next week. She will be testifying in a lawsuit between Macy’s and JC Penney. The retail chains are battling over who has the right to carry Stewart’s line of products. Last year Martha Stewart renewed an agreement giving Macy's exclusive rights to sell her line of cookware, home décor and textiles. Under that agreement the only other place Stewart could sell those products is in her own stores. Stewart’s lawyers argue that she is simply doing what her contract allows -- selling her products in her own store. At issue is the location of the store.

When it comes to public sector corruption, which of the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- ranks the best and the worst?

The movies Argo and Life of Pi and actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence were among the winners at Sunday's Academy Awards. But no one movie swept the show.

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The political stakes are high for both Congress and the president, while some GOP governors are turning up the heat on House Speaker John Boehner.

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The sequester and its federal budget cuts are just four days away. If Congress and the White House do not act this week, $85 billion will be slashed from the federal budget on Friday. As the government gets closer to that deadline, the warnings about what the budget cuts would mean are getting louder.

"There is certainly some truth to the charge that the president is using this to raise public pressure on members [of Congress]," says Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University.

Last night the White House released a report that illustrates the effects of the cuts state by state. New York would lose $42 million of education funding. Pennsylvania programs that provide meals to senior citizens would get cut. And in Virginia, close to 90,000 defense department civilian employees would be furloughed.

At the federal level, about 400 national parks would see reduced hours or closures. Border stations would also have to cut back on resources creating longer lines at border crossings in Texas and California and at airports across the country.

Although Congress has avoided several fiscal deadlines in the eleventh-hour in the last few months, such as January's fiscal cliff and debt ceiling extension, many political analysts are not optimistic a deal will be struck this time.

To hear more about the sequester standoff and its effect on the economy, click on the audio player above.