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Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com
With his experience as architect and founder of a technorati top 100 blog, he is also a new media / social media consultant and trainer for corporations, non-profits, entrepreneurs and authors.
Rob is a frequent Speaker on the bottom up revolution, politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates, and optimizing tapping the power of new media. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.
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A few declarations.
-While I'm registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of republicans.
-My articles express my personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.
Far from dissipating, groups around the country say they are preparing for a new phase of larger marches and strikes this spring that they hope will rebuild momentum and cast an even brighter glare on inequality and corporate greed.
groups in 34 cities have agreed to "a day of nonviolent direct action" on Feb. 29 against corporations accused of working against the public interest. Then on May 1, they will try to persuade thousands of Americans who share their belief that the system is rigged against the poor and the middle class to skip work and school, in what they are calling "a general strike" -- or "a day without the 99 percent."
The City of Phila. might soon require those who hand out food to the homeless to obtain permits.
A draft regulation adopted by the board of health would require kitchens where food is prepared to be inspected, and for at least one volunteer trained in safe food handling to be on site when food is served.
City Health Commissioner Don Schwarz said the board realized after Occupy Philadelphia set up camp near City Hall that it had no authority to ensure the food being passed out there was prepared safely, and wanted to mandate education efforts.
Both the permits and training would be free.
Dozens of representatives of "Food Not Bombs" and the Occupy movement spoke out at the meeting, calling the rule a thinly veiled attempt to force the homeless off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
"It's not a coincidence that the Barnes (Foundation gallery) is coming onto the Parkway
The various news services are touting this pact at the biggest multi-state settlement since the tobacco deal in 1998. While narrowly accurate, this deal is bush league by comparison even though the underlying abuses in both cases have had devastating consequences.
The tobacco agreement was pegged as being worth nearly $250 billion over the first 25 years. Adjust that for inflation, and the disparity is even bigger. That shows you the difference in outcomes between a case where the prosecutors have solid evidence backing their charges, versus one where everyone know a lot of bad stuff happened, but no one has come close to marshaling the evidence.
...this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn't you and me. It's bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome.
(1 comments) Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran's leaders.
The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims' cars.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.
The Iranians have no doubt who is responsible -- Israel and the People's Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.
(2 comments) Komen for the Cure, the nation's leading anti-breast-cancer charity, has insisted that its since-reversed decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood arose from a routine change in criteria for grant eligibility that had nothing to do with abortion politics.
But a Komen insider told HuffPost on Sunday that Karen Handel, Komen's staunchly anti-abortion vice president for public policy, was the main force behind the decision to defund Planned Parenthood and the attempt to make that decision look nonpolitical.
"Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria," the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. "She said, 'If we just say it's about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.'"
Early in January, the Election Defense Alliance sent an alert to its supporters saying, "All our funds, which had been held" by the 501(c )(3) umbrella organization International Humanities Center, have been misappropriated by that organization and lost."
Unfortunately, they are not alone.
The International Humanities Center (IHC) was a fiscal sponsor for 200 groups, largely politically or culturally progressive activist organizations, all of which were blindsided by the news that the IHC had gone out of business. With it, the funding that the Center held and managed for these groups largely evaporated.
Aside from the Election Defense Alliance, the 200 groups also included the Afghan Women's Mission, Courage to Resist, the National Network Opposed to Militarization of Youth, Global Voices for Justice, the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund and Opednews.com
(2 comments) Faced with a deluge of opposition that included pressure from lawmakers and internal dissent, one of America's leading breast cancer advocacy groups on Friday reversed itself on a decision that would have cut off funding to some Planned Parenthood projects.
"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives," the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation said in a statement. "We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities."
(3 comments) To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
"We need some gender equity here," she told HuffPost. "The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we're going to do that to women, why not do that to men?"
The amendment was narrowly rejected 21 to 19, but the Ultrasound test did make it through.
Wouldn't it be nice, in the best of all worlds, if the congress passed a law that any state in which ultrasounds were required before abortion, men would have to get rectal exams before getting their hard-on prescriptions?
A super-Earth is a planet that is more massive and larger than Earth, although still made of rocks -- perhaps with continents and oceans -- and an atmosphere. There is no such planet in our Solar System, but we know that they must be common in other planetary systems. Moreover, theory predicts that they might have all the nice attributes of Earth, and, in fact, provide a more stable environment on their surface. True super-Earths!
A super-Earth is a planet defined by its mass -- between 1 and 10 ME (where ME stands for Earth mass).
The first super-Earth was found by the serendipitous work of Eugenio Rivera, Jack Lissauer, and the California-Carnegie team in 2005. It orbits the small star Gliese 876 and is about seven times more mass.
...it seems likely that on some of those Earth-like planets, we will find signs of life.
(1 comments) Brzezinski thinks the Obama administration "should have stuck to its guns in promoting a fair settlement" in the Middle East. A longtime foe of Israel's partisans in the United States, he says the Obama team "fumbled by getting outmaneuvered by the Israelis." Then he gets blunter: "Domestic politics interceded: The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence."
Brzezinski is still a believer in the two-state solution... and is hopeful that Obama will again take up the cause if he gets a second term. He also thinks space has opened up in the United States to be more critical of Israel. "The American public is becoming more discriminating, and the Jewish public in America is becoming more discriminating," he says. "They realize that extremist sloganeering and warmongering are not the most helpful approaches."
(2 comments) If Newt Gingrich does pull off a victory in South Carolina on Saturday, he'll owe it to the skill with which he has tapped into the right's persecution complex this past week..
With Newt's ex-wife having accused him of attempting to get her to allow him to have an open marriage, people expected this to come up in the debate.
Moderator John King used the first question of the night to ask Gingrich if he'd like to respond to his ex-wife's words.
"No," Gingrich replied. "But I will."
The audience applauded loudly. It was obvious right away they had his back. Clearly, Gingrich was ready for King's question, but he did his best to feign shock and outrage.
"I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for office, and I am appalled... blah, blah. Result: Standing ovation.
This morning, while I was grinding my blend of French, Colombian and Italian coffee beans, it occurred to me that I could be doing harm to the coffee shop and diner businesses in my neighborhood by making my own coffee at home. Might I have a responsibility and obligation to consume their product, either within their premises or brought right to my door by one of their speedy, undocumented-alien delivery men?
I also wondered whether still using my old, reliable German-brand coffee grinder, manufactured in China, might be an unpatriotic betrayal of American kitchen-appliance makers by choosing not to buy their Chinese-made grinder.
As I poured some house-brand almond milk into my homemade granola, I thought about the depressed demand and earnings on the higher-priced product manufacturers that I wasn't patronizing, their resulting order and production declines...
This article picks up on the story that OEN writer Cheryl Biren broke last week.
As if anxious to confirm our recent observation that conservatives online appear incapable of producing fair and professional journalism, a new GOP-friendly media start-up has hired a former American Spectator staffer who is perhaps best known for his unfair and unprofessional behavior.
The new site in question has been dubbed Washington Free Beacon, and it's part of a larger GOP-friendly initiative called Center for American Freedom. The effort is being launched in an open attempt to match the media messaging success of Center for American Progress and other progressive outlets. Founders claim Washington Free Beacon will produce top-shelf "investigative reporting" and be seen as a "legitimate" source of information.
Hardline activists sought to unseat Rep. Donna Edwards over her Mideast views, but failed to raise enough money.
Most of the money for Edwards, a J-Street supporter, and for her opponent, came from outside the district.
Checks for her opponent were to be sent to the chairman emeritus of the hardline Israel Project...
In the end, though, the effort to raise money for Ivey apparently fell short. JStreetPAC President Jeremy Ben-Ami argues that Ivey's decision not to pursue a challenge against Edwards says something significant about the current moment.
"For too long, the conventional political wisdom has been that the most hawkish within the Jewish community had the fundraising ability to defeat candidates whose views on what it means to be pro-Israel did not comport with their own," he says.
Edwards ability to raise $50,000 from pro peace Jews proved that has changed.
Cynical, endorsement buying, worker firing perpetual candidate Romney thinks like a one percenter as he tells his multigenerational plutocratic tale.
Rick Perry advisor Nelson Warfield slammed the anecdote as a symptom of Romney's wealthy upbringing.
"Mitt Romney had another $10,000 bet moment," he told TPM. "Suggesting only the wealthy can ran for office is something out of a Green Acres scenario of running for president."
Rodell Mollineau, president of Democratic Super PAC American Bridge, also condemned the comments.
"I'd say that Romney has forgotten what it's be part of the working class or middle class, but he never was," Mollineau said, adding his quote showed he "has no idea what average Americans are going through on a daily basis."
(2 comments) Romney's Free and Strong America PAC and its affiliates states have lavished close to $1.3 million in campaign donations to federal, state and local GOP politicians, almost all since 2010. His recipients include officials in the major upcoming primary states of New Hampshire and SC, and in three southern Super Tuesday states where he was trounced four years ago.
In New Hampshire, a U.S. senator, a congressman, 10 state senators and three executive councilors shared $26,000 in donations from Romney's Free and Strong America PAC in 2010 and 2011 combined. All 15 have showered Romney with endorsements leading up to Tuesday's primary
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came out for Romney last month -- a year after his Free and Strong America PACs funneled $36,000 to the Tea Party darling's 2010 election bid. And 19 state and Washington, D.C., lawmakers in three Super Tuesday states
A smart article that ties OWS to new genres.
It's fitting that the Occupy movement should have drawn inspiration from dystopian fiction, an increasingly popular genre for teens and young adults in particular. If, as Time magazine suggests, the person of the year was the Protester, the publishing phenomenon was the Dystopia -- the story of the dissenter in a repressive society who becomes a revolutionary.
All of these books feature adolescent protagonists who, at a crucial point in their lives (usually an adult-initiation process of some kind), reject the limited choices they're offered and learn self-sufficiency instead. They pull together support from other outsider teens and some adults and make difficult decisions that open the door to a new and better way of life. Thus, they avert catastrophe and avoidthe trap of the minimum-wage, dead-end job -- or its near-future equivalent.
A deadly conflict has been raging for over 15 years in the Congo. The conflict has increasingly turned to being a war of profit, with various armed groups fighting one another for control of strategic mineral reserves.
Near the area where I grew up, there are mines with vast amounts of tungsten, tantalum, tin, and gold -- minerals that make most consumer electronics in the world function. There is child labor, slavery, rape-- used to motivate work.
...your favorite electronics don't have to fund mass violence and rape in the Congo, and neither do mine.
I'm asking Apple to make an iPhone made with conflict-free minerals from the Congo by this time next year.
Apple is perfectly positioned to be the first company to create a Congo conflict-free phone, using minerals from Congo that further stability and economic development and don't use slave labor or fund mass atrocities.
(1 comments) How much is each of your Twitter followers worth to you? Try about $2.50 each as mild-manned tech writer Noah Kravitz found out, after his erstwhile employer sued him for damages for keeping Twitter followers he amassed while blogging for the company
(6 comments) When Robert White opened his water bill last month, his jaw dropped: $250 for a month's worth of water and sewer service. The 63-year-old construction contractor, who shares a three-bedroom home with his wife in the bucolic Springbrook Centre subdivision, said he likes to keep his lawn green and expects hefty water bills. "I just don't want to be hijacked," he said.
White's water service is provided by a private utility owned by California-based SouthWest Water Co. LLC. Just across the four-lane Pflugerville Parkway, where White's neighbors in the Springbrook Glen subdivision -- a nearly identical grid of neatly arranged brick-faced homes -- get their water from Pflugerville, rates are on average about 60 percent less.
White's bill for water service may nearly double soon, if SouthWest Water gets the latest rate increase it has requested. "I have never felt so helpless," he said.
A new lawsuit challenges the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act as unconstitutional because it has given activists reason to fear that they could be prosecuted as "terrorists" for non-violent civil disobedience, protests, and First Amendment activity.
The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 5 longtime animal rights activists. The activists say the vague wording of the law, and the corporate-led campaigns against animal rights activism, have made them alter their own advocacy.
The landmark case has implications for all social justice movement, beyond the animal rights activists targeted. It sets a dangerous precedent for labeling anyone who effectively threatens corporate profits a "terrorist." As the OWS grows rapidly, and has begun reclaiming foreclosed homes from banks and shutting down ports, this lawsuit couldn't come at a more pressing time.
Just a few weeks after moving into McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, Occupy DC stood out from its counterparts across the country because it hadn't clashed with police, it hadn't been threatened with eviction and it hadn't seen the mass arrests that marked so many other Occupy encampments.
These days, Occupy DC stands out simply because it's one of the last major Occupy camps still standing.
Occupy Baltimore, one of the last holdouts, was evicted last week. Occupy Wall Street, the original, is long gone, evicted by police in a violent, mid-November raid. Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy LA were evicted within days of each other late last month, and Occupy Boston was kicked out of the park in early December.
In Richmond, Occupiers voluntarily and peacefully broke camp this week. In Denver, protesters set fires when police tried to evict them late Monday night; nine were arrested.
Czech playwright and former dissident who led his nation after the collapse of communism
After the Soviet invasion that turned the Prague spring of 1968 to long winter, he became a leading dissident, a founder of Charter 77 and Vons (the Czech acronym of Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted), and spent much of his 40s in and out of prison. Finally, he emerged as the effective voice of the crowds that, after 20 years of sullen resentment, at last exploded in Wenceslas Square in the winter of 1989 and, having postered all of freezing Prague with the slogan Havel na Hrad! (Havel to the Castle!), did indeed send him across the river and up the hill to the castle as president of the reborn republic.
(2 comments) He's proud of being arrested and won't back down from wearing his old uniform again, in spite of being ordered by Philly's police commissioner not to wear it, and the threat of losing his pension.
(3 comments) In the end, it was Cain's massive ego, not women, that killed the beast... I mean candidate.
Michael Tomasky writes:
It's the end of the line for the hit (for a month anyway) situation comedy The Herman Cain Show--as something worth tuning into, anyway. As the obituaries are rushed to press, most of the experts will chalk the demise up to the candidate's inexperience and his staff's ineptitude. It's not that those things aren't true, but they miss the real point. The real culprit is Cain's bottomless vanity, and even though he may no longer be very interesting, there is a lesson in his collapse for all the candidates.
Two New York Congress members seek to help their constituents by watering down already weak Wall Street regulations
It's how the 1 percent stays that way. It's not just the ideologically rigid Republicans that we read about every day, but the active participation of liberal Democrats who know what side of their bread the butter can be found.
(1 comments) Anders Behring Breivik, the monster who killed 77 adults and children in Norway has been found insane by two psychiatrists who spent 36 hours with him. He will be placed in a psychiatric facility
oday, the Associated Press (AP) has a story where it estimates the costs of police securing for the various ongoing protest occupations across the country. The AP roughly estimates that these occupations over two months in eighteen major cities cost taxpayers $13 million. Right-wing media outlets are already using this number to claim that the protests are too costly to maintain.
But the AP piece does not provide the neccessary context to put this number into perspective. $13 million for policing of ongoing protests all over the country for two months is not a particularly large sum.
The cost of securing these protests against economic inequality and political corruption also pales in comparison to one large figure: the wealth destroyed by Wall Street's recession. The recession caused by Wall Street's misdeeds destroyed $50 trillion of wealth globally by 2009
if our politics is failing, it is not enough to blame a small elite, whether from the world of politics or finance. The crisis is located at a far deeper level, in our own acceptance of a series of implausible economic propositions even as populations in the west disengaged from political involvement.the politicians we have too often elected, are men and women who see politics as part of a boutique career, not as a passionate calling.
We abdicted our engagement in the democratic process to politicians who abdicated influence to an unaccountable system as part of a pact that saw us happy as long as we were relatively comfortable. With that arrangement breaking down, we discover we have given up more than we bargained for.
(1 comments) Richard Branson admits that business, including his own, helped cause the downward spiral to turn even faster. Which is why he has a new approach: Capitalism 24902
every single business person has the responsibility for taking care of the people and planet that make up our global village, all 24,902 circumferential miles of it.
For a long time I have been convinced that this is the way forward if the planet, as we know it, and life as we know it, is to survive. I'm not just talking about the disaster facing people and the planet because of climate change; I'm addressing one of the underlying reasons why the climate is changing and a significant threat to humanity -- our rapid depletion of our natural resources. In the next couple of decades we could soon end up without oil, minerals, water or fish.
When a friend of mine checked in for a flight recently, he was surprised that the gate agent handed him a first-class boarding pass as he was about to get on his flight. What was so unusual about this? Several things: He had bought an economy class ticket, he rarely flies on Air Canada and thus has no frequent flyer status on the airline and, even more unusually, the flight was half empty so this wasn't an oversell upgrade situation. So why the extra love?
Because he was wearing a suit. Yep, my pal asked the gate agent why he was so blessed and she answered, "Our station manager noticed how well dressed you were and told me to upgrade you."
I asked another gate agent if he would give preference to a well-dressed passenger in such a scenario. He answered, "Yes, the better dressed you are, the more likely you are to nab that seat. I am not going to put someone wearing flip flops...
This auction company routinely sells rare and exotic geological and antiquarian items. Here, they have "a first-class specimen, a complete skeleton superbly prepared, with well-formed skull, thin, fragile rib bones, characteristic bird-shaped hips and long slender legs with wicked-looking curving talons to the feet. It boasts a lovely clear patination and bone texture throughout, and is evocatively mounted in a running pose on a discreet metal armature, 30 1/4 inches high and 55 inches long overall.
Estimate $80,000-100,000"
(1 comments) As thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters took to the streets on Thursday, journalists once again found themselves a target of police violence and arrests.
Reporters took to Twitter and, in some cases, to television to spread the word of the heavy hand police were using against them. It appeared to be a repeat of a similar scene two days earlier, when journalists were roughed up and arrested as the NYPD forcibly cleared the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan.
Josh Stearns, a member of media reform group Free Press who has been tracking the arrests of journalists at Occupy movements, estimates that 26 have been arrested in total since the protests began two months ago. On Thursday, that number looked set to grow substantially, as reports of arrests poured in.
(2 comments) Author says she is 'disgusted' that Obama and other Democrats did not act to stop Zuccotti Park evictions. Ehrenreich said her outrage at the police crackdowns was magnified by the acquiesence of Democratic leaders.
"One of the appalling things here is that there are so many Democratic mayors involved in these crackdowns or in Bloomberg's case, someone who is seen as a liberal," Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. "And where in all this was Obama? Why couldn't he have picked up the phone at some point a couple of weeks ago and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: 'go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority'. Would that have been so difficult?"
She said Obama had been practically silent since the protesters first descended on New York two months ago.
(3 comments) One person has been killed after a gunfight near the Occupy Oakland camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza Thursday evening.
The shooting took place shortly before 5 p.m. several feet from the 12th Street BART station adjacent to the plaza where Occupy protesters have set up camp.
A person acting as a spokesperson for the Occupy Oakland movement said an individual who was wounded in the shooting may have been hiding out from a person or a group of people at the encampment shortly before the incident.
A crowd quickly formed a human chain around the individual who was shot until police arrived. Oakland police are currently interviewing eyewitnesses to determine what happened.
Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan confirmed to ABC7 News that the shooting victim passed away from his injuries.
Obama could make the banks write down principal, get tough on currency value with China, ease small business lending, sign an order steering more federal contracts toward high-high-wage companies, Launch A "Buy American" And/Or "Buy Local" Campaign, stop talking about the deficit so much (that helps the GOP anti tax message. It's not about the deficit. It's about not having enough revenue.
The right wing fascists in Wisconsin have banned cameras at the Wisoonsin Assembly. So a group of people, including Matt Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, went there to challenge the law, knowing they risked arrest.
Now, in Wisconsin, people can carry concealed weapons to the assembly, but can' use cameras. Call it a harbinger of things to come as the right wing moves the US more and more into third world territory.
Several thousand Occupy Wall Street demonstrators forced a halt to operations at the United States' fifth busiest port Wednesday evening, escalating a movement whose tactics had largely been limited to rallies and tent camps since it began in September.
Police estimated that a crowd of about 3,000 had gathered at the Port of Oakland by early evening. Some had marched from the California city's downtown, while others had been bused to the port.
Port spokesman Isaac Kos-Read said maritime operations had effectively been shut down. I
(2 comments) Oakland police engaged in actions and use of weapons that soldiers are war are not permitted to do. The shooting of a tear gas canister directly at a person is a violation of rules of engagement that US soldiers operated under in facing the Taliban.
A former marine with special crowd control training said:
"How did a cop who is supposed to have training on his weapon system accidentally SHOOT someone in the head with a 40mm gas canister? Simple. He was aiming at him."
The person that pulled that trigger has no business being a cop. He sent that round out with the intention of doing some serious damage to the protestors. I don't care what the protestors were doing. I never broke my rules of engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. So I can't imagine what a protester in the states did to deserve a headshot with a 40mm. ...that cop knows he was using lethal force against a protester..
They've given Obama more money than any of the republican candidates and why not?
Drug companies won more protections for brand-name drugs against cheaper drugs in Obama's health care reform law. Proposals to have Medicare negotiate drug prices and to allow importation of drugs from Canada did not make it into the final bill. An estimated 32 million new Americans with insurance also means more business for pharmaceutical companies.
Google receives more requests in six months from U.S. law enforcement agencies than all of the wiretaps orders issued nationwide in a single year, privacy and surveillance researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed out to me in an email. The Electronic Privacy Information Center reported that in 2010, federal and state courts issued 3,194 orders for the interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications -- up 34 percent from 2009, per EPIC. (Only 26 percent of intercepted communications in 2010 were incriminating.) Google, meanwhile, received 4,601 requests for disclosure of user data from July to December 2010 alone. These numbers are not inclusive of the various tools at the disposal of federal law enforcement that often come with gag orders, such as National Security Letters, as Wired's Threat Level blog editor Ryan Singel notes.
(1 comments) Alabama began implementation of a draconian immigration law (HB56), codifying a new era of fear and racism in our country. HB56 turns Alabama into a police state reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, making it a crime to appear in public without your papers in order. It requires proof of citizenship in routine transactions. Schools need to see papers for children and their parents before fulfilling their core duty of educating children. In moves worthy of a dystopian late-night B-movie, law enforcement is now required to stop anyone who "appears" illegal.
Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we'd all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.
But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seenbigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
My last tweet:
Majorly armed cops coming aboard
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. "Can I bring my phone?" I asked, of course.
(2 comments) State law deems it legal to quietly videotape or photograph proceedings in the statehouse. These citizen journalists were arrested anyway. Hopefully, they will sue the police and all who were involved in the decision to arrest them.
(3 comments) Why our kids' success - and happiness - may depend less on perfect performance than on learning how to deal with failure.
How character strengths, grit & a Character Point Average came into being at the Riverdale School in NY.
"This push on tests," he told me, "is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human."
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character -- those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. "Whether it's the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful," he said. "Strangely, we've now forgotten that.
(1 comments) Obama's two business friendly Obama advisors-- Cass Sunstein, White House regulatory chief-- you know, the guy who advised Obama to use sock puppets on blogs-- and Bill Daley, who replaced Rahm Emanuel as Chief White House prick.... I mean Chief of Staff.
Seems the two of them were behind the move to gut the EPA regulations.
Nice to put a name on the beasts.
Of course, WSJ discusses how they are strategizing ways to engage and defuse the GOP.
Since 1990, more than 110 million gallons of mostly crude and petroleum products have spilled from the nation's mainland pipeline network. More than half of it occurred in three states -- Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana -- where more pipelines exist.
Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography -- there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. Time picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine
Nice to see some great progressive writers-- Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ralph Nader and one of my favorite books, Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces
(26 comments) So why is Damon's name being mentioned in the context of the 2012 race for the White House and a possible liberal challenge to Barack Obama? The simple answer is to blame leftwing firebrand Michael Moore.
Moore, in a discussion with the liberal politics blog Firedoglake, raised the issue as he talked about his frustration with Obama, who many American leftists see as ignoring them while compromising with the Republican party. Moore called Damon's political stances in recent years courageous and urged him to run, despite there being no hint from the actor himself that he would care to. In a nod to the acting past of two-time Republican President Ronald Reagan, Moore said: "The Republicans have certainly shown the way that when you run someone who is popular, you win. Sometimes even when you run an actor, you win."
The suggestion quickly spread across the media...
OUR leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.
(24 comments) Bachmann took 4,823 votes, narrowly escaped a major upset at the hands of Texas Rep. Ron Paul who won 4,671 votes. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty placed third with 2,293, a showing that is likely to raise questions about his ability to continue in the contest.
The order of finish beyond the top three went as follows: former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (1,567), businessman Herman Cain (1,456), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (718), former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (567), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (385), former Utah governor Jon Huntsman (69) and Michigan Rep. Thad McCotter (35).
Perry, Romney, Gingrich and Huntsman did not actively campaign at Ames.
Nothing would help News Corp. better quiet allegations of political bias in its news coverage than combining Fox News with the Huffington Post. Like Fox's Roger Ailes, Arianna Huffington has repeatedly insisted that her political coverage is beyond left and right.
Both Ailes and Huffington reject the "view from nowhere" pretenses of traditional journalism, claiming to offer frank opinion tempered with political balance. Well, nothing says balance like reaching out to the Tea Party with one hand and the Netroots with the other. What's more, that kind of dynamic conflict would translate to ratings and pageviews gold running up to the US elections in 2012.
(6 comments) In a new documentary, ex-national security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers--then covered it up.
With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.
The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month.
Clarke speculates that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists...
(2 comments) sday when he announced his pick to be the next U.S. attorney for Utah is David Barlow, currently the general counsel to freshman senator and Tea Party favorite Mike Lee (R-Utah).
It's unclear whether Barlow shares Lee's more extreme legal theories about the limits of federal power. But what is known about Barlow is that he has no significant criminal law experience -- he was a corporate lawyer practicing pharmaceutical defense, toxic tort and product liability law before starting to work for Lee in January -- and he's a registered Republican who contributed $300 to Obama's opponent, Sen. John McCain, in 2008.
Todd Taylor, executive director of the Utah Dem Party, said his group sent the names of several strong, qualified Democratic candidates for the job to the White House, then never heard anything back.
"We're just deeply disappointed" by the Barlow nomination, Taylor said, "
(2 comments) The US deficit reduction plan makes no sense until you remember who's behind the Tea Party movement.
There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.
So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.
At least 136 people were killed on Sunday, among them 100 in the city of Hama, when the Syrian military stormed several cities across the country, human rights activists said. Abdul Karim Rihawi, head of the Syrian League for the Defense of Human Rights, said "100 civilians were shot dead Sunday in Hama by security forces."
Experts greatly overestimated the number of people in New York who would suffer lasting emotional distress. Therapists rushed in to soothe victims using methods that later proved to be harmful to some.
And they fell to arguing over whether watching an event on television could produce the same kind of traumatic reaction as actually being there.
These and other stumbles have changed the way mental health workers respond to traumatic events, said Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the special issue along with editors at the journal.
Conservatives are on a winning streak because they have a Big Idea that serves as an animating, unifying force. It happens to be a very bad idea, but it's better than nothing -- which, sadly, is what progressives have.
The simplistic Big Idea that defines today's Republican Party is that taxes are always too high and government spending is always wasteful. Therefore, both taxes and spending need to be reduced.
The essence of the far right's Big Idea fits neatly on a bumper sticker: Cut taxes, cut spending. It's a simple, powerful message
Democrats have utterly failed to develop and communicate a Big Idea of their own.
Obama talks about "winning the future," but that's too nebulous. I'd suggest something pithier: jobs, jobs, jobs.
People may dislike paying taxes, but they dislike unemployment more. Progressives should talk about bringing the nation back to full employment
(2 comments) This week Cenk Uygur lost his spot as interim host of the 6pm slot on MSNBC; since then there has been something of a he said/he said surrounding the reasons behind Uygur's departure from the cable news network. Last night, Uygur appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann...
But the most telling part of the interview came at the end of the segment, when Olbermann asked Uygur how he wants his loyal fan base to react to this. Uygur referred to himself in the third person and said:
Look I think the most important message out of all of this isn't about Cenk Uygur, isn't about MSNBC, its about the media and the press in general. And, are we going to be honest with our audience, are we going to trade in honesty and truth and information that we are supposed to gather for access.
Uygur's fanbase will be delighted to hear Olbermann's throwaway salutation at the end "we'll be in touch"
(1 comments) I had an email that included mention of the koch brothers, and this google link shows up:
Koch Internship Program - "cgkfoundation.org/internship - Advance free-market principles. Intern this fall in DC."
they're helping the right wing policy promotion echo chamber by finding and hiring interns. Another angle on how the right is so successful
(9 comments) Over the last four years, the Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp conglomerate earned $10 billion dollars and received $4.5 billion in federal refunds after paying zero taxes.
Who is David Cay Johnston, the reporter of this provocative piece ? He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been focused on economic and tax policies for some time,
Johnston wrote for Reuters,
"Over the past four years Murdoch's U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government."
UPDATE
Reuters has drastically revised the article this was based on, basically retracting the main claim. See Rob Kall Comment below
Hillary Clinton, the US sec. of state, has issued one of Washington's strongest condemnations yet of Syria's govt, saying President Bashar al-Assad has lost his "legitimacy".
"President Assad is not indispensable and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power," Clinton told reporters on Monday.
"If anyone, including President Assad, thinks that the United States is secretly hoping that the regime will emerge from this turmoil to continue its brutality and repression, they are wrong."
The comment comes hours after protesters loyal to Assad attacked the US and French embassies in the capital, Damascus.
The latest incident seems to have damaged what was always a tense US-Syrian relationship beyond repair.
When the popular uprising first started in March, US President Obama called for the Syrian government to respect the right of the people to protest...
(1 comments) The News of the World scandal continues to unravel with new allegations that the bad practices were employed by more News International papers than just the News of the World and that American victims of Sept. 11, 2001 were also targeted in the phone hacking scandal.
Despite the attempt to keep the scandal contained, News Corp. is suffering from the revelations. Its stock has dropped in the U.S. and its bid to purchase a majority sharehold in BSkyB is now being called into question by culture secretary Jeremy Hunt.
(1 comments) Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg summoned his chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt, to his desk at City Hall a few days ago for what seemed like a routine conversation with the boss. "Let's get a cup of coffee," the mayor told him, motioning to the office kitchen.
There, Mr. Bloomberg made an unusual offer. He did not know if Mr. Feinblatt and his longtime partner, Jonathan Mintz, the city's commissioner for consumer affairs, wanted to marry. But if they did, and were looking for somebody to officiate, he knew just the man for the job. "If you'd like me to do it, I'd really love to," Mr. Bloomberg said.
Mr. Feinblatt, thrilled by the offer but wary of unilateral decision-making in matters of the heart, said he needed to consult with Mr. Mintz, who quickly gave his approval.
City Hall's first gay wedding was on.
"The mayor and John," Mr. Mintz recalled, "popped the question."
(3 comments) It is either poetic justice or a desperate attempt by Rupert Murdoch to stop the bleeding.
By closing down News of the World... Murdoch is taking a drastic step that is virtually without precedent.
It is either poetic justice or a desperate attempt by Rupert Murdoch to stop the bleeding.
By closing down News of the World, the scandal-driven London tabloid that itself became engulfed by scandal, Murdoch is taking a drastic step that is virtually without precedent.
The 2.6 million circulation News of the World paper is valued at about $650 million, or 1.4 percent of the parent company's market value.
Frank Sesno, director of GWU's School of Media and Public Affairs says of Murdoch, " He is in deep damage-control mode right now. This is his Titanic hitting the iceberg, and he has to worry about the rest of the fleet behind him."
(2 comments) Who was that combative president? The guy who came out swinging against tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, for big oil companies, for hedge fund managers, for corporate jet owners?
The Barack Obama we saw at an East Room news conference on Wednesday--drawing sharp distinctions and demanding concessions from Republicans--is the kind of partisan fighter that liberals have craved for the last two-and-a-half years. Gone was the conciliator-in-chief patiently trying to see all sides; in his place was an amped-up leader determined to pressure his opponents.
he Juliano, a boat planning on joining the Gaza flotilla challenging Israel's blockade, was sabotaged in a Greek harbor earlier today, according to a spokesman.
A ship jointly owned by Swedish, Greek, and Norwegian activists hoping to join a flotilla of activist vessels challenging Israel's economic blockade of Gaza, had its propeller cut while in Athen's harbor today. A spokesman contacted by the Monitor said that the damage was a deliberate act of sabotage.
Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet approved using any means necessary to stop the flotilla from reaching Gaza.
Draw your own conclusions.
(31 comments) A shocking report prepared by Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a "total and complete" news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.
According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a "catastrophic loss of cooling" to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a "no-fly ban" over the area.
Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD)
Clay Shirky sees big pictures where others see facebook and twitter. He sees the forest where most see tree branches.
I"ve interviewed rocket scientists and brain surgeons. Pretty much all the people I interview are really smart. Clay Shirky is brilliant. I'm pretty sure this podcast will get more listens than any other I've done. Invest the time. He'll stretch the way you think about things.
it's not just Rand's economic and regulatory arguments that has the non-profit advocacy group American Values Network (AVN) angsty: they want Republican evangelicals to know that Rand was also an atheist who quite literally hated Jesus. They've even produced a video to that effect.
"Ayn Rand encapsulates in a very powerful way this drift [away from Christian values], especially with the rise of the tea party which is in many ways very un-Christian,"
(3 comments) Thomas appears to have "knowingly and willfully" filed falsified Financial Disclosure Forms which withheld disclosure of nearly $700,000 his wife received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation for the better part of the last 20 years. Only once it was pointed out publicly this year did Thomas bother to file "self-initiated amendments" to the forms he had signed
Jim tells us his moving story on a video, about his going first through non-hodgkins lymphoma then double lung transplantation.
He says:
God is just what happens when humanity is connected.
We all owe every moment of our lives to each other. We are all connected.
The universe was connected in each day. Today, we are the creators.
We are the leaders of this new leaders. We have faith that people connected can create a new world.
(5 comments) The most complex biochemical circuit ever created from scratch using DNA-based devices in a test tube has been built by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
To build their circuits, the researchers used pieces of DNA to make logic gates. Instead of depending on electrons flowing in and out of transistors, DNA-based logic gates receive and produce molecules as signals. The molecular signals travel from one specific gate to another, connecting the circuit as if they were wires.
The new logic gates are made from pieces of either short, single-stranded DNA or partially double-stranded DNA, in which single strands stick out like tails from the DNA's double helix. The single-stranded DNA molecules act as input and output signals that interact with the partially double-stranded ones.
All the logic gates have identical structures with different sequences.
Kevin Bacon plays a senior officer escorting home the body of a 20 year old Marine killed in Iraq. This is a touching, poignant film which shows how the military handles returning the bodies of our killed soldiers, and how so many people, as the body travels to its final resting place, are touched and show their love, honor and respect. It is a perfect movie for Memorial day. It reminds us that we have a duty not just to mourn our soldiers but also to vigilantly challenge those who keep us at war, questioning the reasons we stay each additional day.
Ron Wyden, has once again taken a stand against his own party to defend what he sees as the inherent right to free speech on the Internet, placing a hold on a bill that could force search engines and Internet service providers to block websites deemed to be "infringing" on copyrights.
The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act -- or "PROTECT IP" for short was part of a second attempt to pass provisions of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which failed to clear Congress during its last session thanks to a parliamentary maneuver by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
And once again, Wyden has stepped forward to ensure those measures do not pass.
"In December of last year I placed a hold on similar legislation, commonly called COICA, because I felt the costs of the legislation far outweighed the benefits,"
(1 comments) Thom Hartmann isn't taking Fox Business Network's weeklong series of "Makers vs. Takers" segments lying down, branding the theme an extension of the Republican "war on the middle class." On his TV show, The Big Picture, Hartmann calls out the meme, "a war that pits the rich or the makers against the poor the takers," but his most revelatory insight is his debunking of the myth that wealthy individuals and corporations "create jobs."
The way Hartmann breaks it down, it is truly amazing that this line of thought gets any traction at all, and indeed, the Tea Party energy that fueled the extension of the Bush tax cuts is giving way to the realization that such largesse comes at the expense of the so-called "takers," or "people," as they're usually known.
Where Hartmann's commentary really shines when he debunks the notion that wealthy corporations and individuals "create jobs."
(2 comments) Lt. Dan Choi, the LGBT activist and West Point graduate that became a media staple during the battle to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, has been arrested in Moscow for attending a gay pride parade along with more than 30 other domestic and foreign activists. Interestingly enough, Moscow police allowed Lt. Choi to keep his cell phone with him in jail, which has allowed him to use Twitter to narrate the entire legal process.
"This has been my favorite pride march yet,"Lt. Choi tweeted from jail. The decision to allow protesters to keep their telephones in jail and use them to report on the experience seems strange, though demonstrates the heightened level of respect given to foreigners protesting in the country. Lt. Choi also noted that fellow protesters claimed they were being treated better than at other attempted rallies because foreigners were present...
(1 comments) Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups at the University of California, Santa Barbara issued a joint letter condemning a conservative activist's attacks on the school's Muslim student group.
The letter criticizing David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was signed by the Santa Barbara Hillel and UCSB American Students for Israel along with the campus' Muslim Student Association and its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
It was published Thursday in the campus newspaper in advance of a scheduled address by Horowitz that evening titled "Infantile Disorders at UCSB: Why the Muslim Students Association is Afraid of David Horowitz." The campus' College Republicans chapter is sponsoring the address.
Rand Paul suggests he's holding up the Patriot act to protect constitutional rights. But it's really about making the nation less safe by removing tracking of weapon ownership-- a clear case of the NRA putting fanatical resistance to gun tracking and accountability over national security. At first glance, Rand Paul might seem like he's a good guy, but no, he's deep in the slime like the rest of the NRA congressional pawns.
(1 comments) sraeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni praised President Obama's Middle East policy speech and warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was opening a rift with the United States by criticizing it.
"An American president that supports a two-state solution represents the Israeli interest and is not anti-Israeli," Livni, the leader of Israel's Kadima Party, said on Friday. "President Obama's call to start negotiations represents Israel's interests."
She said that "a prime minister that harms the relationship with the U.S. over something unsubstantial is harming Israel's security and deterrence." According to The Jerusalem Post, Livni said that such a prime minister should resign. "I am saying this loud and clear," she said.
Netanyahu's rejection of Obama's Mideast speech underestimated the president's strength--and could hasten the Israeli leader's political demise.
Bibi Netanyahu could have reacted any number of ways to Barack Obama's mention of the "1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps." Let's say, actually, four ways--embrace, circumspection, suspicion, tantrum. That he chose the last--saying immediately after the Obama speech that he "expects" to hear Obama in essence renounce what he'd just said before the entire world!--tells us a lot about the man's shortcomings and (lack of) political instinct. All political is local, and Netanyahu undoubtedly scored points with his Likud base back home. But he has a base here in America too, and I think he misjudged that base badly.
Donald the clown surprised no-one, except for some simple minded tea-baggers, when he announced today, shortly after NBC announced its fall line-up. Apparently, Trump went with the surer thing - his TV show - over a run for president which polled pretty badly. The commentary above, for this link to a report on this news by mediaite, does not reflect what the Mediaite articles states, opinion-wise.
(5 comments) There's a bottom up revolution going on. Our world, culture, business, brains, ways we work, relate and see things are all transitioning from top down to bottom up, from centralized to decentralized, from an information era to a connection era. This is not something you can ignore or avoid. It is a tidal wave that is changing everything. If you don't get it and ride the wave it will knock you over and leave you behind.
If you are under thirty, you need to understand how the still very powerful top-down world still functions. If you are over thirty, you MUST understand this new bottom up world to be able to work, communicate and succeed.
(1 comments) Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote--the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
The problem, in Franken's view, is that tucked away inside the iPhone is a little database that keeps track of everywhere you go. The phone knows where you are based on which cell towers you're using. As Franken points out in his letter to Jobs, it's conceivable that someone could create a virus that would pull this data from people's devices. Worse, the data isn't even encrypted. It's just sitting there, waiting to be read.
"There's a certain amount of privacy that you might be willing to give up, but you should know that you are giving it up."
Readings Monday from robots that entered two crippled buildings at Japan's tsunami-flooded nuclear plant for the first time in more than a month revealed a harsh environment still too radioactive for workers to enter.
Nuclear officials said the radiation data for Unit 1 and Unit 3 at the tsunami-flooded Fukushima Dai-ichi plant — collected by U.S.-made robots that look like drafting lamps on treads — do not alter plans for stabilizing the complex by year's end under a "road map" released by the plant operator Sunday.
With the public growing increasingly frustrated at the slow response to the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crises, parliament grilled Prime Minister Naoto Kan and officials from plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
(3 comments) "I have been very disappointed in the administration to the point where I'm embarrassed that I endorsed him," one senior Democratic lawmaker said. "It's so bad that some of us are thinking, is there some way we can replace him? How do you get rid of this guy?"
The Japanese have revised the rating of the Nuclear disaster from five-- the level of the Three Mile Island disaster-- to seven, which only Chernobyl was rated before. The reason for raising the assessment was because of the level of radiation measured. While Reuters says "maybe" on the level, Japanese news is reporting it as a fact.
(14 comments) A new book purports there are seven levels of empathy and that less empathy contributes to the ability to do evil things. Testosterone is a factor.
A man came home from work late again, tired and irritated, to find his 5-year-old son waiting for him at the door.
"Daddy, may I ask you a question?"
"Yeah, sure, what is it?" replied the man.
"Daddy, how much money do you make an hour?
"That's none of your business! What makes you ask such a thing?" the man said angrily.
"I just want to know. Please tell me, how much do you make an hour?" pleaded the little boy.
"If you must know, I make $20.00 an hour."
"Oh," the little boy replied, head bowed. Looking up, he said, "Daddy, may I borrow $10.00 please?"
The father was furious.
(2 comments) The paper questions the findings of Kathy Nicholaus, the former employee of the judge for whom she "discovered" the extra 7000 ballots. It points out that the number discovered are just enough to prevent an automatic recount.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- A video of an American CEO shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe that villagers then sliced apart for meat has raised thousands of dollars for a conservation group after a rival Internet firm used the graphic footage to steal away customers.
The founder of Save The Elephants, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, said he was surprised but appreciative by the more than $20,000 in funds raised by Internet domain registration site Namecheap.
Namecheap offered to donate $1 for every customer who opened a new account with them after the chief executive of their competitor GoDaddy.com appeared in the video of an elephant being killed last month.
After JoAnne Kloppenburg declared victory on Wednesday over conservative incumbent Justice David Prosser in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Gov. Scott Walker (R) quickly tried to convince the public that the result was not a referendum on him, his legislation that stripped collective bargaining from public employees, or the state's embattled Republican Party. But before the election, back when Prosser's victory looked more likely, Walker's allies were branding it as exactly that.
Just a couple of weeks ago, few people thought Kloppenburg could beat Prosser, a close ally of Walker's. She lost by 30 points to Prosser in the February primary (the election is nonpartisan), and incumbents for the state's high court have rarely been unseated.
(10 comments) The "birth certificate" Donald Trump released earlier today to show how easy it was to produce "is not an official New York City birth certificate, but rather a document generated by Jamaica Hospital, where Trump's mother Mary reportedly gave birth in June 1946," the Smoking Gun reports.
"Official birth certificates are issued (and maintained) by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Office of Vital Records."
