July 31, 2014

New York Skyscraper With a Poor Door--Falwty Towers to be sure

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/30/336322608/new-york-skyscrapers-separate-poor-door-sparks-outrage?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20140730

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is under fire for signing off on a building plan that allows a new luxury high-rise on Manhattan's western edge to have a separate entrance for low-income residents.

I wonder in the case of a fire if the Poor Door will be blocked so that the "proper people" will be allowed first use of elevators and stairs to exit.

July 19, 2014

Russia Today Has Different Definition of the Truth

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/19/russia-today-defends-crash-coverage-we-have-different-definitions-of-truth/

snip:

Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded international news agency, pushed back against accusations from one its former correspondents that it is a propaganda outlet for the Putin administration, explaining ” We have different definitions of truth.”

When did Fox News' Roger Ailes starting running Russian TV?

July 14, 2014

Hucklebag Does Not Fly With The Unwashed

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/mike-huckabee-private-planes-108851.html
snip:

As a presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee made a name for himself as the regular Joe on the debate stage, a threadbare underdog who couldn’t afford his opponents’ Madison Avenue-style commercials, plush hotels and chartered planes. In his campaign memoir, Huckabee proclaimed that he “kept in touch” with ordinary people while eating food-court fare and waiting for long-delayed commercial flights as “other candidates were stepping onto their Gulfstream jets.”
These days, the former Arkansas governor is living — and flying — far more comfortably.

Now a Fox News commentator and highly paid public speaker, Huckabee has in just a few years racked up at least $253,000 in private air travel bills on the way to political events, according to a POLITICO review of federal and state campaign finance records.

Another 1 percent hypocrite flimm-flamming and scamming the rubes with his "plain feller" return. More Elmer Fudd than Elmer Gantry.

July 8, 2014

Benghazi Panel Gets More Cash Than Veteran's Panel-Rethug Priority

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/07/benghazi-committee-budget_n_5565430.html

snip:

House Republicans have requested nearly $3.3 million to operate the select committee investigating Benghazi, which gives the GOP-launched committee a bigger budget than that granted to the committee overseeing the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs.

Follow the money and you will always find where the Rethug priorities are. Politics before Veterans. Not surprising.

July 5, 2014

Miss Shrub--Get Your New Tee Shirt

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/05/george-bush-shirt_n_5560394.html

snip:

The Republican National Committee is celebrating former President George W. Bush's birthday this weekend by selling wistful "I Miss W." t-shirts to its supporters.

I could think of few other things that could be on the shirt. Iraq in flames, Supreme Court with misspelled Tea Party signs behind the bench, the Titanic sinking with the words "U.S. economy on the side, CIA-selling them out one agent at a time, or Shrub reading My Pet Goat.

July 5, 2014

One of Raygun's Legacies--Mountain of Debt for college students

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/

snip:

The students Reagan loathed were the beneficiaries of a consensus that paired the GI Bill with the post-Sputnik explosion of higher education to offer no- to low-cost access to public institutions, and aid to those who needed it to make private college possible. Students were not expected to shoulder the burden of their educations alone, and this freed them to explore who they wanted to be and the kind of America in which they wanted to live. There were many adults, of course, who despised them for just this freedom, and powerful forces terrified of the changes they saw coming.

By the time Reagan was elected to the nation’s highest office a decade and a half later, these powers had devised perfect tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus. During Reagan’s two terms as president, dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased, federal guidelines pushed individual loans, and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that hardest kind of debt to escape was whatever you took on for your education. Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neo-liberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good.

Students reduced to paupers leaves little time to protest. Diabolical.