The Vogues:
Oh what a shame
The Strypes:
What he said
John Oliver on climate change:
That’s the kind of senator you want
One who’ll sacrifice his home state on the altar of his own political ambition:
Of all the states that stand to suffer from climate change, Florida is facing potentially the bleakest consequences. A New York Times report noted last week that global warming was already having an effect on everyday life, like leading to flooding on streets that never used to flood.
Meanwhile, a National Climate Assessment has named Miami as the city most vulnerable to damage from rising sea levels. While a Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact paper warned that water in the area could rise by as much as two feet by the year 2060.
On Sunday, one of the state’s U.S. senators, Marco Rubio (R), was pressed about the general subject of climate change, and despite the warnings outlined above, he argued that there was nothing lawmakers could or should do to reverse the climate trends (whose origins he also questioned).
“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” Rubio said, according to excerpts released by ABC “This Week,”
Cute
This is from China’s version of America’s Got Talent. Watch the whole thing:
http://youtu.be/MdcuaeYV9oM
Blackwater
The Times has an in-depth look at the case against Blackwater for shooting into a crowd in Iraq:
WASHINGTON — The team of F.B.I. agents arrived in Iraq to investigate a shooting involving a private company that provided security for Americans in a war zone. It was October 2007, and the name of the company — Blackwater Worldwide — did not yet mean anything to the agents. But what they found shocked them.
Witnesses described a convoy of Blackwater contractors firing wildly into a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad the previous month, killing 17 people. One Iraqi woman watched her mother die as they rode the bus. Another died cradling the head of her mortally wounded son.
“This is the My Lai massacre of Iraq,” one agent remembers John Patarini, the team’s leader, saying as they were heading home.
Whether it concerns bankers after the crisis in 2008 or the shooting of innocent civilians by American contractors in Iraq, the prosecution does not seem to be up to the task.
That shooting in Nisour Square, along with the massacre by Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, became a signature moment in the Iraq war. Five Blackwater security guards were indicted on manslaughter and weapons charges, and a sixth entered a plea deal to testify against his former colleagues.
But over the years, a case that once seemed so clear-cut has been repeatedly undermined by the government’s own mistakes.
Prosecutors are trying to hold together what is left of it. But charges against one contractor were dropped last year because of a lack of evidence. And the government suffered another self-inflicted setback in April when a federal appeals court ruled that the prosecution had missed a deadline and allowed the statute of limitations to expire against a second contractor, Nicholas A. Slatten, a former Army sniper from Tennessee who investigators believe fired the first shots in Nisour Square. A judge then dismissed the case against Mr. Slatten.
The appeals court unanimously rejected the argument that letting Mr. Slatten walk free would be a miscarriage of justice. If such an injustice occurred, the court said, it was caused by the government’s delays, which the court called “inexplicable.”
Thanks to Kush Arora.
Old white dick
John Oliver featured this fake campaign commercial on his HBO show this week. If you have an aversion to old white dick, you probably shouldn’t watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIhxklwLDZc
Interesting
I wonder what information they will glean from the wreckage:
The leader of an undersea expedition says a pile of wreckage on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, off the north coast of Haiti, may well mark the spot where Christopher Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria, sank in 1492.
“All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus’ famous flagship, the Santa Maria,” team leader Barry Clifford is quoted as saying by The Independent, a British newspaper.
Clifford said the next step would be to work with the Haitian government on a detailed excavation of the wreck.
The claim is based on photographic documentation of the underwater site, plus Clifford’s interpretation of previous research that identified the location of La Navidad, the fortified settlement that Columbus established on the coast of present-day Haiti after the Santa Maria ran aground on Christmas Day, 1492. The Independent quoted Clifford as saying that the location of the wreckage site was consistent with descriptions set down in Columbus’ diary.
Can’t hurt Tom’s fee-fees
If there’s anything we know about Tom Corbett, it’s that he’s highly adverse to public confrontation. That’s why he takes such pains to appear only in front of friendly audiences, and does minimal publicity of his events:
For four years, Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) has led the charge on education funding cuts in Pennsylvania so devastating that individual school districts were left asking parents to chip in. While Corbett has softened his position on education funding cuts over the past few months as the November election approaches, at the height of the debate over budget cuts, students at JP McCaskey High School in Lancaster County were encouraged to lobby the legislature on cuts to the budget.
But when Corbett held a press conference at JP McCaskey last week touting a small chunk of funding for school resource officers, students who planned to protest Corbett’s spending priorities say they were intimidated by their school administrators into backing out.
“As soon as they found out that we were going to protest they said that we were not allowed to come and that we did not have the permission anymore,” said Brittani Carr, 17.
Carr and several fellow students had planned to hold up signs, with messages about Corbett’s push to fund other priorities like the now-invalidated voter ID law, prisons, and fracking, while making drastic cuts to education. One read, “diplomas not handcuffs.” Another said, “Corbett cut public education funding while increasing prison funding. Don’t be fooled.”
“I didn’t like the idea that he was coming because it’s like, if I’ve been stealing money from you for four years and then all of the sudden I give you ten dollars, I didn’t want it to be seen that our district was welcoming him,” said Therese DeSlippe, a senior at McCaskey.
Carr and DeSlippe were told that if they protested, they would be uninvited from Corbett’s remarks and would face consequences for cutting class, including suspension.
Good news
Even if it is somewhat like locking the barn door after the horse is out. But still!
President Obama is expected to announce a series of executive actions and agreements on Friday morning that will advance solar power and energy efficiency in the United States, part of his pledge to tackle climate change without having to go through a gridlocked Congress…the initiatives will represent an 850-megawatt increase in solar power deployed, or enough to power 130,000 homes. They will also lead to more $2 billion in energy efficiency investments in Federal buildings, $26 billion in savings for businesses on energy bills, and a 380 million metric ton decrease in carbon pollution — the equivalent of taking about 80 million cars off the road for a year, the statement said.