The local diner is closing. This is the one that made the news when customers were buying meals for other customers and paying it forward…
Robert Reich
On his Facebook page, Reich says if nobody runs for president with the goals of “broad-based prosperity” and “big money out of politics,” he will:
Connect the dots: Almost all the economic gains are going to the top, which means the rest don’t have the purchasing power to get the economy out of first gear. So unemployment remains high, and most families’ wages continue to drop. The ranks of the poor are growing and almost a quarter of our nation’s children are in poverty. We know how to reverse this (a living wage, better schools and affordable colleges, stronger unions, wage subsidies, no more trickle-down or austerity economics, green jobs) but cannot because our democracy is drowning in big money. Much of it is coming from Wall Street, large corporations, and a few billionaires that want to keep wages down and unemployment high, reduce their own taxes and regulations, and collect corporate welfare.
This is not sustainable. We must get big money out of politics and restore broad-based prosperity. How and when? At the very least, with a candidate for president in 2016 who makes this the centerpiece of his or her campaign and turns it into a national movement, which you and tens of millions of others join. I don’t see any prospect on the Republican side. Then will Hillary Clinton do it? If not, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders? If no one else will do it, I will.
Layover heaven
There’s a new library in Philadelphia – and it’s in the airport.
The Free Library of Philadelphia recently opened an outpost in the Philadelphia International Airport in the form of a book-themed lounge with free Wi-Fi access to the library’s digital catalog.
Passengers are encouraged to relax in the reading room, in the concourse between the D and E terminals, and download books or author podcasts from the library’s collection of nearly 30,000 titles.
“We brought our high-speed line out to the airport in that little area. That Internet connectivity is extraordinarily robust, it matches what we have in the library,” said Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Free Library.
The idea was inspired in part by an especially snowy winter, she said.
“We were having extensive blizzards here in Philadelphia, and we knew that there were thousands of people camping in the airport,” Ms. Reardon said. “We thought, ‘What if we put a library in?’ ”
Crazy sex-hating wingnut assholes
Arguments in front of the Supreme Court start next week in the Hobby Lobby case. Hobby Lobby is suing for a religious exemption from the Department of Health and Human Services mandate requiring that employer-provided health insurance cover contraception. Most of the coverage of the case has focused on Hobby Lobby’s objection to the contraception itself and how, if the business prevails, its employees will have to pay out of pocket for things like birth control pills or IUDs. But, as Tara Culp-Ressler at ThinkProgress explained on Wednesday, Hobby Lobby and their co-plaintiff, Conestoga Wood Specialties, are also objecting to insurance plans covering “related education and counseling” for contraception. In other words, these for-profit businesses aren’t just asking their female employees to pay for their own contraception, even though they are already paying for their own contraception by paying for their insurance coverage. These companies want to elbow their way into doctor’s offices and call the shots on what doctors can and cannot say to Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood employees.
“Essentially, if Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood are successful, they’ll win the right to refuse to extend coverage for doctor’s visits that include discussion about certain forms of contraception, like IUDs or the morning after pill,” Culp-Ressler writes. That would probably be something insurance companies could deal with if there was such thing as a specialized doctor’s appointment to only discuss contraception. In the real world, however, most women receive their contraception counseling at general gynecological appointments or annual checkups. You go in, get your blood taken, get a Pap smear, get your breasts squeezed, and then your doctor asks what you use for contraception, and you walk out with a prescription in hand. If Hobby Lobby has its way, by merely acknowledging the birth control pill during that appointment, your doctor would render your entire visit ineligible for coverage by your health care plan.
Yeah, that worked well
The older I get, the more strongly I believe that conservatism is not a coherent ideology, but an actual mental illness. How else do you explain a Republican representative who is truly grateful to have benefited from Obamacare — but will probably still end up supporting Scott Brown, who just told him how awful it is?:
WASHINGTON — As former Sen. Scott Brown barnstorms through New Hampshire in a likely prelude to another Senate run, he has dusted off a familiar playbook. Condemnation of Obamacare has been front and center of his pitch, much like it was in 2010 when he unexpectedly won a race to take over the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.
But times are different now. The law is no longer some theoretical set of reforms, but is being implemented with varying degrees of success and failure. And while it remains largely unpopular (virtually every Republican is making the same attacks as Brown), there are those who have already benefited, some of them Republicans.
Brown found that out on Saturday, when he stopped by the home of Herb Richardson, a Republican state representative. Sitting in Richardson’s home, Brown called Obamacare a “monstrosity” that members of Congress didn’t even bother to read before they passed. At that point, according to the Coos County Democrat, Richardson chimed in to explain that the law had been a “financial lifesaver” for him and his wife.
From the the piece (page 14):
Richardson was injured on the job and was forced to live on his workers’ comp payments for an extended period of time, which ultimately cost the couple their house on Williams Street. The couple had to pay $1,100 a month if they wanted to maintain their health insurance coverage under the federal COBRA law.
Richardson said he only received some $2,000 a month in workers’ comp. payments, however, leaving little for them to live on.”Thank God for Obamacare!” his wife exclaimed.
Now, thanks to the subsidy for which they qualify, the Richardsons only pay $136 a month for health insurance that covers them both.
The Huffington Post called and emailed Richardson to get more details on his medical and financial situation, and how and why he has benefited from Obamacare. Those requests for comment were not immediately returned. The reporter who covered the event did, however, share some details in a phone conversation Wednesday night.
“We were in [Richardson’s] trailer, his wife was there, a former state rep was there, as well,” said Edith Tucker. “So there were only six of us. There wasn’t any interrupting. It was a general conversation. And when Scott Brown started to talk about Obamacare, it was then that Rep. Richardson explained what a boon it had been.
“Richardson, Tucker noted, had gotten hurt on the job and the large costs of his health insurance premium had put him into financial disarray. “He used to live in a 12-room house in Lancaster, but he could not maintain mortgage payments during his bankruptcy proceedings,” she explained, “and so he moved to a trailer home, which was where we were.”
When Richardson explained how helpful Obamacare had been for him, Brown didn’t interrupt, Tucker said. The conversation moved on from there to other, somewhat related topics.”[Brown] did not [respond],” said Tucker. “You could be sure, if he had, I would have written about it.”
Post-racial America
I get so tired of “reasonable” people who telling me black people get “special treatment”:
Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil RightsDepartment of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor.
Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer any Algebra II courses, while a third of those schools do not have any chemistry classes. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements.
“Here we are, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the data altogether still show a picture of gross inequity in educational opportunity,” said Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project.
Dems figure out way around most food stamp cuts
Poor, poor John Boehner. Those crafty Dems have come up with a way to keep feeding children, and he just won’t have it!
Democratic governors appear to have the upper hand in a fight with House Republican leaders over a change to federal welfare policy that was enacted in February.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is accusing several states of “cheating” by increasing their home heating aid to recipients of food stamps in a bid to circumvent cuts to federal funding.
The states, which are mostly in the Northeast and led by Democrats, say they are merely protecting needy citizens in a way that is well within the law.
While Boehner said last week he wanted the House “to stop” the states from avoiding the cuts, aides do not expect a fast legislative response, and advocates say they aren’t sweating a congressional crackdown.
“This is just political pontificating,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “The idea that there is some secret bait-and-switch is just preposterous.”
At issue is a provision in the farm bill, known as “heat and eat,” that allows people who receive benefits through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to also receive more nutrition assistance.
The idea behind the link was that low-income families should not have to choose between buying food and heating their home. But Congress has chafed at states that have sought to obtain more food stamp money by sending $1 LIHEAP checks to households that would not otherwise receive help.
To close what some lawmakers called a loophole, Congress increased the LIHEAP subsidy threshold to $20. The
Congressional Budget Office estimated the change would save $8.6 billion over a decade, representing a majority of the spending cuts in the nearly $1 trillion farm bill. Yet in the weeks since President Obama signed the law in February, seven of the 17 states that currently send nominal LIHEAP checks have announced plans to increase that aid to $20, so they can continue to access additional funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Those states include Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Oregon, Montana, Massachusetts and New York. All of them, with the exception of Pennsylvania, have Democratic governors.
The moves at the state level prompted Boehner to lash out at his weekly press conference, where he said addressing the “cheating” was a priority for the House in 2014.
“I would hope that the House would act to try to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing,” Boehner said. “I mean, listen. The American people work hard for their money; they send it here because we impose taxes on them, and they expect us to spend the money wisely. And, we just passed the farm bill, and then we find states finding ways around the law, and, frankly, perpetuating the fraud that we were trying to stop.”
The martyr
Any longtime observer of RT knows they can be a little wacky, but in many respects, they do better coverage than our corporate media. And there was something a little pat about Wahl’s resignation, a little too PR-friendly. Well, looks like it was a manufactured event – by the usual neocons. (You remember PNAC, right?) Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek:
For her public act of protest against Russia Today’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory and supposedly advancing the agenda of Vladimir Putin in Washington, D.C., previously unknown news anchor Liz Wahl has suddenly become one of the most famous unemployed people in America. After her on-air resignation from the cable news channel, Wahl appeared on the three major American cable news outlets—CNN, Fox News, MSNBC—to denounce the heavy-handed editorial line she claims her bosses imposed on her and other staffers.
“What’s clear is what’s happening right now amid this crisis is that RT is not about the truth,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “It’s about promoting a Putinist agenda. And I can tell you firsthand, it’s also about bashing America.”
Wahl’s act of defiance eventually earned her invitations from “The View” and “The Colbert Report,” offering her the opportunity to introduce millions of Americans to a Russian government-funded network whose Nielsen ratings have been too low to measure, but which commands a massive following on YouTube. Wahl was the toast of Washington, winning plaudits from a variety of prime-time pundits, from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (“remarkably badass”) to the conservative Amanda Carpenter (“Liz Wahl is proud to be an American and in the last five minutes I think she made everyone else proud to be one, too.”)
The celebration of Wahl fed directly into a BuzzFeed expose on “How The Truth Is Made at Russia Today,” with writer Rosie Gray painting a portrait of an “atmosphere of censorship and pressure” on American staffers toiling in RT’s D.C. offices. RT had long been the subject of criticism and ridicule for its promotion of Zeitgeist-style trutherism and libertarian paranoia, but Wahl now placed RT under unprecedented scrutiny, with mainstream U.S. media sounding the alarm about a bulwark of soft Russian power situated just blocks from the White House.
Continue reading “The martyr”
Spring can really hang you up the most
Rickie Lee Jones: