Jefferson Airplane:
Happy Hour: Stanley Turrentine – Little Sheri …
Culture is not for the little people anymore
And really, isn’t that as it should be?
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
I am amused to announce
That this happened in the only Republican area of Philadelphia. This is a big deal, it’s a major traffic artery (one I avoid at all costs). Maybe they will finally wake up:
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A huge water main break Tuesday morning closed the Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia.
Water on the roadway forced traffic to detour between Conwell Avenue and Grant Avenue. Both the inner and outer lanes were affected.
The outer lanes of the boulevard, both northbound and southbound, were reopened south of Red Lion Road just before 9am. All inside lanes remained closed.
The water main broke around 6:15am near a crosswalk just south of Conwell Avenue, between Red Lion Road and Grant Avenue. Water bubbled out of the street, covering all 12 lanes of the boulevard.
The main was reported as a 16-inch transmission line, though crews are working to get in and confirm that. The water department reports that the main was successfully shut off sometime around 8:15am.
As of now, there’s no timeline announced for when the entire highway will reopen.
It takes a village of ‘experts’ to craft Hillary’s spiel
The headline — “Economic plan is a quandary for Clinton ’16” — was provocative. The lede was downright bizarre:
With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.
“She’s betwixt a rock and a hard place,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t gonna be easy to solve that there quandary.”
“The poor are being cheated because of laws that are too favorable to the wealthy,” I said. “At this point, the wealthy should understand this. It doesn’t take 200 experts to state the obvious.”
I wondered why I felt so worked up about Hillary’s campaign strategy. Then I remembered I’m one of the poors, living in a shack in the Tinicum swamp with an alcoholic rabbit. It galls me that she is trying to successfully mimic Elizabeth Warren’s call to correct income inequality, but without endorsing any of Warren’s remedies for the problem.
“She’s just another Democrat trying to win without changing the status quo,” I said. “She’d rather alienate millions of poors than risk alienating her hard core of wealthy campaign contributors.”
The rabbit shoved some twigs in the wood stove and looked at me funny. “What’s so odd about that, Odd Man? If wealthy people quit givin’ her money, how’s she gonna afford all them experts that tell her how not to piss off the wealthy?”
Oops
I hate reading stories like this. It’s so painful to know this child would be alive if this operator had been properly trained and knew how to do her job:
Just 12 hours before police say a man threw his five-year-old daughter to her death off a Tampa Bay bridge last month, his own attorney called Florida’s child abuse hotline, warning that his client was suffering from mental delusions. But the hotline operator didn’t refer the call to investigators because she didn’t think the child was in danger, according to documents released by Florida child welfare officials Monday.
One week earlier, another worried caller told the Department of Children and Families that John Jonchuck’s daughter Phoebe had been physically abused in the past. But that call also failed to get to DCF investigators because the operator hung up before she got Jonchuck’s address. Instead of calling back, she simply closed the case, according to the state’s investigation.
The lapses have cast the already troubled DCF in a harsh spotlight, prompting the agency’s new secretary Mike Carroll to change hotline protocol. Going forward, if a caregiver seems to be experiencing a psychotic episode, a child protective investigator will be required to visit within four hours.
Police say Phoebe Jonchuck was likely alive when her father sped past a police officer on 8 January, stopped on the Sunshine Skyway bridge, pulled the girl from the back seat and dropped her to her death. He was arrested and accused of first-degree murder, but hasn’t formally been charged as he is undergoing mental health evaluations.
Jonchuck’s own divorce lawyer had warned authorities of his mental state on 7 January, telling the hotline operator that Jonchuck had driven to three different churches in his pajamas with Phoebe in tow and asked his attorney to translate a Bible in Swedish. Jonchuck was also expressing paranoid fears that Phoebe was not his biological daughter, his lawyer said.
Land of the free
I wonder when people are going to fix this:
The NYPD wants to take away your right to vote if you don’t obey them. It sounds extreme, but the recent push from the New York City Police Department to reclassify “resisting arrest” as a felony amounts to just that.
On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton had the audacity to urge state legislators to increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony.
He argued that this is necessary, because New Yorkers need to be reeducated so they can “get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can’t.”
But police routinely slap the “resisting arrest” charge on anyone and everyone they don’t like. Some of our reporters have documented this at an array of protests we have covered. The Beavercreek, Ohio police even backed a police SUV cruiser into an elderly woman and then brutally twisted her arm, bent her over a second cruiser and continuously yelled “stop resisting” like a mantra, even though dozens were witnessing and filming the compliant woman who never once offered the least bit of resistance to the officers.
Law enforcement expert and retired University of Nebraska-Omaha criminal justice professor, Sam Walker, explained the situation to local WNYC as follows:
“There’s a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover – and that phrase is used – the officer’s use of force,” said Walker, the accountability expert from the University of Nebraska. “Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest.”
Reclassifying resisting arrest as a felony would mean depriving those convicted of this charge of the right to vote.
The United States is one of the strictest nations in the world when it comes to denying voting rights to those who have felony convictions. Nearly 6 million people in the United States have been denied the right to vote in some of the most recent elections, due to felony disenfranchisement. That means if you have too much of a certain leaf in your possession, you can’t vote any longer. If you bounce a check for $501 then you can’t vote any longer. But bounce one for $499 and you’re good, you can still vote. Now, if you are slapped with the dubious “resisting arrest” charge – which is often about as vague and undefinable as the charge of “disorderly conduct,” then the NYPD would also see you stripped of your right to vote.
Transparency
Go read David Dayen’s take on Obama’s interview about the TPP with Ezra Klein.
Joan Walsh reads my mind
Yeah, it’s just getting weird. I know people who work with Warren, and they say she’s not running, too. So what is the point?
So I’m coming to find the “draft Warren” juggernaut a little bit perplexing. I know the participants have wonderful motives and genuinely would welcome a Warren candidacy. But with every email I receive, I get a tiny bit more cynical. It doesn’t feel so much like groups are using their organizational strength to help Warren, but enlisting Warren to help build their organizational strength.
Don’t get me wrong, I think MoveOn and Democracy for America have done important infrastructure and leadership building on the left of the Democratic Party. But I’m not really sure that the “Draft Warren “effort does much more for progressives than encourage a cult of personality – and risk member disillusionment when Warren all but certainly declines to make the race.
I confess my misgivings about all this crystallized Sunday night, when I heard the news that the Working Families Party had joined the “Draft Warren” movement. I admire WFP; I think they’re doing exactly what progressives should be doing: Working within the Democratic Party and pulling it to the left, not standing outside the party and declaring it no better than the GOP.
But it was hard not to contrast their “Draft Warren” move, which looks symbolic at best, and contains an implicit challenge to Hillary Clinton, with their cave-in to Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year — which was not merely symbolic but had real ramifications. At that time, they had a terrific progressive female candidate, Zephyr Teachout, ready to challenge Cuomo – and they backed Cuomo. So to recap: With a willing progressive woman challenging a politically centrist Democratic man – the progressive didn’t get the WFP endorsement. But now, with a centrist but more liberal (than Cuomo) Democratic woman, Hillary Clinton, (probably) running for president, WFP is courting a challenger — who (probably) isn’t running anyway.
Predictably, other “Draft Warren” groups hailed the WFP news. Move On emailed to invite me to share a graphic on Twitter and Facebook that thanks WFP for joining the movement. “It’s important that we show them this morning that the number of people who think they absolutely made the right decision far outweighs the nay-sayers” – that would be me, I guess.
In addition to advancing the assumption that the Clinton campaign won’t be progressive enough, before she’s even declared her candidacy, the hype about Warren serves to obscure the depth and breadth of the new populist movement afoot among Democrats in Congress. Why not draft Sen. Bernie Sanders, who says he’ll run if he believes he has organizational backing? Or other progressive senators like Sherrod Brown or Al Franken or Kirsten Gillibrand? Elizabeth Warren is a star in her own right; she doesn’t particularly need this kind of help.
It’s also past time to observe that in addition to saying she isn’t running, Warren hasn’t done anything to build an organization in any of the early primary or caucus states. Now, presumably “Draft Warren” could help with that in the unlikely event she changes her mind – but Warren’s failure to make any of the moves associated with building a campaign is just one more reason to believe she won’t run.
I’d love to see a campaign that popularizes Warren’s “eight point plan to build the middle class” and encourages all Democratic candidates – including Clinton — to back it. Building a movement around a single political leader rather than around issues seems like a recipe for disappointment, especially when that leader has made it so clear she’s not looking to run for president.