Tom Waits:
Get Your War On: The Watch List
Coverup?
I’ve seen things that lead me to suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber, was actually an FBI operative. It’s funny how hostile people are to the idea — the FBI uses undercover assets all the time, just like the CIA, and obviously they’re not eager to admit it in a case like this. Was this yet another case where the FBI was encouraging a terror attack they planned to thwart? The circumstances surrounding the death of Ibragim Todashev, Tsarnaev’s associate, aren’t reassuring, because it looks more like an execution:
Ending an interrogation in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing with a dead body and a host of new questions was not the sort of thing the FBI wanted.
But on May 22, an FBI agent shot Ibragim Todashev – a 27-year old former mixed-martial arts fighter and associate of one of the suspected bombers – seven times, killing him. The agent had just completed a lengthy interrogation of Todashev in his Orlando apartment, part of an inquiry into the already-dead bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One of the bullets appears to have entered through the top of Todashev’s head.
The FBI’s story, doled out through anonymous leaks, changed several times in the weeks that followed. First, Todashev, who had voluntarily endured hours of questioning, lunged at the FBI agent with a knife, or even a sword. Then it was a length of pipe. Other accounts had him knocking over a table. At least one account held that Todashev was unarmed. The version that currently stands is that Todashev wielded a metal pole – or, perhaps, a broomstick.
Little is known about that mysterious pole-slash-broomstick: its heft, its dimensions, its use. Yet it is likely to be a major difference between vindication and damnation of the FBI’s handling of the case. A Florida prosecutor examining the case is expected to publish the results of an long-awaited investigation into Todashev’s death on Tuesday morning.
Unknowns accumulate in the Todashev shooting. Two Florida detectives reportedly aided the FBI interrogation, and their role during the shooting remains unclear. Florida’s autopsy report, available since July, was barred from release by the FBI. The bureau’s months of silence over the case have compounded the questions it faces.
But the FBI has already reached its conclusion. An internal FBI inquiry vindicated the agent, whose name is not public, months ago. That’s typical for the FBI – between 1993 and 2011, its agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded another 80, and the bureau found no major improprieties in any of those cases, according to records obtained by the New York Times last year.
Poor Kochs
Looks like Europe doesn’t need their frackin’ gas! (h/t Ron K.)
Deepwater Horizon
So apparently it’s killing off a lot of the fish.
Bernie calls out class warfare
I won’t be happy until every rich fuck is looking over his shoulder:
Later Sen. Sanders ripped Republicans for claiming that the problem is that children get too much help from the federal government, “These are the same people who want to eliminate the estate tax, which applies to only the top three tenths of one percent of all Americans, which is the richest of the rich, then they are going after kids. The politics of this, Al, is what they are trying to do is deflect attention away from income and wealth inequality. Attention away from the fact that the rich are doing extraordinarily well, and tell their supporters that the real problem in America is that children are getting too much help from the federal government, and that’s the kind of mentality that we have got to fight back against.”
Sen. Sanders nailed it. This is a classic case of Republicans trying to blame the victims of their policies. Republicans crashed the economy, threw millions out of work, then blamed the unemployed, and their children for needing assistance. While the GOP tries to take the food out of the mouths of those who are struggling, the rich continue to get richer.
The Koch brothers won’t have less money if children continue to get free school lunches. The issue is that the people at the very top continue to see their wealth grow while nearly everyone else is struggling to survive.
That’s the dirty little secret that Bernie Sanders exposed.
Republicans refuse to limit themselves to encouraging the wealthy. They are on a mission to take everything away from everyone else, and give it to the rich. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been leading this new smokescreen with a war against the poor that has been disguised as budget cuts and poverty studies.
Ryan and his millionaire Republican brothers are running a shell game. They are trying to convince the American people that the income inequality that is obvious to everyone isn’t a problem. Instead, they want the country to focus on the fact that poor people need to eat.
Oh no, not my baby
Maxine Brown with the song written by Goffin/King:
That’s how heartaches are made
Baby Washington:
http://youtu.be/CuPpUMwJlY8
Divisionary (Do the right thing)
Ages and Ages:
At least I did this right
As a parent, I spend a lot of time feeling guilty. So I was happy to read this.
I wasn’t involved with my kids’ education — not the way parents today are. But I always had a pretty clear idea that homework was for the kids, not me, and all I did was check to make sure it was done. I didn’t go over it with them, and I didn’t coach them. I told them if they really didn’t understand something in their homework, they were to ask the teacher the next day.
And no, I never volunteered at their schools, although I did join the PTO.
Many of my friends are appalled when I tell them this, and it made me feel guilty. It honestly didn’t occur to me to be any other way, but my kids are both smart people and I don’t think anything I did changed that. Okay, maybe a little.
What I did do was expose them to a lot of politics, art, music and culture, and kept a lot of different reading material around the house. They knew I cared about how they did in school, but that was their job and there was no hovering. I was working 50-60 hours a week, there was no time to hover. The only time I ever intervened was when one of my kids had learning difficulties.
And fortunately, my hands-off approach turned out to be the right thing:
One of the central tenets of raising kids in America is that parents should be actively involved in their children’s education: meeting with teachers, volunteering at school, helping with homework, and doing a hundred other things that few working parents have time for. These obligations are so baked into American values that few parents stop to ask whether they’re worth the effort.
Until this January, few researchers did, either. In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement, Keith Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a sociology professor at Duke, mostly found that it doesn’t. The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. In an attempt to show whether the kids of more-involved parents improved over time, the researchers indexed these measures to children’s academic performance, including test scores in reading and math.
What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.
Do you review your daughter’s homework every night? Robinson and Harris’s data, published in The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children’s Education, show that this won’t help her score higher on standardized tests. Once kids enter middle school, parental help with homework can actually bring test scores down, an effect Robinson says could be caused by the fact that many parents may have forgotten, or never truly understood, the material their children learn in school.
It’s interesting, go read the rest.