Category: Issues of the Day

Best paragraph of the day

“Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.”

Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

Line of the day

“Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.”

War Room – Salon.com

From an earlier Salon story:

“Apparently Americans want to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because they think 5 percent of the federal budget goes to NPR and PBS. That was the median guess in a CNN poll released Friday.”

The correct figure is .00014 percent.

Today’s long reads

I don’t blog ’em if I haven’t read ’em.

The Kill Team

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them.

The Lost Boys

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

Fiesta Bowl scandal reminder that BCS system invites corruption

In an age of dwindling university budgets, the presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities outsourced the championship of their most lucrative sport to an organization that may have been involved in criminal activity.

But these new details prove that the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision presidents are venturing into downright reprehensible territory if they continue to support the bowls as a means to crown a national champion in football.

Aftermath

Japan raced to avert a nuclear meltdown today by flooding a nuclear reactor with seawater after Friday’s massive earthquake left more than 600 people dead and thousands more missing. Towns in the country’s northeast coast were literally wiped away by an ensuing tsunami, leaving countless people seeking shelter in the aftermath of the quake, which measured 8.9 on the Richter scale and was the country’s strongest recorded quake. — Lloyd Young 44 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

This is Japan we’re looking at, not some backward country like the U.S.

Earthquake Warning System

If you were in Japan on Friday chances are you would have seen this.

It’s Japan earthquake warning system that the government spent $1billion to build and includes a network of 1,000 GPS-based sensors spread out over the country.

Considering the devastation that followed it doesn’t sound actually sound all that alarming, but according to Alan Boyle at MSNBC it provided “enough time for people to switch off their gas lines and get beneath a table or a door frame.”
And was especially helpful to those in Tokyo who were 230 miles from the epicenter and therefore may have had an additional 80 seconds to prepare. 

Boyle says it is considered a model for the rest of the world and the basis for a system the U.S. is trying to develop for California.

Business Insider

Trying to develop in California. Trying!?! WTF?!?

Photos and video at the link.

Go watch the video at least through the end of the quake. It’s fascinating.

Alan Simpson has issues

“This is a fakery. If they care at all about their children or grandchildren, and sometimes I doubt that – I think, you know, grandchildren now don’t write a thank-you for the Christmas presents, they’re walking on their pants with the cap on backwards listening to the enema man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg, and they don’t like them!”

Alan Simpson, scolding old folks for complaining about possibly having their Social Security funds reduced, quoted by Politico.

It’s assumed he means Eminem and Snoop Dogg. I’d say Simpson has regularity problems. This is the asshole President Obama had co-chair his deficit commission.

Best line of the day that will not be heeded by any policy makers

It really is worth repeating: no matter how much the right-wingers may like to claim that the US government is “broke”, it’s not, in any normal sense of the term. Investors, putting real money on the line, are willing to lend funds to the Feds long-term at an inflation-adjusted interest rate of only 1 percent. There is nothing in the markets or the cash flow requiring immediate austerity.

Yes, there is a long-run problem — but this requires long-run solutions. Slashing spending now now now is neither necessary nor helpful.

Paul Krugman

Girls and Boys Together

Gail Collins reports on a new status of American Women report, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt prepared one for President Kennedy.

At the time, there were 454 federal civil service job categories for college graduates, and more than 200 were restricted to male applicants. It was perfectly legal to refuse to hire a woman for a job because of her failure to be a man, or to refuse her credit unless she had a husband to co-sign her loan. The median age for marriage for a woman was 20, and the only job open to most women that involved a chance to travel was flight attendant.

The median age for American women to marry today is 30.

Another insight from Collins, as women still earn just 80 cents to the male $1.

There has always been a big difference: in 1979, women made only 62 percent of what men did. And the report suggests that part of the problem is because of the fact that women tend to pursue the lowest-paying professional careers, notably teaching. Perhaps part of the answer is just to increase compensation for people who devote their careers to education. Perhaps the governors could take that up next time they get together to discuss public employee unions.

There’s more.