this is a good one...This is Richard Thompson and the song is "Mingus Eyes". The bass player, Danny Thompson no relation, drives this bad boy all the way to the bank! Put the headphones on and turn it up...way up like the old days! I understand Richard is a hockey fan...a LA Kings fan to be more specfic which makes it all the better. very smart guy...and funnyWatching this video is well worth your time if you're interested in education... If you like this talk he has another one on education at www.ted.com from a few years back. In fact, there's lot of interesting stuff at TED that's worth watching. now what...but wait a minute
When it rains in pours...now the Department of Justice is subpeonaing reporters and their phone records. The Justice Department informed the AP News Organization last week that it had obtained phone records for more than 20 different AP phone lines over the course of a two-month period last year. Today Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that Deputy Attorney General James Cole, signed off on subpoenaing a wide range of Associated Press phone records.
Apparently, this is nothing new. Holder himself has signed off on various subpoenas like this in the past. He used the following statement to basically explaining their attitude towards subpoenaing reporters... "The focus should be on those people who break their oaths and put the American people at risk, not the reporters who gather this information." The DOJ subpoenas reporters to find bad guys...and that's a good thing! Although, on one level it sounds illegal and on another level the reporters aren't going to give up their bad guy source because they want the story. Plus, the bad guys have other bad guy friends and they have their ways. We do far too many things today just because it's easy to say...that's a good idea. The problem is we hardly ever examine the results, after the fact, of these so-called good ideas and we just keep on doing the same old same old whether it's paying off or not. All that the DOJ has to do is present the effectiveness of their subpoenas...the results will speak for themselves! exactly right...
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) both said that somebody at the IRS is going to have to own up for targeting certain right wing political groups. Democrats should be saying the exactly the same thing because this kind of targeting should not be tolerated by any American....ever!
"My question isn't about who is going to resign. My question is who's going to jail over this scandal," Boehner told reporters in his morning news conference. Asked who should be arrested if, as the IG report found, the targeting of tea party groups was spurred by incompetence and was not politically motivated, Boehner stood by the insistence that someone should be. "There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse. Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax-exempt status," he said. "I think we need to know who they are [and] whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law." "If the president is truly concerned about this issue as he claims, he'll work openly and transparently with us to get to the bottom of what happened, and people will be held accountable," McConnell said. I love her...sorry honey!
It's hard to believe that no politician, until now, ever thought that it was unfair of the Government to loan money to the big banks at really, really, really, really low interest rate and sit back and watch the banks profit off of the backs of college students. Now they want to profit BIGTIME! Somehow some way the banks are going to double the interest rate from 3.4% to 6.8% for college tuition loans starting in a couple of months. But hopefully not! That would mean that the banks would be making 9 times more than what they are paying out...who wouldn't want that deal especially in today's economy....anytime for that matter. Have you seen college tuition rates lately? Did you know that the total amount of dollars students have in loans is greater that all the credit card debt in the US? And that amount starts with a T...not a B.
So here's the thing...when the economy is bad enrollment in college goes up. This is nothing new...it's a well known fact in the education business. Mr. Banker is also aware of this fact because he sees it directly in the increased activity for student loans. So naturally the banker figures it would be pretty sweet if he could capitalize even more on this opportunity. You know...it's never good enough to see an increase in business and be greatful for that! Maybe they could just bump the interest rate up a bit? How about a half of one percent...that would increase their return by 14%...not bad...right! No not them...they need more. A lot more so they decided to do the ole' Tom Cruise...WTF and doubled it! Some economist are starting to look pretty hard at this college loan debt issue because next to mortgages this is the next biggest debt being carried in the US. With poor, good job, opportunites for recent college graduates this debt problem pushes down the line and hurts our economy as a whole. For those students now entering the workplace and who are carrying college debt it will dramatically slow down their ability to obtain mortgages, household purchases, new car purchases, entertainment purchases, etc. etc. etc. And nobody really knows how many of these students have degrees in areas of study that are heading south or aren't producing any new jobs...then what go back to school again? More on "areas of study" in another blog post... What Senator Warren is proposing is not only good for the students but it's also good for the economy. Don't forget...it was the bankers that almost took down our economy not that long ago. Now these poor, poor, poor banking chaps see another big opportunity but hopefully our elected officials can all agree on something like...protecting our children's future. You know it was Elizabeth Warren that the bankers didn't want to see get elected...not Obama! I LOVE HER! WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) unveiled her first bill Wednesday, designed to set student loan interest rates at the same level the Federal Reserve offers to big banks.
"Every single day, this country invests in big banks by lending them money at near-zero rates," Warren told The Huffington Post. "We should make the same kind of investment lending money to students, who are trying to get an education."
once again...Here we go again.... So the people who get elected to represent us said that as an "elected official" you can't trust an "elected official" to make the hard choices on their own so they had to build in automatic cuts, in other words a little thing called a SEQUESTOR, to protect everybody from the "elected official". This all happenned in 2011. And now that the sequestor has kicked in the "elected official" is say that they weren't the right programs to cut even though they, the "elected official", chose what to cut out in the first place. Now we have the "elected official" saying that the administration, the President, could have changed things around a bit so the programs that the "elected official" said to cut wouldn't have to have been cut. In hindsight, the "elected official", is now saying that the President should have known better and it's his fault. He could have picked different programs to cut from and he chose not to. Well, it might have been possible for the President to shift things around a bit...I don't know. But then he would have had to "veto" what the "elected official" put in place and then make up his own mind what to cut. Ya right...like that would have been fine with everybody! So at the end of the day...it appears that our "elected official" likes to operate under the assumption that what one says/does doesn't really matter as long as the buck can get passed down the line. WASHINGTON -- First they saved the meat inspectors, then the air traffic controllers. Then they lobbied for the medicare patients being denied treatment at private cancer clinics. Now members of Congress are suggesting that children attending Head Start could -- indeed, should be spared from the grip of sequestration. "None of those cuts have to be made there," Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kansas) told the station. "That is a choice by the administration, so we are going to continue to put pressure on the administration. The whole purpose of making a 2-percent cut is for you to carve out waste." Jenkins, who voted for the Budget Control Act of 2011, which turned sequestration into law, has used thistype of defense before, suggesting that Congress could find enough budget litter to ensure that seniors and national security aren't harmed. spills happen...
Monday, March 25: Fort MacKay, Alberta Canada...Suncor tar sands tailings pond leaks 2,200 barrels of toxic waste fluid into the Athabasca River. Wednesday, March 27: Parker Prairie, Minnesota U.S...CP Rail train derails and spills 952 barrels of tar sands crude oil. Sunday, March 31: A power plant in Lansing, Michigan U.S...16 barrels of an oil-based hydraulic fluid spills into the Grand River. Wednesday, April 3: 350KM southeast of Newfoundland, Canada... Wednesday, April 4: Chalmette, Louisiana U.S.... Tuesday, April 9: 29KM NE of Nuiqsut, Alaska U.S.... it's a good morning...This happen a lot with these two K9's...  These two goldens are quite different from each other although you'd never know it from this picture. The one of the left is the "King of Beach". If I've thrown the stick into the ocean once I've thrown it ten thousand times over the years and he has never ONCE quite on it. The one on the right is the sweetest dog we've ever had...and she's a leaner. Scratch her chest she'll start to lean on you and the longer you go the more she leans and eventually she just falls over! The odd man out in this picture is my offspring....she's pretty sweet too! we the people...riiiiight
Back to the Sequestor...
Back in 2011 the Senate and the House passed into law a little thing called "Budget Control Act of 2011". Our bright forward-thinking political brothers and sisters decided that the thing to do was to put into place a law that would automatically cut the Federal Budget. These folks had just been through a debt ceiling brouhaha and both sides were pissed at each other. So...now both sides couldn't trust each other and an automatic cut sounded pretty good. Here are the voting results for the "Budget Control Act of 2011... Senate...74 oui & 26 non. House...269 oui & 161 non. Not even close...all the big names voted OUI!!! Neither side had any trouble on deciding which items to cut and the deal was done. Now lets do the math...2011 + 2 years = 2013...and BOOM the cuts went into effect! The day before the cuts went into effect our bright forward-thinking brothers and sisters could have said..."you know maybe this slice and dice thing wasn't such a good idea". They could have, like a lot of what they do today, just kicked it down the road a couple of more years. But NOOOOOO... Now both sides are even more pissed with each other than back in 2011...you know before the #$%^& election! Hayseuss...nothing makes any sense! Both sides wouldn't budge because they wanted to pin the blame on the other side. Now here's what's going on today with the FAA cuts... "I think we all agree the administration and the FAA has handled this sequester poorly," said Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa), who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversee the FAA. "The Congress is stepping in to correct the problems created by the administration's gross mismanagement," Latham added, accusing the White House of playing "political games." Democrats argued that the FAA debacle was another reason to replace the sequester. "The solution is a comprehensive removal of sequestration," said Rep. Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.), Latham's counterpart on the subcommittee. "That needs to be done in order that we're not dealing issue by issue and crisis by crisis." "The president would sign this," said White House spokesman Jay Carney of the FAA legislation, but he lamented Congress' failure to address the broader problem. "He believes this is a Band-Aid covering a massive wound to the economy," Carney said, adding that it would be a "welcome development" if Republicans showed the same concern for children and the elderly that they are showing for airline passengers. Others -- who voted against giving the FAA the loophole -- saw in the move rank hypocrisy. "It's totally outrageous. The people who are whining the most are the ones who made this happen," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.). "They wake up and they're shocked, absolutely shocked, when their flight home is delayed. So they take immediate action to carve out an exception that benefits them and the most well-heeled Americans, by and large." "This is an issue that we have been trying to raise in every avenue we can find, having our doctors and patients call congressional offices to explain what an emergency it is for us and patients in terms of access and continuity of care," said Dr. William Nibley of Utah Cancer Specialists, based in Salt Lake City. "We haven't gotten much of a response. Then there is a little news about delays and all the sudden there is legislation and debate. That's frustrating to us. We think cancer patients and their access to care is an issue that is critical. Those patients feel like their care is super-critical and it's being ignored."
AND SO IT GOES... Why is it that our politicians are no longer interested in "we the people" and that elections don't matter...what audacity! good for them...This is great to see!
Like it or not these people take an ass kicking for us while they're doing what they do...   |
