Category Archives: communications/media

Attack on embassy in Libya

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Report here. Stevens was apparently trying to find a safer place when he and his staff were killed.  And for what?  He didn’t produce the offensive video, so why target him?  Or why target anyone?  If your spirituality is strong, you’re not going to let something like this make you insane. And the Islamic religion also has  “do unto others as you would have done to you” in their book, as well, so by this act, they are going against their religion.

And what about the idiot who produced this hate-film?  Terry Jones was advocating burning the Koran, and is behind promoting this—so why isn’t this guy being reined in?  And who is the Israeli-American property developer?  I’m suspicious that he wasn’t named in the piece.

DN! reports on the Libyan situation.

They are also reporting that President Obama has refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Gah, the guy has a pair, after all. Color me shocked.  Israel has made the statement that they are free to do as they wish–to attack Iran if the mood strikes them, and the U.S. is not supposed to have any say in the matter, but we’re supposed to come running and bail them out if they do attack–extending our people, our funding, our equipment, etc. when the country is struggling. (Well, not the 1%, mind you)

So…anyone wanna place  a wager on us getting into another senseless war…?

 

Chicago public school teachers to strike

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Story here.

Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education.  (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂

…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited.  They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them?  What kind of profit can we make off of them?

This report from Indiana.

From the story:

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

 

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Unbelievable.  What a way to worm out of accountability.  The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?

This from Pennsylvania.  Nepotism? Um, yeah.  Nice little game they have going there.

Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah.  If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.

This from Miami.  Taxpayers should not be funding them at all.  But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it??  You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?

 

 

Clinton Fact Check

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AP has this up on the Clinton speech.

Yeah, I for one am sick of the “we were prosperous when Clinton was president…” while forgetting that he instituted NAFTA.  We, in the midwest, were feeling this before the rest of the country–there were factories closing down left and right in the town I was raised in.

The health care law only makes sense to me when it will help me with preventative care.  That includes organic food and attention to diet by the medical profession instead of pushing pills as the solution for health ills.

Of course, I don’t have cable and didn’t watch it, so I can’t comment on that, but from what is being reported–he took an hour to speak?  WTH?

 

Taibbi on Romney

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DN! has this up with Matt Taibbi giving the scoop on what Romney is all about–he’s not about creating jobs, and saving companies, but swooping in, making a boatload of money, and leaving the carcass behind…

Taibbi mentions Carlyle Group--red flags go up. (hat tip to this site)

From the article:

But what sets Carlyle apart is the way it has exploited its political contacts. When Carlucci arrived there in 1989, he brought with him a phalanx of former subordinates from the CIA and the Pentagon, and an awareness of the scale of business a company like Carlyle could do in the corridors and steak-houses of Washington. In a decade and a half, the firm has been able to realise a 34% rate of return on its investments, and now claims to be the largest private equity firm in the world. Success brought more investors, including the international financier George Soros and, in 1995, the wealthy Saudi Binladin family, who insist they long ago severed all links with their notorious relative. The first president Bush is understood to have visited the Binladins in Saudi Arabia twice on the firm’s behalf.

Another article here.

On the rest of the video–the guy going to the Romney campaign event and being told he was unpatriotic for wanting to save his job should be blasted on every radio station, every TV station, and printed on the front page of every newspaper (what ones are left…).  People are being lied to and are not getting that “fair and balanced” coverage.  I mean, the utter gall of them saying that unemployed people on food stamps are just lazy and unmotivated…while shipping their jobs to China…

…my mind flashed to Romney’s poor rendition of “America, the Beautiful…”  while Taibbi speaks of him and his cohorts’ non-allegiance to the States and the people trying to earn a living.

Taibbi makes a good point when he says the dispute over the actual time that Romney left Bain isn’t as important as to what profit he was reaping from Bain’s actions…that’s the key–what money did he make off the deals?

And Taibbi hints about how they don’t want to pay for anything–they make boatloads of money on these companies, after borrowing the money to do it.

 

 

Entertainment?

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You know, sometimes it ain’t so bad being without cable…

I had no idea this kind of garbage was on NBC.  And look at the cast–Todd Palin…why does that not surprise me?

…um, do people know that GE, a defense contractor, owns NBC?  Do they think that just maybe this is a way to *glam up* war so more folks will blindly go into combat not knowing how horrific and soul-destroying it is…?  Or how the viewers watching it will become more numb to human suffering?

What about Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor”…which I always detested for its pitting people against one another, and encouraging a “weakest link” mentality…I often said that I grew up on “Gilligan’s Island”, where everyone worked together– while my kids were exposed to crap like “Survivor”, where people worked against one another for their own selfish reasons.  This encourages that  mentality of fear and violence and discourages cooperation and charity.

Good God.

Krugman deconstructs Christie and Ryan

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Paul Krugman has this up on Chris Christie…*fiscally conservative* towards the 99%…but a whole ‘nother view towards the one percenters…

….and this on Paul Ryan...

You just can’t make this stuff up:

In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

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…while ignoring that most people who are dependent on not only food stamps but are dependent on disability/social security are there because of a health issue?

So if someone is on disability from a stroke, how is that person a moocher?  Or someone who is on oxygen and cannot work?  I see a building full of people with  health issues…so tell me again how we can get these damn moochers off of welfare/disability and working until they freaking drop?! /snark

I personally got a college degree so I would not be in the situation I’m in now…I got mercury poisoning and had undiagnosed Celiac that caused my health to deteriorate, which had a domino effect on the disaster that is my life.  I drove up and down a two lane highway for three and a half years, through wind and rain and dark of night so I could get my degree.  I studied every night for two to three hours after taking my kids to baseball, softball, ballet, etc., and fixing dinner and whatever else needed to be done…so don’t tell me that I’m lazy or unmotivated.

LG said it best:

  • LG  NYC

I always wondered why people always become “dependent and complacent” and lose “their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives” right after a financial crises…