Birkenfeld vindicated

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This is good news! Another tiny bit of my faith in people is restored with this story.  (not ignoring the fact that he had good lawyers–poor people don’t have that luxury.)

If Mitt Romney is following U.S. tax laws by putting his money in foreign banks…then why the evasion?  Why put it there in the first place? Romney is  skilled banker himself.  He would not do something unless he stood to gain a huge benefit.

More reasons to be suspicious that he has something to hide and that is why is not releasing his tax returns.    It stills boggles the mind that folks who are so quick to tell other people that they must be hiding something if they want to protect their Constitutional right to privacy, will turn around and put millions and billions into foreign accounts and then say that they have a right to privacy.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?? Not.

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…?

 

9.11.01

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I think this is one of those moments like “where were you when Kennedy was shot?”

I can see clearly in my mind where I was when I first learned that the towers were falling–

My youngest was home sick that day and I was playing on the internet while she watched TV (same room). (I still had a house -what a concept.)  I actually found out what was happening by the posts of a blog I was on–some of the members were in New York City, and they posted heart-wrenching posts.

I told my daughter to turn it to the news station, and watched in disbelief as the second tower was hit.  I’m still unclear on whether I was actually watching it being hit or whether I was a few minutes late–the time was about the same as the tower was hit.

I’ll never forget the utter terror of people running away from the mayhem.  Or seeing people jumping from the buildings.  Or the stories of those who saved others at their own peril.

God Bless us everyone.

(I’ll save the political commentary for another time.)

Social Security is just fine, thank you

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David Cay Johnston has this excellent post up on the soundness of Social Security. (Be sure to read the post below the first–also an excellent one.)

I was searching for an analysis of the losses of Social Security funds due to the stagnant wages of the past twenty years…I was wondering how much of an impact on the amount now in the bank?  How many millions or billions have been lost because wages did not  increase at the same rate as previously?

I found some hints of an article like that–one blurb on a site said that Boomers were deferring their retirement because they didn’t have the money due to stagnant wages….but when I tried to find the article mentioned, I came up empty.

I did find this, however:  http://money.usnews.com/money/business-economy/slideshows/10-industries-with-stagnant-pay/5

It’s interesting that not all people working in banks have gotten the windfall.

 

More on the Chicago Teacher’s Strike

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Valerie Strauss has an excellent article up here on her perspective of the critical reasons for the strike.

The problem with the whole pay incentive thing is that really doesn’t appeal to those who love kids and love to teach–this appeals to people who are there for the paycheck…

People who love money over everything else have little sense of fairness and compassion.

I really don’t want them anywhere near kids…

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?

 

 

Elizabeth Warren

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Her speech last night, seen here, is what truth looks like… (hat tip to crooksandliars.com)

…only when a corporation can walk into a voting booth will it be a *person*, in my view.

And as that refrigerator magnet said “I’ll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas.”

I don’t know why she didn’t name names when talking about a credit card company that cheated cardholders…why not publicly state it?

For me, she should have been the one running for president.  I would have no problem with going to the voting booth to cast a ballot for her.