January 4, 2011 archive

TEA what TEA, Hard Stuff from now on

Gotta keep these cushy jobs!

Elected As Cost Cutters, GOP Freshmen Will Party With Fatcats Tonight

Tea Party Populists Will Be Among Republicans At Private High Roller Gala

Hey it’s a hard work a comin, what with more destruction that wasn’t finished in the 109th, gotta make friends with the cash cows.

Banned Books: Editing Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s classic novel, was initially published in 1884.  And it has survived as an important book for more than a century without ever being edited.  For offensiveness.  Or more specifically to eliminate offensive, racist words.  At least until now.

Today NPR reports that a “New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words”:

The Seeds of Development Strategy

The seeds of development strategy is for a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, trapped between a massive, oppressive debt burden left it by a preceding less than legitimate regime which grabbed power with both hands but left responsibility on the table for someone else to pick up, with collapsing infrastructure, and a far less than progressive head of state working with an even weaker governing majority in the legislature.

So, nothing like the US situation, after all, but still …

… build from the bottom up. Create local producer cooperatives, to ensure fair markets in the central market town for a set of villages. Give jobs to a cadre of mostly younger people looking to establish themselves to serve continuing education, primary health care, local credit union, local cooperative work on maintaining paths for transport to the central market town and transport beyond. Trial fields to prove out crops fitted to local conditions and then make seeds and cuttings available to local farmers.

Minimize hard currency purchased inputs, maximize leverage of local resources, to keep the official value of the activity low, to stay off the radar scope of the locusts known as International Aid Agencies.

Cooperatives will fail. Some of the young cadre will be incompetent. Some of the field trials will be failures.

BUT, as opposed to the United States Agency for Locust Deployment, the low external resource cost and high leverage of abundant local labor means that instead of having to put all the resources into one trial, there are thousands of trials spread around.

Waaaaaoooow: We is left-wing as heeeeeyyyll!!!

Most Americans say tax rich to balance budget: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters via YahooNews) – Most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released on Monday.

President Barack Obama last month signed into law a two-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for millions of Americans, including the wealthiest, in a compromise with Republicans. . . .”

Well this is kind of a fun headline to read. But again, I find it a bit on the subtle side of things. Perhaps a more eye-catching headline might read:

Poll: Holy Shitballs! Who let all these left wingers in?

or perhaps

Poll: MMMMYeah . . . . about that whole ‘center-right nation’ thing

Betsie Gallardo: We’re Doing Great So Far, But January 5th Is Key

Since Christmas we’ve been talking about the story of Betsie Gallardo, a woman who is dying of cancer in a Florida prison.

When we last met, she was being starved to death, literally, at the direction of the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC), who had decided not only to withhold further treatment for her inoperable cancer, but to withdraw nutritional support as well.

Her adopted mother is fighting to have her discharged from prison so that she can die at home-and the DOC have recommended that she be released.

On December 9th, Florida’s Board of Executive Clemency (“the Board”) chose to ignore the DOC advice.

Since then, thanks to a whole bunch of outside pressure, things have changed, for the better, which we’ll be talking about today.

On January 5th, the Board meets again-and if we do this right, we can bring some closure to this story.  

JP Morgan Chase Exec For WH Chief of Staff?

Things I Couldn’t Make Up If I Tried, continued:

William Daley, an executive with JP Morgan Chase in Chicago, is under consideration to replace Rahm Emanuel, who is running for Mayor of Chicago, as President Obama’s Chief of Staff.


http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-…

Emanuel hopes to succeed outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley, the brother of William Daley. Like Emanuel, Daley would be a choice with strong ties to the president’s hometown of Chicago.

The decision comes at a critical point of turnover for the Obama administration, as it pivots toward the back half of its first term, and looks toward re-election in 2012.

On Mandatory School Busing here in Boston:

Unlike  many, if not most of the Southern areas,  Boston’s busing program was confined to the city limits,  which  was also partly  why Boston became so explosive during the mid to late 1970’s when  mandatory school busing was implemented there.    A Metropolitan solution was considered in a number of areas including Boston, but it got scrapped.   People in Boston’s all-white suburbs would not  accept it,  and Boston’s black  community, already small, and fearful that the limited amount of influence and power that they had, would be “diluted in the sea of suburbia”,  also rejected it. 

However, the Boston area also had a METCO program (I forget what the letters stand for), in which black students from Boston were bused in to a number of the outer-lying bedroom communities,  including my old hometown, which implemented METCO later.  The METCO program was a  voluntary program aimed at inner city students from Roxbury,  Mattapan and North Dorchester who wished to participate in it,  and a great many METCO kids benefited by getting a better education at better schools in wealthier communities.

Six In The Morning

Texas Where Even The Innocent Are Guilty  



Texas man who spent 30 years in prison likely to have conviction quashed

An exoneration hearing for Cornelius Dupree Jr. is scheduled for Tuesday in Dallas. If his conviction is overturned, he would have spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.

The district attorney’s office said on Monday it supports Dupree’s innocence claim.

Dupree was charged in 1979 with raping and robbing a 26-year-old woman and sentenced in 1980 to 75 years in prison for aggravated robbery.

He was released on parole in July. DNA test results came back 10 days after his release, excluding him as the rapist.

Late Night Karaoke

Time To Explode

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

For Europe, it was a year when the cash ran out in some countries. But one thing that wasn’t in short supply was the number of angry protestors. As governments severely cut back on budgets, hundreds of thousands of people lashed out in response. RT’s Laura Emmett wraps up what’s been a troubled year for Europe – and why people should brace themselves for 2011.

Well, all people except Americans who will continue to stay in their houses and blog about the injustices happening around them…..