Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Pilgrims land in Plymouth Massachuesttes; Pan Am flight 747 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland; Apollo 8 lifts off on first manned mission to the Moon; Actress Jane Fonda is born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.
Breakfast News
People’s party wins Spanish election but without absolute majority
The conservative People’s party won Spain’s general election but fell short of an absolute majority, as voters fed up with corruption, austerity measures and double-digit unemployment took aim at the two-party dominance that has characterised modern Spanish politics.
With 99% of the votes counted on Sunday night, the PP was on track to receive 123 seats, leaving it shy of a majority in the 350-seat legislature. Led by Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister, it earned 29% of the vote and won only two-thirds the number of seats it took in 2011.
The Socialists, who asserted throughout the campaign that they were best placed to rival the conservatives, came in second, with 90 seats and 22% of the vote.
Most polluted US nuclear weapons building site plans for influx of tourists
Thousands of people are expected next year to tour the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, home of the world’s first full-sized nuclear reactor and the most polluted US nuclear weapons production site.
Hanford, near Richland, about 200 miles east of Seattle in south-central Washington state, is the newest national park.
Visitors will not, however, be allowed anywhere near the country’s largest collection of toxic radioactive waste.
“Everything is clean and perfectly safe,” said Colleen French, the US Department of Energy’s program manager for Hanford. “Any radioactive materials are miles away.”
The Manhattan Project national historical park, signed into existence in November, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the US effort to build an atomic bomb during the second world war.
Firefighters across US suing siren maker over their hearing loss
There were times by the end of his shift that firefighter Joseph Nardone’s head would be pounding and his eyes crossing, because of the noise of the siren on his truck.
“The siren was so loud inside the cab that it actually physically hurt,” said the former New York City fire battalion chief. Even though he has been retired for more than a decade, Nardone said, the effects of the sirens linger in hearing loss that has left him unable to understand rapid conversation or follow along in church.
Nardone is among about 4,400 current and former firefighters nationwide who are suing Federal Signal, an Oak Brook, Illinois-based company that makes sirens, claiming it did not do enough to make the sirens safer for those on fire trucks who have to listen to them nearly every day.
Mountain lion kitten spotted near Los Angeles fuels conservation hopes
Conservationists are celebrating after sighting a young mountain lion they did not know existed amid a tiny, threatened population of the animals in the hills around Los Angeles.
Wildlife experts were amazed both that they had not previously spotted the animal and that it was alive at all. The kitten survived a spate of recent deaths that killed its four siblings.
On Friday, the National Park Service (NPS) released video footage of the mountain lion kitten in the wild, mewing and approaching the carcass of a deer killed by the its mother.
The kitten’s siblings, from a litter born earlier this year, came to a grisly end, two being cannibalized by an adult male and the other two apparently killed by unspecified predators, the Los Angeles Times reported.
But conservationists followed the mother and discovered her surviving offspring just days ago, having set up motion-activated cameras.
Finally, an Explanation for Hillary Clinton’s Long Bathroom Break
As the third Democratic debate faded to a five-minute commercial break, Hillary Clinton had exactly one minute and 45 seconds to walk out of the gymnasium at St. Anselm College to the ladies’ restroom and one minute and 45 seconds to return to her place on stage.
Not a lot of wiggle room.
With the men’s room significantly closer to the debate stage, Mrs. Clinton’s male opponents, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, made it back quicker and, well, it takes women longer, as Mrs. Clinton pointed out after returning slightly late from a commercial break during the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas.
Breakfast Blogs
Today Among Our Benevolent Local Overlords Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns and Money
Don’t Blame the Voters Atrios, Eschaton
Dr. Krugman Explains Strategic Forgettery In Two Sentences driftglass, Crooks and Liars
2 comments
Good morning. Just dropped in to say hi. Took me awhile to get in, but I made it. The new site is pretty snazzy.
Thank you. Sorry about the delay in the response, we are still a little busy.