Second Avenue
I wonder whatever happened to Tim Moore?
Secrets
The Justice Department is defending the government’s refusal to discuss—or even acknowledge the existence of—any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency.
The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.
The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear the dispute March 20.
Meant to be
Bobby Stinson (former bass player for Guns n’Roses) has a new solo album. I heard a live radio show today, he and his band were great:
March Photo a Day Challenge….. Red
I had a long day, but a real special day. I had an opportunity to do a sales call at the inn at Cumberland National Seashore today.
Serfs don’t need no schoolin’
Uneducated = ignorant and apathetic, which is just fine with Romney and his cronies
Yes, it’s true that college education isn’t for everybody, and that the need for trades people of all sorts is as important as the need for college-educated workers. But the ruling class’s antipathy to public education is about more than this. More here.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
This should be fun. Even if they get to give the cash, they may not get to keep it a secret anymore:
WASHINGTON — For years, the IRS has done little or nothing to check the rise of overtly political groups that claim a special tax-exempt status in order to funnel secret money into election-related advertising.
But in a sign that the agency may be waking from its slumber, the IRS has sent detailed questionnaires to several Tea Party organizations — and possibly other political groups — to determine if they truly qualify for the 501(c)(4) designation intended for groups whose exclusive purpose is to promote social welfare.
Should any group currently calling itself a 501(c)(4) have its designation denied or revoked, tax experts said the consequences could be severe, including fines of 35 percent or more of the money they raised in secret.
And the groups might have to make donors’ names public.
[...]
Penalty box
By Susie
Barney Frank forbidden to speak on the floor of the House for telling the truth.
Juiced
By Susie
My best friend kept telling me about this movie, “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead.” It’s about a guy who goes on a juicing diet. Compelling, right? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it took me a while until I watched it on Netflix. (You can watch it on YouTube for $1.99 if you want.)
And you know what? It was really good, even funny. I told one of my brothers about it, and he started juicing. The other day, he even sent me a juicer as a thank-you present. So now I’m juicing!
I have to admit, the juice I made yesterday sucked. It was all fruit and much too sweet. Today’s is much better: Carrots, a cucumber, some kale, a green apple and a couple slices of mango. It tastes really good! If only it didn’t look like baby diarrhea.
Vegetables are expensive, though. I bought this first batch at the supermarket, but it will only last a few days. I’ll be headed to one of the produce outlets (really cheap, everything’s ripe so you have to use it fast) to pick up some more.
P.S. I’ve now discovered that people like me who are allergic to grass shouldn’t eat chard. So I won’t, ever again. Hopefully my sinuses will die down soon.
Filling quotas
What could possibly go wrong? This reminds me of when the county I lived in did such a good good getting people to recycle plastic that there wasn’t enough trash to power the new trash-to-steam plant (for which they were contractually obligated). So they started dumping the “recycled” plastic in there, too:
At a time when states are struggling to reduce bloated prison populations and tight budgets, a private prison management company is offering to buy prisons in exchange for various considerations, including a controversial guarantee that the governments maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years.
The $250 million proposal, circulated by the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America to prison officials in 48 states, has been blasted by some state officials who suggest such a program could pressure criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences to maintain the contractually required occupancy rates.
Oh no! That would never happen!
“You don’t want a prison system operating with the goal of maximizing profits,” says Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and advocate for reducing prison populations through less costly diversion programs. “The only thing worse is that this seeks to take advantage of some states’ troubled financial position.”
Frankenfood
By Susie
Oh, what a tangled web we weave… when we start genetically engineering the food supply.
‘Not enough support’
So not enough members of Congress give a crap that students are sliding deeper and deeper into debt during a recession, huh? Just more members for Occupy:
WASHINGTON – College would get costlier for millions of low- and middle-income student loan recipients starting next fall, unless Congress intervenes.
The fixed interest rate on Stafford federal subsidized loans, held by nearly 8 million undergraduates, is set to double on July 1, a few months before the start of the new school year.
President Obama has asked Congress to block the rate hike for current and future Stafford loan recipients, but legislation aimed at keeping it permanently at 3.4% has stalled in Congress.
Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget would freeze the interest rate at 3.4% for a year.
“We’re saying to Congress, now is not the time to make school more expensive for young people,” Obama said last month when he unveiled the budget. “And they can act right now to make that change.”
Advocates aren’t sure if there’s enough support in Congress to prevent the interest rate from doubling to 6.8%.
If the rate does double, recipients would pay an extra $5,000 over 10 years if they borrow the maximum $23,000, said Rich Williams, a higher-education policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Jesus, save us from your followers
By Susie
Remember when Republicans throughout the land were wailing and gnashing their teeth about the Affordable Care Act? How concerned they were about the government “getting between” citizens and their doctors? Well, I guess we know now just how sincere they were:
The Arizona Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would allow doctors withhold information about prenatal problems if it could make the decision to have an abortion more likely.
Republican state Sen. Nancy Barto introduced the measure to protect doctors from so-called “wrongful birth” lawsuits.
Such lawsuits are sometimes filed by parents of children with disabilities who believe that doctors withheld information that could have led to the decision to have an abortion.
“When I first heard of this issue, I couldn’t believe that these lawsuits are actually happening,” Barto told KTAR last month. “That some couples, after they give birth to their child that has a disability, would claim that the child should not have been born, and would sue to get damages.”
What a self-righteous twit of a woman. Not everyone can afford to take care of a child with a serious disability. Does she think God will send magical pixies to pay those bills? Not everyone can become a high-powered lobbyist like Rick Santorum, who admits that despite his hefty income, his family struggles with the cost of caring for his disabled daughter.
“The lawsuits that are being brought imply that the physician is somehow at fault if the child is born with a disability,” she added.
Barto claimed that a doctor could still be sued if there was evidence of wrongdoing.
Barto, who last year was named ALEC’s Legislator of the Year, is a proud member of the Pureheart Christian Fellowship. Apparently they use special editions of the Bible that delete the part about “judge not, lest ye be judged.”
Who knows? Perhaps her next legislative project may be modeled on Deuteronomy 22:28-29, a bill to force a raped virgin to marry her attacker.
See no evil
For decades, the Village Voice was famous for its investigative pieces into NYC corruption. Looks like they can add another one to that list:
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft’s superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
In the wake of our series, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly ordered an investigation into Schoolcraft’s claims. By June 2010, that investigation produced a report that the department has tried to keep secret for nearly two years.
[...]
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