July 23, 2015

Arizona Drug Tested Welfare Recipients — Here Are the Shocking Results

But an examination of Arizona's experiment reveals a flawed policy that has failed to accomplish its stated goal. Instead of saving the state money, it's cost taxpayers millions of dollars while doing little more than further stigmatizing poverty and marginalizing the poor.

The results are thin: According to USA Today, Arizona tested more than 87,000 welfare recipients in the three years after the program began. The total number of drug cheats caught was exactly one — a single positive result, which saved the state precisely $560.

Checking in again in March, the Arizona Sonora News Service cited state Department of Economic Security figures which found that over the course of more than five years, "42 people have been asked to take a follow-up drug test and 19 actually took the test, 16 of whom passed. The other 23 were stripped of their benefits for failing to take the drug test."

That adds up to a grand total of three failed tests from 2009-2014. The net savings reaped from withholding benefits for those who either tested positive or failed to complete a drug test was around $3,500, once the $500 cost of testing the 19 is factored in, according to one state agency report. The haul is especially unimpressive when you consider the $1.7 million in savings state officials promised when they unveiled the program.


http://mic.com/articles/122607/arizona-drug-tested-welfare-recipients-here-are-the-shocking-results

July 23, 2015

Rubio: Obama’s like Trump — he’s got ‘no class

PERSONAL NOTE: This is Marco Rubio, known associate of the Cuban-American mafia and a former FL Speaker of the Hoise who took his mistress on trips funded by the State Republican Party.



Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that President Obama has "no class."

In an interview with "Fox and Friends," Rubio argued that his GOP rival Donald Trump has not behaved in a way that is "worthy of the office that he seeks." Then, he pivoted to going after Obama.

"We already have a president now that has no class," said Rubio. The Republican, like most of his GOP opponents, has been an outspoken critic of Obama. But his disapproval has mostly been on policy, making his Wednesday comments especially notable.

"I mean, we have a president now that you know, does selfie stick videos, that invites YouTube stars there, people that, you know, eat cereal out of a bathtub," Rubio continued. "You just saw the interview he did right now, where he goes on comedy shows to talk about something as serious as Iran. The list goes on and on."

Earlier in the interview, Rubio said Obama showed "little class" in a Tuesday interview with "The Daily Show" by bringing up former vice president Dick Cheney in defense of the Iranian nuclear deal the Obama administration helped broker. Obama said critics of the deal have been "vague" and added that they are basically arguing that if Cheney was at the negotiating table, things would have turned out differently.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/07/22/rubio-obama-has-no-class/

July 22, 2015

How The Reddit Debacle Proves Libertarians Wrong

While most of the major players are making their lawyers happy by being purposefully vague in public, Ellen Pao’s resignation as CEO of Reddit has reignited the debate over how to handle the squirming underbelly of the internet. This underbelly consists mainly, but not exclusively, of angry white dudes who want to spew as much hate as possible at women, people of color, and LGBT people. While most of them hide behind the auspices of “free speech,” it’s increasingly clear that these trolls are motivated mainly by a deep desire to silence: to use harassment as a tool to run off anyone who values meaningful discourse or wants an environment that is inclusive to all sorts of people. This silencing campaign has harmed Pao and, as she fears, the “trolls are winning."

While the new CEO of Reddit has promised to keep with Pao’s program to clean up Reddit and make it safe for non-toxic people to use, it immediately became clear that the white male-heavy leadership of Reddit has zero intention of actually doing anything about it. The smart, easy move to make is to just start shutting down subreddits that exist exclusively to perpetuate hate and bigotry. While it’s true that these places don’t necessarily create bigots, it is also true that finding communities of likeminded people in mainstream places like Reddit—which hosted a presidential forum, for god’s sake!—empowers bigots to believe that their views are more mainstream and acceptable than they really are, which is one of the sustaining myths that keeps bigotry going. Instead, the Reddit leadership decided to keep subreddits like r/Coontown open, but only accessible with a login and without ad content on the side, so Reddit will not generate revenue from them. That might initially sound like a good compromise, but as David Futrelle, who runs a blog keeping track of internet misogyny points out, this basically blesses bigots with a higher level of service than the rest of us get: They get more privacy for their conversations and they get to have an ad-free experience the rest of us have to pay for with our ad-laden interfaces.

“So, yeah, Reddit’s grand plan to deal with its bigots is to … subsidize them,” Futrelle writes glumly. Already, bigots are planning to up the amount of bigoted content they put on Reddit in order to get the superior level of service. However this was intended, the reality is that they are getting rewarded for their bigotry.

Why not just ban the crappy subreddits? On what planet are a bunch of white supremacists and woman-haters entitled to have someone else pay for space for them to organize and encourage each other? This debacle demonstrates, above all, that libertarianism is not the coherent ideology that it purports to be, so much as a cover story for protecting or even perpetuating bigoted behavior.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/reddit-controversy-ellen-pao-libertarians

July 21, 2015

Sandra Bland's Death Will Be Investigated as Murder Case

The probe into the jail cell death of Sandra Bland will be treated as thoroughly "as it would be in a murder investigation," a Texas district attorney said Monday.

"There are many questions being raised about this case," Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said during an evening news conference. "It needs a thorough and exhaustive review."

Yet, Waller County Sheriff's Office Captain of Patrol Brian Cantrell said at the same press conference that Bland's July 12 death inside a Waller County Jail was already ruled a suicide.

"I want to make clear that the death of Ms. Bland was a tragic incident — not one of criminal intent or a criminal act," Cantrell said.

Cantrell claimed Bland, 28, strangled herself with a jail cell trash bag, but her family has disputed the very notion that she would kill herself. They have asked for an independent autopsy.

"Ms. Bland's family did make valid points that she did have a lot of things going on in her life that were good," Mathis said.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sandra-blands-death-will-be-investigated-murder-district-attorney-n395456

July 21, 2015

Old School Ultraman Comes Back to Life in Short Trailer.

July 21, 2015

I'm standing up for Bernie on civil rights

Regardless of whom we support for POTUS, there should be no doubting his commitment to equality for all.

July 20, 2015

What Donald Trump was doing while John McCain was a prisoner of war

It was the spring of 1968, and Donald Trump had it good.

He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money-making ideas that would make him a billionaire.

“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000,” he said in his 1987 autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” written with Tony Schwartz. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”

More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/20/what-donald-trump-was-up-to-while-john-mccain-was-suffering-as-a-prisoner-of-war/

July 20, 2015

FL-SEN: Alan Grayson does NOT support progressive taxation.

He's pledged to make income inequality and other progressive priorities a focus of his bid. And Grayson told NBC he'd like to make eliminating the income tax for the poorest Americans a key priority. But he seemed more reluctant to tackle the tax rate for top income-earners like himself.

"One way that you could try to address [income inequality] is through the tax system, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you tax people who make more money more," he said.

"At the top end, it's a complicated situation," he added. "I can tell you, in fact, there are repercussions and second order effects that come from modifying the tax rates at the top."


http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/alan-grayson-dems-would-crawl-over-hot-coals-naked-back-n389436

July 19, 2015

Will the RNC condemn the Bush supporters who swiftboated McCain in 2000?

There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. (There was then, and still is, a wacky Web site devoted to those last theories. The former Green Beret behind it, Ted Sampley, is back at it today with a savage “Stop Hanoi John Kerry” diatribe; he also supports the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Beyond Sampley, most anti-McCain vets in South Carolina opposed the senator on political and/or veterans’ issues—not for his war service. A top McCain aide told me he didn’t think the vets’ antagonism was nearly the factor that the more personal attacks were.) For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.




http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411

July 19, 2015

Had a blast at Ant Man (No Spoilers)

I just got back with the kid from a Ant Man. Great time. But (and this is the only thing I will tease), it took getting used to a Marvel movie that was not as big in scope as we've been accustomed to since the first Avengers. That may acutely be a good thing.