In which a Hollywood star actually says that his salary is "ridiculous by any normal standard" and that "No one should feel sorry for any of us."
(Source: inothernews)
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We can’t afford these special lower rates for the wealthy — rates, by the way, that were meant to be temporary. We can’t afford them when we’re running these big deficits.
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President BARACK OBAMA, introducing his $4.5 trillion debt reduction plan — which will partly depend on eliminating Bush-era tax cuts.
Note to the wealthy: don’t worry. Even after you help save our country, you’ll still be filthy fucking rich.
(Source: inothernews)
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Union Workers Replaced With Prison Labor Under Scott Walker’s Collective Bargaining Law
While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law dismantling collective bargaining rights has harmed teachers, nurses, and other civil servants, it’s helping a different group in Wisconsinites — inmates. Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state.
We make up indefensible laws to incarcerate citizens (for video taping police officers, sending their children to good schools or smoking marijuana), then enslave those citizens for cheap labor. It’s very similar to indentured servitude, but without consent (and thus less morally defensible). Will we continue to allow the upper class to make serfs out of us?
(Source: azspot)
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How Michele Bachmann Bought the Iowa Straw Poll.
I wonder, of the five — FIVE — news organizations that had Bachmann on their Sunday morning talk shows, how many of them asked about this?
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NY TIMES: "Thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, music artists now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving record labels out in the cold."
(Source: inothernews)
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NY TIMES: Corporate profits rise, as worker income declines. Of course.
AT LEAST THE STOCK PRICE LOOKS GOOD!!!11
You want to know what causes a recession? A middle class that doesn’t have enough money to put back in.
Capitalism is not self healing future tech. It seems to be more of sadomasochist.
#myopia
(Source: inothernews)
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The law is the law. When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get pick and choose which laws. You don’t get to say, ‘I like this law, I’ll enforce this law. I don’t like this law, I won’t enforce this law.’ You can’t do that. So if you can’t enforce the law, then you shouldn’t be in that position.
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Governor ANDREW CUOMO, reacting to the news that a town clerk in upstate New York had resigned rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Good riddance, Laura Fotusky.
Although I agree with the spirit of the quote, with the amount of laws we have ‘in the books’ there is no way we enforce all of them. So to some degree we do pick and choose what laws to enforce, don’t we?
Also, I really get a kick out of religious folk who don’t see the pattern where society decides a tradition or law or taboo isn’t worth keeping around, they find a few holy verses to back up their awful idea, and then everyone in the future thinks they’re a crazy asshole.
Heliocentrism, crusades, inquisitions, women as property, slavery, abortion, gay marriage…
Religion is the worst. Rational thought and intellectual discourse on the other hand, is pretty fucking suweet.
(Source: inothernews)
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Bank of America announced plans on Wednesday to set aside $14 billion to pay investors who bought securities it assembled from mortgages that later soured, an agreement that the company expected would lead to a second-quarter loss of $8.6 billion to $9.1 billion.
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The whopping charge represents the banking industry’s biggest single settlement tied to the subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent financial crisis of 2008.
Of the $14 billion, $8.5 billion will go to help settle claims by a group of heavyweight holders of the securities, including Pimco, BlackRock and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that have been pressing for a settlement since last fall.
The losses stem largely from mortgages underwritten by Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage lender that Bank of America bought in 2008.
The deal will also require Bank of America to improve its payment collection process by hiring specialists to focus on high-risk loans and to do a better job of tracking whether the bank is adhering to its own internal loan-servicing standards.
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The New York Times, “Bank Of America To Set Aside $14 Billion In Mortgage Deal.”
Sure, it’s a $14 billion hit. But ever get the feeling BoA is like that de-appendaged knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with his arms cut off and boldly stating “‘Tis but a flesh wound!”?
(via inothernews)
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Yep.
- Our economy has shit itself (although I think most of that can be blamed on things he had nothing to do with)
- We’ve solidified our rep (again) as one of the worst human rights violators
- We’ve been helping terrorist recruitment stats since the Iraqi reconstruction effort failed and since we found out the bold faced lies the declaration of war was based on.
- Most terrorists inside of our borders are white and we’re still eyeing brown people waiting for them to light their beard bombs.
(via terenceinmonochrome)
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American resident (and future American president) Barack Obama, age 6, with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in Hawaii — where Barack was born; she is the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile:
To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
(Photo via friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham / The New York Times)
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Pete King stated that “not one terror-related case in the last two years involved neo-Nazis” literally one day after a neo-Nazi tried to bomb a Martin Luther King, Jr. day celebration. Meanwhile (in the real world), investigators are learning that less and less terrorism is related to Islamic extremists:
The FBI has reported that roughly two-thirds of terrorism in the United States was conducted by non-Islamic American extremists from 1980 to 2001; and from 2002 to 2005, it went up to 95 percent.
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LISTEN THE FUCK UP!: As the Treatment of Bradly Manning Grows More Obscene, Reality Becomes Harder to Ignore
Imagine that you’ve arrived at the local multiplex for a weekend flick. Popcorn in hand, you settle in to watch Matt Damon star in a new thriller as a young American soldier imprisoned by the government for blowing the whistle on crimes witnessed while serving in a foreign country.
INT. MILITARY…
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Bradley Manning stripped naked for seven hours
Last night, PFC Manning was inexplicably stripped of all clothing by the Quantico Brig. He remained in his cell, naked, for the next seven hours. At 5:00 a.m., the Brig sounded the wake-up call for the detainees. At this point, PFC Manning was forced to stand naked at the front of his cell.
The Duty Brig Supervisor (DBS) arrived shortly after 5:00 a.m. When he arrived, PFC Manning was called to attention. The DBS walked through the facility to conduct his detainee count. Afterwards, PFC Manning was told to sit on his bed. About ten minutes later, a guard came to his cell to return his clothing.
This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification. It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. PFC Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the Brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.This is just despicable and it gets continually worse. How far can they push a person before they break?
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Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three daughters from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow-Scientologist after revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, “Katy is ‘1.1.’ ” The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard published in a 1951 book, “The Science of Survival.” A person classified “1.1” was, Hubbard said, “Covertly Hostile”—“the most dangerous and wicked level”—and he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex, sadism, and homosexual activity. Hubbard’s Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated “homosexuality with being a pervert.” (Such remarks don’t appear in recent editions of the book.)
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