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2013-06-15 03:38:45 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

"Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has vetoed a bill meant to prevent wage discrimination against women.

An aide to state Rep. Senfronia Thompson (D), who authored the equal pay bill, HB 950, said Perry's office called on Friday to say he had vetoed it. State Sen. Wendy Davis (D), who introduced the Senate version of the legislation, told the Texas Tribune that she had received the same call.

In a statement, Thompson said she was "deeply disappointed" and "heartbroken."

"Women will still have to struggle to receive their equal pay for their equal work," she said.

The bill would bring Texas state law in line with the federal Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for women to sue employers over wage discrimination. It cleared the state House in late April, and the Senate passed its version in late May."

For... more »

2013-06-15 02:56:26 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 13 +1s)

"The effort identified hundreds of charities that run donation drives across the country and regularly give their solicitors at least two-thirds of the take. Experts say good charities should spend about half that much - no more than 35 cents to raise a dollar.

For the worst charities, writing big checks to telemarketers isn't an anomaly. It's a way of life."

2013-06-14 14:18:57 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Within two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a pair of cases involving marriage equality. In both cases, the Indiana Attorney General drafted or co-sponsored amicus briefs supporting a state's prerogative to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. The Hoosier state has a long, dubious history of defining marriage that dates back to an 1840 incident in Indianapolis.
#gaymarriage   #indianahistory   #supremecourt  

2013-06-14 14:10:13 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Of all the ridiculous lawsuits I have read in the past, this one takes the cake. Can you imagine if this company decided to go after people for singing Happy Birthday? Makes you wonder why we even bother to learn the lyrics of songs if we could be sued for singing it.

If I ever felt unpatriotic about my country this only reinforces that feeling. The greed our society has embedded into our culture is one of disgust, shame and stupidity. Now I understand Michelle Obama's comment when she said for the first time she was proud of her country. For the first time, I feel extreme shame. 

2013-06-14 04:45:09 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Love him or hate him...there is only one Keith Richards! A great interview.

2013-06-14 04:37:38 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Obamacare! Rationing! Death Panels! Fox!

Sigh.

Okay, so I get that Fox News needs to reflexively critique the ACA for its own partisan viewership reasons.  But it's one thing to point out problems and quite another thing to, y'know, just make shit up.

Also, Mr. Johnson, in case you hadn't noticed it, in most cases health care is already rationed.  It's rationed by who can pay to get a particular procedure, either based on personal wealth or on what some private for-profit insurance company decides it wants to okay spending money on.

And lawyering up not only doesn't help in those cases, Mr. Johnson, it's actually not possible for the people who who are most  "rationed" in the current system.

2013-06-14 04:34:43 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Christianity is a faith that professes to defend the meek and the humble, but many Christians—at least of the more fundamentalist stripe—tend to be more interested in propping up unjust systems and using religion as a cudgel to bully the weak. Obviously, there are plenty of Christians who aren’t massive hypocrites, but when it comes to using religion as a weapon to push hard-right ideology, deeply un-Christian behavior runs rampant. Here’s a few examples of some of the more egregious recent sins of those who claim to be holier than thou.

2013-06-14 04:15:59 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&utm_source=Column&utm_medium=twitter&_r=0

2013-06-14 04:07:55 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

2013-06-14 02:08:19 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Well written take on the ridiculous 'controversy' stirred up by this commercial...

2013-06-13 19:53:05 (27 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

"If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments."

Oh yeah, he accidentally got his penis in her vagina???? 

2013-06-13 19:33:24 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 20 +1s)

Lol.

2013-06-13 18:08:35 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Elevator malfunction - now every floor in my condo building is floor K

2013-06-13 17:57:27 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Now I've lost all faith in advertising

2013-06-13 14:11:50 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Professor Thomas Byrne Edsall writes about #DarkMoney  in his op-ed for tomorrow's +The New York Times 

My comment here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/dark-money-politics/?comments#permid=1

2013-06-12 02:35:28 (17 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Did NSA Get "Direct Access to Servers" or Not?

Tech companies are following Google's lead and claiming the NSA had "no direct access to servers" and blame the press: "the media reports are wrong". But the media reports are based on the NSA docs.

So A) Is this purported NSA slide wrong? B) Is somebody parsing words like Bill Clinton facing impeachment? C) Are the tech execs claiming that downloading data from their servers in compliance with a specific request is not "direct acces"?   D) Or do the techs not know what NSA is doing {which would be extraordinary}? 

Wired: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post this afternoon. “We have never received a blanket request or court order from anygovernm... more »

2013-06-11 13:59:03 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Be very careful with whom you chose to invest with. the finance and investment business as a whole continues to set the rules, break them and let us pay for it.

2013-06-11 13:28:57 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

"The Senate bill is hardly great, but the House Republican version is needlessly, almost comically, cruel for no particular reason. Why? Apparently because GOP lawmakers, without so much as a hint of shame, are eager to redistribute wealth in the wrong direction -- punishing poor families and rewarding wealthy agricultural interests."

2013-06-11 12:28:58 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

"In 2012, President Obama signed a bill disallowing government insider trading of all kinds. You see, academic studies figured out that on average congressmen miraculously earned returns that were 6 percent higher than the average market returns. And senators did even better by scoring 10 percent higher returns. Either these elected officials are really, really smart investors (of course, doing all their prodigious stock research on their own time), or they are trading on insider knowledge. Then again, they also might profit handsomely by pushing legislation to feather their own investment portfolios. Either way, it's good work, if you can get it.   

Knowing how difficult it would be to police thousands of government officials, the new law relied on sunshine: All federal elected officials and key staff would have to put the investment portfolios online so that we could see the resultso... more »

2013-06-11 12:28:00 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

"There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that humans are and will be in charge of it, and humans have shown throughout history a bit of a tendency to play every trick and bend and break laws. “If men were angels,” as James Madison wrote, limits, checks, balances and specifically protected rights would not be necessary. But they aren’t angels. Add to all this simple human mistakes, innocent and not, and misjudgments. And add to that sheer human craziness, partisan lust, political mischief of all sorts.In the ... more »

2013-06-10 14:05:26 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

no hoodie for me today, thank you
I received a Facebook event invitation to wear a hoodie today (which is the first day of the Zimmerman trial) to show solidarity with Martin, and, it is heavily inferred, to show Zimmerman is guilty. My solidarity is with the concept that persons are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. How about we show solidarity with THAT?

2013-06-10 13:55:25 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

I’ve been in this economics business for a while. In fact, I’ve been in it so long I still remember what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis. Normal, back then, meant an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. Normal meant an unemployment rate not much above 5 percent, except for brief recessions. And while there was always some unemployment, normal meant very few people out of work for extended periods.
So how, in those long-ago days, would we have reacted to Friday’s news that the number of Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months? Well, we know howmost ... more »

2013-06-10 00:00:14 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

NSA "Whistleblower" Snowden: Hero? Fool? Traitor? Or ... ?

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001043.html

Oops.  I'd thought there was a good probability I could get through today without having to post again about the ever more confusing NSA mess.

Not a chance, as it turns out.

This saga is now taking on the various aspects of a 60s-era spy spoof film, and its bizarre twists and turns are making David Lynch's 1984 production of "Dune" look clear and easily comprehensible by comparison.

Here's where we stand.

Word is out that the NSA leaker, "whistleblower," or whatever your preferred terminology may be, is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA tech assistant who (until very recently) was a contract worker at NSA on behalf of various outside firms, like Dell and Booz Allen.
more »

2013-06-09 23:54:42 (3 comments, 4 reshares, 17 +1s)

As oil companies run amok throughout the world, externalizing their costs onto both society and the environment, thousands suffer:

Ten thousand barrels of oil are now making their way down Ecuador’s Coca River, a waterway that eventually feeds into the Amazon River after a pipe run by the state-owned Petroecuador burst during a landslide, says Reuters.

The pipe is the country’s largest, and it usually carries around 309 thousand barrels of oil per day. On Monday, says Agence France-Presse, the burst pipe left at least 60,000 people without access to fresh water when well pumps in nearby Puerto Francisco de Orellana were shut off.

The Ecuadorian government says that equipment is in place to control the oil spill. The pipeline is now repaired and back online, but some of the already-spilled oil is now making its way downstream. Some of it could makeit ... more »