CNN Opinion: In Steubenville, why didn’t other girls help?
“This week, two teenage boys were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old classmate while she was apparently drunk and passed out during a night of parties last August. Everyone who was there and said nothing that night was complicit; if we want to prevent another Steubenville, the role of other girls must also be considered.” Parts of Western PA can be terribly, shockingly 50’s-ish in mentality. Some kids never get more than 20 miles from their hometown in their lives before they go to college—and then all hell breaks loose. Many kids I knew were practically foaming out the ears with unexpressed anarchy over their parochial upbringing. (I went to college aways north of Pittsburgh for a semester.)
NationalJournal: Why the Trader Joe’s Model Benefits Workers—And the Bottom-Line.
“The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, which in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it’s an entirely different story. The convenience store and gas station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn’t stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate.” This is related to what we saw here with the living wage in Santa Fe. Poorly-run businesses went under, while properly-run businesses stayed the course.
NY Times: Facing Protective Orders and Allowed to Keep Guns.
CNN: Opinion—The Internet is a surveillance state.
“And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.” Not that you haven’t heard it all before.
National Journal: The GOP Keeps Getting Whiter.
“They clearly did everything they could to purge Democratic voters from their districts ahead of 2012, no matter whether those voters were white, black, Hispanic, left-handed, or right-minded—just as Democrats would have done had the roles been reversed. But in the process of quarantining Democrats, Republicans effectively purged millions of minority voters from their own districts, and that should raise a warning flag. By drawing themselves into safe, lily-white strongholds, have Republicans inadvertently boxed themselves into an alternate universe that bears little resemblance to the rest of the country?” Which should mean that putting a ‘tan’ on the SOP (Same Old Platform) can’t actually attract them enough voters and will lose them the next Presidency as well.
NY Times: Casey B. Mulligan: Hidden Costs of the Minimum Wage.
“To keep constant the damage from the federal minimum wage, the federal minimum wage needs not an increase but an automatic reduction over the next couple of years in order for it to stay in parallel with market wages.” Make no mistake; some enjoy gleefully shoving citizens into debt bondage. Santa Fe’s experiments with the minimum wage have shown something in stark relief — businesses that have no business being in business self-immolate almost immediately. Well-run businesses continue on with slightly fewer employees who have enough spending money to benefit the local economy. [There’s much more to that story … I’m simply nutshelling it for quick-readers.]
NY Times: After Over a Century at Sea, 2 Sailors Are Laid to Rest.
“It’s the irony of the ship that saved the Union. [snip] Ten months later, it was lost in a storm.” Woof. Get the likely unintended pun there?
Telegraph.UK: Barack Obama ‘has authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on US soil.’
“Eric Holder argued that using lethal military force against an American in his home country would be legal and justified in an ‘extraordinary circumstance’ comparable to the September 11 terrorist attacks.” Erm, the Patriot Act showed us what the government thinks of ‘extraordinary circumstance.’ Habeas Corpus. Restore it to its full extent and power.
Later: Doesn’t really make me feel any better. We’ve seen the flexibility of definitions between ‘unlawful combatant’ and ‘noncombatant.’
Guardian.UK: Clint Eastwood backs gay marriage.
Only between two consenting chairs.
CNN: 10 years later, Dixie Chicks right all along.
It’s worth pointing out, when popular media follow up on a decade-old story.
The Atlantic: Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation.
Reading this renews my appreciation for having had an attorney as a father. “Never talk to anyone until you’ve talked to your lawyer.” And, thanks to Ms Norton here, I can add: “Make sure they’re good lawyers.”
CNN: To perform CPR or not? Woman’s death raises questions.
‘Good Samaritan’ laws are being challenged?! I suppose, given our litigious bent in this country, it’s not surprising. Check your state laws.
ArtDaily: Stalin fails to inspire horror in Russia 60 years after death.
“Stalin’s image started to improve and this intensified with the arrival in power of Putin.” Worrisome.
NPR: In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data.
“Roberts’ questions and conclusion appear to be taken from a census survey cited in a lower court dissent. But upon close examination, the numbers are less than reliable, according to the Census Bureau itself.” New Jersey and Massachusetts had, once upon a time, larger KKK membership than Southern states … purely because of population density. Roberts is playing ideological games.
The Day: Hewett defends comment, says he won’t resign.
“During a Feb. 20 Appropriations Committee hearing, a female 17-year-old ambassador for the Connecticut Science Center asked the committee to continue funding the center’s ambassador program. During her speech, she said the program helped her overcome her shyness and get over her fear of snakes. According to an audiotape of the hearing, Hewett said: ‘If you’re bashful I got a snake sitting under my desk here.’” Anyone still want their kids to grow up to be politicians? Hmmm?
TarenSK: DOJ admits Aaron’s prosecution was political.
“This is making me angrier than almost anything I’ve heard since Aaron died. I finally figured out why: Because I worked my ass off to elect the Obama administration in 2008. I helped these people get in power. And then they drove the man I loved to suicide because they didn’t like something he said once. And not only that: They are standing by their actions!”
HuffPo: Sonia Sotomayor Condemns Prosecutor’s Racially Charged Question.
ProPublica: What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding.
“What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high. It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.”
Reuters Photographers Blog: An amendment revisited.
Dazed Digital: The desert festival on the run from Sharia law.
Could music take down Al Q in Africa?
OilPrice.com: North Korea—Preparing for War.
The question is, exactly who is preparing for war.
SF New Mexican: Ashes of Taos WWII vet found in dumpster.
“The documents state that Lang’s Indian name was ‘White Fang’ and that his father was ‘Sam Rising Sun’ and his mother, ‘Alice Silver Willow.’ However, Vargas said, when he contacted Taos Pueblo tribal officials, he was told there was no record of the family’s tribal affiliation there.” If any readers have further information, let ‘em know.
Mother Jones: What’s It Like to Wake Up From a Tea Party Binge? Just Ask Florida!
“After Scott’s cuts, the percentage of unemployed people who received benefits fell from 17 to 15 percent—far below the national average of 27 percent. One reason: Florida now requires the jobless to take a 45-minute online math and reading test before even applying for benefits, a move the National Employment Law Project [50] calls an ‘unnecessary burden’ that may violate federal law.” My emphasis. Compassionate conservatism, at its finest. If you’re uneducated, die and decrease the surface population. They won’t help you climb out of the pit.
Alternet: When Prostitution Wasn’t a Crime—The Fascinating History of Sex Work in America.
Heh. History with blinders on, these days. Few seem to want to recall that some of our ‘glorious and moral’ Founding Fathers partook of the benefits of the sex trade.
Naked Capitalism: Warren Makes Promising Start in Senate Banking Committee Hearing.
“The Senate gives her ready media access, but the convention in the Senate is for newbies keep a low profile for the first six months. Warren might be allowed some liberties on banking issues, given her expertise in this arena. Notice how she breezily overstepped her time limits in the video clip. But expect her to hew to convention elsewhere, otherwise she could undermine her ability to get things done. Remember, Hillary Clinton had to bring fellow Senators coffee as a freshman to prove she didn’t have airs.” If someone asks Elizabeth Warren to get some coffee, I hope she kicks ‘em.
