All Further Articles for 2013-04-sites
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Umm, Err, Well, Uhh: Ayotte Tries to Explain Gun Vote to Daughter of Newtown Victim Accountability may yet live. In conceivably the only good to come from the Senate's gun-control failure, several lawmakers who voted with the NRA have seen their ratings plummet, including Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.). At a town meeting, Ayotte was confronted by an angry Erica Lafferty, daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, who cited Ayotte's concern about background checks harming gun store owners: "I am just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the halls of her elementary school isn't more important." See Ayotte stammer and stutter because, really, what is there to say? Read more |
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Keystone to Keystone: The Toxic Belly of the Beast With Keystone sparking ongoing protests and so much lobbying it's "a full employment program for K Street," the human, local, hard-to-breathe impact can get overlooked. Welcome to the poor Houston barrio of Manchester, the most polluted neighborhood in the most polluted city in the U.S., where 10 petrochemical plants spew 1.9 million pounds of pollutants a year into the sulfurous air, residents are already chronically ill - nosebleeds to soaring rates of leukemia - and, if Keystone goes forward, 90% of its particularly toxic tar sands crude will be processed. A mother on taking her child to school with four petrochemical plants in sight: "I feel a deep emptiness... I don't know whether I am giving her an education or a death sentence." Read more |
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Women, Take Heed: Being Assaulted Too Many Times Can Lead To Eviction That seems to be it for good news. The ACLU is suing Norristown, PA. on behalf of Lakisha Briggs, who faced eviction under the town's "disorderly behavior” ordinance after she called the police when her boyfriend beat her up - according to police, her first "strike." She was too scared to call again when the by-now-former boyfriend a. threw a brick at her and b. stabbed her in the neck, but the neighbors called. Many other cities have similarly insane "nuisance ordinances." Read more |
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Little Snivelling Jerks: Rush Complains He's Only Got Penile Enhancement Ads A sliver of good news to start the week: With Clear Channel posting massive losses, Limbaugh has taken to the vile airwaves to complain all you "little snivelling jerks" have driven away so many respectable sponsors he's been reduced to the advertising likes of Ageless Male, Rove Pest Control and Ronco Veg-o-matic. Alas, he's still getting paid $38 million a year to spew his sludge. Go Jerks: Flush him, stop him, get the petition to 500,000. Your children will thank you for the (more) breatheable air. Read more |
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Picture of the Week With all the boot-licking, stomach-churning coverage of last week's rewriting of history, this photo was nowhere in sight. Yes, it's real: Melissa Stockwell, the first female U.S. soldier to lose a limb in Iraq, reads the Pledge of Allegiance. By Alex Wong for Getty . More in More. Read more |
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How to Stop A Rape When a drunken, knife-wielding bus driver tried to rape a female U.S. Navy sailor on shore leave in Dubai, she knocked the knife from his hand, wrestled him to the ground, put him in a stranglehold between her legs, ran off the bus, and reported the incident to her commander and then the police, who promptly arrested the guy. Smarts, strength, no gun. Read more |
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Poor Kids: Let Them Eat (and Empty) Trash Cans With the sequester hitting all the wrong people, it was refreshing to hear of West Virginia's Feed to Achieve Act, a model public and private partnershp that would expand the national free lunch program to make sure poor kids don't go hungry because, you know, they're kids and all. Enter GOP jerk Ray Canterbury, who wants kids to first sweep the halls and take out the trash so even "if they miss a lunch (or) might not learn to add, they’ll learn a more important lesson” - presumably that that's likely all they can expect of life. Harsh. Happily, many of his colleagues disagreed. “It is pathetic that in a country as wealthy as this, we’re talking about whether we should feed kids or not. Somebody better check your pulse and see if you’re still living." Read more |
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Fracking Debris Ten Times Too Radioactive for Hazardous Waste Landfill A truck carrying cuttings from a Pennsylvania fracking site was turned back from a hazardous waste landfill after its contents triggered an alarm showing the load was emitting 10 times the level of radiation allowed - thus proving, in officials' eyes, that safeguards worked. Most scary: Pennsylvania is reportedly the only state that even requires landfills to monitor radiation levels. “It’s not too frequent that this occurs, but it’s not totally infrequent either.” - DEP's John Poister, trying to be reassuring. Read more |
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Fiction Accomplished: Bush Outhouse Makes Excuses, Rewrites History, Lies and Lies About Its Awful Crimes It may be tough to keep food down today with the opening of the $250 million "temple to prevarication and ruin" that is the Bush "Library" - for many like pouring battery acid into still-open wounds - and the fawning coverage of a "courtier press." The Defending Freedom Table! The Ground Zero bullhorn! The video games of tortuous choices faced by the great decider! Protests, Guardian livestream and the best from a raging Charles Pierce on this "monstrous public lie" and the effort "to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage (done) by a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched." "No, he doesn't deserve the day. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis who don't get today." Read more |
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Either Way, We Win: Wikileaks Wins Visa Case In what Julian Assange called "a victory for free speech," Iceland's Supreme Court has ruled that Valitor, Iceland's Visa, must lift the blockade against payments to WikiLeaks or pay $204,900 a month in fines. The whistle-blowing group called the decision "the most important victory to date against the unlawful and arbitrary economic blockade erected by U.S. companies against Wikileaks." Read more |