As we enjoy this beautiful spring, you might want to look to the sky (far far into the sky). This is the Comet Siding Spring and its ghostly tail was picked up the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, telescope.
Continue reading “Welcome Siding Spring: WISE Captures Three Incredible Images in Space”
This video has people talking about whether Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, knowingly used the five-finger discount to take a ceremonial pen during a state visit to Chile — as 5 million people watched. You be the judge.
Continue reading “The Czech is in the Mail: Czech President Accused of Palming Pen”
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
According to T. S. Elliott in his poem The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month.” I think many of us would agree because April is the month in which we Americans are required to file our annual income taxes. And thinking about who is actually paying taxes these days, has really gotten my dander up.
Today, while many working class and middle class people are trying hard to survive from paycheck to paycheck and when millions of Americans are out of work and unable to find new jobs that pay them a living wage, it’s hard to accept the fact that huge corporations like GE may not be paying any taxes at all while receiving tax rebates. It’s also maddening to see millionaires and billionaires who blew a hole in our economy and nearly caused a financial meltdown getting bailed out with OUR tax dollars.
Continue reading “Wealthy “Faux Farmers” Get Huge Agricultural Tax Breaks on Their Properties”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Considering the recent and ongoing opposition of many Republicans to contraception, a review of this landmark 7-2 Supreme Court decision was conceived. The case involved a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives by married couples. The Appellants were Estelle Griswold, Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and C. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and professor at the Yale Medical School, who served as Medical Director for the League at its Center in New Haven.
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
SpaceShipTwo is a civilian spaceship that offers trips to suborbital space and back for $200,000 a seat. I’ll wait for the Groupon.
Another video here.
Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Forty-three year old belly- dancer, Dorothy McGurk, has learned just how expensive internet dancing can be. Receiving $850.00 in monthly alimony due to a disability, the Staten Island resident was hauled before a county judge by her husband, Brian McGurk, who caught her dancing act on her blog and who now claims his ex-wife’s disability has actually “slip-sided away.”
Continue reading “Gut Feeling: New York Belly Dancer Loses Alimony”
Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
The United States Postal Service makes an occasional wrong delivery, but the latest is a doozy.
Issuing 3 billion stamps bearing that unmistakable icon of America, the Statue of Liberty, the Service was rightly proud with its work. That is, until contacted by a stamp collector who pointed out that the visage was not the copper-skinned statue designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi that stands in New York Harbor, but the fibreglass and Styrofoam replica placed outside a Las Vegas casino appropriately named, New York- New York.
Continue reading “Give Me Your Tired, Your poor … And Welcome to Vegas!”
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Poets know how to say things best–and the best poets know how to pack a punch with their words, which are often quoted. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said: “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of
prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.”
When speaking, politicians don’t always use the best words. They tend toward uttering their “talking points” and “staying on message.” They are often caught off guard when someone asks them an unexpected question that they aren’t prepared to answer. Rick Santorum found himself in an awkward position recently. Santorum was speaking at an “ECON-101” Town Hall meeting-style event Thursday sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement at New England College in New Hampshire when he was tripped up by a student who asked him if he knew that his campaign slogan “Fighting to make America America again,” was borrowed from the “pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
The push by Republicans to deny funding of Planned Parenthood has been justified by citing the abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood. However, the contraceptives provided by Planned Parenthood prevent abortions. Cutting funding for contraception would actually
increase abortions.
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
This is a question frequently asked by police officers to use the consent exception to the requirement to obtain a warrant. Note the difference compared with “Can I search you/your car?” A “yes” answer has exactly the opposite meaning depending upon which question was asked. Police officers are well aware of this fact.
In the case of J.W.E. v. State of Florida, this question, and its answer, were critical.
Arizona legislators are again wading into national politics. With the controversial immigration bill moving toward the Supreme Court, House has passed a bill that would require all presidential candidates to prove they were born in the U.S. by producing their birth certificates. It is a bill that this clearly crafted to exclude the current documents produced to show the birth of President Barack Obama. I am currently scheduled to discuss this legislation with Lawrence O’Donnell tonight
Continue reading “Arizona Bill Would Require Proof of U.S. Birth For Presidential Candidates”
Tommy R. Bennett, a former employee of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. at the Rainbow Push Coalition and Barack Obama’s LGBT Leadership Council, has filed a wrongful termination and discrimination complaint against Jesse Jackson with Chicago’s Commission on Human Rights. It is scathing filing that alleges that Jackson routinely forces staffers to arrange (and clean up after) his trysts with women as well as other demeaning jobs. Jackson previously had to admit in 2001 to an affair with staffer, Karin Stanford, that resulted in the birth of a daughter, Ashley. He swore that he had again found God and the Rainbow Coalition paid Stanford money to resolve the scandal.
Well, it now appears we are at war for regime change after all. President Barack Obama joined British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in a rare article appearing in International Herald Tribune, Le Figaro, and Times of London to say that they will not accept anything less than changing the government in Libya. We are now officially parties in a civil war to overthrow a government — without a declaration of war from Congress.
Continue reading “It is About Regime Change After All: Obama Changes Rationale for Libyan War Once Again And Demands Libyans Change Their Government As A Condition For Ending Combat Operations”
That’s it, my planned vacation with my dog Molly to Tehran is off. Iranian legislators have moved to ban dogs from both public places and private apartments. Muslim are taught that dogs are unclean and the Iranian legislators insist that dogs are not just an affront to Islam but ” a blind imitation of vulgar Western culture.”
Continue reading “Ayatollah Not To Walk Your Dog: Iranian Leaders Move To Ban Dogs”
One of our students yesterday was found dead in his room at the City Hall dormitory. The name of the male student has not been released. Fox News, however, caused a sensation by running an article tying the suicide to the arrival of President Obama on campus for his speech on debt reform. Fox later removed the article entitled GWU Suicide Tragically Coincides with Obama Speech from its website after objections from the school and public.