Key members of the Congressional Black Caucus are calling for an end to U.S. prohibition on travel to Cuba, just hours after a meeting with former Cuban president Fidel Castro in Havana.
“The fifty-year embargo just hasn’t worked,” CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca.) told reporters this evening at a Capitol press conference after returning from a congressional delegation visit to Cuba. “The bottom line is that we believe its time to open dialogue with Cuba.”
Lee and others heaped praise on Castro, calling him warm and receptive during their discussion. But the lawmakers disputed Castro’s later statement that members of the congressional delegation said American society is still racist.
“It was quite a moment to behold,” Lee said, recalling her moments with Castro.
The logical implication is that we may never determine who actually received more legally cast ballots. Coleman formulates the issue in terms of equal protection and urges a lowest-common-denominator approach to the inclusion of rejected absentee ballots as a matter of constitutional law, but I am afraid he may have identified a wrong without a legal (as opposed to a political) remedy.
I admire Coleman’s public service and believe he has been an outstanding senator. But since the election, the Coleman campaign has put on a performance that conveys a strong impression of complacency and ineptitude; the Franken campaign outhustled and outsmarted it.
Al Franken is a man with political views as ugly as his jokes are unfunny. He may also be the first U.S. senator to have joked about his past use of cocaine. In the 2002 oral history of Saturday Night Live assembled by James Miller and Tom Shales, Franken talked (pages 119-120) about using cocaine while pulling all-nighters writing for the show: “I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh heh.”
And I don’t think it can exactly be said that he won the election fair and square. Indeed, I can’t find a single good thing to say about him except that he didn’t steal the election.
In other words, the person the Census Bureau imagines it is targeting with its communications plan is not someone who looks at himself as a net payer of taxes but someone who looks at himself as a net taker of government funding. He is a moocher.
In fact, the Census Bureau’s communications plan says its studies indicate that the way to sell people on participating in the census is to tell them that they get “benefits” for doing so.
“These studies consistently show that messages that increase knowledge of the benefits of filling out the Census improve motivation and favorability towards Census participation,” says page 24 of the plan. “New primary research among a wide range of target audiences further confirms the importance of communicating Census benefits.”
Time to stop procrastinating: The deadline for mailing federal and state tax returns is midnight Wednesday.
But with income taxes on our minds, it’s revealing to examine how many other taxes we pay throughout the year. It’s a growing list, too, a fact bound to catch extra attention during tight economic times.
Sales-tax rates have inched up and now top 8 percent in several area cities. It happened in increments, usually to help pay for targeted good causes. But as the total grows, local officials should decide if the small additions are good policy for the long-haul.
Without question, the most important change in the composition of the American electorate over the past several decades has been a steady increase in the proportion of nonwhite voters. This trend has been evident for at least 50 years but it has accelerated in the last quarter century. It is a result of increased immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, higher birth rates among minority groups, and increased registration and turnout among African-Americans, Hispanics, and other nonwhite citizens. Moreover, this shift is almost certain to continue for the foreseeable future based on generational differences in the racial and ethnic composition of the current electorate and Census Bureau projections of the racial and ethnic makeup of the American population between now and 2050.
PETA to Pet Shop Boys: Rescue Shelter Boys, perhaps?
LONDON, England (CNN) - Just because they named their new CD “Yes,” does not mean that British electro-pop duo, the Pet Shop Boys, will agree to just about anything.
The band has turned down a request from an animal rights group to rename itself the Rescue Shelter Boys.
The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear “bizarre.”
But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the “cramped, filthy conditions” that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter.
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Small island states have sharpened their calls for the rich to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying low-lying atolls risk being washed off the map by rising ocean levels.
An alliance of 43 island states, backed by more than a dozen nations in Africa and Latin America, urged developed countries at U.N. climate talks in Bonn on Thursday to cut greenhouse emissions by “at least 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”
“The scientific findings about climate change are frightening,” M.J. Mace, a legal advisor to the Federated States of Micronesia who presented the demands at the March 29-April 8 meeting, told Reuters.
A group of leading researchers last month projected a quickening pace of sea level rise this century, of about a meter (3 feet) or roughly double the projections by the U.N. Climate Panel in 2007.
At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone. Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion - it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.
- In T. Boone Pickens’ version, it seems like wealth gets transferred overseas without any benefit to the U.S. But oil imports, like all trade, involves mutually beneficial exchange. Remember trade is win-win, not win-lose (like T. Boone Pickens suggests).
One dictionary definition of “wealth” is “an abundance of valuable resources.” In that case, wouldn’t T. Boone Pickens’ “greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind” actually be a transfer of wealth in the form of valuable natural resources (oil) TO the United States, and not a transfer of wealth FROM the United States in the form of paper currency?
USA Today reports that 61 housing agencies that have failed previous audits (they mishandled federal aid in the past) will get $300 million in stimulus money.
With all the finger-crossing, nail-biting anticipation of a Mega Millions drawing, more than 11,000 kids and their families learned Tuesday night if their numbers had come up in the “Super Tuesday” charter school lotteries.
But, like the Lotto, there was lots more disappointment than satisfaction.
Only 2,260 students went home happy after nailing a coveted seat in one of 29 schools in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn in lotteries held around the city.
Tara Haynes, one of about 2,500 parents who turned up at the Brooklyn College drawing, shouted for joy when the name of her 4-year-old daughter, Jordan, was the first one called.
“I’m excited. I’m just so happy,” she gushed. “My daughter just had to get in.”
Nearby, Megan Golding, 4, who sat patiently during the half hour or so drawing, wept on her mother’s knee because her name wasn’t among the 504 called.
“She’ll get over it, she just doesn’t know why they didn’t say her name,” said her mom, Catherine, 33.
But the top House Democrat with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security said in a letter to Ms. Napolitano that he was “dumbfounded” that such a report would be issued.
“This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans - including war veterans,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in his letter sent Tuesday night.
The letter was representative of a public furor over the nine-page document since its existence was reported in The Washington Times on Tuesday.
We thank our readers and writers for our continued growth. Just a little over half-way through the month of April, we’ve already matched our readership from the entire month of March.
The more you learn about this, the madder it will make you. The President of Johnson County Community College, Terry Calaway (I call him the New Chuck, because he is as much a lying, conniving weasel as was Chuck ‘The Groper’ Carlsen) is still persisting in his coverup of his CLEAR VIOLATION of the Ks. Open Meetings Act (KOMA).
Calaway (and his boy, the lazy attorney Mark Ferguson)have concocted a “Speak No Evil” coverup story, a wholly novel legal maneuver, claiming that if you hand out illegal materials ie proposed budget cuts, during a closed meeting, it’s OK “as long as you don’t SPEAK OUT LOUD about them!”
You know, it’s the cover-up that kills you. Just ask Bill Clinton.
Later:
Then two cohorts in crime, elected JCCC Trustees Lynn Mitchellson and Shirley Brown-VanArsdale, served as Calaway’s other two monkeys: Hear No Evil and See No Evil. They supported the coverup. They smeared Trustee Ben Hodge. And made up, completely made up, a story that HODGE broke confidence, when he shared the illegal document with Jim Sullinger, the Star reporter who diagnosed the document as a violation of KOMA.
