TV News LIES

You'd think electrically punishing children, as ways of getting their attention, would be outlawed by now in America -- but you would be wrong.  You would have thought this would have come up before now -- and it has, over and over.  And you know: The shocks still go on and on.

My first nudge in the direction of the Judge Rotenberg Center, the JRC, came in an email today, asking for my support, on a petition at Change.org.  It began:

One of Mitt Romney’s favorite lies these days is to label Barrack Obama as the enemy of small business. Obama’s response is to point to a long list of small business friendly executive orders. In fact he’s the first President since FDR to show them any real sympathy, but none of the things he’s been able to do really makes much of a difference at this point.

Traditionally, small businessmen have always voted Republican since they tended to either believe the nonsense Republicans told them, or they foolishly believed that someday they’d be the kind of big business that Republicans actually favor. It’s not like they’re a big voting block anymore,- the last 30 years of Republican policies have gotten rid of almost all of them.

Speaking of the continuing meltdown horrors at Fukushima...

Speaking of the fresh fuel rods jammed into damaged buildings so fragile they couldn't ride out a wiggle...

Speaking of hydrogen gas and steam explosions carrying radioactivity aloft...

Speaking of all the radioactive water dumped into the sea, over and over again, sometimes by accident, sometimes by helplessness and design...

It’s 4-20 and if you can’t remember reading Les Miserables in high school because you were smoking in the boy’s room, there is just one aspect of the story relevant to this rant. It’s that Jean Valjean got five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He then got another 16 years for several attempted escapes. In the past this was considered shocking, but in the corporate owned prison system of America this would a light sentence.

The Corporate prison system routinely engineers ever longer sentences for prisoners in their custody for simple infractions of the rules. A serious crime like stealing bread on three occasions can get you life without parole in a private prison.

Where will you go when the cow, whale, and/or volcano blows?

Instead of starting with Parrotheads -- fans of Jimmy Buffett and his songs -- for clues, we first go to Colorado, where the U.S. Forest Service is pondering what to do with a group of stray cows that wandered away from the herd over the winter, then moseyed into a ranger cabin, making themselves at home.

We’ve had an increase in the Initial Unemployment Claims number for the second straight week, and this may or maybe not bad news. It’s too early to get really worried about it, we’re still way below the 400,000 number that seems to indicate a failing economy these days.

The numbers are seasonally adjusted and thanks to global warming we had no winter to speak of, causing the normal spring spike in activity to start in January. Low winter heating bills put an average of $400 per family into the economy with twice that in the northeast. Unfortunately,  high gasoline prices are taking it back again.