Graham Spanier allegedly failed to report abuse claims despite knowing that inaction could leave Penn State 'vulnerable'
A former president of Penn State University failed to report allegations of child sex abuse against Jerry Sandusky despite knowing inaction could leave the college "vulnerable", according to emails seen by several news organisations.
Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of 45 counts of sexually assaulting underage boys over a 15-year period.
But with Sandusky now behind bars - potentially for the rest of his life - attention is turning to whether there was a cover-up at the university, one that may have allowed Sandusky to carry on with his abuse for many years. Two of Sandusky's former colleagues, athletic director Tim Curley and finance official Gary Schultz, have already been charged with perjury and failing to alert authorities to one act of sexual abuse.
And in a potentially damaging development, former university president Graham Spanier has been cited as another member of staff who knew about allegations of abuse but did nothing to alert authorities.
CNN said on Saturday that it had seen emails in which Spanier discusses with Curley and Schultz a 2001 incident in which Sandusky was allegedly caught abusing a boy in a shower.
The messages reportedly show that Spanier was supportive of the decision not to hand Sandusky over to the authorities, but fretted that the decision could cause Penn State problems further down the line.
rest at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/30/penn-state-president-sandusky-abuse?newsfeed=true
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Tony Blair earned £20m in just one year advising business bosses and foreign governments
Tony Blair earned more than £20 million last year from advising business chiefs and foreign governments, it was reported yesterday.
The former Prime Minister's income since leaving Downing Street has been shrouded in mystery, but the new figure emerged during an interview with Mr Blair by Financial Times editor Lionel Barber.
The size of the former Labour leader's income is certain to provoke fresh criticism of his money-making exploits since he left office, even though he has insisted he pays 50 per cent income tax on all his earnings.
He told Mr Barber, who interviewed him in Jerusalem, that the money was ploughed back into his philanthropic ventures, adding: 'The purpose is not to make money. It is to make a difference.'
Mr Blair's financial affairs have been difficult to unravel because a network of companies and partnerships allows him to avoid publishing full accounts.
In January he filed accounts declaring an income of £12 million last year for just one of his dozen or so companies, Windrush Ventures.
But the accounts appeared to show he had paid tax on only a fraction of the income, thanks to administrative expenses experts described as 'surprisingly' high.
rest at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2167038/Tony-Blair-earned-20m-just-year-advising-business-bosses-foreign-governments.html#ixzz1zO9kZl00
Obama outspending Mitt on Latinos 20-to-1
Over on the home page, POLITICO's Robin Bravender takes a look at the Latino vote and what the candidates are doing to court it:
Obama's campaign has spent more than $2 million on Spanish-language television and radio ads since mid-April, according to several sources who track media buys.
That's on top of the $4 million the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action and the Service Employees International Union have committed to spending through the summer on Spanish TV and radio ads hitting Romney in Colorado, Nevada and Florida.
In contrast, Mitt Romney has spent about $110,000 on Spanish-language ads during the general election, sources say... Obama already has a sizable advantage over Romney with Latino voters. A survey in five swing states released June 22 showed Obama leading Romney among Latino voters by 36 percentage points overall across Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia, with the biggest leads in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.
rest at http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/07/obama-outspending-mitt-on-latinos-to-127827.html
Must Read: Investigation Reveals True Hazards Of Piping Tar Sands Across America #p2 #tcot
America has a new word to learn: Dilbit.
Dilbit, short for diluted bitumen, is a combination of tar sands crude (bitumen) and dangerous liquid chemicals like benzene (the dilutant) used to thin crude so it can be piped to refineries.
And there is a lot of it being piped into America — in some cases through the backyards of communities that don't even know it's there.
The U.S. imports around half a million barrels of bitumen a day from Canada's tar sands. According to the Sierra Club, if Keystone XL backers get their way, that number may grow to 1.5 million barrels per day.
A must-read investigation released this week by Inside Climate News illustrates why that could be a potential nightmare for communities located near pipeline infrastructure.
The story follows the complicated clean-up of a tar sands oil spill that most people haven't even heard of — a 2010 pipeline rupture in southwestern Michigan that resulted in more than one million gallons of dilbit fouling a local waterway close to the Kalamazoo River.
The three-part narrative is detailed and extremely well-researched. It features a blow-by-blow account of how the pipeline ruptured, how officials acted (or, in the case of the pipeline owner, Enbridge, how it failed to act) and why dilbit represents a double threat to the environment and public health. It also shows why having an Environmental Protection Agency is so important when crisis hits.
This investigation is a must-read for any public official or resident from a community located near the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Instead of remaining on top of the water, as most conventional crude oil does, the bitumen gradually sank to the river's bottom, where normal cleanup techniques and equipment were of little use. Meanwhile, the benzene and other chemicals that had been added to liquefy the bitumen evaporated into the air.
InsideClimate News also learned that federal and local officials didn't discover until more than a week after the spill that 6B was carrying dilbit, not conventional oil. Federal regulations do not require pipeline operators to disclose that information. And Enbridge officials did not volunteer it.
Mark Durno, an EPA deputy incident commander who is still involved in the cleanup in Marshall, is among those who were surprised by what they found.
"Submerged oil is what makes this thing more unique than even the Gulf of Mexico situation," Durno told InsideClimate News. "Yes, that was huge—but they knew the beast they were dealing with. This experience was brand new for us. It would have been brand new for anyone in the United States."
One of the most compelling pieces of the investigation comes when the reporters examine the safety record of America's pipeline infrastructure. The results are shocking:
When corrosion rises above a certain threshold, PHMSA requires that it be repaired within 180 days. But the rules are flexible, and companies can easily negotiate for more time.
Records show that 6B had a history of corrosion problems.
In 2008, Enbridge identified 140 corrosion defects on 6B as serious enough to fall into the 180-day category. But the company repaired just 26 of them during that period.
In 2009, Enbridge self-reported a separate set of 250 defects to PHMSA. The company fixed only 35 of them within 180 days.
Instead of immediately addressing the 329 defects that now remained, Enbridge got a one-year extension from PHMSA by exercising its legal option to reduce pumping pressure on 6B while it decided whether to repair or replace the line.
A defect on 6B near John LaForge's house, where the pipeline eventually ruptured, didn't appear on any of the 180-day repair lists.
That defect, at mile marker 608, was detected at least three times before the pipeline ruptured, in 2005, 2007 and 2009, according to documents Enbridge filed with PHMSA over the years. But each time, Enbridge decided it wasn't significant enough to require repairs within 180 days.
Ten days before 6B ruptured, Enbridge applied to PHMSA for another extension. It asked for an additional two and a half years to decide whether 6B should be repaired or replaced.
Does this sound familiar?
rest at http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/01/509026/must-read-investigation-reveals-true-hazards-of-piping-tar-sands-across-america/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Romney Advisers Reveal Strategy: Ignore Journalists, Pander To Right-Wing Conspriacy Websites #p2 #tcot
In a stunning interview with Breitbart.com, two top advisers to Mitt Romney revealed the campaign's plan to largely ignore journalists in favor of right-wing conspiracy websites.
From the beginning of the campaign, Romney has pointedly avoided news outlets who might pose tough questions. The press dubbed it "the Mittness Protection Program." As the campaign wore on, Romney has refused to answer direct questions about major policy issues central to the campaign. For example, Romney has still not stated whether he would undo Obama's order ending deportations for many young undocumented immigrants.
Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar recently outlined how the campaign will avoid journalists and cooridnate and communicate their message through Brietbart.com and the Drudge Report:
When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. Never before – in a way that has taken Democrats off stride – have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement.
Boehner: Health reform law must be ‘ripped out by its roots’ #p2 #tcot
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Sunday admitted that some parts of President Barack Obama's health care reforms were beneficial, but insisted that the entire law must be "ripped out by its roots."
"There's always going to be parts of it that are good," Boehner told CBS Chief White House Correspondent Nora O'Donnell.
"Since you're going to be repealing it, are you willing to roll back the provisions that would provide free mammograms under Medicare?" O'Donnell wondered.
"Listen, there are a lot of provisions that can be replaced," Boehner explained. "Remember I said we want to take a common-sense, step-by-step approach to replacing Obamacare."
"Why not then, if you like some of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act, why not work with it?" O'Donnell asked.
"No, no," Boehner replied. "This has to be ripped out by its roots. This is government taking over the entire health insurance industry."
"It has to be ripped out and we need to start over."
rest at http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/01/boehner-health-reform-law-must-be-ripped-out-by-its-roots/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Worst flooding in more than a decade inundates 2,000 villages in India – Over 1 million displaced – Rhinos vulnerable to poaching
GAUHATI, India, 1 July 2012 (AP) – The death toll from monsoon rains in northeastern India has risen above 60, with more than 2,000 villages inundated as rivers breached their banks, an official said Sunday.
More than a week of heavy rains in Assam state has caused the massive Brahmaputra river — one of Asia's largest — to exceed danger levels. Smaller rivers have also overflown their banks.
Floods and landslides have killed 62 people, Assam's agriculture minister Nilomoni Sen Deka said.
Deka said the disaster has affected about 2 million people.
The state's disaster management authority said thousands of homes have been destroyed and more than 480,000 people have sought shelter in government-run relief camps.
There was no rain Sunday in most parts of the state but thunderstorms were forecast over the next 24 hours.
The monsoon season in India begins in June and ends in September.
Assam suffers flooding almost every year but this year's disaster is the worst in at least a decade.
‘Worst rainfall in many years’ leaves hundred dead, 250,000 stranded in Bangladesh floods
DHAKA, Bangladesh — At least 100 people have died and 250,000 were left stranded by flash floods and landslides in Bangladesh set off by the heaviest rain in years, police and officials said on Wednesday.
The low-lying and densely populated country, which is in its wet season, has been battered by five days of torrential downpours.
The deaths took place late on Tuesday and on Wednesday. Most were caused by landslides, others by wall collapses, lightning strikes and surges of floodwater. Army, police and fire brigade personnel were helping in rescue efforts.
Weather officials said more rain was expected over the next few days.
Hundreds of homes have been washed away, while authorities have moved many families from slums and told others to leave quickly.
At least 23 people were killed in and around the southeastern port city of Chittagong, while 36 died in Bandarban in an area known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
"Several more people are feared trapped in hillside homes buried under heaps of mud. Rescue operations are continuing," Chittagong Deputy Commissioner Faiz Ahmed said.
Officials in the affected areas said about 100 people were missing, many swept away by floodwater, and about 200 injured.
In Sylhet, houses were filled by up to three feet of floodwater, and residents were forced to perch on boats or scramble to high ground. Three children were reported killed.
Flooding also hit districts northwest of the capital Dhaka.
rest at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47979353/ns/weather/t/die-stranded-bangladesh-floods/#.T_EgGfXAHyI
heartbreaking: Middle-class Americans, Suddenly Homeless and Living in their Cars #p2 #tcot
Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van's roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot's remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn't always have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn't need to eat much - if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds - but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.
Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed - she'd worked for 40 years, through three major recessions. During her first year of unemployment, in 2010, she wrote three or four cover letters a day, five days a week. Now, to keep her mind occupied when she's not looking for work or doing odd jobs, she volunteers at an animal shelter called the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. ("I always ask for the most physically hard jobs just to get out my frustration," she says.) She has permission to pick fruit directly from the branches of the shelter's orange and avocado trees. Another benefit is that when she scrambles eggs to hand-feed wounded seabirds, she can surreptitiously make a dish for herself.
By the time Adkins goes to bed - early, because she has to get up soon after sunrise, before parishioners or church employees arrive - the four other people who overnight in the lot have usually settled in: a single mother who lives in a van with her two teenage children and keeps assiduously to herself, and a wrathful, mentally unstable woman in an old Mercedes sedan whom Adkins avoids. By mutual unspoken agreement, the three women park in the same spots every night, keeping a minimum distance from each other. When you live in your car in a parking lot, you value any reliable area of enclosing stillness. "You get very territorial," Adkins says.
Each evening, 150 people in 113 vehicles spend the night in 23 parking lots in Santa Barbara. The lots are part of Safe Parking, a program that offers overnight permits to people living in their vehicles. The nonprofit that runs the program, New Beginnings Counseling Center, requires participants to have a valid driver's license and current registration and insurance. The number of vehicles per lot ranges from one to 15, and lot hours are generally from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Fraternization among those who sleep in the lots is implicitly discouraged - the fainter the program's presence, the less likely it will provoke complaints from neighboring homes and churches and businesses.
The Safe Parking program is not the product of a benevolent government. Santa Barbara's mild climate and sheltered beachfront have long attracted the homeless, and the city has sometimes responded with punitive measures. (An appeals court compared one city ordinance forbidding overnight RV parking to anti-Okie laws in the 1930s.) To aid Santa Barbara's large homeless population, local activists launched the Safe Parking program in 2003. But since the Great Recession began, the number of lots and participants in the program has doubled. By 2009, formerly middle-class people like Janis Adkins had begun turning up - teachers and computer repairmen and yoga instructors seeking refuge in the city's parking lots. Safe-parking programs in other cities have experienced a similar influx of middle-class exiles, and their numbers are not expected to decrease anytime soon. It can take years for unemployed workers from the middle class to burn through their resources - savings, credit, salable belongings, home equity, loans from family and friends. Some 5.4 million Americans have been without work for at least six months, and an estimated 750,000 of them are completely broke or heading inexorably toward destitution. In California, where unemployment remains at 11 percent, middle-class refugees like Janis Adkins are only the earliest arrivals. "She's the tip of the iceberg," says Nancy Kapp, the coordinator of the Safe Parking program. "There are many people out there who haven't hit bottom yet, but they're on their way - they're on their way."
Kapp, who was herself homeless for a time many years ago, is blunt, indefatigable, raptly empathetic. She works out of a minuscule office in the Salvation Army building in downtown Santa Barbara. On the wall is a map encompassing the program's parking lots - a vivid graphic of the fall of the middle class. Kapp expects more disoriented, newly impoverished families to request spots in the Safe Parking program this year, and next year, and the year after that.
"When you come to me, you've hit rock bottom," Kapp says. "You've already done everything you possibly could to avoid being homeless. You maybe have a teeny bit of savings left. People are crying, they're saying, 'I've never experienced this before. I've never been homeless.' They don't want to mix with homeless people. They're like, 'I'm not going over to those people' - sometimes they call them 'those people.' So now they're lost, they're humiliated, they're rejected, they're scared, and they're very ashamed. I'm worried about the psychological damage it does when you have a place and then, all of a sudden, you're in your car. You have to be depressed just from the fall itself, from losing everything and not understanding how it could happen."
One evening last spring, I visit Janis Adkins in her parking lot at the Goleta Community Covenant Church. When I turn into the driveway, the sun has fallen to the horizon. The other residents haven't arrived yet, and Adkins' van, at the far corner of the lot, seems almost metaphysically solitary, drawn to the parcel of greenery at the asphalt's edge.
Because the night is chilly and the van shell seems to draw the cold inward, Adkins has already tucked herself in, reclining against pillows and a rolled sleeping bag at the back corner of the van, beneath blankets and layers of piled-up fleece clothing. For privacy, Adkins has put silver sunshades in the front windshield; a row of clean shirts and blouses suspended on hangers obscures the lot-facing side window. By the light of a little LED bulb in a camping headlamp, she is reading a novel called The Invisible Ones, whose main characters are gypsies.
Adkins has tousled blond-gray hair and the kind of deep, unaffected tan that comes from working outdoors. She grew up in a middle-class family in Santa Barbara, but eventually took off to become a river guide in Utah. Adkins engages you frankly, her manner almost practiced in its evenness: few gesticulations, steady intonation. Across the ceiling of the van she has affixed a silken red-and-gold banner that spells out a Buddhist chant of compassion. She practices yoga and meditation and believes in the Buddhist concept of equanimity; she takes comfort in the parable of the Zen ox herder, who tries and fails, day after day, to break a raging ox. When a friend calls to ask how she's doing, she often says, "Still riding the ox."
But the rigors of homelessness - the sudden loss of the signifiers of her selfhood - regularly breach the protection of detachment; the trick for her is regaining it quickly. "When negative thoughts come, it's important to be able to say, 'It's just a thought,'" she tells me. "'Just let it go.' When I get really down, I try to look at a worse-case scenario, like the pictures of the Haiti earthquake. I go, 'What could I do to help?' Things like that drive me forward." She also reminds herself to be grateful: to Starbucks for free cups of hot water, to the YMCA for her discounted membership, to the Safe Parking program. Gratitude snuffs out self-pity.
Before the financial crash decimated the value of her home and her customer base, Adkins had been contemplating selling her nursery, High Desert Gardens, and going to work for a humanitarian or environmental organization. But the suddenness and violence of the recession took her by surprise. The nursery specialized in drought-tolerant plants and offered more than 100 species of trees. Over the years, she had developed a deep base of horticultural knowledge, and people came from long distances to seek her advice. Business was good enough that she could leave her employees in charge of the nursery and travel for a month or so every summer to escape the harsh Moab heat.
rest at http://www.sott.net/articles/show/247382-Middle-class-Americans-Suddenly-Homeless-and-Living-in-their-Cars
Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed - she'd worked for 40 years, through three major recessions. During her first year of unemployment, in 2010, she wrote three or four cover letters a day, five days a week. Now, to keep her mind occupied when she's not looking for work or doing odd jobs, she volunteers at an animal shelter called the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. ("I always ask for the most physically hard jobs just to get out my frustration," she says.) She has permission to pick fruit directly from the branches of the shelter's orange and avocado trees. Another benefit is that when she scrambles eggs to hand-feed wounded seabirds, she can surreptitiously make a dish for herself.
By the time Adkins goes to bed - early, because she has to get up soon after sunrise, before parishioners or church employees arrive - the four other people who overnight in the lot have usually settled in: a single mother who lives in a van with her two teenage children and keeps assiduously to herself, and a wrathful, mentally unstable woman in an old Mercedes sedan whom Adkins avoids. By mutual unspoken agreement, the three women park in the same spots every night, keeping a minimum distance from each other. When you live in your car in a parking lot, you value any reliable area of enclosing stillness. "You get very territorial," Adkins says.
Each evening, 150 people in 113 vehicles spend the night in 23 parking lots in Santa Barbara. The lots are part of Safe Parking, a program that offers overnight permits to people living in their vehicles. The nonprofit that runs the program, New Beginnings Counseling Center, requires participants to have a valid driver's license and current registration and insurance. The number of vehicles per lot ranges from one to 15, and lot hours are generally from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Fraternization among those who sleep in the lots is implicitly discouraged - the fainter the program's presence, the less likely it will provoke complaints from neighboring homes and churches and businesses.
The Safe Parking program is not the product of a benevolent government. Santa Barbara's mild climate and sheltered beachfront have long attracted the homeless, and the city has sometimes responded with punitive measures. (An appeals court compared one city ordinance forbidding overnight RV parking to anti-Okie laws in the 1930s.) To aid Santa Barbara's large homeless population, local activists launched the Safe Parking program in 2003. But since the Great Recession began, the number of lots and participants in the program has doubled. By 2009, formerly middle-class people like Janis Adkins had begun turning up - teachers and computer repairmen and yoga instructors seeking refuge in the city's parking lots. Safe-parking programs in other cities have experienced a similar influx of middle-class exiles, and their numbers are not expected to decrease anytime soon. It can take years for unemployed workers from the middle class to burn through their resources - savings, credit, salable belongings, home equity, loans from family and friends. Some 5.4 million Americans have been without work for at least six months, and an estimated 750,000 of them are completely broke or heading inexorably toward destitution. In California, where unemployment remains at 11 percent, middle-class refugees like Janis Adkins are only the earliest arrivals. "She's the tip of the iceberg," says Nancy Kapp, the coordinator of the Safe Parking program. "There are many people out there who haven't hit bottom yet, but they're on their way - they're on their way."
Kapp, who was herself homeless for a time many years ago, is blunt, indefatigable, raptly empathetic. She works out of a minuscule office in the Salvation Army building in downtown Santa Barbara. On the wall is a map encompassing the program's parking lots - a vivid graphic of the fall of the middle class. Kapp expects more disoriented, newly impoverished families to request spots in the Safe Parking program this year, and next year, and the year after that.
"When you come to me, you've hit rock bottom," Kapp says. "You've already done everything you possibly could to avoid being homeless. You maybe have a teeny bit of savings left. People are crying, they're saying, 'I've never experienced this before. I've never been homeless.' They don't want to mix with homeless people. They're like, 'I'm not going over to those people' - sometimes they call them 'those people.' So now they're lost, they're humiliated, they're rejected, they're scared, and they're very ashamed. I'm worried about the psychological damage it does when you have a place and then, all of a sudden, you're in your car. You have to be depressed just from the fall itself, from losing everything and not understanding how it could happen."
One evening last spring, I visit Janis Adkins in her parking lot at the Goleta Community Covenant Church. When I turn into the driveway, the sun has fallen to the horizon. The other residents haven't arrived yet, and Adkins' van, at the far corner of the lot, seems almost metaphysically solitary, drawn to the parcel of greenery at the asphalt's edge.
Because the night is chilly and the van shell seems to draw the cold inward, Adkins has already tucked herself in, reclining against pillows and a rolled sleeping bag at the back corner of the van, beneath blankets and layers of piled-up fleece clothing. For privacy, Adkins has put silver sunshades in the front windshield; a row of clean shirts and blouses suspended on hangers obscures the lot-facing side window. By the light of a little LED bulb in a camping headlamp, she is reading a novel called The Invisible Ones, whose main characters are gypsies.
Adkins has tousled blond-gray hair and the kind of deep, unaffected tan that comes from working outdoors. She grew up in a middle-class family in Santa Barbara, but eventually took off to become a river guide in Utah. Adkins engages you frankly, her manner almost practiced in its evenness: few gesticulations, steady intonation. Across the ceiling of the van she has affixed a silken red-and-gold banner that spells out a Buddhist chant of compassion. She practices yoga and meditation and believes in the Buddhist concept of equanimity; she takes comfort in the parable of the Zen ox herder, who tries and fails, day after day, to break a raging ox. When a friend calls to ask how she's doing, she often says, "Still riding the ox."
But the rigors of homelessness - the sudden loss of the signifiers of her selfhood - regularly breach the protection of detachment; the trick for her is regaining it quickly. "When negative thoughts come, it's important to be able to say, 'It's just a thought,'" she tells me. "'Just let it go.' When I get really down, I try to look at a worse-case scenario, like the pictures of the Haiti earthquake. I go, 'What could I do to help?' Things like that drive me forward." She also reminds herself to be grateful: to Starbucks for free cups of hot water, to the YMCA for her discounted membership, to the Safe Parking program. Gratitude snuffs out self-pity.
Before the financial crash decimated the value of her home and her customer base, Adkins had been contemplating selling her nursery, High Desert Gardens, and going to work for a humanitarian or environmental organization. But the suddenness and violence of the recession took her by surprise. The nursery specialized in drought-tolerant plants and offered more than 100 species of trees. Over the years, she had developed a deep base of horticultural knowledge, and people came from long distances to seek her advice. Business was good enough that she could leave her employees in charge of the nursery and travel for a month or so every summer to escape the harsh Moab heat.
rest at http://www.sott.net/articles/show/247382-Middle-class-Americans-Suddenly-Homeless-and-Living-in-their-Cars
Romney outlines his version of the DREAM Act....then claims he misspoke #p2 #tcot
Click here to view this media
Benjy Sarlin over at Talking Points Memo flags Romney for this obvious screw-up. Understandable though when you consider the ever changing positions Romney has had throughout his career on major issues. Even he probably can't keep track of what he believes (or says he believes) anymore.
Mitt Romney accidentally floated a new immigration position in an interview with conservative site Newsmax on Friday, suggesting that he favored a path to permanent status for young illegal immigrants through higher education. The campaign quickly walked the position back when confronted with the discrepancy by TPM.
via the wingnut site Newsmax:
"I will reform immigration with an idea of making immigration more transparent, helping reunite families, assuring that we have a large and ample supply of workers that are needed in agriculture and other temporary assignments," he said.
rest at http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/romney-outlines-his-version-dream-actthen-c
Arctic sea ice tracking at record low levels
19 Jun 2012 (NSIDC) – After a period of rapid ice loss through the first half of June, sea ice extent is now slightly below 2010 levels, the previous record low at this time of year. Sea level pressure patterns have been favorable for the retreat of sea ice for much of the past month.
rest at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/06/sea-ice-tracking-at-record-low-levels/
Supreme Court Springs A Leak; Leaks To Conservative Pundits May Have Started More Than A Month Ago #p2 #tcot
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy – believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law – led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."
The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.
Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.
Paul Ryan: Repeal Health Law Because Rights Come From God #p2 #tcot
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is arguing that President Barack Obama's health care reform law should be repealed because rights come from "nature and God," not the government.
During an interview on ABC, former Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy's widow, Victoria Kennedy, told host George Stephanopoulos that the Supreme Court had made the right decision by upholding the Affordable Care Act.
"This health care reform was the cause of my husband's life," she explained. "He believed that it was a moral issue, that it defined the character of who we were as a society, who we were as a country, and that decent quality, affordable health care should be fundamental right and not a privilege."
But Ryan rejected Kennedy's assertion and promised to completely undo the law.
"We're going to repeal the entire law and then we're going to advance patient-centered reforms that address these kinds of issues," the Wisconsin Republican said.
rest at http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/paul-ryan-repeal-health-law-because-rights-c
Mitch McConnell On 30 Million Uninsured: ‘That Is Not The Issue’ #p2 #tcot
WASHINGTON -- Republicans have said repeatedly that the landmark health care reform law, upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court last week, must be repealed and replaced. But the GOP leader in the U.S. Senate gave a surprising answer on "Fox News Sunday" when asked how Republicans would provide health care coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans.
"That is not the issue," Sen. Mitch McConnell said. "The question is how to go step by step to improve the American health care system. It is already the finest health care system in the world."
"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace interrupted, "You don't think 30 million uninsured is an issue?"
"We're not going to turn the American health care system into a western European system," McConnell said. "That's exactly what is at the heart of Obamacare. They want to ... have the federal government take over all American health care. The federal government can't handle Medicare or Medicaid."
Wallace pressed McConnell, noting that the Affordable Care Act will prohibit insurance companies from not offering plans to individuals with pre-existing health conditions. "If you repeal Obamacare, how will you protect those people with pre-existing conditions?"
rest at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/01/mitch-mcconnell-uninsured-obamacare_n_1641033.html
Rep. Ryan Repeats Zombie Lie that ACA Cut Medicare Spending, And George Stephanopoulos Lets Him Get Away With It #p2 #tcot
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On This Week, George Stephanopoulos almost (not quite, but a lot closer to it than he usually does) holds Rep. Paul "I Play A Catholic When It's Politically Convenient" Ryan's feet to the fire over his evasions and lies. And how can you tell Paul Ryan is lying? His lips are moving:
ROMNEY: Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion. Obamacare cuts Medicare -- cuts Medicare by approximately $500 billion.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, several independent fact-checkers have taken a look at that claim, the $500 billion in Medicare cuts, and said that it's misleading. And in fact, by that accounting, your budget, your own budget, which Governor Romney has endorsed, would also have $500 billion in Medicare cuts.
RYAN: Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.
I mean, I've heard for years how much people don't like the idea that we're raiding Social Security to pay for other government programs. What Obamacare does for the first time in history is it raids Medicare to pay for Obamacare. In addition, it puts this new board of 15 people in charge of putting price controls on Medicare, which we think will end up rationing Medicare in ways that will deny care to seniors. So not only do we think this law is bad for Medicare, it's bad for health care, it's terrible for the economy, and it will move us closer toward a debt crisis.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressman, correct me if I'm wrong...
rest at http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/rep-ryan-repeats-zombie-lie-aca-cut-m
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