Crying Toddler - a haiku
Via Told or Known Comments (View)Lowered head to push
Her mommy, but mommy moved.
Thud! (the wall did not)
Balloon Juice » Paula Deen Makes KFC Look Like Slackers
Paula’s Food Network show is “Paula’s Home Cooking”, which makes the point that the shit people slap together at home can often be far worse than anything KFC, Burger King or McDonald’s sells.
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Losing our cherished freedoms
Via Squashed Comments (View)The Tea Party is livid about our purported “loss of freedom”. But … we haven’t lost any freedoms under Obama. (Except fake freedoms like the freedom to get a tan without paying a 10% tax.)
At least, most of us haven’t lost any freedoms. If you’re Hispanic and in Arizona, you’re likely to be stopped and interrogated by the police for looking insufficiently white. But that’s not Obama’s fault. And that doesn’t seem to bother the Tea Partiers.
Spotted by our Sarah Ball:
“This is Alabama. We speak English. Learn it.”
—Tim James, a Republican candidate for governor of Alabama. James’ campaignposted this ad on YouTube last week (with disabled comments, presumably to avoid any commentary in languages other than English), getting at the most important issues in his state, which has 11 percent unemployment and among the lowest educational attainment rates in the nation.
Sad thing is, he’ll get elected. Seriously though, will printing that test only in English save enough money to pay for education?
Actually, this numbskull skull doesn’t understand that it will cost them money. Here’s Steve Benen:
Tim James may or may not have thought to look into this before using it as the basis for a television ad, but Alabama administers the test in multiple languages in order to qualify for federal transportation funding. If a James administration insisted on dropping the current standards, it wouldn’t “save money” for Alabama; it would do the exact opposite. For that matter, courts have, more than once, rejected efforts to mandate English-only exams.
What’s more, as a substantive matter, the reason officials want the exam to be available in multiple languages in the first place is because they want drivers to get drivers licenses and demonstrate proficiency when it comes to operating a vehicle and understanding the rules.
Via tj.hanton.net (View)
here is a very happy elephant. i’d be this happy to be on Design Crush too!
I recognize him. That’s the elephant on the Jungle Cruise at Disney World.
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Fowl Math For A Chicken-Based Health Care Economy | TPMDC
Total U.S. health care costs in 2008: $2.3 trillion
US population: About 300 million
Average cost of health care per person: $7,681
Average weight of a chicken: 5.9 lbs
Market price per pound: 85 cents
Average spot price per chicken: $5.02
Average number of chickens per resident needed to cover health care costs: 1,530 chickens
Total number of chickens needed to cover United States health care costs: 459 billion chickens
Estimated worldwide chicken population: 16 billion chickens
Current worldwide chicken shortage to cover U.S. health care: 443 billion cluckersOf course, it should be noted that chickens are only one of many commodities, and are thus only one component of a barter economy — for example, Tennessee state Rep. Mike Bell (R) has referred to Mennonites paying for health care with vegetables. There are also the options of beef, pork, turkeys, sugar, metal ore, or even finished products like iPods or gasoline. What would really help here is if there were some kind of single, universally accepted commodity, which could be used as a medium of exchange for all the others…
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The measure, like the other anti-immigrant laws of recent years, is hypocritical. Arizona’s low-wage, low-quality economy is built around the inexpensive labor of illegal immigrants. Construction, tourism and landscaping companies have made huge profits on the backs of workers making less than citizens and lacking even the minimal protections and safeguards that Arizona provides. Why do you think you “get so much house for the money”? The remains of the state’s agriculture industry would die without illegals. Anglos from the toffs in north Scottsdale to working stiffs in Phoenix get housekeepers and yard care for a fraction of its real cost. As Phoenix, especially, became a narrower economy focused on house building, illegals became more important. The people in power sure as hell weren’t going to pay competitive wages for citizens, much less allow unions. In exchange for this exploitation, the illegals pay a disproportionate amount of their incomes in taxes because Arizona relies so heavily on regressive sales taxes. And, yes, they use hospital ERs — they work for companies that offer no benefits. These anti-immigrant laws are the state’s gratitude. This, along with the “sweeps” by the Badged Ego of Maricopa County. Of course if one really wanted to attack illegal immigration, one would go after the employers that hire them. Arizona has rarely done so. And no wonder. How many degrees of separation are there between the immigrants toiling to improve the riches for the local economic elite and Sen. Pearce and his gang? Or wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III? Don’t dig too deep or look too far.
– Rogue Columnist (via azspot) Via AZspot Comments (View)
