Around the World on a Wednesday

Hump Day Happenings

·         Former Iceland Prime Minister Geir Haarde is facing a possible 2 year prison sentence for negligence connected with the global financial crisis that included the complete crash of the Icelandic financial system.  A head of government facing negligence charges?  Oh my bring that kind of rule of law over here for the entire Bush Administration.

·         Marine Cpl. Alexander Degenhardt agreed to donate bone marrow to a stranger.  Two days later, he hit a $2.9Million slots jackpot in Vegas.  That is some serious My Name is Earl shit there.

·         Conservative Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions on food stamps: “No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps.  Do you think there are four times as many people who need food stamps today as 2001?”  The answer is simple.  The failure of trickledown economics and the great recession produced more eligible people and yes, Mr. Sessions, president Obama added $20/week for a family of four for a whopping new aid package of $287/month.  My God, how the GOP can demand more tax breaks for the 1% and bitch about government care for the millions ruined by the GOP enabled Casino del Wall Street.

·         Don’t always agree with David Brooks, but he hit this one on the head.  This year the GOP had “an excellent chance to defeat President Obama”, but the ideologues have ‘trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.”

·         Hey GOP Are you still opposed to education?  According to a survey of U.S. Manufacturers 600,000 job openings went unfilled in 2011 because employers couldn’t find candidates with sufficient skills in automation, computers, and other technology.

·         While Arizona debates whether to allow guns on the campus of its schools (bad idea), the New York Times reports that in New York City the suicide rate is about half of the national average and that suicides by firearms account for only 12% of total suicides versus the national average of 51% and 66% in the nation’s most suicide prone states.

·         Now that GM is in a much healthier position, the anti-rescue anti-Obama warriors are now saying that the government stepping in will create a bad precedent that will enable the government to step in at any time in the future.  Excuse  me Mr. Potato head but that ship sailed with TARP in 2008.  The other complaint is that there is no guarantee that GM won’t fail in the future and the American taxpayer is still on the hook for $Billions.  That’s true, there are no guarantees, but one thing that was certain was a million people would have been out of work in 2009 in the middle of a great recession if the government did nothing.

·         The same Republicans who are condemning Barack Obama for ‘allowing’ Iran to get this far in its uranium enrichment program were the same clowns pounding the war drum to invade Iraq and in the process took out the one guy, albeit a very bad guy, who was our buffer against Iran.  It wasn’t until President Obama came into office that serious effort was put into preventing the Iranian regime from reaching nuclear weapon capability.

·         100 years ago in Hoboken, New Jersey the Oreo was born.  Since then 452BILLION Oreos have been sold.

·         Donald Trump tweeted that President Obama added more debt to the US than the first 42 Presidents combined.  Notice he didn’t say 43 Presidents?  Yeah because that would have included Presidential debt champion George W. Bush.

Later folks!

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