Still on the road, watchin' things run OFF the road...
i'm sitting at a coffee shop in duluth, minnesota, looking east over lake superior on a cold (hey, it's DULUTH!), gray, windy day... the trees are just beginning to leaf out and don't look any too happy about it either... it's the kind of day that defines the term "raw" when applied to weather...
"raw" pretty well sums up the current climate of the country too... biting chill, gray, stunted vitality, hope for the bright, nourishing sun buried under not-quite-winter jackets... somewhere, people are cheerful - but not in mudville...
tons of things continue to evolve and some seem to be careening right off the road...
(more)
i suppose we could have seen THIS one coming but, once again, if it doesn't draw ratings or please the administration, it's just not likely we're gonna hear about emerging news until it blows up all over the front page... nuance...? we don't need no stinkin' nuance...
Four protesters were killed and more than 60 injured Wednesday in the eastern city of Jalalabad as the police and troops struggled to contain the worst anti-American demonstrations in Afghanistan in the more than three years since the fall of the Taliban. At least a dozen buildings in Jalalabad were ransacked and burned during the anti-United States protest. Students in Jalalabad protested a reported desecration of a Koran. Government officials said the violence appeared to have been planned and that religious hard-liners and armed men had usurped what had started as a student protest.
afghanistan...? oh, yeah... i remember... don't we still have some troops there...?
The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees.
accountability...? how about shame...? how about any kind of acknowledgement...? how about hypocrisy...? how about disgust...? how about some trace of humanity...? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US...?
[A] recent report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that the employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 - just 36.3 percent - was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking teenage employment in 1948. [...] "Younger workers," said Andrew Sum, the center's director, "have just been crushed."
yeah, and here's the dirty little hunk of reality that everyone of us in the country oughta be gagging on... the same ugly hairball that united airlines is using on its employees as i type this...
Workers have been so cowed by an environment in which they are so obviously dispensable that they have been afraid to ask for the raises they deserve, or for their share of the money derived from the remarkable increases in worker productivity over the past few years. And from one coast to the other, workers have swallowed draconian cuts in benefits with scarcely a whimper. [...] Some segments of the population have been all but completely frozen out. In Chicago, only one of every 10 black teenagers found employment in 2004. In Illinois, fewer than one in every three teenage high school dropouts are working.
but bushco will continue to do the happy dance cuz, after all, the ones who truly deserve to do well are prospering quite nicely, thank you...
[W]ealth and power in the United States has become ever more dangerously concentrated, leaving an entire generation of essentially powerless workers largely at the mercy of employers. A remark by Louis Brandeis comes to mind: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both." Submit To Propeller
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"raw" pretty well sums up the current climate of the country too... biting chill, gray, stunted vitality, hope for the bright, nourishing sun buried under not-quite-winter jackets... somewhere, people are cheerful - but not in mudville...
tons of things continue to evolve and some seem to be careening right off the road...
(more)
i suppose we could have seen THIS one coming but, once again, if it doesn't draw ratings or please the administration, it's just not likely we're gonna hear about emerging news until it blows up all over the front page... nuance...? we don't need no stinkin' nuance...
Four protesters were killed and more than 60 injured Wednesday in the eastern city of Jalalabad as the police and troops struggled to contain the worst anti-American demonstrations in Afghanistan in the more than three years since the fall of the Taliban. At least a dozen buildings in Jalalabad were ransacked and burned during the anti-United States protest. Students in Jalalabad protested a reported desecration of a Koran. Government officials said the violence appeared to have been planned and that religious hard-liners and armed men had usurped what had started as a student protest.
afghanistan...? oh, yeah... i remember... don't we still have some troops there...?
The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees.
accountability...? how about shame...? how about any kind of acknowledgement...? how about hypocrisy...? how about disgust...? how about some trace of humanity...? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US...?
[A] recent report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that the employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 - just 36.3 percent - was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking teenage employment in 1948. [...] "Younger workers," said Andrew Sum, the center's director, "have just been crushed."
yeah, and here's the dirty little hunk of reality that everyone of us in the country oughta be gagging on... the same ugly hairball that united airlines is using on its employees as i type this...
Workers have been so cowed by an environment in which they are so obviously dispensable that they have been afraid to ask for the raises they deserve, or for their share of the money derived from the remarkable increases in worker productivity over the past few years. And from one coast to the other, workers have swallowed draconian cuts in benefits with scarcely a whimper. [...] Some segments of the population have been all but completely frozen out. In Chicago, only one of every 10 black teenagers found employment in 2004. In Illinois, fewer than one in every three teenage high school dropouts are working.
but bushco will continue to do the happy dance cuz, after all, the ones who truly deserve to do well are prospering quite nicely, thank you...
[W]ealth and power in the United States has become ever more dangerously concentrated, leaving an entire generation of essentially powerless workers largely at the mercy of employers. A remark by Louis Brandeis comes to mind: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both." Submit To Propeller
Tweet
posted by profmarcus at
5/12/2005
