- Congressman Gets Kicked Off House Floor by Republicans For Wearing Hoodie For Trayvon
Segment from the Rachel Maddow Show showing that when asked, the people who oppose health care reform actually WANT Obama's Health Care reforms ONLY when you don't mention "Health Care Reform" or "Obama Care". When it's explained to them- THEY WANT IT.
- Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) donned a hoodie and took to the House floor this morning to speak out against the murder of Travyon Martin, but was shouted down and removed from the floor by the Republican speaker pro tem for violating House rules prohibiting the wearing of hats.
- Did Rick Santorum really just come within a few micro-seconds of calling America's first ever black president a "nigger"?
- The horrific story of Anna Brown, a black, homeless, 29-year-old St. Louis woman and mother of two who after refusing to leave a hospital because her legs hurt so much was arrested for trespassing, handcuffed, dragged into a jail cell and left moaning on the floor, where she died of blood clots minutes later. Police thought she was on drugs. She wasn't. Can anyone possibly argue there is not underway in this country a gender, color and class war, though not the one the right wing envisions? There's a Change.org petition demanding access to health care, and video.
- One of Japan's crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and much less water to cool it than officials had estimated, according to an internal examination that renews doubts about the plant's stability.
- Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study.
- Despite reports this week that the Fukushima nuclear situation may be even worse than previously thought, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has given approval today for two combined licenses for two nuclear reactors in South Carolina, only the second time in the last three decades that new nuclear plants have been approved in the nation.
- The impact of human activity on the Earth is running out of control, and the amount of time in which action can be taken to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change is rapidly dwindling, a leading scientist from the Australian National University told a global scientific climate conference in London yesterday.
- The Obama administration must warn drug makers that the government may soon ban agricultural uses of some popular antibiotics that many scientists say encourage the proliferation of dangerous infections and imperil public health, a federal magistrate judge ruled on Thursday. The order, issued by Judge Theodore H. Katz of the Southern District of New York, effectively restarts a process that the Food and Drug Administration began 35 years ago, but never completed, intended to prevent penicillin and tetracycline, widely used antibiotics, from losing their effectiveness in humans because of their bulk use in animal feed to promote growth in chickens, pigs and cattle.
- Today the Food and Drug Administration has announced that it will not take steps to bar bisphenol-A, or BPA, a known toxic chemical, from canned food and liquid infant formula containers.
- With President Obama visiting Vermont and Maine today -- two states where gay marriage has been a major issue of late -- concerns about how stance on gay marriage may impact his re-election campaign continue to mount.Obama's 'evolving' stance on gay marriage could complicate his re-election campaign. President Obama has never supported gay marriage, but in 2010 he said he was "evolving" on the issue.
- Last year Republican Rep. Paul Ryan presented a budget plan that was, according to one analysis, full of "dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures." But Ryan's brand of budget austerity makes the media swoon–hence we saw coverage (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/12/11) of Ryan's "piercing blue eyes" that dubbed him "a PowerPoint fanatic with an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents."Ryan's budget was never going to be adopted, but its release was widely covered across the corporate media. He was given credit for presenting a plan to reduce government deficits, even though his plan didn't really do much of that.
At the same time, the Congressional Progressive Caucus released its People's Budget, which raised taxes on the wealthy, slashed military spending, enacted a public option in healthcare and a Wall Street speculation tax–and unlike Ryan's plan, actually balanced the budget. It got almost no media attention.
- Here’s the new American reality: about half of all kids will spend at least part of their childhood in a family headed by a single mother, and the typical single mother is white, has one kid, is separated or divorced, works and probably earns less than $25,000 a year.
Segment from the Rachel Maddow Show showing that when asked, the people who oppose health care reform actually WANT Obama's Health Care reforms ONLY when you don't mention "Health Care Reform" or "Obama Care". When it's explained to them- THEY WANT IT.
Sean
