I wonder if all of those old people who voted for tea party candidates because of evil "Obamacare" will take advantage of the following benefits that take effect as of today:
Seniors who've been stuck in prescription-drug "doughnut hole," will, for example, receive a 50% discount on the price of brand-name prescription drugs starting today. On a related note, seniors will also be eligible, starting today, for free "preventive services" screenings, including cancer tests like mammograms, and annual check-ups.
They want their country back. And they want their government-run Medicare benefits, too. And they want government to keep its hands off all of it. Including the new benefits.
Yep. The Greatest Generation.
The short form: African American business owner. Low blood sugar. Pulled over by police for weaving. Brutality ensues.
I realize police officers are in a difficult position, and decisions are often based upon snap intuition -- decisions that could mean life or death. But at the same time, too many officers are out on a power trip with way too much to prove and way too much anger motivating them.
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Up in the northern states, the acid test of local government is getting the streets plowed. You can ask Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic, who lost his re-election bid because the city government failed that job. If there was a Handbook of How to Be a Mayor of a Northern City, the very first maxim in the handbook would be this: Get the freaking streets plowed after a snowstorm.
Of course, ol' Mayor Mike doesn't give a flying f**k about any of that. He had the rules changed to negate term limits, ignoring the fact that a referendum adopting term limits had been twice approved by the voters. See, Mikey-boy is a billionaire and the rules are different for him. In his mind, he is the Lord of the City, he's the boss, not the voters, and elections are to be bought by comparatively massive amounts of campaign cash.
So Mikey made certain that his street was plowed, the streets of midtown Manhattan (at least below 110th street) and screw all of those plebes in the other boroughs. Nobody in his inner circle would live there, anyway, so what's it matter to him if the streets of Brooklyn or Queens aren't plowed for four days?
If you were to look in a pictorial dictionary for the entry of "political arrogance", you'd find Mike Bloomberg's picture.
Or, maybe, it's all about the Republicans' crusade to dismantle government at every level.
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On Morning Joe Thursday morning, NBC anchor Brian Williams stopped by to discuss the different stories that the media covered during 2010 and he had the temerity to blame the media's lack of coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster once the gusher was capped in the Gulf on the public losing interest in the topic.
WILLIAMS: And in between for those of us that have a love affair the state of Louisiana, with the southern portion of the coastline in the United States, the one story I think that's been forgotten, because it's cognitive dissonance looking at that live camera, of that spewing oil. We as Americans certainly like to pick ourselves up and recover and move on. And you can go down there to Venice Louisiana and not see too much in the way of pick up and clean up crews.
I'm happy to read that the Chevy Volt is being made of 100,000 pounds of plastic body parts that are a product of 100 miles of oil soaked boom. That's what happened to all that stuff. They transported it and they're churning it up and melting it down and making plastic body parts for the Chevy Volt. […]
So something good came out of this awful year. But I don't think, I think we've all moved on and forgot what it was like to wake up on this broadcast and others every morning… let's go to the live picture and just the helplessness that we watched.
So that's what I'm going to remember this year for because that area already meant so much to me and I might add a person here at this table, the only one who represented it in Congress.
Yeah, it's a good thing all that oil just magically disappeared now that there's no more ambulance for the media to chase in the form of that gusher of oil. Good grief. Somehow I doubt anyone who's still living with the oil on their shores and the dispersants or anyone that wonders if seafood from the Gulf will ever be safe to eat again feels the same way. Hey Brian, there's still a story to cover if you and your cohorts would get off your butts and go down there and do some follow up. The public didn't lose interest in the story. The media just refuses to cover it now that it will actually take some investigative journalism to do so and bucking the establishment they love to suck up to.
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"In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser told reporters in the flooded city of Bundaberg on Saturday.
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2010 closes with even more killer climate disasters.
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Juarez sets a record body count in the brutal third year of a turf battle between drug cartels "The embattled border city of Ciudad Juarez had its bloodiest year ever with 3,111 people killed in drug violence, an official said Saturday. ... The city across from El Paso, Texas, has seen its homicide rate soar to one of the highest in the world since vicious turf battles broke out between gangs representing the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels in 2008. ... That year, 1,587 people were killed in drug violence, and the toll increased to 2,643 in 2009. ... Ciudad Juarez's bloodiest month last year was October, when 359 people were killed, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for prosecutors in Chihuahua state, where the city is located."
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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) has received heavy criticism from residents and lawmakers for leaving the state, along with the Lt. Governor, during the fifth-largest blizzard in New Jersey's history. Yesterday, Christie defended his vacation as "a great five days."
"I would have been doing the same thing here as I would have been there," Christie said. "I would have been in a room someplace. I would not have been out, like, driving a plow." The governor also dismissed a question about trapped residents and attacked some New Jersey mayors:
When asked about the hundreds of people trapped in their homes for days, Christie said unless they lived on state roads, it's not something his administration would have been able to change.
"If someone is snowed into their house, that's not our responsibility," Christie said.
When asked about mayors who said they were forced to divert their resources to unplowed state roads instead of clearing local roads Christie said, "I know who these mayors are and they should buck up and take responsibility for the fact that they didn't do their job."
Some residents did not appreciate Christie's vacation, however. "I think this was his first priority. I mean, I'm all for everybody going away and having a vacation. He's entitled to that, just like any of us, but…this storm really debilitated the whole state," one man told CBS New York.
Today, 95 percent of the roads in New Jersey are clear. Over 550 trapped vehicles had to be removed from roads, and Christie is requesting funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help pay for what he says is a state of disaster in 13 counties.
