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#although he looks very small in this portrait i think. small tired stressed kind man
patriotsnet · 3 years
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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected
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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected
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Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term
A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo
When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.
Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.
But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”
Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”
In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner
And Then There Were Three
The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.
How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.
Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era
Poop Feminism
For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!
But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.
Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?
The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.
The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy
The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted
“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”
Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile
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What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?
Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.
Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.
MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.
Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”
MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.
JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?
MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.
JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?
Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later
On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings
In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.
Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident
“I Know I Let Everybody Down”
“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.
We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.
Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy
Plan B
“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.
This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’
Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry
The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out
After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.
Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.
It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.
Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions
“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”
“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.
A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi
A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways
“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.
When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’
Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki
The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank
MJ=JC?
Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.
Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.
LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.
NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.
LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.
Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.
LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt
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A Rare Moment of Unity
“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.
That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.
I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”
Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet
• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.
• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.
• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.
• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.
• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.
Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months
What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.
They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.
The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.
In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs
Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.
Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader
From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day
On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.
The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.
In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit
They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.
Twenty-two million new jobs were added.
Unemployment dropped below 4%.
The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.
The budget deficit was eliminated.
There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.
Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist
The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession
You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.
Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.
In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity
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Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:
The budget surplus immediately disappeared.
The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.
Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.
The poverty rate began climbing again.
We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.
In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.
Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World
Earthlings Gain a New Appendage
What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.
Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.
This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.
Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.
Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism
In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.
Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.
An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.
Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.
In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.
Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy
Explaining Kale
ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.
ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.
AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.
AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.
AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.
AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?
AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.
AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.
AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.
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comfort-blankets · 7 years
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*Scenario*
@bootyshakerkegrimm
Could you do scenario with Junkrat and Zenyatta who notice that their s/o is in a lot of pain, yet keeps on working even though it's starting to effect their work?
Aah I love Zenyatta! This is my first time writing for him so it may suck a little bit, but hopefully you enjoy it deary <33
I’m thinking about changing my icon to Zenyatta, maybe even one with him wearing a flower crown, but I can’t seem to find the perfect picture anywhere.
Anyways, tell me if it isn’t long enough or if I didn’t quite portray them correctly, because I’m all ears to constructive criticism!
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Zenyatta:
It always begins with the gentle touch on your shoulder. He has no perception of how it is to feel, but he knows that the tissue there may not be agreeing with you. Here you are, bent over this desk with your terrible posture you always pretend you don’t have, pen scribbling away on your latest project. Work is hard, they’re being too rough on you. At this point even Satya asks if you have received enough sleep to be well enough for a bigger day tomorrow, Jack insists that you go eat dinner with the rest of the team.
But paperwork needs to be done, and the alerting thought of knowing it isn’t blares in your brain until it is completed.
This includes leaving Zenyatta to feel isolated from you.
At first he thought it was just a small portion of time you’d be busy, reminding you to drink plenty of water and coming in often to ask if you want a break. This work that plagues you destroys your mind, and when he sees it his concern heightens greatly.
Although it is hard to break you from these papers, his persistence would soon accomplish something. It would have to, or else he just wouldn’t stop.
So when your eyes tear from a world of specifically particular events and how to logically solve them, you see that the beautiful sunset has left you, a portrait made of twinkling lights has settled above, and the one you care for has a very worried aura about him.
“You have not rested like I’d recommended earlier?”
Zenyatta’s voice is as calming as it always has been, already making your muscles relax and ache for sleep. You open your mouth to tell him that you have taken a few breathers, but quickly close it when you discover that you cannot lie to him. Your body has rested none today, it’s been working day and night, morning and evening.
You did not even bat an eyelash at the emphasized knowledge of what not drinking or eating could do. Not even a drop of the liquid that kept you alive was consumed, and in hurting yourself you hurt your loved one as well.
The worst part was that even if you did lie, he would know. “I have to finish this.” It was the last set of logical questioning when even you finally realized your brain could work no longer.
“Perhaps we should speak to your advisors?”
When Zenyatta offered to talk with someone, this was when things were growing a bit too serious for him to handle. It was unknown how a monotone, mechanical voice could sound so caring and worrisome, though perhaps it came with knowing him for such a long time. The hand on your shoulder took an unusual action from the past encounters with no longer keeping the regular stillness it held, intricate and well manufactured metal fingers tugging on your shirt.
Tekhartha Zenyatta could become impatient sometimes, but his tended to come out more with sadness than anger. You’ve only seen him the slightest bit peeved a handful of times, and amazingly he still manages to calm himself.
His blue eyes that were created to observe and calculate still shine even in your silence, but it’s easy to tell that it’s unnerving him.
“Please.”
You have never heard that tone before, and it makes a bit of fear spike up randomly from the depths of your mind.
His speech is stuck sounding calm and almost inspirational at all points in time, but the glitches in his voice box are not something of a problem with his gear.
This is his way of growing emotional. To cry.
Your back screams at you when you rise from the chair slowly, and despite the fact that Zenyatta has no tears to physically shed he hides his face with the other hand, looking down.
His hand has yet to stop clinging to your shirt.
As the glitches in his tone begin to come out with small whirring noises, he has reached his end emotionally. His shoulder gear shivers, knees looking unstable to keep him standing. You have been working much too hard, you have been hurting him while harming yourself. You have unlocked a weakness that you never want to find the key to again. So with this new found knowledge that even an omnic such as he could cry, you pull him to rest his face in your shoulder.
“Okay.”
And while you lay in bed that night, a warm mechanical body curled around the back of your own for the first time in a few weeks, you decide it feels nice to have a full stomach again.
Little engines working for things you could never understand whirr behind you. Your name is whispered with a dash of reverence.
“Hm?” Your tired body responds in the least dedicated way possible.
“Promise me you will not abuse the needs of your body again. I care for you deeply.”
A hand rests on your hip at this remark out of pure concern, nothing more.
Shifting around a bit, the covers over you make a soft shuffling noise as you turn around. Kissing was never a topic you really ever got on about, but Zenyatta could always see the importance of it to humans. So of course when your soft lips that he could only imagine being able to fully feel touch the metal plate of his forehead, a small puff of steam comes from his shoulders, causing you to laugh and have to wave the sheets in order to get the heavy oxygen away from your lungs.
“I promise.”
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Junkrat:
You’ve been promising Junkrat something, and you feel that you may not be able to keep doing this particular activity anymore.
You work incredibly hard, almost harder than Winston does whenever he finds something interesting that he wants to study for the time being.
For the time being.
This is when you start to have differences in capacity of working.
Of course, you have no choice when it comes to doing these loads of paperwork in a short time frame, because your advisors have told you plentiful times otherwise whenever you ask them to give you a break.
Junkrat is not helping.
At least his buddy Mako (Are they buddies? Not even you knew at this point, though the giant man seemed to have no issue with you) was trying to distract the messy man from getting his ashy fingerprints all over your papers. Jamison isn’t stupid though, and never will be. He can only take so much with being away from you, and it kind of concerns him how long you sit in one place. His worry is always exposed in very different ways than the usual pep talk from others, trying to get your attention to make you focus on something else or joke around until you laugh. What frustrates him is the fact that you always end up telling him to go away politely at some point, explaining that your boss will be upset if you don’t get some ungodly amount of papers on his desk by tomorrow.
It’s been 2 weeks since you did your little reading sessions with him, since he seemed to love it whenever you spoke of mythical beasts or actions in the making of the mind before bed. He loved the sound of turning pages, never finding himself into reading books until he discovered that he could make you laugh from giving all of the characters funny voices. Sure, his grammar wasn’t that great and sometimes you needed to tell him what a word was several times in a row, but at least he was trying.
Jamison especially missed falling asleep to the smooth/gravelly sound of your voice, something to chase away his nightmares about where he was years ago, his missing limbs and phantom pains.
A book was laid on your desk by ragged and skinny fingers.
You can’t even be bothered to read the title, boring words from other papers ruining the thought of reading anymore than you had to already. The cover seemed rather magical, waves of sparkles and purple across a midnight sky, something you may see a preteen girl reading. You remember a long time ago of Jamison making you promise not to make fun of him or ever tell anybody about his guilty pleasure of lighthearted books. Perhaps the simple plots and happy endings made him forget about the real world.
This time, there are no words or funny antics shared between the two of you, and it’s one of those rare instances that Jamison looks strangely melancholy.
“Jamie?”
His face tightens into a sort of childlike pout, but those dark eyes keep looking downwards. He doesn’t do it often, but it seems that he’s scrubbed himself clean to avoid your scolding in the morning of the white sheets being ruined again. Hell, he’s even taken the time to dress himself in proper sleepwear.
“Stop that.” 
It’s blunt and direct, much different from the way he clowns around the room, pulling boring books off your shelf and threatening to replace them all with little bang snaps one day. Both of you are stressed, and although for different reasons, Jamison is the first one who wants it to stop.
“Stop hurting yourself.”
When you finally get onto the bed, the tall explosive man that has been labeled as one of the most dangerous criminals in the world lays his upper body in your lap. Despite being a person of jagged body shapes, he looks a lot more soft like this, curled up like a child.
Your tired hands open the book he recommended to the first page, reading much slower than usual from the eyestrain earlier today of boring black letters against pale white paper. There’s something calming about reading a regular book rather than a strict syllabus on what you’ll be expected to do in your next project. Nothing to be memorized or to be taken too importantly, to write in your little agenda of what you’ll be doing on what day of the week on what week of the month. Just a smooth sailing story of a young girl riding a boat in her dreams, on a mission to find her lost stuffed tiger that she loved so dearly. You get so invested in the simplicity of it that you reach the end of the chapter book, the magical undertone leaving to form a heartwarming denouement when it turns out that the toy was under her bed the entire time.
When the book finally closes, you see that the man has fallen asleep on your stomach, a bit of drool threatening to drip from his ajar lips. Peaceful, something you wouldn’t usually see from a man who bombs his enemies for a living. For a moment you wonder how much of the reading he’s been asleep for, and another for if he’ll beg you to read it over tomorrow because ‘it ain’t the same unless it’s your voice’.
You find that you don’t really mind the thought of doing so.
Perhaps you should take a break.
Please be sure to take care of yourselves, because there’s always someone out there who cares for you <3
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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected
New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/
Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected
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Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term
A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo
When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.
Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.
But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”
Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”
In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner
And Then There Were Three
The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.
How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.
Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era
Poop Feminism
For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!
But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.
Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?
The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.
The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy
The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted
“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”
Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile
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What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?
Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.
Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.
MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.
Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”
MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.
JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?
MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.
JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?
Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later
On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings
In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.
Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident
“I Know I Let Everybody Down”
“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.
We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.
Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy
Plan B
“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.
This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’
Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry
The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out
After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.
Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.
It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.
Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions
“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”
“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.
A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi
A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways
“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.
When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’
Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki
The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank
MJ=JC?
Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.
Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.
LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.
NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.
LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.
Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.
LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt
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A Rare Moment of Unity
“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.
That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.
I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”
Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet
• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.
• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.
• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.
• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.
• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.
Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months
What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.
They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.
The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.
In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs
Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.
Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader
From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day
On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.
The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.
In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit
They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.
Twenty-two million new jobs were added.
Unemployment dropped below 4%.
The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.
The budget deficit was eliminated.
There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.
Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist
The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession
You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.
Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.
In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity
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Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:
The budget surplus immediately disappeared.
The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.
Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.
The poverty rate began climbing again.
We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.
In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.
Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World
Earthlings Gain a New Appendage
What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.
Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.
This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.
Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.
Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism
In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.
Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.
An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.
Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.
In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.
Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy
Explaining Kale
ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.
ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.
AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.
AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.
AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.
AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?
AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.
AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.
AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.
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