Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Why No Nation Can Endure Half Fox News and Half Free: House GOP Believes Pell Grants Are Welfare : Mike the Mad Biologist – Once we were proud of how much we helped kids get into college. Now it’s just another bit of parasitism to cut. “I never thought aspiring college students would become the new ‘welfare queens.'”
- If You Ever Fall Into Thinking Democrats Are “Just As Bad” As The GOP, Think About The Environment And The Future Of Mankind: DownWithTyranny
- Conservatives Demand No Defense Cuts at All Costs – Who cares if the elderly are hungry, children are poorly educated, bridges are crumbling, earth and air and water are toxic, and farmland is blowing away into dust — we need more nuclear aircraft carriers and cruise missiles, dadgummit, so we can be the greatest nation on the globe!
- Batman logo in equation form – Rocks.
- Bill Harming Online Privacy Moving Through Congress – Because why wouldn’t we want the government to have carte blanche permission to know everything we’ve done on the Internet, gathered into databases that will, to a moral certainty, be prone both to data theft and hacking.
- From Pranks to Prison – It’s the next logical step from stupid-ass Zero Tolerance policies — stupid-ass and destructive imprisonment.
- Feds stonewall on cell phone tracking of Americans – Don’t you feel safer?
- The latest Goldman scandal – stockpiling raw materials – No, that’s exactly how the free (Darwinian) market is supposed to work — which is why a certain amount of government/social regulation of the marketplace is so important.
- U.S. National Debt Chart Shows Bush Created Much More Debt Than Obama – Does this (and similar charts) put all Afghanistan/Iraq costs into the Bush court because of his being responsible for those efforts (which have been continued under the Obama administration), or because under his administration those items were considered “off budget,” whereas Obama at least rolled them into his budget submissions? Regardless, between the Recession (and the largely though not exclusively GOP policies that allowed it) and the Bush tax cuts and “off budget” war effort, yeah, it’s largely a GOP responsibility. Which is why, of course, they’re interested in shifting the pain onto everyone else.
- Long time coming: Current insanity – “It’s been a long time coming, no doubt about it. You could say it started decades ago, with that famously loopy math: ‘Let’s balance the budget by cutting everyone’s taxes and spending more on the military! That’ll work!’?”
- Judge Finds Apple in Violation of HTC’s Newly Acquired Patents – It sure seem these days that these companies are spending more time in court than in the labs.
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AAAAGGGGHHHH, the article about Pell grants being “welfare” really struck a chord with me — a very dissonant chord. I spent the past few years educating myself in a new field, and took many undergraduate classes where there were Pell grant-supported students. Mind you, these were upper-division classes, so maybe the slackers had already been weeded out… but the Pell grant students worked at least as hard as the rest of us. Scratch a REALLY dedicated student, and you found either: a grad student making up deficiencies, or a Pell grant student.
Well, if you were one of the deserving rich, then the other deserving rich wouldn’t need to bankrupt themselves funding your little hobby. If you just went into retail, or fast food, or gardening, nobody’d need to provide you with a Pell “grant”. I mean, this is America, after all!