Drew from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo.
Can anything prepare us for Drew’s story?
Drew lost his job, then he lost his wife and daughter to a drunk driver. He is an educated man, but today he lives on leftover food he finds in dumpsters.
There’s nothing I can add to a story like this, except that homelessness can happen to anyone. Please don’t let Drew’s story stop here. Watch this video, talk about it, blog about it, email a link to everyone you know.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy’s funeral mass.
Beautiful, simple, and elegant liturgy.
If you’re watching on television, do NOT watch your local NBC affiliate. The commentators won’t be quiet. Watch MSNBC, where the commentators are silent, letting the moment speak for itself.
Glenn Beck is crazy.
Enjoy this video.
If you’re viewing this via one of our affiliate sites, make sure you click through to Turning Left.
Mike Huckabee is only the latest inglorious ultra-conservative to exploit the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, claiming that Kennedy would have been urged to die earlier under ObamaCare.
Win at all costs. Is that it, Mike? Just another hater waiting to dance on the Senators grave?
From Sam Stein at the Huffington Post:
Conservative media figures are blasting Democrats for trying to draw political gain from the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. But on Thursday, it was one of their own — former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — who went there.
The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, “The Huckabee Report,” on Thursday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.
“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”
As it happens, Huckabee made his remarks shortly after he derided Democrats for using Kennedy’s death to make the pitch that “Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,”
“That not only defies good taste,” said Huckabee, “it defies logic.”
Huckabee defies logic. And ethics. And good taste.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural Address
The Haves and Have-Mores of Bolingbrook have a luxury golf facility that is bleeding taxpayer dollars. Mayor Roger Claar thinks that’s just fine, thank you very much.
In the chilled interior of this 76,000-square-foot clubhouse, visitors who trod the plush carpets, admire the bottles of Dom Perignon displayed at the cherry-wood bar or dry their hands with monogrammed paper towels in the marble bathrooms may feel like they’ve stepped inside a posh Florida golf resort.
But this chalet-on-steroids is in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, part of the $36 million Bolingbrook Golf Club. Some residents call it the “Rog Mahal” — a reference to longtime Mayor Roger Claar, who championed the project, which also includes a village-owned “luxury” subdivision.
It’s a public amenity that some view as a sign of Bolingbrook’s success in transforming itself over the last three decades into a thriving business hub. But the golf course hasn’t made money since opening April 25, 2002, losing $1.3 million a year on average, and the luxury subdivision is at least $2 million in the hole, according to a Tribune review of village and Will County records.
And then there’s this:
The village has spent at least $9 million propping up the golf course — more than Bolingbrook took in last year in state income taxes (its second largest revenue source), developer contributions and building permits combined, according to financial records.
Well, good for them. Blame it on the Bush Recession, perhaps?
Claar defends the golf course:
Claar disputes the buzz among critics that the clubhouse is his personal retreat, saying he’s there about 10 times a year.
“It’s provided an amenity that thousands of people have enjoyed,” Claar said, listing the events hosted there. “Those things always had to go out of town before.”
I would like to know if Bolingbrook is getting any federal stimulus money at all. Any grants from the state or feds for anything? I hope they took a pass on any grants from the feds, state or county, since obviously they have money to throw away for a bottles of Dom Perignon.
What a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got on this one. I don’t see how anyone can defend such a careless waste of money.
Among his credential listed on the Village of Bolingbrook’s Web site, we find, “Republican Mayors and Elected Officials Vice-President and Executive Board Member.”
Is this your idea of fiscal responsibility, Bolingbrook? Is this sound, conservative Republican economics?
There is no such a thing. This is greed, pure and simple.
I enjoy Gregory Tajeda’s blog, Chicago Argus. And while I like Alexi Giannoulias personally, Tajeda has a point when he accuses the current Democratic pols vying for Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat a bunch of no-names.
Giannoulias is fresh on the political scene. And everyone else?
Am I losing my memory, or was there once a time when we political observers who are Illinois-oriented were talking about how our state’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010 could wind up being a fight between a Kennedy, a Jackson, and maybe even a Madigan?
So what happened?
IT SEEMS NOW like we’re going to get a scrap between a Giannoulias, a Hoffman and a Jackson. And by the latter, I mean Cheryle, not Jesse Jr.
And Tajeda is not very impressed with Republican David Hoffman either:
Inspector General for Chicago city government. In theory, that means he’s in charge of ferreting out corruption within city government, and there are those people who think that Hoffman was an annoyance to Mayor Richard M. Daley because of the way that his office pointed out that the leasing out of city parking meters to a private company became a public mess.
BOTTOM LINE AS far as most people are concerned – Hoffman has an incredible grasp of the obvious. Some might want to argue that corruption doesn’t appear to be on the decline due to Hoffman, so how much could he have succeeded?
Anyway, Hoffman is now unemployed. He quit his post on Wednesday so he could devote his full time to a campaign for Senate.
Look, I believe Tajeda raises some valid points. Democrats need to consider this race carefully. Playing pick-up basketball with Barack Obama does not alone qualify one to be a U.S. Senator.
I’d like to know more as well.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon signed legislation last week decriminalizing the personal possession of small quantities of cannabis and other controlled substances.
The legislation, passed by Congress in May, eliminates criminal penalties for the personal possession of up to five grams of marijuana. The possession of small amounts of other illicit substances, including heroin and cocaine, will also no longer be prosecutable.
Under the new law, anyone caught by law enforcement with small amounts of illicit drugs will be encouraged to seek treatment. Drug treatment will be mandatory for third-time offenders.
The new legislation authorizes state and local police to enforce drug trafficking laws. Previously, only federal police (about five percent of Mexico’s law enforcement personnel) had the authority to arrest individuals suspected of selling drugs.
State lawmakers have up to a year to implement the new law.
In 2006, Mexico’s Congress passed a virtually identical measure, only to have it vetoed by former President Vincente Fox. Fox’s veto came after political pressure from members of the US State Department, who alleged that enacting such a law would promote “drug tourism.”
At the Netroots Nation conference a few weeks ago in Pittsburgh, I interviewed members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Their arguments in favor of the legalization of all drugs are very compelling.
I’ll work on finally transcribing the interviews this weekend. We need to bring this to the forefront before another young person is dragged to prison and punished for a medical issue.
More on this to come soon.
Look. We have to make a decision. Do we approve of torture or not?
If we approve of torture, then, fine. We’ll have to accept the fact that our men and women will be tortured. And we must give up our right to complain or “officially protest” any torture on an American soldier.
So, which is it? Do we approve of torture, or not?
From Carol Marin at the Sun-Times:
The feds can’t — just yet — deport Michigan restaurateur Ibrahim Parlak to his native Turkey. But they are frighteningly closer.
And the irony screams out.
On Monday, the same day Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, announced he would appoint a special counsel to investigate whether torture was used by the CIA to extract confessions from foreign suspects, a U.S. appeals court at the behest of the U.S. government ruled that it didn’t have a problem sending Parlak back to the country where he was tortured — imprisoned for 17 months, shocked with electrodes, hung by his arms and sexually violated.
A Turkish Kurd, Parlak was granted political asylum in 1992. It was before our government got cozier with Turkey, before it re-classified some of the Kurdish separatist movement as “terrorist” and before the attacks of Sept. 11. With 9/11, Ibrahim Parlak’s horror began anew.
Suddenly he looked different to the newly created Department of Homeland Security and to the Justice Department’s Immigration courts. Instead of seeing a hard-working, tax-paying Chamber of Commerce member who ran Cafe Gulistan, a small Middle Eastern restaurant in the resort town of Harbert, Mich., the feds now saw an international menace.
So, which is it? Yes, or no? Torture yes, or torture no?
When I think about how over-scrupulous I’ve been at times during my life, I have to wonder about the apparent lack of scruples among some pols and certain others in government.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Scott Fawell turned on Gov. George Ryan “to save the love of his life,” not because it was the right thing to do.
Well, good for him. Losing any sleep over the six children who were killed in a fiery crash?
Not at all.
Consider:
Less than a year after his release from the U.S. prison system, Scott Fawell isn’t all that sorry.
Sure, he pleaded guilty and testified against his now-imprisoned ex-boss and mentor, former GOP Gov. George Ryan. But Fawell — Ryan’s onetime chief of staff and campaign manager — says he turned against Ryan to save the woman he loves.
Yes, he understands the public’s perception that the licenses-for-bribes scandal under Ryan led to the deaths of six children in a fiery highway crash. But “do I feel any responsibility?” he says. “No I really don’t.”
And what about all those political friends that Fawell carefully cataloged in lists that the feds seized and used to put Ryan and him away?
They’ve deserted him.
“I’ve been very disappointed in the people that are friends of mine,” Fawell said. “If it was a reverse situation and one of my friends of mine came back, I would have done anything I could to help. You know, that’s friendship. And friendship should go beyond prison.”
Fawell and his co-defendant and fiancée, Andrea Coutretsis, broke six years of silence Wednesday night on WTTW-Channel 11’s “Chicago Tonight.” In a 25-minute interview, they tackled subjects including the despair of leaving their families for prison to the plight of Ryan’s successor, recently indicted ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and Blagojevich’s co-defendants.
Kudos to Carol Marin for landing this interview, and for conducting it so eloquently.
You know what? Stick to your scruples. Keep your soul. Whether you believe in a Higher Power or not, you don’t want to rush in where angels fear to tread.
Ron Reagan interviewed his mom, Nancy Reagan, today on Air America Radio regarding the death of Senator Edward Kennedy. It was incredibly, incredibly moving. Ron’s show comes on every day at 5:00 p.m. in the Chicagoland area.
Asking his mother how her and her late husband’s friendship with Ted Kennedy started, Mrs. Reagan responded responded, “Nobody really knew it,” that their friendship was so close. “I think they couldn’t quite conceive of two people in two different parties, how could that become a friendship? Which it, of course, did.
“Yes,” her son Ron replied.
“I think it started when we first got to Washington and Teddy asked Dad, Daddy, if he could bring his mother to the Oval Office. And Daddy, of course, said, ‘Of course.’ Which he did.
“And then after that, he asked him to speak at the Kennedy Library, which he did. And from then on, they developed this friendship.”
“Both of them respected one another,” Mrs. Reagan continued. “It was a very good friendship. It’s what there should be more of today.You know, two different parties. Enough with all this other stuff.”
Ron commented that it would be unusual today, his father and Ted Kennedy, “polar opposites politically,” that a friendship like that could begin and endure for so long.
“But it shouldn’t be,” his mother replied. “It shouldn’t be thought of as unusual. That’s my point. It just shouldn’t. They were two men who respected each other — didn’t agree, politically — but that doesn’t make any difference. You can still respect one another. And they did.”
She continued, “Ted gave the best speech about Daddy that I have ever heard. I forgot what it was, but, oh, it was a good speech. So good.”
“I got to know him better over our association over stem cell [research], because we both worked very hard for that,” Mrs. Reagan went on. “There just was a great, great friendship and respect for one another.”
“I’ll miss him,” Mrs. Reagan said.
The interview is very moving, especially when the conversation turned to President Reagan’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. A subsequent phone call Mrs. Reagan received on her birthday is also very moving.
“It was a good, solid friendship,” Mrs. Reagan said, “We need more of them today.”
Ron asks his mother if perhaps there was an “air of sympatico” between his father and Senator Kennedy because of the attempt on President Reagan’s life, and Mrs. Reagan says she “never thought about it like that. How smart you are!” she says to her son.
That was quite nice.
Mrs. Reagan also expressed her hope that health care reform would pass.
Listen to the whole interview here:
I have to say, this was one of the most touching interviews I’ve ever heard in my life. I had to pull the car over because my eyes were watering up. Gave me a whole new perspective on Mrs. Reagan, and I appreciate that.
Very moving. Very stirring.
Also, please visit the Ron Reagan show on the Web, and listen to Air America Radio.