How do they do it? Blazing the trail for the most extreme budget cuts circa ever, House Republicans also comprise the proverbial caboose of those who have latched on to the crazy notion that gay people should be permitted to tie the knot like millions of other miserable heterosexual couples. Being two places at once isn’t only difficult, it’s also physically impossible! So which end is just a veneer?
Alas, there is money to be made off incarcerating individuals for nonviolent crimes.
The Article: Paying the Costs of Iraq, for Decades to Come by James Fallows in The Atlantic.
The Text: A little over 10 years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely “self-financing” via Iraq’s oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war’s total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.
As it turns out, Lawrence Lindsey’s estimate was indeed off — by a factor of 10 or more, on the low side. A new research paper by Linda Bilmes, of the Kennedy School at Harvard, begins this way:
The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history — totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion.
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A couple weeks outside of Exxon’s latest private disaster being felt most by the public, Exxon is still fighting documentation of its oil spill and the journalists who are, well, doing their jobs by trying to cover it.
Despite the company’s concerted efforts, though, more and more images have emerged. The same cannot be said about the oil-free states of many natural habitats and homes. If Exxon tried to solve the problem as adamantly as they tried to conceal it, all of the oil would be clear by now. Three cheers for private efficiency.
The Article: NYPD officers testify stop-and-frisk policy driven by quota system and race by Ryan Devereaux in The Guardian.
The Text: The New York police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program is being driven by a high-pressure quota system imposed upon lower-ranking officers by their supervisors, two NYPD officers testified in court this week.
The claims were made as part of a landmark class action lawsuit that began Monday. The suit seeks to prove that the nation’s largest police department has demonstrated a widespread and systemic pattern of unconstitutional stops that disproportionately target minorities.
