Amanda Marcotte on why cats are better than Ron Paul (or any Republican candidate really):
Cats get delusional ideas all the time, but what’s nice is that their ambitions are small. Instead of trying to destroy the Fed, they climb trees they can’t get out of. Or, instead of having an irrational fear of black people, they have an irrational fear of vacuum cleaners. Given the choice to vote for Paul or for cats, you should take cats every time.
Thin skinned, thick as shit police. From the description of the video:
Here’s the scene:
We were enjoying the nice spring weather from our balcony. A friend was visiting on his bike, and he rode up on the sidewalk from the street to our front door. In NYC this is illegal. You are supposed to stop in the street, get off the bike and walk it on the sidewalk. Although he was merely coming from the street up to our front door, those few second were illegal. NYPD rolls up, and I begin to film as they are issuing him a summons to appear in court.Meanwhile our neighbor walks by while this scene is unfolding. My neighbor and my friend on the bike exchange some banter. No one is offended. We all laughed. He keeps walking.
From there everything escalates… Seems completely unnecessary to me…
At the end of the day, my neighbor was charged with harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Welcome to an afternoon with the NYPD
There’s the reason why there’s never a cop when you need one. Dude jokes to his friend, didn’t say anything to the police and officer McRacist decides to make a case out of it — in the end three police cars and about a dozen officers are involved. Meanwhile one of the local neighbourhood drug dealers (judging from the commentary from the guys with the video) walks by…
That’s one reason I don’t want to visit the US anytime soon, because I’m not sure I could’ve stayed as calm as this guy did had this happened to me. I’ve been angry and done stupid things before, but nothing that could’ve gotten me tasered and I’m not in a hurry to try that.
Just some of the people who committed suicide after their (disability) benefits were stopped:
Richard Sanderson, 44, an unemployed helicopter pilot of Southfields in London, who stabbed himself twice in the heart in May. He had been informed that his family faced a £30 a week cut in housing benefit and he feared this would leave his family homeless
Paul Willcoxson, 33, of Corby, Northants, was according to the suicide note he left behind, worried about benefit cuts when he hung himself in April.
[…]
Elaine Christian, 57, of Hull, was worried, according to reports of an inquest in July, about a meeting to assess her disability benefits. She was found drowned in a drain with ten self-inflicted cuts to her wrist and she had taken painkillers.
Now imagine you’re on long term disability benefits, unable to work or even find an employer willing to take you on, knowing that the “reforms” will mean you will lose what little money and assistance is getting you by at the moment. Sign the petition against this “reform” that will end up killing more people.
Today public sector workers in the UK are on strike. According to a BBC poll,
the majority of the British public supports them:
An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.
[…]
Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.
Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…
Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.