Ding! San Diego Chalker Acquitted and Idiot Prosecutor Condemned by Mayor!

SAN DIEGO - A 40-year-old man was acquitted Monday of 13 misdemeanor vandalism charges that stemmed from protest messages written in chalk in front of three Bank of America branches in San Diego.

Jeffrey David Olson's attorney argued during the trial -- which garnered national attention -- that his client was engaging in a legal protest and was not maliciously defacing of property.

Olson could have faced up to 13 years behind bars if convicted of all counts. Jurors began deliberating Friday.

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The prosecution of Olson brought condemnation of the City Attorney's Office from Mayor Bob Filner, who called it a waste of time.


wow, San Diego!
http://www.10news.com/news/verdict-in-san-diego-chalk-vandalism-case-070113

Soledad O’Brien & Other CNN Alums Join Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera America Confirms Soledad O’Brien Deal

By LISA DE MORAES, TV Columnist | Monday July 1, 2013 @ 6:00am PDT

Al Jazeera America confirmed this morning it had signed a deal with former CNN star Soledad O’Brien to contribute to the network as “special correspondent.” O’Brien’s production company, Starfish Media Group will produce hourlong documentary specials for the cable network. “I look forward to beginning a relationship with Al Jazeera America, which has made a commitment to producing quality programming and pursuing underreported stories,” O’Brien said in the announcement, confirming speculation that started last week. As a correspondent, O’Brien will contribute short-form segments to the primetime current affairs mag America Tonight on the new network, which is funded by the government of Qatar.

O’Brien stepped down from CNN in March when network chief Jeff Zucker scrubbed her program Starting Point; he gave the time slot to Chris Cuomo’s New Day. At the time she left CNN, she formed Starfish Media, which, in addition to the production deal with Al Jazeera America, now also has a production deal with CNN, and development deals at HBO and National Geographic Channel.

America Tonight’s senior exec producer Kim Bondy is another CNN alum. In this morning’s announcement, Bondy said she’d worked with O’Brien since 1997, “so I know she cares deeply about covering the human side of a story based solely on the facts,” Bondy said, adding that the newsmag “will go beyond statistics and headlines to provide an in-depth, unbiased look at the events of the day and how they affect our viewers.” Al Jazeera Media Network exec director of international operations, Ehab Al Shihabi used similar language in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, saying the new network would be unbiased and feature less political grandstanding and celebrity coverage than existing cable news network. Al Jazeera America has been lining up relationships witeh names known to U.S. news viewers in an effort to quell what Al Shihabi, in that LAT interview, called “a bucket of resistance” to the channel. In addition to O’Brien, the list includes CNN’s Ali Velshi and NBC’s Mike Viqueira.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/07/al-jazeera-america-confirms-soledad-obrien-hire/

Fox News host on immigration reform: ‘Baloney,’ just focus on white people

"Look, I’ve read all kinds of analysis of this… I am absolteuly convinced that this troupe that you’re hearing, that says if the Republicans don’t go for immigration reform much as the Senate has done, they’re never gonna win another presidential election,” Hume said. “Oh, baloney.”

“If you look at the statistics, you’ll find that there was one significant bloc of voters that turned out in smaller numbers this time in a major, major way, way below expectations, below even their ’08 turnout, and that was white voters,” he added. “Now, that doesn’t mean if they turned out Romney would have gotten them all. But it shows you that this Hispanic vote — which I think now is about 8.5 percent of the U.S. electorate or something like that — is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote, which is above 70 percent.”


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For the record, Hume sigificantly understated the eligible Latino vote, pegged by the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF) at 10.8 percent of the eligible electorate in 2012, having grown by more than 1 percent every two years since 1996. And while the growth rate for eligible Hispanic voters slowed in 2012, The Pew Hispanic Center noted that it’s because the community’s overall growth actually outpaced it, even though more Latinos registered to cast U.S. ballots last year than any year to come before it.

Those numbers are largely due to the growth in the Hispanic community in the last decade, which was up 43 percent on the 2010 census, whereas the white population grew by just 1 percent over the same period. The Obama campaign is widely credited with capturing an overwhelming majority of those newly-eligible voters and hurtling to victory on the back of a “rainbow coalition” that married Latinos to issues important to women, African Americans, LGBT people and working families.

Ten Egyptian ministers submit resignation after mass protests

Source: AlArabiya

Al Arabiya EnglishVerified account
?@AlArabiya_Eng
Ten ministers resign from the Egyptian government: Al Arabiya http://ara.tv/jqdsu via @AlArabiya_Eng
https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_Eng/status/351728985811587072

Ten Egyptian ministers have submitted their resignation after huge protests against Islamist President Mohammed Mursi, Al Arabiya correspondent reported Monday.

Earlier, Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil has rejected the resignation request of five ministers, a senior government official told AFP.

Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou, Minister of State for Environmental Affairs Khaled Abdel-Aal, Communication and Information Technology Minister Atef Helmi, Minister of State for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Hatem Bagato, and Water Minister Abdel Qawy Khalifa handed their resignation letters at the same time to Qandil, the official said.

Zazou had already attempted resignation last month after Mursi appointed the controversial Adel al-Khayat as governor of Luxor.

Read more: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/07/01/Four-Egyptian-ministers-resign-from-Mursi-s-cabinet-after-protests.html

Hilarious!

Is This A Joke?
Is someone at the New York Times getting pwned or is this for real?

Yet another reminder of how hard we work to ensure poor people stay poor.

Yet another reminder of how hard we work to ensure poor people stay poor.

Video: Jim DeMint Says Women Want Mandatory Vaginal Probes --- Yes, he really did say it

Video: Jim DeMint Says Women Want Mandatory Vaginal Probes
Yes, he really did say it

Not only do Jim DeMint and Ralph Reed say they’re in favor of forcing women who request abortions to have ultrasound probes, they say women want this.

It’s an amazingly revealing moment.

DeMint: She’s forgetting about the thousands of women who want an informed choice, who want the opportunity to get a free ultrasound, which they can get not from Planned Parenthood, but from a lot of these pregnancy centers.

War On the Unemployed - By PAUL KRUGMAN

War On the Unemployed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 30, 2013 419 Comments


Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.

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So what’s going on here? Is it just cruelty? Well, the G.O.P., which believes that 47 percent of Americans are “takers” mooching off the job creators, which in many states is denying health care to the poor simply to spite President Obama, isn’t exactly overflowing with compassion. But the war on the unemployed isn’t motivated solely by cruelty; rather, it’s a case of meanspiritedness converging with bad economic analysis.

In general, modern conservatives believe that our national character is being sapped by social programs that, in the memorable words of Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, “turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” More specifically, they believe that unemployment insurance encourages jobless workers to stay unemployed, rather than taking available jobs.

Is there anything to this belief? The average unemployment benefit in North Carolina is $299 a week, pretax; some hammock. So anyone who imagines that unemployed workers are deliberately choosing to live a life of leisure has no idea what the experience of unemployment, and especially long-term unemployment, is really like. Still, there is some evidence that unemployment benefits make workers a bit more choosy in their job search. When the economy is booming, this extra choosiness may raise the “non-accelerating-inflation” unemployment rate — the unemployment rate at which inflation starts to rise, inducing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and choke off economic expansion.

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the rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/opinion/krugman-the-war-on-the-unemployed.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=0

If You’re Poor and You Live in Texas, Your Right to Vote Has Been Taken Away

Al Gore must be getting fatter....

Al Gore is Fat
by BooMan
Mon Jul 1st, 2013 at 10:02:02 AM EST