Today is tax day in the US, the deadline for filing one’s returns. Reader Norm sent me this short clip by Robert Reich where he explains how it can be that the rich and super-rich pay taxes at a much lower rate than do the middle and classes, thanks to a whole bunch of measures that have been thoughtfully inserted into the tax code by the people they purcahsed, also known as the members of Congress.
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The US Attorney for a region is part of the US Department of Justice and is tasked with prosecuting federal crimes in that region. They have a lot of power and some of them have developed a reputation of using that power in ways that infringe on the rights of people to due process.
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Here is a very cute video of little children at judo. I love the way they bow to each other before going at it, doing it so vigorously on one occasion that she fell over.
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Many of us have heard of the ‘blue moon’. This is when a full moon appears twice in one calendar month. This is a perfectly predictable astronomical phenomenon that occurs once every two or three years, infrequent enough to serve as a metaphor for rarity, as in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’.
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Ed Brayton not only writes the widely read blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars but is also the person who manages the business end of the Freethought Blogs site and keeps the whole thing running smoothly.
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Yesterday the Pulitzer prizes for 2013, considered the apex of establishment US journalistic achievement, were announced. Of those the public service prize is the most coveted and the committee stunned the world by giving it to Edward Snowden, adding to the Polk award that he received earlier in the year.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show looked at how the Spanish language media promoted the Affordable Care Act to encourage people to sign up and how that was covered by Fox News.
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A friend recently sent me this very short video clip. It briefly tells the love story of a middle-aged couple in rural Sri Lanka who have been married for 34 years and live and work on their own small tea plantation.
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NPR had a wonderful story about someone whom I had never heard of. It was about a US District Judge named J. Waties Waring in South Carolina who, in a landmark school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott, declared that segregation “was an evil that must be eradicated”.
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