According to a new study by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), only four percent of the 210 lawmakers who pledged their allegiance to a bill raising the minimum wage pay their interns.The Fair Minimum Wage Act would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. EPI found that 96 percent of its House and Senate supporters give their interns a minimum wage of zero.
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| (Left to right) Vitali Klitschko, Oleh Tyahnybok and Arseniy Yatsenyuk |
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| So far, 12 oblasts of Ukraine plus the Kyiv City Administration have been seized by the people. |
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| Protester Mikhail Gavrilyuk: stripped, beaten and humiliated by 'Berkut' special police in Kyiv |
... once Ukrainians realize that the ideal of the color revolution is dead and the West has no tools to revive it, there may be consequences. If peaceful demonstrations don’t work, after all, some may logically conclude that it’s time to use violence. Ukrainians have indeed constructed violent resistance movements more than once in the past century.First of all, nobody in Ukraine's opposition ever believed the U.S.-Russian construct about colored revolutions financed and organized by outsiders. (I was there for the Orange Revolution and I know the colored revolution theory is hooey: nobody "trained" or paid hundreds of thousands of people to stand out in the freezing cold for weeks and start loving each other and their country, just like nobody is pulling their strings now.) So there is nothing for Ukrainians to "realize;" only the Anne Applebaums of the Western media and diplomatic corps. Indeed, the hardcore protesters on Maidan realized weeks ago that violence must be met with violence, so Applebaum's fretting is moot. Maybe Applebaum is pretending violence hasn't happend because it so offends her Western sensibilities, and because the escalating conflict -- now a burgeoning revolution -- rejects America's conceit that it somehow has a handle on events in that part of the world?... Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
1. In the first place for my family. I want my children to grow up in Ukraine and not "Little Russia" [historically, a condescending, imperialist Russian term for Ukraine - J]'; I want them to be told at school about European, not post-Soviet, values; I want them to go to university for knowledge and new contacts, and not for teachers/bribe-takers to issue them grades; I want my children to work in any international organization in any country, and not dream to be state bureaucrats. I do it for the future.
2. Second, for my country. It is my inner conviction that the current regime is criminal. We are not a monarchy, and I, as a citizen of this country, want to have the right, the instruments and the opportunity to change the government in this country. Anybody who takes away these instruments from me and my fellow citizens, anybody who limits our freedom, is my enemy. I am ready to fight this enemy by all means available.
3. Finally, for myself. I do not want to be afraid. I am a cultured adult, and on the inside I'm disgusted to think that I should be afraid to go to a public hospital, afraid to contact the police, afraid to go to court. It's disgusting to think about bribery and "Untouchables" in my favorite city. About the Range Rovers of police chiefs, and Mezhigorie [President Yanukovych's palatial presidential residence -- "lawfully" leased to him at taxpayers' expense - J].UPDATE 1 (28.01.2014): From CNN: "Ukraine's parliament scraps anti-protest laws, Prime Minister resigns," and President Yanukovych accepted PM Azarov's resignation.
“Nobody wants to end up owning all the problems that Ukraine faces,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “the country is bankrupt, it has a terrible, broken system of government and insane levels of corruption.”The big question for many and yours truly, what will the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol do now? A delegation of about 100 deputies and officials from Crimea attended a meeting Saturday in Kharkiv with Party of Regions and Communist Party members, where they declared they would take control locally of ensuring the constitutional order. Over the past few weeks, the speaker of Crimea's supreme council (parliament) Konstantinov has been making noises about independence for Crimea, and/or joining Russia. Today the Verhovna Rada (parliament) of Ukraine is asking the new Interior Minister what he's going to do about burgeoning separatism. So the threat of civil war is not over. Mostly it depends on the resolve of Crimea's (former) ruling Party of Regions members to risk the wrath of Kyiv.... But their political power is on the line, and they may be willing to risk anything to hold onto power, especially if Russia will throw in with the South and East of Ukraine.
Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.
That's what the President believes. Obama doesn't believe in the prescription of hard work equals success. In that statement, he just puts it down. He just delegitimizes it. Cookie, find that from our archives. That was July 2012, Roanoke, Virginia. Give me the whole thing. "I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there." That's not what makes the difference.
There’s no question Obama inartfully phrased those two sentences, but it’s clear from the context what the president was talking about. He spoke of government — including government-funded education, infrastructure and research — assisting businesses to make what he called “this unbelievable American system that we have.”In summary, he said: “The point is … that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
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| I'm fired up! WHOO! |
The Senate committee report stressed that the intelligence still suggests the attack was not “highly coordinated,” but rather “opportunistic” – possibly put in place in “short order” after protests over an anti-Islam film elsewhere in the region.“It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks,” the report said.
Based on data from those requests and dozens of interviews, a CNN investigation revealed that most schools have between 7% and 18% of revenue sport athletes who are reading at an elementary school level. Some had even higher percentages of below-threshold athletes.According to those academic experts, the threshold for being college-literate is a score of 400 on the SAT critical reading or writing test. On the ACT, that threshold is 16.Many student-athletes scored in the 200s and 300s on the SAT critical reading test -- a threshold that experts told us was an elementary reading level and too low for college classes. The lowest score possible on that part of the SAT is 200, and the national average is 500.On the ACT, we found some students scoring in the single digits, when the highest possible score is 36 and the national average is 20. In most cases, the team average ACT reading score was in the high teens."It is in many ways immoral for the university to even admit that student," said Dr. Richard M. Southall, director of the College Sport Research Institute and a professor at the University of South Carolina.
Former and current academic advisers, tutors and professors say it's nearly impossible to jump from an elementary to a college reading level while juggling a hectic schedule as an NCAA athlete. They say the NCAA graduation rates are flawed because they don't reflect when a student is being helped too much by academic support."They're pushing them through," said Billy Hawkins, an associate professor and athlete mentor at the University of Georgia."They're graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they're able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That's a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different."
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| Trickle-down economic theory vs. trickle-up economic fact. |
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| Mission accomplished? Have you seen Iraq lately? |
