This is America, Dude.

"I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something." -Belize, Angels in America

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May 14

“The Obama administration is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation’s most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of the four largest U.S. banks by assets.”

Obama Student Loan Policy Reaping $51 Billion Profit

(via bostonreview)

May 1

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/sunday-review/the-debate-over-the-american-community-survey.html

Apr 10

“WASHINGTON — President Obama, who has seen court nominees run into Republican roadblocks, may have found a winning strategy for putting a judge on the powerful U.S. appeals court here: He chose a highly regarded corporate lawyer whose resume suggests he could have been a Republican nominee.” http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-judge-20130411,0,1944306.story

Apr 9

“American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/raymond-davis-pakistan.html

Mar 25

“Building managers and legislative staffers have sought to reassure some concerned Tennessee lawmakers that recent renovations at the state Capitol did not install special facilities to support Muslim prayer rituals. The new sink is instead meant to make it easier for custodial staff to fill buckets and clean mops.” http://www.wsmv.com/story/21787216/q-is-that-capitol-sink-for-muslims-a-no-mops

Feb 3

“Ten people live in this trace of a town. In 2011, its four beer and wine stores sold 403,118 gallons of alcohol, the equivalent of nearly 4.3 million 12-ounce cans of beer, according to the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission. Over the years the people of [Pine Ridge Indian Reservation] have tried to shut the stores down, but without success.” http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hometown-pine-ridge-20130203,0,3955198,full.story

Jan 24

“Critics say Mr. Brownback’s tax cut was passed on the backs of low-income Kansans. The bill included the repeal of tax credits for food, rental housing and child care that benefited low-income residents. Because of those repeals, the poorest 20 percent of Kansans will spend an additional 1.3 percent of their incomes, an average of $148 per year, on taxes, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The top 1 percent, meanwhile, will see the share of their income that goes toward taxes drop by 2 percent, or $21,087 per year, the report said.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/us/politics/gov-sam-brownback-seeks-to-end-kansas-income-tax.html

Jan 10

“

The nation’s main immigration enforcement agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), refer more cases for federal prosecution than all Justice Department law enforcement agencies.

And a larger number of individuals are detained each year in the immigration detention system (just under 430,000 in fiscal 2011) than are serving sentences in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities for all other federal crimes.

” http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/01/immigration-reform

Nov 3

“Occupy Wall Street protesters have been especially vulnerable targets. Gideon Oliver, president of the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which, in partnership with the Legal Aid Society, has been providing free counsel to OWS arrestees, told me that in criminal court he and others have increasingly seen signs that peaceful political activists are landing on terrorist watch lists.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/25/problem-new-york-police/

Oct 19

“CDCR officials are quick to point out that inmates can challenge their gang status: They can appeal to the gang investigator, the warden, and, as a last resort, the departmental appeals office in Sacramento….Gang investigator Barneburg, who has worked at Pelican Bay for 15 years, has never seen a validation appeal succeed either—evidence, he says, of his team’s thoroughness. “We put out really quality work,” he says.” http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confinement-shane-bauer?page=2

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