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When AIG attempted to rationalize the bonuses given as the only way for them to retain "the best and the brightest" in the workforce, it was all I could do not to lose my lunch. Those guys--who drove the corporation into the ground are the best and the brightest? Mais non.

Meet the real best and the brightest: Michael Steinman's Advanced Placement English class at Village Academy High School in Pomona, California. These are the real faces of how this economic crisis has hit America.

Steinman led his students in a discussion of the American Dream following the novel The Great Gatsby. Steinman discovered that his students' idea of the American Dream was far more utilitarian than the acquisitive Buchanans or Jay Gatsby: a refrigerator with food inside; no fear of homelessness; employment for their parents. When he discovered that every student in his class was touched deeply by the economic crisis, he encouraged them to put their stories on video. The video, entitled "Is Anybody Listening?", was sent to then presidential candidates Obama and McCain as well as uploaded to YouTube. In the video, students talk about how economic realities have infringed on their hopes and aspirations for the future.

"We're all businessmen and doctors and lawyers and all this great stuff, and we have all this potential, but the way things are going, we're not going to be able to do that," said Yvonne Bojorquez, 16.

The video reflects life in a community where unemployment is at 12% and half the adults did not finish high school.

Village Academy is housed in a former department store, in an abandoned mall that now contains an indoor swap meet and a beauty school. More than 89% of the school's 521 students receive free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty. One-third are learning English as a second language. Yet the school consistently beats state and federal goals, and last year was named one of the nation's 500 best high schools.

The student video, as well as the coverage both on Newshour above and ABC's 20/20 last night are heartbreaking and put real faces (as I've tried to do on this post as well) as to who exactly are the victims of the de-regulated marketplace, where hedge fund managers and CDS traders still feel they're entitled to seven figure bonuses despite the bailout. This should once and for all quell the attempts to minimize the importance of those bonuses. It's not about the percentage of the overall bailout that matters...it's that these people's actions have taken food out of these children's mouths and roofs from over their heads.

As it turns out, someone was listening to the students of VAHS. President Obama, during his tour of LA this week, took time out to visit the students that inspired his speech on education, timed fortuitously with legislation that will help these kids and their future:

Continue reading »

(h/t Scarce)

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Senator Kit Bond appeared on PBS's The NewsHour and further muddied the water with all the lies and rationalizations one must use to abet war crimes, bless his heart (I'm learning from Blue Gal), including the laughable-on-its-face claim that discussing waterboarding enables "the enemy" to adapt to it. This is an assertion that I feel strongly should be tested out on anyone amoral enough to suggest it. But it was this claim that earns him the Wanker title for today (and from such an embarrassment of riches of other awardees too!):

IFILL: I just would like to -- but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming: freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used.

I don't know if you're a religious man, Sen. Bond, but I surely do hope that if you are, this fine bit of wankery is used against you at the Pearly Gates. One word for you to hold in your heart: Nuremberg.

FAIR:

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS's flagship news program, touts its "signature style-low-key, evenhanded, inclusive of all perspectives"; Corporation for Public Broadcasting ombud Ken Bode called it "the mother ship of balance." But a new FAIR study finds that the NewsHour fails to provide either balance or diversity of perspectives-or a true public-minded alternative to its corporate competition.

• Public interest groups accounted for just 4 percent of total sources. General public-"person in the street," workers, students- accounted for only 14 percent, while current and former government and military officials totaled 50 percent of all sources.
• Male sources outnumbered women by more than 4-to-1 (82 percent to 18 percent). Moreover, 72 percent of U.S. guests were white males, while just 6 percent were women of color.
• People of color made up only 15 percent of U.S. sources. African-Americans made up 9 percent, Latinos 2 percent, and Asian- Americans and people of Mideastern descent made up one percent each. Alberto Gonzales accounted for more than 30 percent of Latino sources, while Condoleeza Rice accounted for nearly 13 percent of African-American sources.
• Among partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats on the NewsHour by 2-to-1 (66 percent vs. 33 percent). Only one representative of a third party appeared during the study period.
• At a time when a large proportion of the U.S. public already favored withdrawal from Iraq, "stay the course" sources outnumbered pro-withdrawal sources more than 5-to-1. In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq.
• Segments on Hurricane Katrina accounted for less than 10 percent of all sources, but provided nearly half (46 percent) of all African-American sources during the study period. Those African-Americans were largely presented as victims rather than leaders or experts: In segments on the human impact of the storm, African-Americans made up 51 percent of sources, but in reconstruction segments, whites dominated with 72 percent of sources; 59 percent of all African-American sources across Katrina segments were general public sources.

The Hill: How some lawmakers are sabotaging the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and why they are wrong.

My run-in with a Fundy...We need never bow to God's bullies. After reading these two items, I thought it was important to support this soldier in the fight against the AmTaliban .

Online NewsHour: Offered a timid examination of the controversy surrounding the use of electronic voting machines. Serious problems were noted but they didn't mention this or this.

Workbench: Andrew Breitbart is getting huge traffic and raking in lotsa ad $ because former partner Drudge links to his copies of AP and Reuters news stories. Don't generate any click-thru cash for him. Avoid Brietbart.com links.

The Impolitic: White House announces its new al Qaeda chief in Iraq

IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE: by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935--"Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist...Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?" (thnx to reader Cynthia)

Brady was on Newshour last night and used his time to frame the debate by comparing us to cowboys in the wild, wild west hanging out over in Deadwood, waiting to visit Mr Wu's and his stable of pigs because we dared to complain on his online operation.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (hat tip David Edwards)

They have yet to show us any proof that the vast majority of comments were over the top, (today he didn't make that any clearer) but even if a small percentage followed that trail, they could easily be controlled. Brady obviously was ill prepared to deal with what his job entails as was Howell's column and would rather throw out a straw man argument than address the issue at hand. It's so much easier to attack the critics (as he did to Jane during the online chat) than just to correct the problem. Here's a little message to Jim. Wait till your pal Hugh Hewitt objects to something.

Here's a Kos Diary about the whole online chat-cutting out some of the filler you'll find interesting.

Waging peace for humanity

writes an article about Amnesty International and the Bush Administration:

"On 6/3/05, the Bush administration lacked the courage to face its accuser directly. Jim Lehrer of Newshour on PBS moderated a discussion between Amnesty International and the Bush administration. The topic was Amnesty's recent allegations concerning prisoner abuse in the American version of Stalin's Gulag Archipelago. Amnesty sent William Schulz, their executive director in the United States. Lehrer invited the Pentagon to send a representative. Instead, they sent their proxy, Neil Livingston, CEO of Global Options, a security firm with expertise on the subject of terrorism...Read on

We're very excited about the changes Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson is compelling PBS to make. Here's a preview from their soon to be launched web site: read on for the Lineup:

One of the new shows:

6pm The Newshour with Jeff Gannon
In depth reports on why Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid hates puppies, Hillary's trail of bloody corpses, and the proper amount to tip military escorts.

Read on for the whole schedule.