Truth

climateadaptation:

joshsternberg:

WSJ reports Yahoo board has approved a $1.1 billion deal — in cash — to purchase Tumblr. 

Ugggg…

(via silas216)

lbjlibrary:

May 18, 1965. LBJ speaks about Head Start: 

“This is a very proud occasion for him [Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity] and for us today, because it was less than 3 months ago that we opened a new war front on poverty. We set out to make certain that poverty’s children would not be forevermore poverty’s captives. We called our program Project Head Start.

“The program was conceived not so much as a Federal effort but really as a neighborhood effort, and the response we have received from the neighborhoods and the communities has been most stirring and the most enthusiastic of any peacetime program that I can remember.

“Today we are able to announce that we will have open, and we believe operating this summer, coast-to-coast, some 2,000 child development centers serving as many as possibly a half million children.” 

Full text here. Read the booklet here. Lots of OEO promotional videos for Head Start available on our YouTube channel playlist here. 

(via ourpresidents)

covenesque:

excitablehonky:

“Timely Justice,” my ass:

For a state with 24 death row exonerations under its belt (the highest in the country), you would think Florida might want to slow down its execution process to avoid putting innocent people to death. But Florida lawmakers are doing just the opposite

The Miami Herald calls the bill “unacceptable”:

As Mark Elliott, director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, points out, “That’s one exoneration for every three executions.”

That should give every Floridian pause.

Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on Death Row after 14 years in prison. Sadly, after his death, DNA testing proved he was innocent and also identified the real killer. What kind of justice did Mr. Smith get?

Natasha Lennard, writing for Salon, calls it “ill-named”:

In a most perverse admission, flagged by Khalek, Republican Senator Rob Bradley said “this is not about guilt or innocence, it’s about timely justice.” So long as proceedings through the Kangaroo court are swift, Bradley seems to admit, the lives of inmates are expendable.

Chris Hedges calls it “cynically named”:

William Van Poyck … is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. June 12 at Florida State Prison. He is a writer who has spent years exposing the cruelty of our system of mass incarceration. On June 12, if Gov. Rick Scott has his way, Van Poyck will write no more. And that is exactly how our political class of murderers wants it.

The New York Times calls it “grotesquely named”:

As the American Bar Association explained in a scathing 2006 report on the state’s death penalty system, Florida is one of the few states that allows a jury to recommend a sentence of death based on a majority vote rather than a unanimous one. Defendants charged with capital crimes often have woefully unqualified counsel, and are much more likely to be convicted and sentenced to death if the victim is white — a sign of racial disparity that is clearly unconstitutional. The flaws in Florida’s system, which soaks up huge amounts of resources, cannot be fixed. It is long past time to abolish capital punishment.

An MSN headline appropriately summarizes, “Florida’s death row Timely Justice Act is cool, unless you’re innocent“—which Juan Melendez can understand since he spent 18 years on death row before being exonerated in 2002: 

The “Timely Justice Act” would speed up a system we know has already sent innocent men, like myself, to death row. Some of these prisoners may be men like me, who have exhausted their legal appeals, yet keep trying to find a way to prove their innocence.

In multiple cases of current death row prisoners, we don’t know exactly what the legal claims are. Some of the men on Florida’s death row ran out of legal options simply because their attorneys missed filing deadlines.

In those instances, no court had the opportunity to evaluate the claims and determine whether they have merit. How can we possibly justify speeding up the execution of prisoners in those cases?

According to logic of the “Timely Justice Act,” any prisoner who has exhausted his appeals and been through a clemency process has had every opportunity and is ready for an execution date, regardless of the specific questions and issues that surround his case.

I am living proof that each case is unique and that the system must allow ample time for the truth to emerge.

Given Florida’s troubling track record on wrongful convictions, this legislation ensures the unthinkable — the execution of an innocent person.

There needs to be more outrage about this.

Dood is unpopular as hell. Rather than making up the millions lost during that drug testing welfare debacle, or making up the tourist revenue lost bc you decided to pass a driver’s license bs directed at brown ppl but pissed off much of canada (the biggest source of tourism Florida has), figuring out what to do with millions of empty foreclosed homes, fixing the shittiest public school system in the US, having a plan b after turning down free money to build a light rail system that would have brought millions in jobs and tourism revenue…he decides he can fix his image by killing prisoners, mostly poor, nonwhite ppl

Someone pls curbstomp this baldhead, thieving sack of shit

(via generalbriefing)

todayinlaborhistory:

Today in labor history, May 18, 1979: An Oklahoma jury finds for the estate of atomic worker and OCAW member Karen Silkwood, ordering Kerr-McGee Nuclear Co. to pay $505,000 in actual damages and $10 million in punitive damages for negligence leading to Silkwood’s plutonium contamination.

nbcnews:

Taste of outside world: Smugglers sneak KFC into Gaza

(Photo: NBC News)

The demand for KFC in the Gaza strip has led one company to beat the Israeli blockade by smuggling the fast food through tunnels from Egypt.

NBC’s Annabel Roberts reports.