This Is Funny, No Matter What You Believe

From VOX

Can House Republicans "defund" marijuana legalization in DC if it doesn't cost anything?

Updated by German Lopez on December 3, 2014, 3:40 p.m. ET @germanrlopez german@vox.com

Rep. John Mica (R-FL) holds up a fake joint during a congressional hearing on DC's marijuana decriminalization law.

1. House Republicans want to block a marijuana legalization law in Washington, DC, that local voters overwhelmingly passed in November, multiple Democratic and Republican sources reportedly told the National Journal.
2. The House language would ban DC from using local funds to carry out the legalization measure, according to the report.
3. DC's marijuana legalization measure allows adults 21 and older to possess up to two ounces of marijuana, grow up to six plants, and give marijuana to other adults 21 and older.
4. The measure doesn't legalize, regulate, or tax sales, because voter initiatives in DC can't have a direct impact on the local budget.

The House Republican measure might not work

A marijuana plant. (Shutterstock)

The House provision would block DC from using local funds to carry out its legalization measure. The problem with this idea is DC's legalization initiative costs nothing; it actually saves the district money to not enforce laws against marijuana possession.

The ballot measure actually couldn't cost money in the first place. DC ballot initiatives, by law, can't have a direct impact on the local budget.

Me Thinks there is a reading comprehension issue in the House...talk about structural education issues. This is Saturday Night Live shit!

It's Not About Darren Wilson or Ferguson

Darren Wilson resigns from Ferguson Police Department

Citing threats of violence, Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Michael Brown Aug. 9, resigned from the Ferguson Police Department on Saturday.
Wilson, 28, whom a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict in connection with the shooting, had worked for the city’s police department for six years.
In a telephone interview Saturday evening, Wilson said he resigned after the police department told him it had received threats that violence would ensue if he remained an employee.

It is about the over militarization of the domestic police force, when the crime rate has been falling since the early 1990s. 

OK...I'm Over the Midterms Blues, Now About Ferguson, MO.

Ferguson must force us to face anti-blackness

By Michael P. Jeffries  November 28, 2014

‘Black lives matter” has replaced “Hands up, don’t shoot!” as the mantra of those protesting for justice in Ferguson and throughout the country...anti-blackness more accurately captures the dehumanization and constant physical danger that black people face. The “anti” in “anti-blackness” is denial of black people’s right to life. Black humanity is desecrated in plain view, as Mike Brown’s dead body laid uncovered on the street for four and a half hours before being unceremoniously hoisted into an SUV. Brown is described as “it” and “a demon” in his killer’s testimony, and killing black people is all too frequently rewarded, as George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense of their actions, and Wilson remains employed.


...when well-meaning people shy away from discussing anti-blackness, they cede the discussion to people like Rudolph Giuliani, who suggest that black people are exterminating themselves, and “black crime” is the root cause of black suffering. Anti-blackness is already part of the public discourse. We saw and heard it in the dehumanizing anti-Obama posters and slogans during the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012. We can read it in the comments section of articles about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and on Twitter, as everyday citizens mock “Hands up, don’t shoot!” by tweeting, “Pants up, don’t loot!” We can no longer ignore anti-blackness. We must name it, and meet it with equal force.

Just a Reminder:

Kris Kristofferson - Jesus Was A Capricorn (Owed To John Prine)   

What a Shitty Day

America has taken a giant leap backward. How can that happen?

Credit for this gif:

http://cutiebunch.deviantart.com/art/AW-SHIT-AMERICA-timbo-381243751

Paul Krugman Is Not Shrill

He Is A Hero To the  Working Class

Plutocrats Against Democracy

It’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn't their intention...So what’s a plutocrat to do?
One answer is propaganda: tell voters, often and loudly, that taxing the rich and helping the poor will cause economic disaster, while cutting taxes on “job creators” will create prosperity for all. There’s a reason conservative faith in the magic of tax cuts persists no matter how many times such prophecies fail (as is happening right now in Kansas): There’s a lavishly funded industry of think tanks and media organizations dedicated to promoting and preserving that faith.
Another answer, with a long tradition in the United States, is to make the most of racial and ethnic divisions — government aid just goes to Those People, don’t you know. And besides, liberals are snooty elitists who hate America.
A third answer is to make sure government programs fail, or never come into existence, so that voters never learn that things could be different...The obvious answer... Don’t let the bottom half, or maybe even the bottom 90 percent, vote.
And now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.
The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win.

Yes, we are still living in the 18th century ...bleeding the patient to death.

Ezra Hits It Out of the Park

6 reasons Elizabeth Warren should run for president

Updated by Ezra Klein on October 24, 2014, 10:00 a.m. ET @ezraklein ezra@vox.com

Yup. It's time to fire up the Lizzy band. Hillary pales beside Ms. Warren.

Now This Is Depressing, No Matter Who You Are

Aw, hell. This really sucks;

From Dylan Matthews at Vox:

I Just Have To...

Say something nice about Matt Yglesias.

He has become a more influential and extremely productive voice in our information sphere since commencing collaboration with Ezra Klein. Vox has become the go to sight for many folks. Matt has always held controversial positions, but he seems to frame them better, nowadays. I'm going to give him enough rope to hang the right people.

Where's the Money?

This is great work by Jared Bernstein at his blog, 

On The Economy;

"I’m [JB] working on a longer-term wage project and made the figure below as part of it.  It’s from a principle components analysis of five different and pretty diverse, compensation/wage series:

Employment Cost Index: Hourly Compensation
Employment Cost Index: Hourly Wages
Productivity Series: Hourly Compensation
Median Weekly Earnings, Full-time Workers
Average Hourly Earnings, Production, Non-Supervisory Workers

The plot shows the first principal component of the five series–a technique to summarize a bunch of related data series in a way that pulls out their common signal..."

Bye Goerge! When Will He Go?

Tell The Washington Post: Fire George Will

From: Ultra Violet

UPDATE: The Washington Post just doubled down on rape culture. After a barrage of criticism over George Will's weekend column, the newspaper published an article titled "One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married." The Washington Post has to stop. That starts with firing George Will.  ----

The Washington Post actually just published an opinion piece mocking sexual assault survivors and saying that women want to be raped.
The author, conservative columnist George Will, goes so far as to write that colleges are making "victimhood a coveted status" by taking public steps to curb sexual assaults on campus.
He even implies that non-consensual sex is not rape, when in fact it's the very definition of rape!
George Will makes his living writing columns that many people disagree with. But his latest column has gone too far. Rape is a serious crime--accusing women of making it up and arguing schools shouldn't be addressing sexual assault puts both women and men at risk. By publishing George Will's piece, The Washington Post is amplifying some of the most insidious lies that perpetuate rape culture. It's not just wrong--it's dangerous.

Tell The Washington Post:
"Rape is real. No one wants to be a victim. Fire George Will."

Click the pic and sign the petition

and stop the madness

Ants? A Lesson in Co-operation

From The Scientific American;

Secrets of Ant Rafts Revealed

Jun 12, 2014 |By Emma Marris and Nature magazine

To negotiate floods and cross streams, fire ants band together — literally — linking together to form rafts and bridges in a feat of social cooperation and biophysics...David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology...and his team found that the ants had grabbed hold of one another with adhesive pads on their legs, which they stretched out to create pockets of air. They also tended to orient themselves perpendicularly to one another, distributing their weight and creating a light, buoyant structure. The formation seems to take advantage of the ants’ different sizes, with smaller ants slotting neatly in between larger ones to add more connections. Each ant averaged 14 connections to fellow ants. The study is published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Fire ants cluster together after a heavy rain. 
Credit: Junglecat via Wikimedia Commons

Seems like some of the political denizens of DC could learn a thing or two from these intrepid creatures. Or maybe not.

Housing Bubble or Finance F**k-US?

You decide.

All Day Long

4-20 All day, baby...all day long.

Burn it if you got it.

The Chase Is On

Chase Elliott is on the move. As much as I scorn Nascar and the Frances, I am glad to see this young mans success.


Nationwide Series rookie Chase Elliott (center) poses in Victory Lane at Darlington with his parents Cindy and Bill Elliott, the 1988 Sprint Cup champion.  

A Really, Really Bad Idea

From to-days Washington Post, an article by Josh Hicks at The Federal Eye:

Should the IRS use private firms to collect taxes?

• BY JOSH HICKS

• April 15 at 2:49 pm

A federal-worker union is fighting bipartisan plans that would require the Treasury Department to contract with private collection agencies to pursue tax debts that the Internal Revenue Service is not addressing.
The National Treasury Employees Union said in a statement on Monday that a similar effort between 2006 and 2009 caused the government to miss out on millions of dollars in potential revenue while paying $102 million to cover administrative and commission costs.
***
A report last year from the nonpartisan Taxpayer Advocate Service said the IRS collected about 62 percent more than corporate firms during the first two years of the previous program. Private collectors brought in $86 million, compared to $139 million for the IRS.

*****

What in the world could go wrong with this idea?  Everything.

Where the Money Comes From

Looks like most of it comes from Mr. & Ms. Joe Six Pack

Where the Money Goes

Why Americans Still Feel Poor

We Have Empty Socks

Wages are improving but our housing wealth is well below historic trend. Not surprising to have a demand constrained economy when folks feel poorer. To avoid housing bubbles it appears compensation must grow slightly faster than the value of our housing stock.

Let Us Please Not Kill the Messenger

We asked her to do what?



This lady was tasked with an almost impossible job, by the President and the Congress. She did a splendid job, dealing with the obvious and the unforeseen. 

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON -- In the end, Kathleen Sebelius was able to resign as secretary of Health and Human Services during a high point, when the administration had just announced that 7.5 million Americans had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

But that moment came only after six months of battering and blame over the botched roll-out of the healthcare.gov website. The enduring image of her five-year tenure as head of the huge agency is likely to be as the silver-haired woman sitting alone at a congressional hearing table, peering over reading glasses as she faced what often seemed to be an inquisition.

Some times Americans are just stupid.

Oh the Fed, the Fed...Proving the Sun Shines When It Is Light Outside

This is an amazing piece of wasted wonkiness from: 

FEDERAL RESERVE BANK
OF SAN FRANCISCO

Age Discrimination and the Great Recession

David Neumark and Patrick Button

The Great Recession led to large increases in unemployment rates and unemployment durations for workers of all ages, but durations rose far more for older workers than for younger workers. This difference was apparent both during and after the recession, fueling speculation that age discrimination played a role. Research indicates that in states with stronger age discrimination protections, older-worker unemployment durations increased more relative to increases for younger workers. This suggests that state age discrimination laws may need to be modified to strengthen protections during downturns. 

Conclusion and interpretationThese results provide very little evidence that stronger state age discrimination protections helped older workers weather the Great Recession. In fact, the opposite may have occurred, with older workers bearing more of the brunt of the Great Recession in states with stronger age discrimination protections.

Hiring older workers=increased risk, so hiring them will be a marginal decision. This consigns older workers (as well as any demographic group that could potentially pose increased risk) to the back of the bus. Just not new news.

An Ugly Little Man in Cowboy Boots

Vox is better than Wonkblog ever was:

MoveOn.org beats Louisiana's government in billboard lawsuit

Updated by Andrew Prokop on April 8, 2014, 4:34 p.m. ET 

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that a billboard critical of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal can remain standing, despite the state government's attempts to have it taken down.

We got us some real Presidential material here. Jindal, Rand Paul and Chris Christie (who would name their child that?and why?) have made Jeb Bush the GOP candidate apparent.

No News Here

From Vox and Brad Plumer:

Europe's honeybees are vanishing — and we still don't know why

"...the European Commission just published a massive new studytracking 32,000 honeybee colonies across 17 states — the largest-ever study on honeybees and the diseases that affect them...The EU study didn't figure out why the honeybees are dying...There's probably no one single explanation. As the 2013 report by the US government put it, "Consensus is building that a complex set of stressors and pathogens is associated with [colony collapse disorder]... This massive new study out of Europe is just a first step in getting a better handle on why the bees are vanishing..there are also reports that wild bees — which are also increasingly crucial for pollination — are in trouble, too. One recent report found that 31 of the 68 species of bumblebees in Europe are in decline, with 14 facing extinction..."

CCD took off in 2006. Now, eight years later, all we have are theories. We have come within a nano-second of being able to see the birth of the universe but we can't save the bees and, by extension, ourselves. 

More from Brad Plumer:

"The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that"out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated."

From the USDA:

Why Should the Public Care About What Happens to Honey Bees?

Bee pollination is responsible for more than $15 billion in increased crop value each year. About one mouthful in three in our diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination. Commercial production of many specialty crops like almonds and other tree nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables are dependent on pollinated by honey bees. These are the foods that give our diet diversity, flavor, and nutrition.

Honey bees are not native to the New World; they came from Europe with the first settlers. There are native pollinators in the United States, but honey bees are more prolific and easier to manage on a commercial level for pollination of a wide variety of crops. Almonds, for example, are completely dependent on honey bees for pollination. In California, the almond industry requires the use of 1.4 million colonies of honey bees, approximately 60 percent of all managed honey bee colonies in the United States.

Got To Love Ezra Klein

How did he get so smart? Nate Silver eat your heart out. Ezra has a splendid article and interview with Yale Law professor Dan Kahan  out on VOX that deals with partisan thinking from a very different point of view.

Ezra Klein April 6, 2014, 4:30 p.m. ET

How politics makes us stupid

But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe.

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." 

Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

Updated 4/8/2014 4:22p.

Paul Krugman has his take on Ezras Vox venture, and he don't say too much hateful about it.

A New Low For the 1%

This article from CNN is difficult to read and even more difficult to comprehend, unless we believe in Paul Krugman and  his view that the GOP is a failing institution. How much deference can wealth really buy? We have become a pitiful nation when we don't, at the very least, put on a show of justice.

Is This the Face of America?

The Dirt

March 31 (UPI) -- The probationary sentence a Delaware judge gave a DuPont heir in 2009 for raping his young daughter [3 years old] has become an issue because his ex-wife has sued him. 
Robert H. Richards IV was sentenced to eight years after pleading guilty to fourth-degree rape. But Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden suspended the custodial sentence."Defendant will not fare well in Level 5 setting," Jurden wrote in her sentencing report, using the state's legal term for prison.

We may view the rich as models, but this type of behavior and outcome is becoming more common and is probably attributable to wealth rather than the possibility of rehabilitation. "A rich boy goes to college, a poor boy goes to war."

Do We Really Consider These People Employees?

It's that crazy Arizona again...from CNN:

16 arrested after crowds get rowdy following Arizona's loss to Wisconsin

By Ralph Ellis and Joe Sutton, CNN

updated 7:55 AM EDT, Sun March 30, 2014

(CNN) -- Police in Tucson, Arizona, arrested 16 people Saturday night after rowdy crowds threw bottles, beer cans and firecrackers at officers following the Wildcats' overtime loss to Wisconsin.
Wisconsin beat Arizona 64-63 on Saturday night and earned a spot in the Final Four of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
Arizona was the No. 1 seed in the West Region and Wisconsin the No. 2 seed.
About 20 minutes after the game ended, several hundred people blocked a road on the University of Arizona campus, said Sgt. Pete Dugan.
When they refused officers' orders to disperse and began lobbing objects, police used pepper balls and canisters, Dugan said.
Police reported some damage to property.
Those arrested were charged with resisting arrest, unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct.

Not exactly a Pete Seegar Rally. 

I'm Thinking

And that ain't good...I enjoy my family and friends, who are the primary people I interact with...Am I short sheeting them? Should I spend my time teaching my grandchildren to fish, garden, ride a horse, run a tractor or pontificate? Should I get drunk with my buddies or curse the Koch bothers? Everyone but me seems sure of the answers. I guess old fucks is just old fucks...

 

Looking Thru A Small Lense

Shooting At A Birds Tale

I am hearing an uncomfortable and persistent message from both sides of the political universe:

Democracy sucks as an economic arbiter and distributor of economic gains...

This may be true...a cow sucks for transportation but tastes just fine. So what are we to make of this fake equality between prosperity and de-enhancement of personal rights? Does prosperity and its manic pursuit make us richer than inclusion and diversity of wealth and income? Or is our present system of allocation a zero sum game except for the "levitation effect" of opportunity and inclusion? Looking at the data and a few graphs tells a very clear story:

"The figure and its data come from Janet Gornick, the director of a CUNY research centre on international inequality. The dark-blue lines tell a now-familiar tale: America boasts the highest post-tax-and-transfer income inequality of any highly developed country in the world. The metric at play is a number between 0 and 1 known as the Gini coefficient. In a hypothetical country with a coefficient of 0, everyone has exactly the same income, while a nation with a coefficient of 1.0 is home to one fat cat who takes everything while everyone else earns nil. At 0.42, America’s level of post-tax-and-transfer inequality outranks Israel, Britain and Canada, and dwarfs the figures in Japan and Scandinavia."

Now, about that zero sum game...it won't win the Warren Buffet bracket, but the returns could be considerably higher with a tweaked model of our economy. Equality of opportunity and freedom certainly have some non-zero value. The challenge of the working folks is to enhance this value and make it the "point of the spear". Be happy.

Who Could Have Guessed We Were at Full Employment?

Greg Mankiw

Who else?

The Evidence:

      Measuring Slack in the Phillips Curve
According to a new paper coauthored by Alan Krueger, the short-term unemployment rate works better than the standard unemployment rate in explaining changes in inflation, and according to this measure, the economy was about at its NAIRU in 2013.  This finding is related to issues I discussed in a recent Times column.   (emphasis mine)

And we get this from his NYT column:

"One possible reason for hysteresis is that the long-term unemployed lose valuable job skills and, over time, become less committed to the labor market. In some ways, perhaps, they should be thought of as effectively out of the labor force...Policy makers at the Fed may have to accept that lower employment is the new normal."

 There are somewhere between 9 and 25 million people in America that know GM is full of shit...maybe more.

We Can Only Hope

From USA Today:

Fred Phelps' death may mean end of Westboro church

"With the death of Fred Phelps, the vitriol-spouting leader of Westboro Baptist Church who picketed military funerals and espoused hatred for gays, the future of his church is hazy.
Phelps, 84, died late Wednesday, according to online postings of his church. The cause of death was not reported.
"It's unclear whether this so-called church will survive the death of its founder," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has closely monitored the group. "In some ways, it was a cult of personality."

 Perhaps, when enough of the monsters die off, we can get back to a civil conversation about our nations future.

The House Has the Edge

I borrowed this graph from Jared Bernstein over at his On The Economy blog:



There is definitely some correlation with this graph from  Atif Mian and Amir Sufi at House of Debt:


Somebody got screwed...big time.

Not Just Another Graph

From Atif Mian and Amir Sufi at House of Debt via Mark Thoma:

"If you must know only one fact about the U.S. economy, it should be this chart:"

This is actually an offensive situation. There are millions of working folks that could have pointed this out to the pointy heads economists years ago. Now it is all the rage to doctor the patient after she has died. Yup. The fire department saved that foundation.

Joe Stiglitz Is One Smart Feller

From Dr. Joe on the TPP...

"And this brings me to the second point that I have repeatedly emphasized: Trickle-down economics is a myth."

 

Like A Snowball Headed For Hell...

Paul Krugman explains the price of success, for some.

The Wages of Men

For reference: Here are changes in hourly real wages of men, 1973-2012, at different percentiles of the wage distribution, calculated from Census data by the Economic Policy Institute. As you can see, wages have fallen for 60 percent of men.

Listen Up, Y'all

From Yaleworldfellows:

OPPOSITION LEADER AT RISK

One of our World Fellows, Carlos Vecchio, is at risk in Venezuela.

Carlos is National Political Coordinator of the Venezuelan opposition party Voluntad Popular (VP). He’s senior deputy to Leopoldo López, who was taken into custody on February 18, 2014 after a week of national protests and demonstrations (many led by VP members), followed by government raids on VP’s political offices. Some serious charges have been leveled against Carlos there is a warrant out for his arrest. With López’s detention, Carlos now serves as the de facto leader of the VP party: this makes him a likely government target. 

We are deeply concerned for Carlos’ safety: he is currently in hiding in Venezuela with limited access to communication. Unlike López, he is not an internationally recognizable figure - media outlets outside of Venezuela have yet to report on his situation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have released alerts specifically naming Carlos as a government target. The Yale Politic and Yale Alumni Magazine have also written about Carlos’ situation. 

But we worry that his relative anonymity will allow government forces the space and ability to do whatever they will without fear of international repercussion. 

While at Yale, Carlos Vecchio spoke passionately about his tireless efforts to promote democracy in Venezuela: his enthusiasm and depth of knowledge were infectious. He reached across campus to students, faculty and other Fellows – many of whom have rallied around him in this time of crisis – with his pure love of country and genuine respect for democratic ideals.  In Venezuela, Carlos a well-loved political figure and an inspiration to young people across the country. 

This is Carlos at a rally in Venezuela in December, just after he left Yale: 

Please join our efforts to raise global awareness of Carlos’ situation, and support our call for his safety. Along with Yale World Fellows Henrique Salas-Romer (who is helping us from New Haven) and Maria Corina Machado, he has sacrificed much and placed himself and family at great risk to help Venezuela achieve democratic reform.

Maria Corina Machado (a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly and also an opposition leader) has also been vocal throughout the protests. She joined Al Jazeera to discuss the continued protests against the Venezuelan government.

For more information and updates on the situation as we have them, please refer to the list of links and contacts below. Please help us spread the word by sharing this page and other links. We will continue to update this page as we receive news. 

Also, see what Leslie Bull has to say at the Next New Deal:

"Given the recent revolutionary events in Ukraine, it is understandable that much of American media attention on foreign politics is concentrated on that country, and that country alone. But it is important to remember that our myopic focus on just one world event at a time comes with a price: sometimes the other crises in the world that go ignored are actually made even worse because of it. We sometimes forget the power that just paying attention to a crisis can have – without it, those perpetrating the crimes can rest assured that the international community’s eye is elsewhere, and can behave with impunity. In the case of the current unrest in Venezuela, the price of that apathy might just be my friend’s life."

EconoSpeak: Tesla v. the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission

Just a reminder...about CC 
 


EconoSpeak: Tesla v. the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission

It All Makes Sense, Now

From CBS News:

Tampa family sickened by LSD-tainted beef

J. Scott Applewhite, 

TAMPA, Fla. -- A Tampa Police investigation is underway Friday after an entire family, including a pregnant woman and two young children, were hospitalized as a result of eating LSD-laced meat, reports CBS Affililate WTSP in Tampa.
According to reports, it all began Monday night when 24-year-old Ronnie Morales complained he felt sick after eating dinner.
Morales' girlfriend, 31-year-old Jessica Rosado drove him to St. Joseph's Hospital, but it wasn't long before she too, fell ill. Roasado, who was nine-months pregnant, was rushed to St. Joseph's Women's Hospital, where they safely delivered her baby.
The situation worsened as Rosado's young daughters, ages 7 and 6, also got sick and reportedly began hallucinating.
After being treated, Morales and both children were released from the hospital Wednesday, followed by Rosado and her healthy baby boy on Thursday.
It wasn't clear what caused the mysterious illness until Friday, when officials say they received test results from the medical examiner that pointed to LSD as the meat's contaminant.
Tampa Police are now investigating how LSD could have been in the meat, but Chief Castor did said they know the family is not at fault.
The meat was purchased at a Walmart located at 1501 North Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa. The store has since removed the specific type of meat from their shelves, and released the following statement in regard to the incident:
"Like everyone else in the community, we are deeply disturbed about this situation and we are taking it very seriously. We want answers and we're committed to working with officials to get to the bottom of this.
We know our customers expect safe, quality food and we require our suppliers to meet the highest of food safety standards. It's unclear where and how the food was tampered with or if the tampering occurred after purchase. However, out of an abundance of caution, we have pulled the remaining product from the store.
We have been in touch with our supplier and they tell us they have no reports of similar incidents. We are also reviewing our store's surveillance video to see if we can find any information that might assist in the investigation. At this point, we're not aware of any suspicious activity."
Walmart spokesperson Dianna Gee told CBS News the meat was thin-cut bottom round steak made by a supplier, Cargill.
Cargill told CBS News they have been alerted to the situation and will cooperate with any investigation.

© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.            

WalMart is trying to raise the price of beef, but only to heads. The rest of us just shake our heads and go fishing in polluted waters.       

WTF???

     One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society- nymag.com

• By Kevin Roose

Recently, our nation’s financial chieftains have been feeling a little unloved. Venture capitalists are comparing the persecution of the rich to the plight of Jews at Kristallnacht, Wall Street titans are saying that they’re sick of being beaten up, and this week, a billionaire investor, Wilbur Ross, proclaimed that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons.”
Ross's statement seemed particularly odd, because two years ago, I met Ross at an event that might single-handedly explain why the rest of the country still hates financial tycoons – the annual black-tie induction ceremony of a secret Wall Street fraternity called Kappa Beta Phi...It was January 2012, and Ross, wearing a tuxedo and purple velvet moccasins embroidered with the fraternity’s Greek letters, was standing at the dais of the St. Regis Hotel ballroom, welcoming a crowd of two hundred wealthy and famous Wall Street figures to the Kappa Beta Phi dinner. Ross, the leader (or “Grand Swipe”) of the fraternity, was preparing to invite 21 new members — “neophytes,” as the group called them — to join its exclusive ranks...All told, enough wealth and power was concentrated in the St. Regis that night that if you had dropped a bomb on the roof, global finance as we know it might have ceased to exist.

 Some of these people really need to go to jail.

You Are What You Eat

Slaughterhouse accused of selling meat from cows with cancer

Stacy Finz and Carolyn Lochhead

Updated 10:45 am, Wednesday, February 26, 2014

From sfgate.com: "(02-26) 10:44 PST SAN FRANCISCO --Rancho Feeding Corp., the Petaluma slaughterhouse that recently recalled 8.7 million pounds of beef, is under criminal investigation by the federal government for killing and selling meat from dairy cows with cancer, according to sources who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.Rancho was allegedly buying up cows with eye cancer, chopping off their heads so inspectors couldn't detect the disease and illegally selling the meat, the sources said."

I'll take this: 

From Then til Now

Ferdinand Porsche's vision, the 'Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle,' rolled onto the streets of Vienna for the first time on June 26, 1898

P1

"...the recently rediscovered "first Porsche in the world" — dubbed the P1 — was a technological marvel for its time. It "included a compact electric drive weighing 286 pounds,"

2014 porsche 911