• The health care bill has a section (insanely - hello modern American politics) that will push $36 billion into the Pell Grant program, but beyond that bill, there was also the following:
• $5 billion for home weatherization, targeting energy efficiency and jobs to low-income communities
• $250 million for Choice Neighborhoods, so people can live in a community connected to true opportunity
• $400 million to open new supermarkets and farmers markets in underserved communities
• $600 million for summer youth jobs
• 210 million for Promise Neighborhoods, to spread the powerful message of the Harlem Children's Zone
• $8.1 billion for nutrition support programs--a $400 million boost from last year
• $9.4 billion to help preserve more than 1 million rental units nationwide
• $4 billion for Race to the Top education grants
• $10.2 billion for early childhood education
• $144 million for prisoner re-entry programs
• $4 billion for Community Development Block Grants--plus another $150 million in competitive grants to spark economic development innovation
• $4 billion in job-training programs for youth, displaced workers and the unemployed
• An 11 percent funding increase in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division
• Three major health bills (SCHIP, tobacco regulation, and stimulus funds for Medicaid, COBRA subsidies, health information technology and the National Institutes of Health) enacted even before comprehensive reform
• Stimulus contained myriad other individual policy victories, not only preventing a far worse depression but also:
• Delivered key new funds for education
• Expanded state energy conservation programs and new transit programs
• Added new smart grid investments
• Funded high-speed Internet broadband programs
• Extended unemployment insurance for up to 99 weeks for the unemployed and modernizing state UI programs to cover more of the unemployed
• Made large new investments in the safety net, from food stamps (SNAP) to affordable housing to child care
• Clean cars victory to take gas mileage requirements to 35mpg
• Protection of 2 million acres of land against oil and gas drilling and other development
• Executive orders protecting labor rights, from project labor agreements to protecting rights of contractor employees on federal jobs
• Stopping pay discrimination through Lilly Ledbetter and Equal Pay laws
• Making it easier for airline and railway workers to unionize, while appointing NLRB and other labor officials who will strengthen freedom to form unions
• Reversing Bush ban on funding overseas family planning clinics
• Passing hate crimes protections for gays and lesbians
• Protecting stem cell research
• Strengthening state authority and restricting federal preemption to protect state consumer, environmental and labor laws
• Financial reforms to protect homeowners and credit card holders
• Bailing out the auto industry and protecting unionized retirees and workers

-Wicked
by Gregory Maguire

THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.

If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem. [... I]f there is any demeaning here, it's coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren't real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.

• Octopod
• Touch DJ
• Paul van Dyk app with details
• Loopy
• Beatmaker
• minisynth
• sonic vox

Labels: DJ gear, iPad

Labels: subtitles

Younger Americans endorse gay marriage at strikingly higher rates than older ones. According to a 2009 study underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts, fifty-eight per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine support gay marriage, compared to twenty-two per cent of Americans sixty-five and older. And the age divide cuts across some ideological lines as well. In a 2008 study, twenty-six per cent of white evangelicals under the age of thirty supported full marriage rights for same-sex couples, while only nine per cent of older evangelicals did.

Labels: gay marriage

a coherent view of society [which] expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand.

The S[atanic] B[ible]'s "Nine Satanic Statements", one of the Church of Satan's central doctrines, is a paraphrase, again unacknowledged, of passages from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

And I'm posting from my phone.