It was Tuesday, October 1, and the federal government had partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse. The U.S. Census Bureau and Education Department websites were out of commission, leaving the students in [Professor Rachel Slocum's] introductory geography class without access to data for an assignment.
"Hi everyone," she wrote to the 18 students in the online course. "Some of the data gathering assignment will be impossible to complete until the Republican/Tea Party controlled House of Representatives agrees to fund the government."
By lunchtime the next day, Slocum found herself the recipient of a deluge of nasty emails, not from her students but a network of conservative organizations.
Dottie Sandusky, Jerry Sandusky’s wife of 37 years, maintains that her husband is innocent of the charges of child sex abuse that resulted in his imprisonment.[...]
She believes the victims' financial gain was at play.
“I think it was, they were manipulated, and they saw money,’’ she said. “Once lawyers came into the case, they said there was money.”
As part of trade talks, the European Union wants to ban the use of European names like Parmesan, feta and Gorgonzola on cheese made in the United States.
The argument is that the American-made cheeses are shadows of the original European varieties and cut into sales and identity of the European cheeses. The Europeans say Parmesan should only come from Parma, Italy, not those familiar green cylinders that American companies sell. Feta should only be from Greece, even though feta isn’t a place. The EU argues it “is so closely connected to Greece as to be identified as an inherently Greek product.”
One bill would triple the mandatory waiting period for abortion, forcing women to wait 72 hours before proceeding with the legal medical procedure. Another would require the state’s lone abortion clinic to undergo four inspections every year.
But those are hardly the only abortion restrictions up before the legislature. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Missouri has introduced more anti-abortion bills than nearly every other state in the country so far this year.
According to new figures from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), more people rode public transit in 2013 than they have in almost six decades. Americans rode buses, subways, trains, and lightrail 10.7 million times in 2013—the most trips since 1956. Yes, that even beats the $4 gas days of 2008!
The APTA boasts that while driving was up 0.3 percent last year, public transit use grew 1.1 percent.
- On today's Kagro in the Morning show, more on the escalating CIA/Senate war, FL-13 and the Fernghazi freak-out, with both Joan McCarter and Greg Dworkin. Plus the latest polling from WSJ/NBC and Bloomberg.