Excerpts from the April
Harper's Index:
• Percentage of all criminal defendants in the United States who forgo a trial by pleading guilty: 97
• Percentage of U.S. convicts exonerated last year who had previously pleaded guilty without a trial: 17
• Portion of the global expenditure on social-welfare programs that is spent on Europeans: 1/2
•Portion of taxpayer-funded research whose findings are not available to the public for free: 1/2
• Chance an Air Force officer responsible for launching nuclear missiles has been accused of cheating on a proficiency exam: 1 in 5
• Minimum number of child-neglect and -abuse cases filed in Arizona since 2009 that have been closed without investigation: 6,551
• Percentage of divorced low-income men who say they wish they had stayed married: 53
• Of divorced low-income women who do: 19
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—British Envoy on US in Iraq: Thirteen Words Say It All:
"No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."
That was British envoy John Sawers' assessment of the U.S. occupation forces to Tony Blair in May 2003, four days after he arrived in Iraq. Three years ago. The scathing report was loaded into a memo even more scathingly titled "What's Going Wrong," one of a series of leaked documents given to The Guardian, which described the exchanges as peppered with "unusual frankness."
The memos—written in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo op on the USS Lincoln—detail a devastating ineptness and indifference at every level of the occupation.
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Tweet of the Day:
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, the morning's chit-chat topic: Amazon Prime is raising its membership price, though the service has pretty much been a total bust for me, personally.
Greg Dworkin poses the "Snowden Effect" question for the Pulitzers, notes the growing Malaysian airliner mystery, "Americans Stick With Obamacare as Opposition Burns Bright," new research questioning the value of a social media-driven Internet, and the new proposed overtime regs. More on how the overtime pay issue "stuns" the business sector (if you feel you should care), then Joseph Williams' "My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish and Poor."
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.