Category: Day to day life

New York Times reported (free registration required) the U.S. Department of Education conducted a research to see if bilingual education benefits non-English speaking children to learn English better. Unfortunately the DOE has refused to publish the findings of the data due to the political sensitivity of the issue.

The study, which has been talked about for years, is still not out. But it is known that the researchers conclude that bilingual education is helpful to those learning English. That conflicts with the views of some powerful Republicans and conservatives who view such programs as useless or downright harmful.

Wait a minute… What data does the politicians have to back up their claims? Why don’t they just leave the researchers alone and publish the data independently? This reminds me of earlier controversies on Bush Science and global climate change and how the Republican (specifically Bush) White House tempers with scientific data to suit its own political agenda. Sounds familiar? Wasn’t the Iraqi War started by such information manipulation?

President Clinton faced impeachment hearings over a personal matter. How come the Democrats are sitting on their asses on the biggest con artist/liar of the American political history?

Bush may be a jackass, but the Democrats are truly cowards. They should really collect their balls strengths and look into impeaching Bush for all his wrong doings (which is clearly harming the country). And this would be the perfect time to do it since his popularity is now at its all time low. But then again, maybe they just want to get things done and not get caught up with all the sensationalism of impeaching the biggest moron of all time.

Here’s another thing, whenever there’s something to do with poor or minorities, the Republican politicians are almost always against it in modern America. How come people still keep voting for them? Does that really reflect the views of Americans as a whole? Or does this mean all those elections have been fixed? It’s f*cked up if the answer to either question is true.

Four days after Katrina left a disastrous trail, Federal aid finally arrived in Louisiana and Mississippi. President Bush took a tour of the area (god knows how much trouble local officials went through to secure THAT trip) and was apparently caught with his pants down when a journalist asked him why the aid arrived so late. To that, he answered, “I am satisfied with the speed of response. But I am not satisfied with the results.” Jack ass comment.

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Kanye West said it best regarding the media coverage:

“I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. See a white family, it says they’re looking for food.”

That comment took Mike Myers, standing right next to him, by surprised a little. But what really shocked Myers was this one-line comment by West:

” George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Leave it to the Republicans to take care of crisis of any kind, man- or nature-caused. The worst crisis of both types took place under the watch of the same Republican White House. The first crisis (911) took this nation to wars despite lack of evidence (and reliable reports planning for the wars even before 911) . The second crisis, Katrina, left thousands of people dead and dying with federal help arriving too little, too late.

I am willing to bet that if exactly the same thing happened to a rich white, Republican neighborhood in Texas or Florida, federal aid would have arrived within hours. Damn it, I am sick of that jack ass in the White House.

Katrina has been a mess on many different levels.

CNN (in the United States at least) has been reporting it nonstop as if there’s no other news in the world, adhering to the true CNN reporting fashion (and American mass media in general). Every single report after another has been about the aftermath and other related news of Katrina and very little of anything else (on BOTH of CNN’s channels). MSNBC and Fox News are not any better.

It’s f*cked up to see how New Orleans is literally under water, which could have been prevented had not been Bush Administration’s budget cut on flood prevention plans for the city. And like Mark said, the gas prices are now in ridiculous levels. Worst yet, some businesses are totally taking advantage of the situation with price gouging practices (six-dollar-a-gallon gas, $200-motel rooms… etc). Jack asses.

Images of people looting, dying (or just plain dead) and being homeless are disturbing (and the mass media is not shy of showing them repeatedly). To think that this level of lawlessness and the disorganization of the rescue efforts can happen in the United States is hard to stomach. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, was on the WWL Radio expressing his frustrations, probably the only politician who’s not afraid to question the slowness of rescue deployment to New Orleans. More and more people are beginning to wonder why rescue has been slow in coming. My humble conspiracy theory tells me that a Republican White House most likely doesn’t really give a rat’s ass to a city where majority of the population is African American.

Coming back to the gas prices, Bloomberg has reported:

Heating oil for September delivery climbed 7.64 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $1.913 a gallon. Futures surged to $2.0137, the highest in 27 years of trading on the exchange. Heating oil is 67 percent higher than a year ago.

The profit margin for turning a barrel of crude oil into heating oil and gasoline is $14.79, based on futures prices in New York. That is up 24 percent from Aug. 26 and more than double a year ago.

Hello? Higher profit margins during the time of disaster and war? By any stretch of imagination in the definition of the word “gouging”, the practice by the oil companies and refineries should easily fit within it.

UPDATE: As I was putting Bryan to bed and about to go to sleep (at 4AM!), I caught a section of a CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien grilling a FEMA official as to why people in New Orleans are dying of hunger and lack of medication several days into the disaster when victims of the Southeast Asian Tsunami received air drops of food within two days of the disaster. Kudos to Soledad for asking tough questions.

My favorite quote from that interview:

Do you look at the situation at New Orleans now and say to yourself, “I am proud of what is being done”? Or do you say to yourself, “There’s a lot of room for improvement here”?

That guy is never speaking to the press ever again.