LEAD STORY: Boston Globe: Bangor Volunteers Demonstrate the Ideal Way to Honor Memorial Day
Thank you to all of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Thank you to all of those who have served our country. Thank you to those who are serving our country today. Thank you to your families who sacrifice every day on your behalfs. And thank you to the wonderful volunteers of Bangor, Maine, who share our appreciation with each and every soldier who sets foot there. ‘Bulo, for one, resolves to do more to thank all those who don the uniform during the year ahead.
Washington Post: The National Guard & Re-Employment-the Saga of An American Teacher/Soldier
Craig Davenport’s brilliant profile on what awaits a National Guardsman–when he returns home looking for a job.
New York Times: Guantanamo-How Rethugs Turn Everything Into a Wedge Issue
And how the D’s let them do it:
Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.
Talk radio and cable news hosts warned viewers that dangerous terrorists might end up in a neighborhood jail, with Sean Hannity of Fox News even broadcasting an online video from House Republican leaders that juxtaposed the security of the detainee camps with images of the twin towers in flames. And from California and Virginia to the small town of Hardin, Mont., Democratic lawmakers began fending off questions about whether they would admit terrorism suspects into their own communities.
Memo to Obama and the pantywaists in Congress: The Rethugs are never gonna change. So, come up with a plan relocating the detainees into red states, especially Kentucky, force it through an a party line vote, and bleep ’em.
Philadelphia Inquirer: How and Why a Downingtown Printing Plant Died–and the Hopes that Died With It
Jane Von Bergen recounts how every plant closing is different, how the factors causing the closings are disparate and sometimes seemingly coincidental, yet how the people suffering are wrapped up in the same nightmare. While this is about one plant, it could be about every plant, and the longstanding worlds within them suddenly being stilled:
Now, after 31 years, (Sam) Smiley has no work, and neither do the majority of the other 150 people laid off from the plant earlier this spring. On a beautiful March day, they turned in their employee badges, some gathering at Chelsy’s Tavern in Downingtown for one last round with friends.
There they were, another set of statistics, joining the 13.7 million other Americans who are unemployed and the 456,000 who lost jobs in manufacturing in March.
But why them?
The complex stew of decisions that led to their joblessness in March involves New Zealand’s richest man, the skyrocketing price of oil, the credit freeze, a botched integration of businesses under their roof, a mothballed printer, and a revolving cast of consultants and managers, evidence of an inconsistent focus on the plant’s printing business by a series of owners who saw it as an adjunct.
“The only reason we were closed is that nobody wanted us,” said Kenneth “Mike” Phillips, who worked there since 1982.
Yep, 150 people who were just pawns in a game of merger-and-acquisition that passes for capitalism in 21st Century America.
London Times: Half of House of Commons MP’s To Be Swept Away By Scandal
Could this ever happen in D. C., and wouldn’t it be cool if it could?
AT least half of the House of Commons’ 646 MPs will be swept away at the general election, as voters take revenge on the political classes for the expenses scandal.
The departure of 325 members of parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of parliament since 1945.
As many as 30 will be forced to resign directly because of the expenses scandal, while whips expect more than 200 to quit because they are unable to cope with continued public anger. Up to 90 MPs will be voted out in the election.
Research conducted by The Sunday Times and Professor Colin Rallings, director of the elections centre at Plymouth University, suggests that about 170 Labour MPs will not defend their seats while 55 Conservatives are also expected to retire.
AT least half of the House of Commons’ 646 MPs will be swept away at the general election, as voters take revenge on the political classes for the expenses scandal.
The departure of 325 members of parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of parliament since 1945.
As many as 30 will be forced to resign directly because of the expenses scandal, while whips expect more than 200 to quit because they are unable to cope with continued public anger. Up to 90 MPs will be voted out in the election.
Research conducted by The Sunday Times and Professor Colin Rallings, director of the elections centre at Plymouth University, suggests that about 170 Labour MPs will not defend their seats while 55 Conservatives are also expected to retire.
The scope of the corruption is epidemic, with MP’s from all the major parties having been caught using their generous taxpayer-funded ‘allowances’ for all sorts of personal luxuries.
Maybe, just maybe, inspired by their across-the-pond counterparts, America’s highest-paid stenographers will rouse themselves from institutional self-pity to demonstrate why the American media deserves to survive. After all, does anyone think that this type of corruption doesn’t run rampant through the Halls of Congress? Or is it just considered less corrupt if bankers, war profiteers, and Big Oil are footing the bill for the freeloaders in the People’s Congress?
Or is it just too much bother to even go through the motions anymore?
McClatchy Papers: Speaking of Congressional Corruption and Kentucky…
You will not believe this one. How about getting the Feds to build an airport in your hometown and then leaning heavily on carriers to service the remote location against their will to keep the airport from having no planes fly into it?
If you are Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Kentucky), if you are the senior Rethug on the House Appropriations Committee, and if you live in the cozy hamlet of Somerset, KY, it’s simple to just stick the taxpayers with the bill. Here are the dirty details by the one journalistic outlet to out the John Murthas and Sen. Stevens’ of this world:
WASHINGTON — Lake Cumberland Regional Airport’s new $3 million, federally funded commercial terminal sat virtually empty for three years while renovations were completed and local officials struggled to persuade a carrier to provide service to rural Somerset, Ky., population about 12,000.
Next month, that long-awaited carrier, Locair, which now makes four 45-minute round-trip flights to Nashville, Tenn., each week, will add service from Somerset to Washington Dulles International Airport on Monday mornings and Friday evenings — the same days and times that government officials and companies with government contracts tend to travel to and from Washington.
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Locair offers discounted fares starting at $39 on its nine-seat planes, and passengers initially will pay less than $200 per ticket thanks to a $1 million taxpayer-subsidized grant. Taxpayers could pay more than $2,000 per flight.
Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, which allocates funds for the grant program, said that Locair’s new service to his hometown is part of an important drive to spur development and tourism in southern and eastern Kentucky.
Other members of Congress have come under fire for using their influence to renovate near-empty airports in rural sections of their district.
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who also sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has helped channel $150 million in federal funds to an airport in Johnstown that locals have dubbed “Fort Murtha.” Murtha considers the airport critical to plans to transform the area into a military nerve center.
Like the planned commercial flights from Somerset to Washington, the Johnstown airport is utilized largely by small commuter craft that fly back and forth to Dulles.
The air service industry is second only to the mining industry in contributions to Rogers’ campaigns.
McClatchy Papers, this time through the time-consuming, but essential, investigative reporting of Halimah Abdullah, is doing what any self-respecting ‘news’paper should do.
Serious readers who want to know what’s going on out of the spotlight need to read this one enduring beacon of what used to be American journalism. Every day.
And, while you’re there, please read the single best analysis of Cheney’s speech last week on torture. Fact-checking sure beats ‘he said/she said’ stenography.
That’s it for this week. Please take time to remember and honor those who paid the ultimate price to keep us free this Memorial Day.