Unemployment is at a 26-year high, delinquent mortgages are at the highest rate in four decades, and Wall Street has bipolar disorder.
Never mind. Lottery ticket sales are up, according to state gaming officials.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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DC Judge Roy L. Pearson, Jr. sued a local dry cleaner for $54 million over a lost pair of pants. The grounds for his claim: the family-run business had a sign that read “Satisfaction Guaranteed;” he said that was false advertising. His claim was denied. So was his appeal of the decision.
The lawsuits may have cost Mr. Pearson re-appointment as a District of Columbia Administrative Law Judge. A lack of judicial temperament was cited in the decision not to re-appoint him to a second ten-year term.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Pearson sued over this decision in U.S. District Court, a wrongful termination suit. He lost.
Now Mr. Pearson is taking his wrongful termination case to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
July 1, 1935 – August 12, 2009
August 27, 1950 – August 6, 2009
November 15, 1941 – August 15, 2009
October 23, 1940 – August 26, 2009
August 4, 1940 — August 20, 2009
June 9, 1915 — August 13, 2009
October 5, 1933 – August 2, 2009
August 15, 1933 – August 7, 2009
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
The Colors of Life, a juried photography exhibition by members of Washington’s Exposure Group African American Photographers Association, runs through Friday, September 4, 2009, at the Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives (1201 17th Street, NW). There is no charge. Museum hours: Monday – Friday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
See an interview with Exposure Group members Sharon Farmer and George Tolbert here.
A new development: Colors of Life: the book. More on this soon.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
T.R. Reid’s article “Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World” appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post. He makes many interesting points, including this one:
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really “foreign” to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we’re Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we’re Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we’re Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we’re Burundi or Burma: In the world’s poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can’t pay stay sick or die.
The fragmentation of U.S. healthcare creates a “costly bureaucratic mess,” writes Mr. Reid, costly in funds and lives. U.S. healthcare leads the developed world in cost and one uniquely American medical area: medical paupers – 700,000 families bankrupted by medical bills, and counting.
Note: T.R. Reid’s book The Healing of America was published today.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
Tom Ridge, first Secretary of Homeland Security, says the G.W. Bush administration pressured him to raise the public terrorism Threat Level before the 2004 elections and for other politically-motivated reasons, when objective measures indicated no increased threats. He refused. His book detailing the charges comes out soon.
Frenchman Sylvain Quimene (aka “Gunther Love”) won the 2009 Air Guitar World Championship in Oulu, Finland yesterday. Clad in a skin-tight gold leotard, his imaginary instrumental antics impressed judges, who awarded him a decisive 35.1 points on the tough International Air Guitar Scale. Last year’s World Champ, American Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier, and 2009 U.S. titleholder Andrew “William Ocean” Litz shared second place with 34.8 points. Other competitors hailed from Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Great Britain, Brazil, New Zealand, France, Taiwan, Switzerland, Romania, Australia, Russia, Belgium and Canada.
Here is a video of Monsieur Quimene nailing the French Air Guitar championship back in June:
John Ensign, U.S. Senator from Nevada (“The Whores & Gambling State”) washed up on the shores of Lake Tahoe this week. The Republican, who has confessed to a long affair where he slept with His Neighbor’s Wife (an employee and the wife of an employee), opined that he was better than former President Bill Clinton, who only got a quickie with an intern.
This month’s Washington, DC Blogger Meetup is today (Wednesday, August 19, 2009) at 7 PM at an Adams Morgan watering hole. RSVP by 4 PM (requires free Meetup registration).
Founded in 2002, this Meetup provides opportunities for Metro DC area blog writers and readers to share experiences and tips, drink beer, socialize, drink beer, and plan collaborative blogging projects and other events. Did we mention that beer is available?
Spend a couple of hours with other DC bloggers this evening.
UPDATE:
Miss the meeting? Read the blogs of some of the folks who were there:
Dumb Things I Have Done Lately
Tao of the Original Tracy Tran
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
Four protesters were arrested outside the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley campus Monday while calling for the dismissal of John Yoo. Mr. Yoo, a tenured professor of law at UC Berkeley, was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General under G.W. Bush whose memoranda justified waterboarding and other actions considered torture under U.S. and international law.
Mr. Yoo returned to Berkeley yesterday from low-profile stints at a DC think tank and an obscure institution in Orange County where no one reads newspapers.
Okay, we really don’t know what happened to the arrested protesters; there’s nothing in the newspapers about that. It’s just like they … disappeared ….
Image of Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater from FireJohnYoo.org
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