Pop star concerned about climate change after hopping off is private helicopter

Will.i.am arrives for climate change conference in his private helicopter shown above.

His words:

'Climate change should be the thing that we are all worried and concerned about as humans on this planet, how we affect the planet, our consumption, and how we treat the place that we live in.'

LINK:  climate hypocrite

Los Angeles bans plastic bags

...Yeah, that will solve all of L.A.'s problems. 
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From the Los Angeles Times:


Los Angeles became the largest city in the nation Wednesday to approve a ban on plastic bags at supermarket checkout lines, handing a major victory to clean-water advocates who sought to reduce the amount of trash clogging landfills, the region’s waterways and the ocean.

Egged on by actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and an array of environmental groups, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to phase out plastic bags over the next 12 months at an estimated 7,500 stores. Councilman Bernard Parks cast the lone no vote.



LINK:  plastic bag ban in L.A.

Democrats to introduce a "pay equity bill" three years after Obama signed one

Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski just announced that Democrats will be bringing up a pay equity bill after Memorial Day, sometime in June. The thing is, Congress already passed pay equity legislation, and President Obama signed that bill into law--the Lilly Ledbetter Act--in January 2009.

"We passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- the first bill I signed -- so that equal pay for equal work is a reality all across this country," President Obama said in June 2009, taking political points for this legislative act. In December of last year, Obama said something similar: "Change is the very first bill I signed, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which says in this country an equal day's work gets an equal day's pay. That's change."

So if a bill that supposedly ensures pay equity is already on the books, why are Senate Democrats intent on pushing for another one?

Dems are still fundraising over their support for the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Obama signed in January 2009—and which he said at the time leveled the playing field," a senior Republican Senate aide tells me.


Barbara "the redundant" Mikulski (D-MD)

LINK:  fundraising overkill

The Power of Cool--excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson's opinion article

Network news anchors anguished over whether George W. Bush had tried coke while thousands of African-Americans languished in jail for doing the same — but they snored when Barack Obama boasted that he had done that and much more. Push down a gay student fifty years ago as a teen, and if you are straitlaced Mitt Romney then you always were a homophobe; push away a little girl decades ago, and if you are Barack Hussein Obama, then you were struggling with identity and coming of age.

In short, millions of well-off Americans, from the entering college student to the full professor of law, from the billionaire thief to the president of the United States himself, endlessly chase cool.

And why would they not? Cool is now America’s holy grail that allows the elite and the rich not just to pursue and enjoy nice things, but to damn others who do the same.

LINK:  chasing cool

 

A day at Disneyland just got pricier

Disneyland has raised its ticket prices as much as 30 percent.

The cost of a single-day pass for either Disneyland or its neighboring California Adventure Park jumped this weekend from $80 to $87, a rise of nearly 9 percent.

The cost of a year-round pass for people outside of Southern California now runs $649 -- a 30 percent hike. SoCal resident annual tickets are discounted and currently cost $329.

Disneyland has boosted prices every summer in recent years, the Orange County Register reported. It now costs $21 more to visit the park for a single day than it did just four years ago.



LINK:  Visiting Mickey will cost you

Female pilot tosses man off plane for his sexist comments

A Brazilian airline says one of its female pilots tossed a passenger off a flight because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes.

Trip Airlines says in a Tuesday statement the pilot ejected the man before takeoff as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman. The jet continued on to the state of Goias after a one-hour delay.


Not the actual female pilot in the story, but
this one has some cool sunglasses


LINK:  woman pilot tosses mouthy man off plane

Where's the recovery?

Harvey Golub writing in the WSJ:

So what went wrong? All the available Keynesian levers for achieving economic growth have been pulled, yet the recovery is one of the weakest since World War II. The problem lies with the way the "stimulus" was carried out, the uncertainty of looming higher taxes, and the antibusiness rhetoric and regulatory strong-arming of this administration.

First, exactly how weak has this recovery been? The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis tracks economic performance for each recovery and compares gross-domestic-product growth and job growth, the two most important indicators of economic performance. Over the past 60 years, there have been 11 recessions and 11 recoveries.

Sadly, this recovery is near the bottom of all 11. Cumulative nonfarm job growth is just 1.9% 34 months into recovery, the ninth-worst performance and well below the average job growth of 6.5%. Cumulative GDP growth is just 6.8% 11 quarters into this recovery, less than half the average (15.2%) and the worst of all 11.


LINK:  our pathetic recovery

Pakistani doctor sentenced to 33 years for helping CIA

The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA in its hunt for Osama bin Laden was sentenced Wednesday to 33 years in prison for treason in a ruling by tribal agency authorities in northwestern Pakistan, officials there said.

Shakil Afridi, a government surgeon in the semi-autonomous Khyber Agency in Pakistan’s northwest, was detained by Pakistani intelligence officials following the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden.

LINK:  hero sentenced to 33 years.

"Uncommitted" takes 42% of the vote in Kentucky Democratic primary

President Barack Obama continued to have trouble on Tuesday performing in Democratic primaries in traditionally conservative states, barely eking out wins in Kentucky and Arkansas.

The president didn’t even have an opponent in Kentucky, but with 99 percent of the vote counted, Obama took just 57.9 percent of the vote, with the remaining more than 42 percent of ballots cast for “uncommitted.”

LINK:  hold off on the coronation for now