Tidbits

From Daily Kos:

There's a wonderfully cooperative relationship between management and labor right now, much like the historic partnership between oranges and a juicer."
---Stephen Colbert

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First recall petition filed in Wisconson -- double the signatures they needed in half the time they were given!

At roughly 4pm central time today, Wisconsin Democrats formally filed the recall petition against Republican state Senator Dan Kapanke. They ended up filing 30,000 signatures, roughly twice the 15,588 required.

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A government report says more than a fifth of air traffic controllers hired by the Federal Aviation Administration in recent years washed out before finishing their training.

The Department of Transportation's inspector general says in a report posted online Friday that the FAA has been underestimating the number of new hires who didn't finish their training.

Using a different methodology, the inspector general said 22 percent of new controllers who should have completed their training last year didn't. In 2009, 21 percent failed to complete their training, and in 2008 it was 31 percent.

FAA had previously estimated a 9 percent attrition rate for new controllers in 2009.

The agency is struggling to hire 11,000 controllers by 2019 to make up for a wave of retirements.

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According to Ed Schultz, MSNBC: New Jersey has the third highest percentage of millionaire residents in America -- nearly 7 percent of the people that live in New Jersey are millionaires. New Jersey millionaires, how many of them are there? Well, there are 212,000 of them. How many teachers? A hundred and twelve thousand. There are more millionaires in New Jersey than teachers, but we're asking the teachers pay for everything. (Huffington Post)

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ARIZONA CONGRESSMAN TRENT FRANKS (R): President Obama has been the most pro-abortion president in the history of the country. And so his commitment to family is already in serious doubt. But to then say he won’t defend the law that protects marriage itself, it shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. But it just further indicates that he is a left-wing ideologue of the first magnitude, and if we don’t understand that now, then I’m afraid that somehow he may get back in in two years, and I don’t know that the country can survive that.

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Brad Johnson (Think Progress): The Tea Party Congress doesn’t just hate EPA rules that protect against industry destroying our country with greenhouse pollution, mercury, coal ash, and mountaintop removal. By a veto-proof margin, the U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to prohibit Clean Water Act limits on pesticide pollution of lakes, streams, and rivers.

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The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William Arkin, "Top Secret America," July 10, 2010:

Every day,collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

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Julie Creswell, New York Times:

Last year was very lucrative for some of the biggest and best-performing hedge funds’ chiefs. Wealth was so concentrated that a mere 25 people pocketed a total of $22.07 billion, according to this year’s annual ranking by AR Magazine, which tracks the hedge fund industry. At $50,000 a year, it would take the salaries of 441,400 Americans to match that sum.

Hedge fund managers can still have huge paydays even in years when their funds do not perform well. That is because of the millions they earn in fees from charging state pension funds, college endowments and wealthy individuals to manage money. These fees are typically collected regardless of whether the firm has a profit or a loss.

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Top economists at NYU, UC-Berkeley, Paris School of Economics and even the Koch-funded Cato Institute all agree: Richest 400 have more than approximately 155 million Americans combined

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Mike Elk, michaelmoore.com:


Last week, the New York Times reported that, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, General Electric, the largest corporation in the United States, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010 and actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion dollars....After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.