The Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) has released a report entitled "Kids in Danger Zones," finding that one in three American schoolchildren now go to school "within the vulnerability zone of a hazardous chemical facility." Lucky for us the West, Texas chemical facility explosion that destroyed (among other things!) three schools in April of 2013 happened at night. I'd say the list of solutions might start with disclosure, but you know how Republicans feel about disclosure, so we might die on that hill if that's the only hill we defend.
Tom Engelhardt writes an essay about American intelligence services enticingly entitled "Failure is Success." Right-wingers who defend our obsession with an intelligence community that doesn't prevent (or even anticipate) actual threats to our security ought to ask themselves whether we're actually funding the kind of failure that might one day lead to success, or the kind of failure that only leads to certain cronies lining their pockets.
The Washington Post finds some evidence that President Obama's reluctance to issue Executive Orders on immigration before the election is actually hurting Democratic electoral chances in 2014, by strongly motivating Hispanic voters to sit out the election. Which anyone could have figured out, except, apparently, the Constitutional law professor in the Oval Office who has had six years to learn that courage fires up voters and who has also done a terrible job reminding voters where his authority for Executive Orders comes from (i.e., from Congress).
Finally, dig this utterly moronic statement, coming from a Hill article describing House Speaker John Boehner's efforts to get former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to run for President in 2016: "the two men are aligned politically, hailing from the same centrist strand of the GOP." What conceivable "centrist strand" is that? All Jeb Bush learned in politics is how to dress up reactionary policies in a patina of "compassion," while John Boehner never deviates from the agenda of his corporate paymasters and never takes a position that would cause the far-right to have a tantrum. The "liberal" media needs to stop enabling right-wingers who want to move the center ever further right.
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