Blondannas's Blog

Sequestration Poll Shows That Nearly 4 In 10 Americans Impacted By Cuts

	WORLD Britain Scrambles Fighter Jets To Escort Pakistani Plane
	CRIME Bridge Collapses In Washington State
	MEDIA WATCH: Maddow Excoriates Alex Jones
	POLITICS Eric Holder Personally Approved Controversial Fox News Warrant
	TED WEEKENDS WATCH: Revealing A Heartbreaking Secret On The TED Stage

BLOG POSTS

	Marlo Thomas: Honoring America’s Women in the Military When I was a child, the only women you were likely to encounter on the front lines of America’s military didn’t wear uniforms. Instead, they wore high heels, hose and sequins. That’s because these women — such as Lucille Ball, Lena Horne and the Rockettes — were not among our soldiers but, instead, part of the U.S.O.
	Adam Levin: 5 Ways Student Loans Hurt Middle-Class Kids Why should middle-class students pay more for loans than is absolutely necessary, all the while padding the government’s coffers and enabling state universities to build facilities that the students will only get to use for four years?
	Arianna Huffington: Huffington This Week: Stressless Summer In this week’s special summer issue, we’re putting the spotlight on all the season’s diverse offerings, with an emphasis on ways to enjoy the summer with less stress — from guides to the best of entertainment, culture and lifestyle to tips and new twists on how to make the most of beloved summer pastimes.
	Michelangelo Signorile: The Boy Scouts: Demonizing Gay Men, Empowering Bashers on the Streets Continuing to ban lesbian den mothers and gay scoutmasters is sending a horrible message to American youth, including the scouts, gay and straight. The Boy Scouts of America made this change to take some of the heat off, and no matter what equality advocates hope for, that will happen.
	Brian Levin, J.D.: ‘Godfather of Hate’ Inspired Both UK Jihadist Killer and US Radicals Omar Bakri Mohammed, 54, who has harnessed a dangerous sliver of American and British youth to religious terror and extremism is a notorious English-speaking hate cleric who for almost two decades, while on public assistance, fomented radicalism in the United Kingdom.

ON TWITTER
Amanda Bynes Arrested & Taken For Psychiatric Evaluation
Eton Exam Asks 13-Year-Old Boys To Justify Shooting Protesters
Awful Discovery At Publix

ON FACEBOOK
What It’s Like To Talk To A 2-Year-Old
Amanda Bynes Arrested & Taken For Psychiatric Evaluation
Pope Francis Says All Who Do Good Are Redeemed – Atheists Included

Obama To Address Drones, Gitmo In Security Speech

	POLITICS Too-Big-To-Jail Dogs Obama’s Justice Department
	WORLD Brave Woman Stood Down Armed London Attackers
	GAY VOICES Boy Scouts To Vote On Allowing Gay Members
	GREEN A Hard Recovery Predicted For Moore
	TASTE The 20 Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes

BLOG POSTS

	Edward Steers Jr.: 6 Biggest Hoaxes In History Napoleon Bonaparte once famously observed “history is a set of lies agreed upon.” For those who look for the truth, it is often far too easy to believe in fraudulent history and science when they tell us what we want to hear.
	Jared Bernstein: Apple on the Hill: What Can Be Learned From Yesterday’s Hearing Because they can indefinitely shield their foreign profits from U.S. taxes, meanwhile engaging in endless (legal) schemes to avoid taxes in countries where they book those earnings, the link between the profitability of American companies and the well-being of America is broken.
	Joanne Harris: A Letter To My Daughter You see, there are things they never tell you when you become a parent. One is that, from the day you give birth, some part of you will be afraid — always and forever. The other is that, someday, the child you love will love someone else even more than they love you.
	Amitai Etzioni: Obama’s Brief The president is either moping or muttering defensively about the abuses by the IRS and the tragedy of Benghazi. As I see it, if he wakes up tomorrow and is willing to speak up, there are a few things he could fairly state. First, any suggestion that “the IRS” went after the Tea Party are bogus.
	John Dramani Mahama: The Big Push to Defeat HIV & AIDS in Ghana The goal of Universal Access to prevention, treatment care and support and to ensuring zero transmission of HIV in children may appear to be a daunting task. But it is achievable. The driving force for realization of this goal is the mobilization of resources for implementation.

ON TWITTER
Pope Francis Says All Who Do Good Are Redeemed – Atheists Included
Frances Bean Cobain Blasts Kendall Jenner As A ‘F**king Idiot’
Darius Rucker Targeted With Racist Tweet About His Country Music

ON FACEBOOK
Pope Francis Says All Who Do Good Are Redeemed – Atheists Included
WATCH: Jon Stewart Shuts Down Bill O’Reilly
Abercrombie & Fitch: Sorry!

Anthony Weiner Enters 2013 New York Mayoral Race

	CRIME Reports: Man Questioned Over Marathon Bombings Killed By FBI Agent
	GREEN Rescuers Search Rubble For Buried Tornado Survivors
	MEDIA NY Times Eviscerates Obama White House
	POLITICS House Republicans Press On With Slashing Cuts
	ENTERTAINMENT ‘I Felt Violated’: Critics SLAM Ryan Gosling’s New Film

BLOG POSTS

	Hollye Harrington Jacobs: The Oklahoma Tornado: How to Talk to Children About Tragedy and Disaster The important thing to know is that children take their coping cues from us, the trusted adults in their lives. This isn’t to say that we should cover our emotions. Not at all. Rather, we need to model healthy coping mechanisms for our children.
	Jeb Bush: Why We Need Comprehensive Immigration Reform Most Americans agree that coming to the United States legally should be easier and with less cost than coming to the country illegally. Unfortunately, right now, that is not the case.
	Jennifer Rowe Walters: ‘This Will Probably Come to Define Us’ Tornadoes. For me and my fellow Okies, it’s probably one of the first words we hear as children. We play “tornado” with our friends. But this. This is something that no amount of experience, no ingrained, Okie-native understanding of the weather or geography can ever prepare you for.
	Marcus Samuelsson: Is Your Child the Next Great Chef? Children want to mimic adults. They notice when you choose to prepare fresh vegetables over calling in another pizza pie for dinner. They will see that food made with love and care outweighs going through the drive-through window.
	Amitai Etzioni: Obama’s Brief The president is either moping or muttering defensively about the abuses by the IRS and the tragedy of Benghazi. As I see it, if he wakes up tomorrow and is willing to speak up, there are a few things he could fairly state. First, any suggestion that “the IRS” went after the Tea Party are bogus.

ON TWITTER
‘I Felt Violated’: Critics SLAM Ryan Gosling’s New Film
Reports: Man Questioned Over Marathon Bombings Killed By FBI Agent
Blue Ivy Is Too Cute For Words

ON FACEBOOK
White Father Allegedly Suspected Of Kidnapping Biracial Daughters
Wolf Blitzer’s Embarrassing Moment With Tornado Survivor
Reports: Man Questioned Over Marathon Bombings Killed By FBI Agent

Oklahoma Tornado Aftermath: Trail Of Destruction In Moore

	COLLEGE Arianna Huffington’s Commencement Speech On ‘Redefining Success: The Third Metric’
	GREEN WATCH: Tornadoes Rip Through Central U.S.
	POLITICS Oklahoma Senators Face Difficult Options On Disaster Relief
	BUSINESS Jamie Dimon To Remain Chairman, CEO Of JPMorgan
	TV CBS Pulls ‘Mike & Molly’ Tornado-Set Finale

BLOG POSTS

	Lisa Belkin: The Tornado in Oklahoma Is This Parent’s Living Nightmare In my nightmares, I can’t get to my children. The parents of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Oklahoma are living that nightmare.
	Jeanne Bishop: Tragedy and Love in Oklahoma City Two elementary schools had been hit by the level EF4 storm. Children were dead. Parents who flocked to the school were reportedly kept away from the perimeter so that rescuers could hear any voices that might be crying for help. My first thought as I surveyed the rubble was, Why?
	Marlo Thomas: Good News! 12 Inspiring Acts of Random Kindness I am an unrepentant news junkie. If I’m not getting the latest stories online, I ‘m hearing them blaring from the TV in the next room. And have I introduced you to my husband, Phil? He makes me look uninformed. So, between the two of us, we’re practically a 24-hour cable news station.
	Robert Scheer: When Good Sites Sell Out, Who Loses? Shredding privacy is the essence of Tumblr’s appeal to Yahoo, and even though it has said it will retain the social networking site’s founders in key positions, one way or another that very personal data will be mined and inevitably fall into what users will discover to be the wrong hands.
	John R. Talbott: Man-Made Disasters Let us all pray for our fellow Americans suffering in Oklahoma. And let us pray that we are able to differentiate between unavoidable disastrous acts of God and those invented much closer to home that we should have some control over. And let us pray for the children.

ON TWITTER
PHOTOS: Tornado Aftermath Leaves Trail Of Destruction
Oklahoma Senators Face Difficult Options On Disaster Relief
Beloved Children’s Author Dies

ON FACEBOOK
Oklahoma Senators Face Difficult Options On Disaster Relief
PHOTOS: Tornado Aftermath Leaves Trail Of Destruction
This’ll Show Abercrombie & Fitch

Mark Penn All But Out For Potential Hillary Clinton 2016 Run

	TECHNOLOGY Yahoo-Tumblr Deal Is Official: We Promise ‘Not To Screw It Up’
	GREEN Deadly Tornadoes Rip Through Plains, Midwest
	MEDIA How Obama Administration Monitored Fox News Reporter
	BUSINESS Wall Street Beating Families To Houses During Recovery
	TED WEEKENDS WATCH: Learning To Read Someone Else’s Mind

BLOG POSTS

	Richard C. Levin: My Last Baccalaureate Address: Lately It Occurs to Me… We leave together. You leave Yale College after four years; I leave the Yale Presidency after twenty. I find myself thinking about a Grateful Dead song written in 1970, the year I came to Yale as a graduate student. You know the words: “Lately it occurs to me, what a long, strange trip it’s been.” It’s been a long trip, but, for us, more wonderful than strange.
	Creed Bratton: Closing Creed Thoughts Well, that’s that. Tears have been shed. Stories have been finalized and Creed ends up right where he belongs… jail. Sometimes the days were long, sometimes the coffee was odd, but the company was always… hmm, well, odd also.
	Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Obama and Nixon: A Historical Perspective Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration’s IRS affair and Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era IRS scandal.
	Michelangelo Signorile: Equality’s Brutal Backlash: The Murder of Mark Carson and the Rise in Violence Against Gays We sometimes forget that getting laws passed and getting court rulings declared is, comparatively, the easy part. The hate is still out there, however, and the haters are getting more desperate. Our worst enemies right now are complacency and the seductive message that we’ve “arrived.”
	Rebecca Solnit: Too Soon to Tell The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space.

ON TWITTER
Justin Bieber BOOED While Accepting Award
OUCH: Singer Jumps, Lands On Fan’s Neck
How Old Are These Celebrities, Really?

ON FACEBOOK
Justin Bieber BOOED While Accepting Award
Student Expelled, Charged With Felonies For Same-Sex Relationship
This’ll Show Abercrombie & Fitch

Law Passed After 9/11 Gives President Authority To Put U.S. Troops On The Ground Anywhere

	POLITICS ‘Planned Bullyhood’ Author Shakes Up GOP Primary
	POLITICS Report: Republicans Altered Benghazi Emails
	WORLD Bombing Outside Mosque Kills At Least 32 In Iraq
	TV And Your New ‘American Idol’ Is …
	TRAVEL Call of the Wild: 8 Offbeat Places to Connect with Nature

BLOG POSTS

	David Bromwich: Secrecy, Surveillance, and Public Safety Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The abuse of power by the IRS may be, in the long run, the most damaging of these cases for the Obama presidency, but its outlines are only beginning to emerge. But the ugliest of the scandals has come from the revelation of the justice department’s seizure of two months of phone calls by 100 AP reporters. This was done to investigate the leak of a thwarted terrorist plot which the government itself had already decided to disclose in public. Different as they are, the scandals all point to a single disorder that afflicts the Obama White House and the Holder justice department. The name of the disorder is paternalism, and its leading symptoms are suppression and secrecy.
	Sec. Kathleen Sebelius: What’s At Stake if the Health Law Is Repealed Today, for nearly the 40th time since it’s been the law of the land, House Republicans staged yet another repeal vote in their latest attempt to turn back the clock on progress and deny Americans health insurance coverage they can count on.
	Shelley Emling: 4 Social Faux Pas No One Over 50 Should Still Be Making Just because you’ve been getting away with a social gaffe for decades doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop making it. By the time you’re 50, you should know a thing or two — or 25 — about etiquette.
	Michael Zakaras: The Case Against the Case Against Empathy In our efforts to solve difficult social problems in particular, we rely too heavily on reason and numbers and econometrics, and not often enough on empathy. And by empathy I don’t just mean our emotions, and I certainly don’t mean feeling sorry — that’s sympathy.
	Marlo Thomas: The Powerful Message Within Angelina Jolie’s Announcement I was as stunned as everyone else by Angelina Jolie’s revelation on Tuesday that she’d had a double mastectomy to reduce her risk of developing breast cancer. That’s not only because one of the most famous women in the world had managed to keep such a dramatic secret under wraps for so long (although that is pretty amazing).

ON TWITTER
A Biography of Idiocy
Kerry Washington Dated The Kid From ‘Big’
Will Smith, Jaden Smith Get Photobombed

ON FACEBOOK
This’ll Show Abercrombie & Fitch
LOOK: There’s Something Wrong With This Picture
Report: Republicans Altered Benghazi Emails

Obama Speaks Of ‘Going Bulworth’ In Second Term

	CRIME Bombing Suspect Allegedly Left Confession: Report
	SPORTS Beckham Makes Major Announcement
	MEDIA WATCH: Maddow Calls Out Obama
	GREEN Scientists Agree (Again): Climate Change Is Real
	WORLD Suicide Bomber Kills 15, Including 2 U.S. Service Members

BLOG POSTS

	Dean Baker: Cutting Social Security and Not Taxing Wall Street Wall Street excesses brought the economy to the brink of collapse. But now the Wall Street behemoths are bigger than ever and President Obama is looking to cut the Social Security benefits of retirees. That will teach the Wall Street boys to be more responsible in the future.
	John Pavley: Reporting in From Google I/O 2013 Day One Google I/O is to software developers as Burning Man is to free spirits. Like its twin sister, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), it is four days of pep rally, serious questions and answers, press releases, demos, knowledge transfer, and catching up with old and new friends.
	John Glaser: 3 Glaring Hypocrisies in Obama’s Iran Policy Americans need to stop pointing the finger at the "bad guys" Washington is so keen to warn us about, and start paying attention to their own government’s crimes.
	Salma Hayek Pinault: Chime for Change — for Every Girl, Every Woman, Everywhere In the information age, there are no innocent bystanders. We all share in everything that happens. But that means we also have the chance, the ability, and the responsibility, to right what is wrong. We can be defined not just by what we know, but by what we do.
	Sheryl Kraft: Why I Chose To Have A Prophylactic Mastectomy Angelina Jolie was not the only one to choose a prophylactic mastectomy. I did, too — but for different reasons.. (Thank you, Angelina, for making it public. You’ve given me the courage to write about it for the very first time).

ON TWITTER
This’ll Show Abercrombie & Fitch
WATCH: Greenpeace Targets Coke In Shocking New Ad
Kanye RIPS Into Paparazzi At Secret Show

ON FACEBOOK
This’ll Show Abercrombie & Fitch
Gollum Sings ‘Empire State Of Mind’ & It’s Perfect
LOOK: The Worst Twitter Responses To Angelina Jolie’s Preventative Mastectomy