Fire? What wildfire? You wanna go out some time?
This dude knows how to take care of business. During a live KTLA report on blazing wildfires this shirtless guy with a dog, got the job done.
“Wow, you’re super pretty. Wanna go on a date sometime?”
h/t AATTP
Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.
He’s a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he’d been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
“I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.
That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion’s share of the cost of the life-saving surgery – or die. He chose the former.
“A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,” Angstadt said. “I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.
The embattled crack pipe mayor of Toronto was found indulging with another crack pipe and this time, like all the other times, there’s a video tape.
Ford, realizing that he is once again caught with his hands in the cookie jar, admitted himself to rehab.
He released a statement. Here it is:
For Immediate Release
April 30th, 2014
Tonight I want to take some time to speak from my heart to the people of Toronto. It’s not easy to be vulnerable and this is one of the most difficult times in my life. I have a problem with alcohol, and the choices I have made while under the influence. I have struggled with this for some time.
Today, after taking some time to think about my own well-being, how to best serve the people of Toronto and what is in the best interests of my family, I have decided to take a leave from campaigning and from my duties as Mayor to seek immediate help.
I have tried to deal with these issues by myself over the past year. I know that I need professional help and I am now 100% committed to getting myself right.
I love the people of Toronto, I love being your mayor and I hope you will continue to stand by me.
With the support of my family, friends, professionals and the people of Toronto, I will conquer this.
Please keep me and my family in your prayers during these difficult days ahead.
I just want to say to the people of Toronto that I thank you for your ongoing support and encouragement. I cannot tell you enough how much I appreciate it.
Mayor Rob Ford
The admitted crack smoker and heavy drinker has long dodged calls for him to resign or go to drug rehab. He relented Wednesday after a video, shot early Saturday morning, shows him reportedly smoking crack cocaine. An audio clip, recorded secretly Monday night, reportedly catches Ford during a drunken evening out at a bar.
Rob Ford is going to rehab.
A lawyer for the crack-smoking, booze-loving Toronto mayor say he’ll take a leave of absence from the job to seek help for substance abuse.
The announcement came Wednesday as new video of Ford smoking crack as recently as Saturday has emerged via The Globe and Mail newspaper. And an audio clip, reportedly secretly recorded Monday at a suburban Toronto bar, caught the mayor cursing and ranting during a late-night drinking bout,according to the Toronto Sun.
The oft-maligned mayor of Canada’s largest city will suspend his reelection campaign as he gets help to “deal with his issues,” Ford told The Sun on Wednesday evening.
He said he is “ready to take a break.”
Ford has been urged to get help after videos of him smoking crack came out last year. He said he had smoked the drug once in a “drunken stupor” and publicly said he had cut back on his drinking.
But The Sun claims they have an audiotape from Monday of an “unruly” Ford ranting and cursing while ordering booze at a bar in Etobicoke, a Toronto suburb.
He even takes a nasty shot at one of his opponents in the mayoral race, Karen Stintz.
“I’d like to f—— jam her, but she doesn’t want … I can’t talk like this … I’m so sorry,” Ford reportedly says on the recording. “I forgot there’s a woman in the house.”
First it was marriage equality. Now it’s the minimum wage. And prison reform. And some lefty laboratories in cities across the country. It’s not a sharp turn to the left as many had anticipated with Obama’s election in 2008. It’s a wide turn, and the country’s already done the first hand-over-hand on the cultural-political wheel.
If you haven’t seen the Frontline series on American prisons, please go their post-haste and watch what you can. The growth of the prison population in this country is staggering, and is a direct result of the conservative policies that created minimum sentences and the mandated arrests of millions of low-level and non-violent offenders, most of whom were males of color. Pair that with the creation of laws that, in some states, treated 12 year-olds as adults, and the results are explosive. We built prisons, then made sure we filled them up.
That’s changing. Many states, such as Kentucky, are trying to reform and rewrite their legal codes to provide the kind of care that young, at-risk juveniles and older, clearly sick men and women need in order to avoid jail time. One of the stories on the program shows a clearly distressed young women who needs counseling, medication, emotional support and a mentor if she is to thrive as a citizen. Otherwise, she’s going to wind up as a ward of the state and she might commit a violent act against someone. Another story shows a 67 year old addict who’s been released from jail to a halfway house with nothing. No money, no prospects, no clothes other than the sweats on his body. And he’s supposed to get a job? Go on welfare or food stamps (that the GOP wants to cut more)?
And while we were spending all of this money on being punitive, the right wing also told us that we needed to spend less on schools and lower taxes that paid for needed government services. Spending more on prisons and less on schools has had a direct impact on our culture. But as I said, that’s changing.
There are other signs of a wide left turn. Minimum wages are going up in some states. In New Jersey, the people voted to raise the wage over the objections of Governor Christie. Today’s vote to try and raise the national wage ended in a Republican-led filibuster, which will show up in Democratic ads come the fall. The national reactions to comments from Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy shows that, although there are still racists in the United States, they will not be tolerated as they were before. Courts are striking down voter ID laws, most recently in Wisconsin, which is a welcome sign for democracy.
We still have work to do, and there will be setbacks, but slowly and surely, ideas that for years were ridiculed as soft and unworkable are seeing the light of day.
A left turn indeed.
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Pharrell surprised us all when he broke down in tears while speaking to Oprah Winfrey about the global success of ‘Happy’ earlier this month. However, that very well could have been CeeLo Green getting all teary-eyed since the movie soundtrack cut-turned-pop culture phenomenon was originally given to him to record.
The Neptunes producer revealed this gem of news during an interview with Howard Stern on Tuesday (April 29). CeeLo passed on ‘Happy’ before Pharrell made it his. The rest is history.
“The powers that be at the time did not see it fit for him,” he says. “There was a much bigger agenda for him, he had an album to put out. He wanted to do it but some folks on his team just felt the priority should have been on his album at the time.”
Though CeeLo didn’t record that track, he had a similar chart-topping reign with his smash hit ‘F— You,’ often censored as ‘Forget You.’ The track was inescapable in 2010, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. ‘Happy’ currently reigns at No. 1.
Another interesting tidbit is the story behind the Pharrell-produced songs on Justin Timberlake’s ‘Justified’ LP. He originally offered those songs to the late Michael Jackson before the King of Pop’s team turned them down. Jackson was still a fan of his work, however.
“Later he sang me all those songs and told me they should have been his and I told him they were for him,” Pharrell says.
Read More: Pharrell Reveals CeeLo Green Originally Passed on ‘Happy’
The Pit bull that mauled a four year old boy back in January, biting and holding on to the boy’s face for several minutes has been sentenced to life behind bars, a Phoenix judge has ruled.
Mickey, a brown-spotted white pit bull who belonged to the boy’s babysitter at the time of the attack, will instead live out his days neutered and defanged in a no-kill animal shelter.
According to the Dodo, the attack occurred when the boy ventured into the sitter’s backyard where Mickey was chained. The dog locked onto the boy’s face for several minutes; the boy required extensive surgeries, but is recovering.
Both the boy’s family and Mickey’s owners were willing to have the dog euthanized, but doctors convinced the judge that “there are a lot of adults responsible” for Mickey’s behavior: Being chained, outside, unneutered, in Phoenix was a recipe for aggression, she concluded, handing down a life sentence instead of destruction.
The assistant Maricopa County manager agreed, telling the Arizona Republic:
If we all, as pet owners, take the time to think about our lifestyle and the type of breed we’re attempting to acquire, then euthanasia will not be a problem for (dogs with) aggression. It’s simply uneducated or uninformed selections of dogs that cause these animals to find themselves in a situation where they … hurt someone.
In an ironic twist, Mickey will serve out his term in a shelter run by controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who will presumably treat the dog better than he treats his human inmates.
(Getty Images)
From 2011 to 2012, the number of New Yorkers who were at or near poverty levels remained constant at 46%. According to a new report [PDF] released by the City’s Center for Economic Opportunity andobtained by the Times, “nearly half of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a figure that describes people who are struggling to get by.”
Being gainfully employed does not necessarily keep you from “struggling to get by”: 17% of families with a full time worker remained in poverty, as did 5.2% of families with two full time workers.
The poverty rate has stopped growing since the recession, but this belies the reality of a city that isimpossibly expensive to live in and has only seen an increase in low-wage jobs with no benefits.
Mayor de Blasio’s first deputy mayor Anthony Shorris says that the new administration “got elected almost entirely on this question,” and vowed to fight “this stubborn undercurrent” with paid sick leave, a living wage law, municipal ID cards, and universal pre-K.
New York’s reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:
The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit.
Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.
Following reports that Donald Sterling will be forced sell his team, Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen and Larry Ellison are considering banding together to buy the Los Angeles Clippers.
Music mogul Geffen told ESPN that he and Ellison (who founded Oracle) would run the Clippers but Winfrey would invest in it.
“Oprah is not interested in running the team,” Geffen told ESPN. “She thinks it would be a great thing for an important black American to own [another] franchise.” An Oprah spokesperson confirmed the report to ESPN, while NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that he’d “always like to see [the league] become more diverse.”
The Game and T.I. were in a super-tense standoff with LAPD after a VIOLENT fight at an L.A. club early Wednesday morning.
A group of guys — who we’re told are “mutual acquaintances” of both Game and T.I. — were denied entrance at Supperclub. The guys began arguing furiously with security when one member of the posse threw a punch at a security guy. You hear the punch at the beginning of the fight video.
Security for the club then descended on 2 members of the posse, beating them to a bloody pulp … at one point kicking one of them in the face while he was down.
LAPD cops were present during part of the fight … as were off-duty officers who were working at the club.
That’s when an angry T.I. and Game stormed out of the club … mistakenly believing COPS beat their guys up. They got into it big time with the LAPD and that’s when the standoff begins.
You gotta watch the standoff … it is intense and on the edge of erupting into violence.
The 2 injured men were taken to LAPD’s Hollywood division but no one wanted to file charges so they left.
You hear people screaming “Bloods” and “Crips” in the video … but we don’t know if this was gang related. But it was definitely bad.
Read more: TMZ
Citizens United, that infamous decision by the US Supreme Court that allows unlimited secret campaign contributions through SuperPacs, could be seeing it’s end days if Senate Democrats get their way.
Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), plans to introduce a constitutional amendment tackling the decision later this year.
“The Supreme Court is trying to take this country back to the days of the robber barons, allowing dark money to flood our elections. That needs to stop, and it needs to stop now,” said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer.
“The only way to undo the damage the court has done is to pass Senator Udall’s amendment to the Constitution, and Senate Democrats are going to try to do that,” he said.
Schumer said the vote would take place by year’s end and called on Republican colleagues to join Democrats to ensure “the wealthy can’t drown out middle-class voices in our Democracy.”
Hawaii, led by a Democrat is doing the right thing for that people, and is following the president’s recommendations to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. The bill is expected to be signed into law on Wednesday.
Hawaii is the third state to pass a wage at that level this year, following Connecticut and Maryland.
Under Hawaii’s legislation, which passed both the state’s Senate and House of Representatives in almost unanimous votes on Tuesday, increased wages would be phased in and reach the new rate by January 2018.
