Foodstamp Record - participation in January hit an all time record 44,187,831 according to the USDA - 44 MILLION! -

Foodstamp Record - participation in January hit an all time record 44,187,831 according to the USDA - 44 MILLION! - 

As some Americans managed to find part-time and temporary jobs in March, some other Americans dropped below the poverty level threshold. 105 thousand in one month to be precise. The total foodstamp participation in January hit an all time record 44,187,831 according to the USDA. But fear not, here's the bullish spin... sorry, there is no way to spin this.



Read more - http://www.zerohedge.com/article/america-celebrates-positive-nfp-surprise-and-wealth-effect-anoher-record-foodstamp-usage

Safe and hound: Tsunami dog found alive and well in Japan after THREE WEEKS adrift at sea on a floating house -

Safe and hound: Tsunami dog found alive and well in Japan after THREE WEEKS adrift at sea on a floating house -



It appears almost too good to be true, but this little dog has been found alive and well adrift at sea, an astonishing three weeks after the tsunami that devastated Japan.
Members of the Japan Coast Guard came across the dog on Friday as they were conducting an aerial search of the area.
Against all the odds, the dog appears to have survived by living in a partially submerged house that had been swept out to sea.

Local television showed showed pictures of the dog scampering around the roof of the house before it disappeared inside through a hole in the roof.

Rescuers had hoped to find more tsunami survivors living inside the house but after tearing the roof open, it was found to be empty apart from the dog.
Despite its three weeks at sea, the medium-sized brown dog seemed to be in reasonably good condition considering its ordeal.

The discovery of the dog is a rare glimmer of hope in Japan where thousands of people are believed to have perished in the disaster.
The nation is now gripped by the ongoing nuclear threat posed by the unstable Fukushima plant as workers continue to battle to restore vital cooling systems damaged by the quake.





Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1372506/Safe-hound-Dog-alive-Japan-THREE-WEEKS-tsunami.html#ixzz1IIuJvicU

Texas Cops Ticket Thousands of Schoolchildren to Raise Revenue, Some as Young as 6-Yrs-Old -

Texas Cops Ticket Thousands of Schoolchildren to Raise Revenue, Some as Young as 6-Yrs-Old - 


This is how low your government will go. Cops in Texas have been writing thousands of tickets to schoolchildren for $250-$500 each for the "crime" of "misbehaving in school" so the government can raise revenue. This has been going on now for over five years.

The Texax Tribune reports:

With the rise of get-tough juvenile crime policies across Texas, the municipal courthouse has become the new principal’s office for thousands of students who get in fights, curse their teachers or are generally “disorderly” on school campuses — even in elementary schools, according to data collected from school systems by Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focusing on social and economic justice.

Dallas ISD’s police department, for instance, issued criminal citations to 92 10-year-olds in the 2006-07 school year, the latest year for which such data is available. Alief ISD’s officers issued 163 tickets to elementary school students in 2007. And “several districts ticketed a 6-year-old at least once in the last five years,” according to a recent presentation to the state Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee by Texas Appleseed. Such tickets, often given for “disorderly conduct” or “classroom disruption,” typically are handled in municipal courts or by county justices of the peace and can have fines of between $250 to $500, police and court officials say, though some courts route many students into community service in lieu of fines. [...]

Last school year, police in Houston ISD, with an enrollment of about 200,000, wrote 5,763 tickets to students, its department reported to the Tribune. The number of tickets in Houston has ranged between 4,000 and 6,000 since 2005, according to district data. Dallas ISD, with about 150,000 students, wrote nearly about 4,400 tickets in 2006-07, according to data the district reported to Texas Appleseed. (Dallas ISD officials said they could not immediately provide more updated data.) Officers in Austin ISD, with enrollment of more than 80,000, wrote 2,364 tickets in the 2007-08 school year, according to the organization’s data, a decline from a peak of more than 3,000 in 2005-06.

This is your pathetic parasite government at work.


Read more - http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=34820

A List Of 28 Things That Will Make You Realise That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With This Country -

A List Of 28 Things That Will Make You Realise That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With This Country - 


What in the world is happening to America?  Perhaps you have asked yourself that question from time to time.  Today it seems like everything is falling apart.  Our economy is crumbling, our politicians are incompetent, we have just gotten involved in another war, corruption is everywhere and the Americans people are so addicted to entertainment that hardly anything can wake them from their stupor.  It is enough to make you think that there is just not much hope for America.  But the truth is that we should never give up.  It is when the times are darkest that the greatest heroes arise.  We truly do live in challenging times, but that just means that there are great victories to be won and great stories to be written.  There may be a whole lot of things that are very wrong with America right now, but that doesn’t mean that the game is over quite yet.
Unfortunately, right now most Americans are completely asleep.  Just like during the declining years of the Roman Empire, most people that live in the U.S. are spoiled, decadent and completely addicted to entertainment.
The following is how many Americans actually plan their weeks….
Monday: Watch Dancing With The Stars
Tuesday: Watch The Dancing With The Stars Results Show
Wednesday: Watch American Idol
Thursday: Watch The American Idol Results Show
At this point, most people in this country cannot even intelligently discuss the pressing issues of our day.
In fact, 63 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot find Iraq on a map and 90 percent of Americans in that same age group cannot find Afghanistan on a map.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
America is in sorry shape and it desperately needs some heroes.
The following is a list of 28 things that will make you really think that there is something seriously wrong with this country….
#1 According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 25 percent of U.S. households now have zero net worth or negative net worth.  Back in 2007, that number was just 18.6 percent.
#2 According to the Pentagon, the cost of the first week of attacks on Libya was 600 million dollars.
#3 The major food producers are shrinking the sizes of their packages so that they won’t have to raise prices.  The New York Times recently did a story about one woman who was absolutely shocked when she started keeping track of shrinking package sizes at her local supermarket….

Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said.

#4 It is being projected that for the first time ever, the OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year.  Their biggest customer is the United States.
#5 According to a recent census report, 13% of all the homes in the United States are sitting empty.
#6 20 percent of all the electricity in the United States is produced by nuclear power plants.  Many of those plants are very similar to the damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan.
#7 Barack Obama promised us that radiation from the nuclear disaster in Japan would not be a problem in the United States, but already it has shown up in milk in Spokane, Washington.
#8 Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently said the following….

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when.”

Of course the Federal Reserve system was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in perpetual debt so actually he should be blaming himself and his friends over at the Fed.
#9 China produced 19.8 percent of all the goods consumed in the world last year.  The United States only produced 19.4 percent.#10 Back in 2005 at the peak of the housing bubble, the median property tax on a home in the United States was $1614.  Today, even though home values have sunk like a rock, that figure has risen to $1917.
#11 In New Jersey, home owners pay an average of $7576 in property taxes every single year.
#12 According to the Federal Reserve, the adjusted monetary base has nearly tripledsince mid-2008.
#13 Thanks for all the money printing Bernanke – according to one unofficial estimate, the U.S. in on track to have an 8.3 percent rate of inflation for the year.
#14 According to a recent article posted on the website of the American Institute of Economic Research, the purchasing power of a U.S. dollar declined from $1.00 in 1913 to 4.6 cents in 2009.
#15 The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from South Dakota to Texas, it is the largest underground supply of fresh water in the world, and it is rapidly running dry.  So how is “America’s breadbasket” going to continue to produce massive amounts of food for the rest of the world once that happens?
#16 The number of homes that were actually repossessed reached the 1 million mark for the first time ever during 2010.
#17 The U.S. industrial base has disintegrated so badly that we could literally export our entire manufacturing output and still not balance our trade with the rest of the globe.
#18 Goldman Sachs almost always wins.  According to a recent regulatory filing, Goldman Sachs lost money on just 25 days in 2010 and on only 19 days in 2009.
#19 In 1994, the top 1 percent of all income earners paid 25 percent of all state taxes in New York.  Today, the top 1 percent of all income earners pay 41 percent of all state taxes in New York.
#20 The National Institutes of Health has spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#21 According to an absolutely stunning recent poll, 40 percent of all U.S. doctors plan to leave the profession at some point during the next three years because of Obamacare.
#22 If the new health care law is so great, then why is the Obama administration allowing so many organizations to opt out of it?  According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 1,000 organizationshave received Obamacare waivers so far.
#23 Large American cattle farms actually feed chicken manure to cattlebecause it is so cheap and because we produce way too much of it to properly dispose of as fertilizer.
#24 Every single year, Americans spend approximately 7.6 billion hourspreparing their taxes.
#25 The IMF says that in order to fix the U.S. government budget deficit, taxes need to be doubled on every single U.S. citizen.
#26 Mandatory federal spending is going to surpass total federal revenue for the first time ever in this fiscal year.  That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.
#27 Today, the U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981.
#28 According to the National Inflation Association, when you factor in the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government, total federal debt obligations now come to a grand total of 76 trillion dollars.


Read more - http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/a-list-of-28-things-that-will-make-you-think-that-there-is-something-seriously-wrong-with-this-country