Monday Toon Roundup 1- GOP

Danziger Toon Today- To Big To Fail

Murder Charges Against Rehab Center a First in California

Source: Fox 40

MURRIETA, Calif. (AP) — A Riverside County grand jury has indicted a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for murder after the death of a man who was seeking help to treat a drinking problem.

Attorneys for A Better Tomorrow say it is the first time in California history that a corporation has been accused of murder.

The Los Angeles Times reports Sunday the second-degree murder charges against A Better Tomorrow and four of its employees sent a jolt through California’s drug and rehabilitation industry.

Prosecutors argue that the company, in its drive for profits, accepted to treat Gary Benefield, a client it was not prepared to care for and killed him by not refilling his oxygen.

Read more: http://fox40.com/2016/02/28/murder-charges-against-rehab-center-a-first-in-california/

Budget crunch could dissolve Berkeley’s College of Chemistry

The University of California (UC), Berkeley, is considering disbanding the university’s College of Chemistry to help cope with a cash crunch at one of the country’s most prominent public universities. According to an article in today’s Daily Californian, the university’s flagship campus is $150 million in debt, and faced with flat income from tuition and rising costs. Though no decisions have been made, closing the College of Chemistry and absorbing its departments into other university colleges is just one of the many plans being considered to save money.

The College of Chemistry dates back to 1872. Today, it’s home to 101 faculty, as well as 1492 students and postdocs. Its chemistry and chemical & biomolecular engineering departments are regularly listed among the top worldwide. Thirteen of the college’s faculty and alumni have won Nobel Prizes. And since 1940, College of Chemistry scientists either led or participated in the discovery of more than a dozen humanmade elements, including berkelium, californium, and seaborgium.

Supporters of the college have started a petition asking Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks to scrap the idea of disbanding the school. As of this morning, more than 2250 people have signed the petition. Among the signees is Carolyn Bertozzi, a former Berkeley chemistry professor, who recently moved to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and posted a comment on the petition’s webpage quipping that the only beneficiaries of the move would be competing institutions.

“UC [Berkeley] College of Chemistry has impacted the chemical sciences, indeed the world, more than any counterpart at any other institution. Dismantling this paragon of excellence is only a good idea if you are at Stanford!” Bertozzi wrote.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/budget-crunch-could-dissolve-berkeley-s-college-chemistry

He thought he could reason with Antonin Scalia: A more naive young fool never drew breath

by BRUCE HAY

In the two weeks since his death, many have spoken about Antonin Scalia’s undeniable impact on American law. As attention shifts to filling the vacancy he has left on the Supreme Court, I would like instead to talk about his less appreciated impact on contemporary physics. But first, a bit of background.

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

His own weapon was the poison-barbed word, and the battleground was what he once labeled the Kulturkampf, the culture war. The enemy took many forms. Women’s rights. Racial justice. Economic equality. Environmental protection. The “homosexual agenda,” as he called it. Intellectuals and universities. The questioning of authority and privilege. Ambiguity. Foreignness. Social change. Climate research. The modern world, in all its beauty and complexity and fragility.

Most of all, the enemy was to be found in judges who believe decency and compassion are central to their jobs, not weaknesses to be extinguished. Who refuse to dehumanize people and treat them as pawns in some Manichean struggle of good versus evil, us versus them. Who decline to make their intelligence and verbal gifts into instruments of cruelty and persecution and infinite scorn.

more (must read)

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/27/i_thought_i_could_reason_with_antonin_scalia_a_more_naive_young_fool_never_drew_breath/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Sunday's Doonesbury- New Bible

Pussy Riot Planning Tribute to Bernie — and a Song for ‘Dickhead’ Trump

Almost immediately after the leader of Pussy Riot arrived in Washington, DC, to headline an annual libertarian gathering on Friday, she was already DMing on Twitter with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

“I will have fun tonight with Bernie Sanders’s office, we will have drinks tonight,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (also known as "Nadya Tolokno&quot told The Daily Beast, as she was wrapping up her evening at the International Students for Liberty Conference. “I am going to hang out with Bernie Sanders’s team.”

Tolokonnikova, who describes herself as a social democrat and was a supporter of Occupy Wall Street, is a leading member of Pussy Riot, the anti-Putin, feminist punk-rock collective based in Moscow. (It goes without saying that she is well to the left of many of the libertarian activists and students who she addressed at the Q&A session on Friday.) In 2012, she was famously convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" in Russia.

Shortly after getting off her flight early Friday morning, she tweeted, “my ass just landed in Washington, and I urgently need a t-shirt with Bernie. could i pick it up somewhere tomorrow morning?” (Earlier this month, the Pussy Riot account posted a photo of her donning a Bernie 2016 shirt with the caption, “¡Viva los revolucionarios! ¡Viva Bernie!”)

more

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/27/pussy-riot-planning-tribute-to-bernie-and-a-song-for-dickhead-trump.html

The stupidest article I've seen today

HRC as the 'new' RFK?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/27/is-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-the-new-rfk-eugene-mccarthy.html

No, Eleanor, HRC is most like a certain pol nicknamed Hubert Horatio Hornblower from that election, an establishment choice who excited nobody and lost to a loathsome crook. And even that comparison sells HH short. At least he wasn't a republican running on the Dem ticket.

They’re killing machines: Newtown families have a right to sue the makers of the AR-15

Cedric Larry Ford gunned down three and injured at least 14 more with an automatic rifle in Kansas Thursday, blasting away randomly from his car and then in the industrial building where he worked. Just another day in America.

This nation cannot awaken from a nightmare: Madmen wield weapons of war to indiscriminately slaughter, in their workplaces, on streets, in movie theaters and in elementary schools.

Ford added to the tally of slaughter as Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis is considering the merits of a wrongful death suit — brought by family members of Sandy Hook Elementary School children and one survivor of that assault.

They are trying to sue Remington, America’s top manufacturer of guns and ammunition in the civilian marketplace, for negligent entrustment in manufacturing AR-15s for purchase and use by ordinary Americans.

These assault rifles are weapons of war.

more
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/killing-machines-article-1.2545453

Toon: Hillary and Wall Street