Monday Toon Roundup 1: Hating the Troops

For-Profit College Enrolls, “Exploits” Student Who Reads At Third Grade Level

BY DAVID HALPERIN
A librarian at a southern California campus of Everest College abruptly resigned last week, deeply upset that the for-profit school had admitted into its criminal justice program a 37-year-old man who appears to read at a third grade level. The man, who shakes, speaks haltingly, and may suffer from a developmental disability, told the librarian he expected to be a police officer after completing the program. But the librarian, Laurie McConnell, is certain he can never obtain such a job.

McConnell, who had been devoting much of her time at work to helping the student with his reading assignments, wrote to the campus’s president on May 21 that the student would be “impossible to place in the field” and had “no idea of the ramifications of signing the enrollment agreement” at Everest. But the president, Richard Mallow, did not give her a response. McConnell quit on May 27, four days after she first contacted me to say that the student was “being defrauded” by Everest. “He breaks my heart,” she told me, “and I feel completely helpless.”

Everest is owned by for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges, which is facing a lawsuit for fraud by the attorney general of California and is under investigation by 17 other state attorneys general and four federal agencies. Kent Jenkins, vice president for public affairs and communications at Corinthian, told me today that the campus believed it was appropriate to take a chance on admitting the student. He also raised the possibility (see below) that Corinthian would refund some or all of the student’s costs if he ended up dropping out.

Corinthian in recent years has received as much as $1.46 billion annually in taxpayer money, about 83 percent of its total revenue. That $1.46 billion represents nearly 4.5 percent of the colossal $33 billion that for-profit colleges have been getting annually from federal student aid.

- See more at: http://www.republicreport.org/2014/for-profit-college-student-reads-third-grade/

Toon: The Bergdahl Test

Sunscreen, "a toxic substance", not allowed in Texas school without doctor's note

SAN ANTONIO, TX (KSAT) — Christy Riggs, a parent of a student attending Northeast Independent School District in San Antonio, TX says, "It just doesn't make sense."

Parent Christy Riggs is upset. Her 10-year old daughter went on a school field trip recently and came back sun burned. Riggs says Northeast ISD policy didn't allow her daughter to bring sunscreen to reapply.

Riggs tells KSAT, "When you have a school field trip or a field day which they're out there for an extended period of time, they should be allowed to carry sunscreen and reapply." She says skin cancer runs in her family. In fact, her father recently passed away from it.

Northeast ISD says sunscreen is considered a medication. They need to have a doctor's note for children to have sunscreen at school.

more

http://www.kmsstv.com/news/sunscreen-toxic-substance-not-allowed-texas-school-without-doctors-note

VA chief: 100,000 vets were on fake wait lists

More than 100,000 of America's military veterans were victims of bogus waiting lists for medical appointments, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs inquiry, and acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said the nation will learn Monday how many patients in each city were relegated to "secret lists."

During a news conference Thursday at the Carl T. Hayden Medical Center in Phoenix, where the VA scandal erupted, Gibson also disclosed that at least 18 Arizona veterans died while waiting for doctor appointments, though it remains unclear whether delayed care was to blame for the deaths.

Gibson vowed to immediately care for neglected veterans, fix a broken health-care system and punish employees who contributed to the falsification of records knowingly or by gross negligence.

"In far too many circumstances, we have let our veterans down," Gibson said. "In too many instances, we have behaved in ways that are not consistent with our values."

more

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/2014/06/06/va-chief-vets-fake-wait-lists/10053681/

Gay Stormtroopers are going to invade Disneyworld and make us all their slaves!

Gays Are New Slave Masters

Even if you survived “Gay Day at Disney,” you might still fall victim to the new gay slavery, at least according to Bryan Fischer.

“Apparently someone forgot to tell the Stormtroopers in the homosexual movement about the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and freedom of both will and conscience,” Fischer wrote this week in reaction to an anti-LGBT discrimination case in Colorado. “The leaders of the Gay Gestapo have become our new slave masters. They can now send us to the hole if we refuse the massa’s demands.”

“So meet our new overlords, the new owners of the American plantation, the gay mafia. All hail Big Gay, our new slave masters,” he added.

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/paranoia-rama-gays-invading-disney-world-obamacare-worse-911-very-evil-sex-ed

Why does the term "send us to the hole" inspire gales of laughter?

Frank Schaefer never expected to speak for gay rights. His son’s gay wedding changed everything.

To Frank Schaefer, it wasn’t three of his four children being gay that bothered him so much, it was that they looked gay. So sometimes he’d offer pointers.

“Swing your arms when you walk,” Schaefer’s son Kevin, then 16, recalls his father telling him one fall day a few years ago.

..

Kevin recalls being humiliated but not angry. He understood that his father was struggling with his own feelings. Debbie just brushed her father off. He wasn’t really criticizing, she told herself — he was just making an observation.

This painful scene between a parent and a gay child is perhaps not so unusual — until you widen the frame.

The next year, Frank Schaefer, a United Methodist pastor in rural Pennsylvania, was in Boston again on a family trip. This time, he was there to officiate at the wedding of his gay son Tim — in violation of his denomination’s doctrine, which prohibits same-sex marriage.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pastor-frank-schaefer-never-expected-to-speak-for-gay-rights-his-sons-gay-wedding-changed-everything/2014/05/30/2a99bcac-b9de-11e3-a397-6debf9e66e65_story.html

Hero's welcome for runaway D-Day veteran

After the campaign came the homecoming.

The D-Day veteran who slipped out of his care home and made his own way to France to honour comrades who fell on the Normandy beaches received a hero's welcome when he returned home on Saturday.

Bernard Jordan, 89, was greeted by cheering staff at the care home in Hove after making the journey back from northern France overnight.

…

Emerging from the taxi returning him to the care home on Saturday morning, Mr Jordan walked slowly inside, barely able to raise an arm to wave to waiting photographers.

Staff sang "for he's a jolly good fellow" as he made his way into the building, where Union Flags had been draped from walls and ceilings in honour of Mr Jordan and his comrades.

more

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10883278/Heros-welcome-for-runaway-D-Day-veteran.html

Breaking Bad: A Nuclear Waste Disaster

Carlsbad, New Mexico – A vast salt mine under the New Mexico desert was the Department of Energy’s last nuclear waste storage solution. On Valentines night, one of the now suspect 500 waste drums from DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) blast open inside DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Casks filled with 3.2 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive wastes remain buried at the crippled plant. That huge facility was rendered useless. Investigators believe the waste drums from Los Alamos were incorrectly packed under DOE supervision and one of them exploded.

“As part of the ongoing efforts to identify the cause of the event at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, we are evaluating all possible causes including the waste packages themselves,” a statement issued by DOE says. “All possible scenarios will be thoroughly investigated until the cause of the event has been determined.” Investigators are examining “the possibility that a chemical reaction may have occurred within a drum, causing a potential release.”

The disaster at WIPP is rooted in careless contractors and lack of DOE oversight, according to a DOE report released on April 24.

Greg Mello, the Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, says, “Perhaps most important is DOE’s willingness to walk away from how waste was supposed to be managed.” Mello points out that four months after the explosion, there are still 367 suspect storage canisters that came from LANL that are still at WIPP. He says they were packed with a form of kitty litter that DOE investigators fear could explode due to a chemical reaction with the radioactive contents inside each container. “The kitty litter acts as an explosive oxidizer. What are already in these storage drums are radiation contaminated salt nitrates – effectively the same salts as in gunpowder. How a national laboratory like Los Alamos let this happen is an issue that needs to be explored,” Mello says. -

See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/201406059835/natural-resources-news-service/breaking-bad-nuclear-waste-disaster.html

Gwyneth Paltrow believes water has feelings

Gwyneth Paltrow is causing controversy again with a statement on her lifestyle website Goop about her belief that water might have feelings.

The 41-year-old actress, who recently split from her husband Chris Martin, endorsed the work of Japanese doctor Masuru Emoto, who has published several books on the theory that human consciousness can change the structure of water.

"I have long had Dr. Emoto's coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water," Paltrow wrote on her blog. "How the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it."

"I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter," Paltrow added.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/gwyneth-paltrow-negativity-structure-water-article-1.1816948#ixzz33rbdal16