Biden to fundraiser crowd: 'You all look dull as hell'

This administration has nothing but contempt for it's supporters:

"I guess what I’m trying to say without boring you too long at breakfast –- and you all look dull as hell, I might add," he told a crowd of more than 200 fundraisers from the Turkish and Azerbaijani communities in Washington DC. "The dullest audience I have ever spoken to. Just sitting there, staring at me. Pretend you like me!”

The comment was met with laughs, per a White House pool reporter on the scene of the $2,500-per-ticket fundraising breakfast.

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Report: Low Seattle hotel wages amount to 'hidden subsidy'

Another example of how America is becoming a third-word nation:

A new report from a Seattle non-profit group says that downtown Seattle's hotels are projected to enjoy tidy profits this year - at the expense of hotel workers and local taxpayers.

The report called "Our Pain, Their Gain: The hidden costs of profitability in Seattle's downtown hotels," notes that between 2006 and 2010, the State of Washington spent more than $44 million to cover an average of 4,224 uninsured hotel workers per year.

"There is a hidden subsidy to this industry," says Howard Greenwich, research director of Puget Sound Sage, a regional economic policy advocacy group.

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Economic Growth Slows in First Quarter

At this point the economy should not be so weak. This suggests serious underlying factors, such as debt, structural unemployment, and low wages. We can expect the economy to dip into a recession or worse in 2013:

The U.S. economic recovery lost a bit more steam in the first quarter than most experts expected, as business investments and inventories slowed and government cutbacks continued to be a drag on growth.

The nation’s economic output expanded at a modest 2.2% annual rate in the first three months of the year, down from a 3% increase in the nation’s gross domestic product in last year’s fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday.

Most analysts were expecting a GDP growth rate of 2.6% or a little higher for the first quarter.

Inflation-adjusted consumer spending grew at a solid 2.9% pace in the first quarter, boosted again by robust car sales as well as a pick-up in consumption of services. But business spending came in much weaker; investments for equipment and software rose 1.7% from the prior quarter, compared with an increase of 7.5% in the fourth quarter.

Much of the GDP slowdown was because of a significantly smaller buildup of inventories of products in the first quarter. That was expected as manufacturers and other businesses had increased their stockpiles of goods late last year to levels higher than what demand seemed to support.

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Blind Chinese Dissident Flees House Arrest for Safety in Beijing

Source:

Blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest in eastern China and is now safe at an undisclosed location in Beijing, a U.S.-based rights group said in a statement.

Chen escaped earlier this week from his home in Shandong province where he has been under house arrest since being released from prison in Sept. 2010, Midland, Texas-based ChinaAid reported on its website. The group said there is speculation he is in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

“Dear Premier Wen, I’ve escaped after trying so hard,” a man who claimed to be Chen and resembled him said in a video that was posted on YouTube today, in a reference to Premier Wen Jiabao. “I am free now, but I am still very worried because my beloved wife and son are still under the devilish hands.”

ATF: Mexico seized 68,000 guns made in or imported to United States since 2006

Thousands of Mexicans have died because of the thousands of guns exported to Mexico. We can thank the NRA and U.S. government for this fact:

The government said Thursday that 68,000 guns recovered by Mexican authorities in the past five years have been traced back to the United States.

The flood of tens of thousands of weapons underscores complaints from Mexico that the U.S. is responsible for arming the drug cartels plaguing its southern neighbor. Six years of violence between warring cartels have killed more than 47,000 people in Mexico.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released its latest data covering 2007 through 2011. According to ATF, many of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted to ATF for tracing were recovered at the scenes of cartel shootings while others were seized in raids on illegal arms caches. All the recovered weapons were suspected of being used in crimes in Mexico.

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Sarah Palin Claims Child Labor Laws Are Causing America To Fail

Palin is wrong. Obama doesn't care about laborers either:

In a Facebook post titled “If I Wanted America to Fail, I’d Ban Kids From Farm Work,” Palin wrote,

“The Obama Administration is working on regulations that would prevent children from working on our own family farms. This is more overreach of the federal government with many negative consequences. And if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”

Her post is in response to US Department of Labor’s plan to update the Fair Labor Standards Act to include the farming industry. For the first time, children would be protected on non-family owned farms. Working with pesticides, lumber mills, animals, manure pits, storage bins, and many other jobs that children are often employed to perform would be regulated. But Sarah Palin doesn’t think America needs to protect kids. She thinks child labor laws make America fail. The problem with Palin’s position is that it’s dangerous and threatens the lives of our kids. Industry has taken advantage of child workers before.

According to Eastern Illinois University, before child labor laws, children, some as young as three years old, “endured some of the harshest conditions. Workdays would often be 10 to 14 hours with minimal breaks during the shift. Factories employing children were often very dangerous places leading to injuries and even deaths.  Machinery often ran so quickly that little fingers, arms and legs could easily get caught. Beyond the equipment, the environment was a threat to children as well as factories put out fumes and toxins.  When inhaled by children these most certainly could result in illness, chronic conditions or disease. Beyond the topic of safety, children working lengthy hours had limited access to education. Many families relied on income earned by each family member and did not allow children to attend school at all. Those fortunate enough to be enrolled often attended only portions of a school day or only a few weeks at a time.”

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