During the surge in Iraq in 2008, Nathan Witmer led an Army scout platoon in a thicket of villages rife with insurgents and roadside bombs. What he really wants to do is direct.

Or maybe write — or produce.

“Anything with movies was always the dream,” said Mr. Witmer, who left active duty in 2010.

Like many troops leaving the military, he was steered instead toward jobs in government agencies that offered preferential hiring or with big corporations that recruited veterans, and he assumed his hope of working in show business would remain only that.

But after selling medical equipment for two years, he had the chance to join a five-week industry boot camp designed to bring young veterans into the television business. To his surprise, it was run by one of the Iraq war’s fiercest critics, Jon Stewart, the longtime host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

<snip>

“The Daily Show” developed the program over the last three years without publicizing it, but now, because Mr. Stewart is preparing to leave the show, he has taken it into the open, urging other shows to develop their own programs to bring more veterans into the industry.

“This is ready to franchise. Please steal our idea,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview at his Manhattan studio recently. “It isn’t charity. To be good in this business you have to bring in different voices from different places, and we have this wealth of experience that just wasn’t being tapped.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/arts/television/jon-stewart-iraq-war-critic-runs-a-program-that-helps-veterans-enter-tv.html?emc=edit_th_20150526&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=45299538&_r=0

Not going downtown this weekend.

No way!

Family Says Airplane Dumped Human Waste on Girl’s Sweet 16 Party

It was not a “Super Sweet 16″ for Jacinda Cambray.



It started out well enough, your regular, run-of-the-mill birthday party in in Levittown, Pennsylvania on a Sunday afternoon – cake, swimming, horseshoes, good times with friends and family.

And then it started raining shit.

Literally. Not “shit, it’s started raining and we have to go in” or “there was a real shit-storm when Jimmy showed up with his new girlfriend” -human excrement was falling out of the sky.

Video at link...
http://www.epictimes.com/2015/05/airplane-dumps-human-waste-on-girls-sweet-16-party/

Something critical is being lost in the torrent of pixels being spilled by the media as Jeb Bush wriggles haplessly, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber, struggling to explain away, recast or rationalize his brother's hideous legacy. Many of us with functional memories concluded long ago that Jeb's brother deliberately lied us into a pointless war, one that resulted in pointless maiming and pointless deaths of our own soldiers and perhaps a million Iraqi civilians, and the equally pointless rise of a nihilistic cult of deluded savages we know as ISIS.
And although many Americans, for various reasons, don't want to face up to it, that is the truth. There may be be a "competing narrative," there may be political "spin," but there really can only be one truth, and Jeb Bush and the secretive Billionaires who hope to install him as the country's next President know that truth happens to be very, very inconvenient for him when the country has not yet forgotten what happened the last time a Bush occupied that office. When Jeb said he'd rely on his trusted brother for foreign policy advice, well, that just made things worse.

There is, however, an even more heinous aspect to what Jeb's "trusted brother" did, and it shouldn't be allowed to escape down the memory hole. We've been lied into wars before, with similar disastrous results. But George W. Bush did something far worse than lie us into a war: he did it in a breathtakingly cynical and malevolent way--in effect, by holding a gun to every Americans' head and threatening to pull the trigger. He did it by holding us--all of us--hostage to a twisted ideology that demanded the war, waving the gun at calculated intervals in our face, the way any terrorist would. And he told us flat out, over and over again, that if we didn't do what he said, we'd all be killed.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/22/1386781/-George-W-Bush-Did-Something-Much-Worse-Than-Lie-Us-Into-War?detail=facebook_sf

Hint: Not Hillary Clinton


The tea party hates South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the feeling is mutual. It attacked the Republican lawmaker mercilessly during his Senate reelection campaign in 2014, but Graham held his seat with 55 percent of the vote. "Kicking the crap out of the tea party is the most fun Senator Lindsey Graham has ever had," wrote Molly Ball for The Atlantic last June after interviewing the South Carolina Republican on the eve of his primary election victory, when he faced six no-name challengers, one of them a tea party pick, in his deep red state's Republican primary.

On June 1, Graham plans to join the crowded GOP 2016 field, according to his preannouncement on Monday. And his soon-to-be presidential campaign raises the question: How will the Graham/tea pary feud continue?

The animosity between this three-term senator and tea partiers began before his 2014 reelection campaign, triggered in part by Graham's intermittent attempts to work with Democrats in the Senate. Such moves have enraged staunch conservatives. The Executive Committee of the South Carolina Republican Party compiled a list of 29 offenses that they "strongly disapprove of and hold to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the South Carolina Republican Party." Right-wing blogs have nicknamed him "Flimsy Lindsey" and "Grahmnesty" because he disagreed with his party on climate change, immigration reform, and a few other hot-button Republican issues.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/tea-party-lindsey-graham-conservative-2016


Graham is only a 3 term Senator?

Darrell Issa, the richest man in Congress, said America has made "our poor somewhat the envy of the world."

Asked by CNNMoney whether he feels personally responsible to address income inequality in the United States, the Republican Congressman from California said "absolutely." But he noted that America is the richest country on earth and implied that those in poverty here are better off than the poor in other nations.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/issa-poor/index.html?sr=fbmoney050715issa0230story


http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2015/05/07/darrell-issa-income-inequality.cnnmoney/

A small high school in Texas is currently grappling with an STD outbreak, as 20 cases of chlamydia have been confirmed among the student population. Since Crane High School only has about 300 students, that means about one in 15 kids there has been infected. School district officials sent out letters to the parents of high schoolers and middle schoolers to inform them of the “growing problem.”
The outbreak is putting the spotlight on the potential gaps in education in the Crane Independent School District. As Raw Story notes, the West Texas district does not currently offer a regular sex ed course that’s integrated into students’ health classes. High schoolers receive just three days of optional sexual health education during the fall semester, and those materials are centered on abstinence.



http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/05/04/3654650/outbreak-texas-sex-ed/

A waitress serving Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) Saturday evening didn't ask for a tip -- instead, she left one for the governor.

No, not that kind of tip. On Brownback’s receipt, Chloe Hough crossed out the line where customers can add gratuity and wrote: “Tip the schools.”




http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/03/sam-brownback-education_n_7200304.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

A very large portion of the public (outside DU) and many comedians are laughing at Bernie ' s hair do. He has to get past that unless he wants to the Donald Trump of the left.