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Centre Expands OBC Creamy Layer Ambit to PSU Posts; Excludes 'Socially Advanced Sections' for Reservation
August 30, 2017 July 11, 2018
New Delhi: The government on Wednesday expanded the ambit of 'creamy layer' to include certain posts in PSUs and public sector financial institutions, thus barring these officials and their kin from claiming reservation benefits under the OBC category.
The Union Cabinet also approved excluding 'socially advanced persons/sections' from the purview of reservation under Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category.
The decision comes almost 23 years after a 1993 office order of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) provided for 27 percent quota for the OBCs in government vacancies and laid down criteria for defining 'creamy layer'.
This order merely said the criterion enumerated for Group A and Group B posts would apply to officers "holding equivalent and comparable posts" in the PSUs, banks and financial institutions.
Briefing reporters on Wednesday about the decisions of the Union Cabinet, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said an approval was accorded to the norms for establishing equivalence of posts.
In PSUs, all executive level posts, board-level executives and managerial-level posts, would be treated as equivalent to group 'A' posts in the government and will be considered 'creamy layer'.
Junior management grade scale 1 and above of public sector banks, financial institutions and public sector insurance corporations will be treated as equivalent to group 'A' in the government and considered as 'creamy layer'.
For clerks and peons in PSBs, financial institutions and public sector insurance corporations, the income test as revised from time to time will be applicable.
"These the broad guidelines and each individual bank, PSU, insurance company would place the matter before their respective board to identify individual posts," an official statement said.
"This addresses an issue pending for nearly 24 years. This will ensure that the children of those serving in lower categories in PSUs and other institutions can get the benefit of OBC reservations, on par with the children of people serving in lower categories in government.
"This will also prevent children of those in senior positions in such institutions, who, owing to absence of equivalence of posts, may have been treated as non-creamy layer by virtue of wrong interpretation of income standards from cornering government posts reserved for OBCs and denying the genuine non-creamy layer candidates a level playing field," the statement read.
The income limit defining 'creamy layer' for OBC reservation was last week raised to Rs 8 lakh per annum from Rs 6 lakh.
Those earning more than Rs 8 lakh per year would be treated as 'creamy layer' and excluded from the benefits of OBC reservation.
Source: First Post
Post Tags:	#OBC reservation
7th Pay Commission – Odisha Govt Employees To Get Salary Hike By September (Hindi Version Included)
Relaxation for Travel by Airlines other than Air India on Official Tour – Instructions


Well, I thought that I'd post a picture of the Birmingham Jail -- it's not *the* jail where Martin Luther King wrote his letter; this is the modern jail. But it is adjacent to the Jefferson County criminal court, where Bobby Frank Cherry, the last of the surviving bombers of the 16th Street Baptist Church was tried back in 2002.
I attended the trial; there was pathos everywhere -- in the fact that other than reporters and a few family members and an occassional group of school children who stayed only for a few minutes each -- that few people in the community seemed to care.
Little bit of a funny story here: I went up to the first day of the trial with one of my friends (and colleagues) at Alabama. And on the way up to the courthouse, he had the idea to call the judge's chambers and ask about getting a ticket. As I recall from what I heard on his end of the conversation, the judge's secretary couldn't believe the question. Just show up and you'll get in seemed to be her bewildered response. That, of course, is what we did -- no problem getting seating.
What our nation had long since put behind itself and its memory was an event that wasn't even fully completed for Birmingham. And even in Birmingham, most of the city had moved on. The moving on part is positive, of course -- the changes were so dramatic over the past forty years -- but the victims' day in court had been delayed for so long that it must have taken away some of the meaning for them. And Bobby Frank Cherry was an elderly man by that point. His lawyer made a feeble appeal to understand the man in his times, but even that seemed (to my ears) half-hearted.
I've included a couple of pictures of the 16th Street Baptist Church as well.
*When we vacation in the tropics, to escape cold winters, we are warmed by the sight of bright flowers basking in the sun.


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Patronyme
Classement par ordre alphabétique du prénom
 André-Georges Haudricourt, (1911-1996) est un linguiste, botaniste, géographe et ethnologue français ;
 Charles Haudricourt, (1858-1935),  est un homme politique français ;

Toponymie
 Haudricourt est une commune française, située dans le département de la Seine-Maritime et la région Haute-Normandie.

Homonymie
Homonymie de patronyme

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Crown Prince Haakon and his wife also own a Lexus RX 400h and two Toyota Prius hybrid cars.
- Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit was the first member of the royal family to use a new luxury hybrid that last week became the latest addition to the royal car fleet, a newspaper reported Tuesday. The princess on Monday used the dark blue Lexus LS 600h for a drive to a cinema in Oslo, tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) reported.
The Lexus LS 600hL sells for roughly 1.6 million kroner (300,000 dollars) in Norway, making it an exclusive vehicle that is also touted as the millionaire's "environmental car," the report said.
According to Verdens Gang, it was the first time the royals have included a Japanese-made vehicle in the official fleet, traditionally dominated by German brands.
"The environment is always a factor when considering new vehicles," palace spokeswoman Astrid Versto was quoted as telling VG.


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Ashley Bethard
You are here: Home / VIDA Review / Issue 5 / Ashley Bethard
A few years ago, in the thick of summer, I returned to my family's Ohio farm. The land there holds the creaky, late-1800s farmhouse where I lived for thirteen years, tucked just beneath the state's northern coast, about ten miles south of Lake Erie. Life swells there, so thick it could burst: the whir of cicadas, the rustling of trees cut by a breeze, the sound of semis rushing on Route 20, all carried across the flat fields and landing as a distant roar. There, the droning of mowers and the loud, incessant beeping of farm equipment dot the auditory landscape like some slow, earthly Morse code. For me, this complete immersion of the senses prompts the process of recall. I find myself clambering back through memory: part climb, part crawl, part breathless scramble. I notice more trees are dying.
"The pines," my mother said to me, as we sat on the front steps. She waved her hand at the twelve trees lining the driveway. Their branches were sparse, the browning needles thinning.
Pines are known for their long lives. Recently, I read about one that scientists found in Italy that's 1,230 years old, making it the oldest scientifically-dated tree in Europe. It juts out from the earth, its sunbleached limbs stabbing at the sky. It's gnarled, wizened, and miraculous: despite its appearance, it's had a recent growth spurt.
"What do you think it is?" I asked.
"No idea," she said. She stared past the trees, lost in her thoughts. I wanted to tell her about the Italian pine, but I didn't.
Several years ago, the emerald ash borer swept through our woods like a winged flame. My memory tells me it happened fast, in the span of a couple years. But when I ask my father, he says otherwise.
"There were already a lot of dead trees when we moved there," he said. "It probably took six to ten years."
Regardless of the timespan, the result was the same: every ash tree in our forest died. My father spent seasons sawing up the dead trees for firewood. It was either that or let them rot in the woods, since Ohio law restricts the transport of ash trees in an attempt to contain the blight. Not one to let anything go to waste, he seized the opportunity to fuel our woodstove for the winter. Ash is some of the best wood to burn, he told me. It produces a steady fire and good heat.
I helped him load and stack the wood, observing the pathways the insect had cut into the trunk. When a tree is infested by the borer, the bark splits and falls off easily, like shedding a too-tight skin. It dropped off in chunks as he sawed through the trunks. I traced the patterns they left with my fingertips, a collection of smooth paths and slight ridges that wound and curled themselves into loops. The patterns are a pretty byproduct of destruction, created by larvae eating their way between the bark and outer layer of the trunk. This delicate space between the two is where the food network is located—the maze of tiny veins and tunnels carrying nutrients to all parts of the tree. Once the larvae begin to eat, they disrupt the network, destroying it completely.
The week my sibling died of a heroin-fentanyl overdose, I came back to the farm and noticed the curly willow was dead. I obsessed over it. It was an otherwise unremarkable feature of the landscape, but suddenly its absence was the only thing I saw. The gap between what once was and what was no more throbbed like a pulse, accompanied by spikes of adrenaline, shortness of breath. Symptoms my body would perfect in the weeks after their death and would hold on to for years.
The only thing that made sense to me was this: walk the yard in the midday heat, let the preternaturally hot May sun blind me, feel the energy drain from my body. My father taught me the best cure for pain was work. That may or may not be true, but I did it anyway. I dragged brittle, unwieldy branches to the fire pit one by one, set one foot in front of the other, pushed the sweat from my eyes. Grief-work is body work. It is carrying. It is sweating. There was nothing logical about it; it was all I knew. I just had to keep moving.
There is one memory I keep coming back to. On a cold weekend in April, when my sibling was still alive, my boyfriend and I drove to the Ohio farm to spend my birthday with my family. The weekend was mostly awful: my boyfriend and I were barely speaking, and my parents had no birthday festivities planned. But a few hours before I had to leave, I convinced my sibling to go for a walk with me.
They had been subdued and quiet. Several times, they fell asleep on the couch for long spells at odd hours in front of the crackling wood stove, the TV blaring. It was the sleep of exhaustion, of resignation. There was a vulnerability in their sprawl, limbs dangling off the couch until someone, one of us, gently moved their arm back to rest. They sweated profusely, and in an occasional fit of motion, tossed the blanket off their body. One of us would pick it up and return it, careful not to wake them.
So we walked to the woods together, silent, making our way along the treeline, past the muddy fields slick from melted snow, the razor-sharp edges of last year's crop still standing at attention. We walked past overgrown thickets with their wild tangle of reedy brambles, catching the attention of a red-winged blackbird that hopped from branch to branch, clucking as it followed us.
It was early spring, after the first true melt, and while everything was bleak and colorless except for the greys and browns of a sleeping earth, there was a scent in the air suggesting it would all turn soon. Once in the woods, we stomped through wet, matted leaves and overgrown paths until we reached the creek. We followed the waterline until we reached it—a small, secure aluminum bridge, wide enough for a pickup truck to drive across. Aluminum is lightweight and very strong, my father said. He had installed it with help from my sibling one summer when I was in high school. They spent several days clearing out brush, assembling pieces, and anchoring the sides.
But it had washed out, turned askew. One side had gone completely unmoored, its end submerged in the creek as the water trickled by. Half of it was now buried in the muck. Its body had gone sideways, like the earth was trying to swallow it whole. Their work had been undone, no match for nature.
We climbed up and sat on the unswallowed half. All around us were the standing carcasses of dead ash trees, bark long gone, their stark white trunks engraved with the otherworldly patterns left by the borer.
And then I confessed: my fear that my boyfriend would propose, and how that filled me with an unstoppable flood of anxiety. When they asked why, I said: because I can't say yes.
They looked at me, eyes wide, searching my face. They asked: then why are you wasting your time?
Through the lump in my throat, I started to run through the list of reasons: I didn't know how to extricate myself after years together. I was scared of starting over. I feared being alone, and the uncertainty of what that meant in a city that still didn't quite feel like home. They reached for my hand. I leaned onto their shoulder, the old Carhartt they wore smelling like cigarette smoke and wood stove ash and mothballs, and cried there quietly into the afternoon, listening to the sounds of birds and the rustle of the creek, and I felt time and place compounding in a way that I hadn't before. Things would change. But somehow I could move forward, could learn a new way of being.
That summer they died, I returned to my first childhood home, the one on the east coast, to find almost all the trees there had been culled, cut back, or removed completely. I discovered this as I pulled into the now-naked driveway leading to the yellow Dutch barn-style house my parents built together. My eyes swam, trying to match what I was seeing with an overlay of memory, the picture of what once was, my brain marking the gaps with tiny synaptic explosions. I could not stop myself from noticing absences.
Once there had been two large maples marking the edges of our property, one on the right, one on the left—imperfect twins that created a comfortable, messy symmetry. A frame for context, now removed. The once-neat edges loosened and blurred. A gnarled apple tree that sat squarely behind our driveway was gone, too. In the fall, the apples dropped to the ground, filling the air around it with the perfume of sweet rot. It became a buzzing carpet of bees, ants, and other stinging insects: a natural landmine.
The three pines hurt the most. They once stood in a loose, formidable cluster to the left of the driveway, across from the house. They were close together and far enough apart that their branches grew into one another, forming a cover from the sun, except in a few places where light streamed through. The smooth dirt floor was protected from the elements, topped with a carpet of soft, dry pine needles. It was a magical treehouse, one that existed just for us.
My sibling and I spent countless hours there beneath its boughs, creating elaborate stories starring ourselves as the main characters. We surveyed the yard, loaded up our rusted Radio Flyer wagon with sticks, rocks, and other found treasures, and used the supplies to furnish the treehouse. We stacked layers of thin sticks in a rectangle, covered it with handfuls of silky pine needles, and called it a couch. We built a fire circle with round stones, and added a cooking spit using two Y-shaped sticks and a bucket.
I was the ringleader; the bossy one who barked out tasks. Get the bricks from dad's pile. Go find a hammer. Ask mom for some wire. Find some leaves. They were eager to please, the sweet one who would fulfill my requests without a question. All I had to do was ask. When they returned, bright-eyed and triumphant, they'd share what they found, a smile on their sweat-drenched face, blonde curls slick around the edges. All they wanted, it seemed, was to do things that made me happy. To make their big sister proud.
This dynamic continued throughout most of our childhood years. They began to copy me, too—at least, that's how I saw it. If I tried a new hobby or started learning a skill, they wanted to try it too. They want to be just like you, my mother would say. It's a compliment. But I saw it as competition. I had to be first; I had to be best. And when it became clear that they were better than me at many things, I'd become angry and give up. I was the flighty, finicky one. They were slow and focused. Soon, they were sewing quilting scraps into elaborate patterns to make potholders, while I could barely make a stitch.
The most memorable humiliation was bike riding. One day, we both had training wheels. On the next, they rounded the corner free of them, riding fast into the wind, golden legs scuffed with dirt and cabs, pedaling furiously on two wheels. I huffed and labored behind them to keep up, feeling heavy with my extra wheels and the petty grievance of an older child who had been outdone by her younger sibling.
I always felt safe there in the pines, as if they formed a circle of protection around us. It was a sort of magic, how we could conjure anything within those trees. But now they were gone: chopped down, reduced to sawdust, someone else's firewood. An unforgettable place of my childhood obliterated from the landscape completely.
I realize place is not memory. I haven't lost my memories because the landscape changed. But they do feel more tenuous, more fragile. Slippery. Like they could disappear at any moment.
It's still hard for me to explain the life-fracturing experience of losing someone so violently, the way I lost my sibling. To say it consumes is just the beginning of the after. Sometimes my breath felt like it was on a looped track, one that kept timing out, interrupting each inhale and exhale. I had to remind myself how to breathe, my internal voice coaching me through it. What was once a thoughtless pattern was now disrupted by the perpetual static of grief. Bursts of panic drove my nervous system into overdrive. Spells of sadness filled my limbs with lead, and I felt stretches of longing pierce deep in my gut.
Worst of all was the way grief clouded my thoughts, my ability to recall. How it began crowding out memories, like everything up to that point had crumbled. Then the loss became something else entirely: the inability to remember. And then, the panic of that. Loss upon loss upon loss.
I read so much grief literature after they died. I signed up for a Bereaved Parents of the USA newsletter, desperate for something that would help, searching for any bit of wisdom I could apply to my pain. But the problem with much of grief literature is that it suggests that you can move forward by promising the past: the lost will live on through your memories. This seems to be false logic to me, because the nature of trauma itself changes the brain and obscures lived experience. Everything becomes hard to remember. And when the landscape of those places change, so does memory itself. My father's removal of the trees is an assault on my already-tenuous memory. How do I get my memory back?
My father is a practical man. He is someone who does what needs to be done. He has a deeply ingrained respect for nature and reserves his highest admiration for landscapes that have remained unspoiled by human hands. When I ask about the trees, he explains to me, with trademark matter-of-factness, why they had to go. Some were leaning dangerously toward a neighbor's house or toward power lines. Some had dropped massive limbs after rough storms. Some were sick—riddled with disease, unable to return to a healthy state, at risk of infecting others. But I can't stop myself from thinking it's deeper than that—like it's his way of grappling with his own grief. I wonder if he needs to change the landscape in order to cope with memories he's unable to run from. There is logic in this: change the place that holds them. Remake it in a new image. Raze what you once raised.
But despite this logic I've superimposed, the urge possesses a fatal flaw by suggesting we have the ability to physically reshape our pasts, to re-architect our own memories. Control is a human obsession. A way to manage something that causes pain. We can try all we want, but we can't wrest pain from the truth, and we can't wrest truth from the land. They are indivisible. These histories can be retold or recast, but the version remaining will never be quite true for the teller.
Later that day, after we've had a few beers, my father tells me he saved the wood from the pines you kids used to play in. I recognize this double-vision, this collision course of then-and-now, as if we're living in two times at once, decades apart.
"I thought about making something out of them, but I don't know," he said. He wiped his face with a napkin, carefully folded it, studied his hands. This is a tic of his, one I couldn't quite read until I was older. It's his nervous fidgeting, the thing he does with his hands to quell anxiety.
He tells me about possibility, forward-facing: this wood he saved could be sawed into boards. He uses the word maybe. He is noncommittal, maybe unsure. He says he wants to remove the four lilac bushes that line the road—they've grown so big that they're a visibility problem now. He wants to replace them with crepe myrtles, maybe—something similar but not the same. My stomach knots at the mention of lilacs. They're the ones we played under after a rain, one of us standing underneath the waterlogged blossoms while the other shook the branch, creating our own outdoor shower.
The conversation suggests he's not fully at ease with what he's done. At least, this is how I read it. It's like part of him wants to hold on to the past, but he's not quite sure what to do with it. Now, that past is piled up in the form of limbs, trunks that have been turned into woodchips, and upturned root systems. It's in the blank circles of dirt where the trees once stood. But it's also a past that he talks of transforming into something new. In other words, it's not just physical eradication—it's transmutation, too. Creating something new out of the old. Something that doesn't remind him of the past every time he looks at it. An act of selective forgetting. Of memory management.
I think of Sophie Calle's book "Detachment." In it, she surveys missing and partially-removed monuments in what was once East Berlin, taking photos of their absence. With the exception of the brief introduction, the text is comprised only of pieces of interviews with the people who live there. I start to think of detachment as an action. As a deliberate way we acknowledge absence. A way we reckon with history, or dismiss it. A questioning of the collective narrative of history. The interviews contained in the book are wildly different. Detachment, it seems, is an individual process, not a collective one. Much like grief.
I think about my father's desire to remove. I think it is probably driven by many things—necessity, pain, shame.
I think of place as a reckoning in a way that time isn't. Time is a kind of softness that creeps up on you, takes you by surprise. Place, on the other hand, is an immediate assault on the tangible. Place is not so forgiving. Here's an equation: place + time = loss.
I look for the ways place mirrors me. Or maybe it's more accurate to say my state of mind dictates how I see place. It can be a canvas I project my own life onto. Place tells the whole story, usually, unconstrained by human desires to shape its narrative. It tells of the build and the fall. Of growth and destruction. Of beauty and trauma. How these things aren't opposites at all, but are part of the very same cycle: birth and death, over and over again. How we always return to the earth. Isn't place like a body, then?
Release is another word for detach. So is remove. It is the letting go of intent, a decision, the brain telling the fist to unclench, the fingers moving from curled to splayed. It is not the letting go of resignation. Maybe grief is the way we learn to let a body go. Here I am, seizing place as a substitute for memory. Would I feel the same way about place if my sibling was still alive?
I think of the trees and I imagine my father's body, still strong at seventy, pushing himself across the land like easy machinery. I know the way he works: methodical, efficient. Applying a chainsaw at just the right angle. Using his body weight as heft behind a handsaw. Triangulating height and lean and distance to ensure a limb's safe fall. I see him clearly, boring into the land the way grief bores into a body, disrupting the circuitry of all that came before it. Not to forget, but to detach.
Ashley Bethard is a writer whose work has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, Hobart, Fanzine, and others. A 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop alum, she was also the 2017 recipient of the Ohioana Library's Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University. She lives in Dayton, Ohio. Find her online at @ashleybethard and ashleybethard.com.
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Twisted Sister's Dee Snider Denounces Politician Paul Ryan's Use of 'We're Not Gonna Take It'
Graham "Gruhamed" Hartmann
Graham "Gruhamed" Hartmann Published: August 23, 2012
It seems like whenever a Presidential race begins, some politician rubs a musician the wrong way by using their music as a campaign theme. In 1984, Bruce Springsteen went after Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan for using 'Born in the USA,' Foo Fighters barred John McCain from playing 'My Hero' during his campaign, and now, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider had denounced the use of 'We're Not Gonna Take It' by Republican Vice Presidential hopeful Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan recently received a tongue-lashing by Tom Morello after the Rage Against the Machine guitarist was informed that Ryan was, in fact, a fan of the band. In an additional example of Paul Ryan showing his taste for statements of antiauthoritarianism in music, the Republican chose to add Twisted Sister's 'We're Not Gonna Take It' to the soundtrack of his political campaign. Dee Snider, however, stood by the song's message in a new statement against Ryan.
Snider released the following statement representing himself and the vocalist's management company:
I emphatically denounce Paul Ryan's use of my song "Were Not Gonna Take It" as recorded by my band Twisted Sister. There is almost nothing on which I agree with Paul Ryan, except perhaps the use of the P90X.
Paul Ryan has not yet responded to Snider's message, but despite their differences, it looks like they could end up becoming good workout partners.
Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello Slams Paul Ryan
Read Original: Twisted Sister's Dee Snider Denounces Politician Paul Ryan's Use of 'We're Not Gonna Take It'
Filed Under: dee snider, paul ryan, twisted sister
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Dee Snider Disses Todd La Torre for Challenging His Plant + Dio 'Real Performer' Statements
Dee Snider Says Ronnie James Dio + Robert Plant Aren't 'Real Performers' But 'Great Singers'
Top 30 Hair Metal Albums
How Twisted Sister Fought Back With 'Under the Blade'
Why 'Performing Wasn't Enjoyable' for Dee Snider
Twisted Sister's Dee Snider Names His 5 Favorite Albums of All Time
Dee Snider Gives Democratic Candidate His Blessing to Use 'We're Not Gonna Take It'


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Who knows who will emerge from the crowded field to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020? However, it is pretty clear that Donald Trump, the GOP and the conservative media will blast that candidate, even if he or she is a slightly left of center traditional Democrat, such as Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar, as a dangerous socialist.
They're already doing it, saying all Democrats have signed on to new Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's call for a 70 percent marginal federal income tax rate for incomes over $10 million and a Green New Deal and Bernie Sander's Medicare for all, free public college and $15 minimum wage plans. All Dems haven't signed up for socialism, of course, with the example of local Representatives Andy Kim and Jeff Van Drew, who still lean more toward the center than the far left, but they're all being painted with the same brush.
Democrats are being put in the same boat as socialist dictators such as Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro or, worse, infamous communist tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro and three generations of North Korea's Kim dynasty. Sanders will tell you that's a different kind of socialism than the democratic socialism he's talking about in the form of Scandinavian countries, but the likes of Sean Hannity will say socialism is socialism is socialism period.
Well, if all forms of socialism are equally poisonous, I suggest we should add another name to the right wing's long list of socialist monsters: Dwight Eisenhower!
The top tax rate in the U.S. during the 1953 to 1961 Eisenhower administration was over 90 percent. Just about everybody I've ever told that said I'm crazy. Well, Google it! And the highest tax rate during Eisenhower's days in the White House was applied to incomes over $200,000, which translates to approximately $2.4 million today. The U.S. of the 1950s not only taxed the rich far more than what Ocasio-Cortez is recommending, but taxed less wealthy people than she is asking for as well.
That sounds pretty socialist. And you can't blame it on a Democratic Congress. We had a divided government for six out of Ike's eight years, but the 83rd Congress, which sat from 1953-54, was controlled by the GOP. If Republicans had wanted lower taxes, it seems like they would have struck then.
In 1956, Eisenhower launched one of the largest public works projects in American history, the Interstate Highway System. Some Democrats in Congress supported it, but don't think it was they who pushed it, because the official name of the system is the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The "Defense Highways" part of that title was rather misleading because while our major enemies at the time – the Soviet Union and Red China – posed a nuclear threat, there was no way in hell that they, with their limited navies, could have ever launched an amphibious attack on the continental U.S. at that time (that is true to this day), necessitating the rapid movement of troops across the country. The main, uh, drive behind the interstate was economic, not military.
The Communists in Russia and China were known for their "Five Year Plans." The Interstate Highway System put them to shame. Launched in 1956, the original construction, authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, wasn't completed until 35 years later.
That wasn't the only huge public works project approved by Eisenhower. On May 13, 1954, he signed the Wiley-Dondero Seaway Act, which authorized the joint construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway by Canada and the U.S., a series of canals and locks that joined the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The seaway diverted much of the Great Lakes shipping through Montreal and Quebec, Canadian cities, away from New York City, which had been the shipping capital of the world, thanks in part to the Erie Canal. The outdated Erie, it has to be imagined, could have been enlarged. But the U.S., under Eisenhower, allowed the expansion of trade to go, in the main, through Canada instead. Imagine, in today's "American First" climate, if the internationalist seaway were to be suggested.
More examples of Eisenhower's socialist leanings: He was the president of Columbia University from 1948 through 1953, what today's critics would call a left-wing elitist university. He was the first supreme allied commander Europe of NATO, another internationalist effort, from 1951 to 1952. NATO. He deployed the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to protect the "Little Rock Nine," nine black students integrating the Little Rock High School in 1957 in response to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954. Some today would call that a blatant federal intrusion into states' rights.
Finally, was Eisenhower a communist? After all, he agreed to end the Korean War in a draw instead of nuking North Korea and Red China, as Douglas MacArthur had recommended. He didn't jump in to support the French in Vietnam after that country's devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. And he allowed Fidel Castro to march into Havana in 1959.
One, thanks in large part to the high tax rate on the richest Americans, the national debt in 1960, the last year of Eisenhower's presidency, was $286 billion. Now it is over $22 trillion. Two, thanks to the National Interstate System, motorists can drive across the country in two days if they want to push the pace. Before the system, that trip could take a week on two-lane roads. And forget pleasure trips, imagine how the delivery of goods was sped up by the interstate system, improving the nation's economy.
Donald Trump, who says he wants to make America great again, has never defined the era when America was great before. But for white Americans (not blacks, because they were being lynched and having police dogs loosed on them), especially union workers, the 1950s might well have been that time.
So, was the 1950s a socialist era or just a time of smart bipartisan politics in the U.S.?
It is according to your definition.


text:
The mailbox vs. the ballot box
Concerns about COVID-19 are giving new life to calls for voting by mail
by Harvest Prude
Election workers sort vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary in Renton, Wash. (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
On Monday, New York officials canceled the state's Democratic presidential primary, slated for June 23. It's an unprecedented reaction in a primary season disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials in other states took less extreme approaches. In Wisconsin, officials plagued with partisan squabbling forged ahead with an in-person election. In Wyoming, they switched to all-mail voting entirely.
Wyoming Democratic party officials pointed to their smooth election as a blueprint for the state, and perhaps the nation, come November. Their counterparts in Washington, D.C., agree. But transitioning nationwide to a strategy of all-mail voting is not going to be easy. On top of administrative and security challenges, disagreements over absentee voting run deep along partisan lines.
Supporting absentee voting is not a new position for Democrats. The first bill they introduced after winning control of the House in 2018, H.R.1, called for mandatory mailed ballots to all registered voters. It also called for the legalization of ballot harvesting—the practice of allowing volunteers to collect and submit absentee or mail-in ballots en masse.
In light of the pandemic, the Democratic National Committee has renewed its push for vote-by-mail programs. Congressional Democrats also lobbied for expanding absentee voting in the $2 trillion CARES Act. Democrats reportedly asked for $2 billion to make election law changes. They also introduced legislation that would have ballots mailed to every registered voter for November.
Republicans rebutted top-down election reform in the CARES Act. However, Democrats are expected to continue to push for such measures in the next legislative response to the coronavirus.
Currently, only five states conduct all-mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.
Currently, only five states conduct all-mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Twenty-nine other states allow "no-excuse" absentee voting. Sixteen states require voters to provide a reason for why they need a mailed ballot in order to obtain one. Some of those states now allow coronavirus concerns to count as a valid reason.
Washington's Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, told me it took her state years to transition to a full vote-by-mail system. To other secretaries of state, she recommends not attempting to convert entirely to absentee voting unless they already have high levels of it: around 50-60 percent. She says a hybrid solution is better for states with low numbers of absentee voting.
Two of the biggest challenges facing states are cost and time. Election officials must print ballots and return envelopes weeks in advance, and must include instructions for voters. Printing, stuffing, and mailing eat up hours. The left-leaning Brennan Center estimated it might cost up to $1.4 billion to implement absentee voting nationwide, mostly due to postage costs.
Meanwhile, high-speed vote tabulation machines needed to process absentee ballots cost up to $1 million.
Temporary elections workers use a machine to scan signatures and sort mail-in ballots in Renton, Wash. (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images))
Of course, the coronavirus introduced a handful of hurdles for states intending to hold in-person elections. Three of the election officials I interviewed mentioned that they faced staffing shortages, as many of their volunteers tended to be in a high-risk category for coronavirus due to age. In Wisconsin, staffing shortages resulted in Gov. Tony Evers calling in 1,000-plus National Guard troops to man polls.
But many states, unequipped for large-scale absentee voting, will attempt in-person elections anyway. Kentucky, where 98 percent of votes are cast in person, is one of them. "It's hard to turn on a dime and redo an election system in a very short period of time," said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams.
One of the biggest challenges facing the expansion of vote by mail is the suspicion it meets across the aisle. President Donald Trump said voting by mail is "ripe for fraud." Republicans coming down in favor of security over accessibility (as the oversimplification goes) prefer voters to fill out ballots under the supervision of election officials. They're quick to point out chronic problems facing administrators including outdated registration rolls, vote-buying, and ballot-harvesting that allow bad actors to commit voter fraud.
Using data from the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Public Interest Legal Foundation found that in 2016, nearly 6 million mail-in ballots went "unaccounted for," or missing. Ballots mailed to the wrong address is a consistent issue, though there is not evidence that these unaccounted for ballots were used maliciously.
"I agree with the president's point that voting by mail is uniquely susceptible to fraud, but I believe you can catch all of that and have a stable and normal election as long as some integrity is built into it," Adams said. He said steps, such as as verifying signatures and requiring personal information in applications for ballots discourage bad actors.
Adams said he finds laws allowing for ballot harvesting of particular concern: "We're not going to allow ballot harvesting when an activist, a political volunteer, can bring in boxes and boxes of cast ballots while I'm Secretary of State. It's a great way to get more vote fraud."
Such fraudulent schemes do occur, though skeptics note that current research does not seem to indicate the problem is systemic.
The Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, in its 2005 report concluded that absentee ballots are "the largest source of potential voter fraud." The commission said that citizens who vote away from the ballot box are "more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation."
The most recent example of voter fraud came in the 2018 midterm elections. L. McCrae Dowless Jr., an operative for Republican Mark Harris' campaign, requested more than 1,200 absentee ballots on voters' behalf and ballot harvested them from their homes when they were mailed. Dowless currently faces criminal charges for absentee-ballot fraud. Harris won by just 905 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. A new election was ordered, but Harris did not run.
Not all Republicans view absentee balloting with a wary eye. Wyman is one of them: "I've done elections for a long time. Do I believe there's rampant voter fraud? No, I do not. Do I believe it's 100 percent perfect? No, I do not." She mentioned cases of well-meaning relatives who had posted a ballot in a recently deceased loved one's name.
She doesn't believe such cases represent an attempt to "change the outcome of the election on some massive scale."
Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis told Politico that Republicans assume "mail-in ballots help Democrats" but said he believes that is because of their reluctance towards utilizing the method. It remains to be seen which party will favor it more if both push for it equally. Even Trump admitted on Twitter that absentee ballots are "a great way to vote for the many senior citizens ... who can't get to the polls on Election Day."
An elections assistant sorts mail-in ballots at a warehouse ahead of the 7th Congressional District special election in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Wyman said the patchwork of election laws presents officials with challenges, that such federalism presents "the strength of American elections." Each vote is as secure as the state's election officials are meticulous, the laws solid, and the protocols straightforward.
Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told me, "We don't need a one-size-fits-all way of voting." Palmer also expressed his confidence that, rain or shine, elections will weather the current pandemic in ways that are suited to each state: "Election officials deal with contingencies all the time: hurricanes, earthquakes, now a pandemic. … [They] know how to handle these emergencies and plan for those contingencies."
A Twenty-first century Congress
While Washington pushes for absentee voting for Americans, it's stewing in a partisan battle over its own voting system. With health concerns, as well as the optics of a sidelined Congress (especially with President Donald Trump's daily coronavirus briefings) some lawmakers have called for changing rules to allow for remote work.
Lawmakers who want a way to work remotely argue its necessary to prevent another instance of what happened when the U.S. House of Representatives took up the CARES Act.
On March 27, the House was poised to pass the $2 trillion economic relief package by unanimous consent. It sailed through the Senate via unanimous consent two days before. But the night before the vote, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., hinted an objection on Twitter to the idea of passing such a massive bill without a majority of lawmakers present. Without a quorum, or a majority of members, to overrule any objection, a single lawmaker could kill the bill. Leadership sounded the alarm, and some 200-plus lawmakers hotfooted it back to Washington.
Nancy Pelosi arrives at the U.S. Capitol to vote on the stimulus bill. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
So while lawmakers urged constituents to follow their state's guidelines to stay at home and avoid nonessential travel, they boarded planes or road-tripped back to the Capitol. The package passed with no fireworks.
But the issues raised by Massie's stunt remain. Rank-and-file lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want their daily work of hearings, markups, and caucus meetings to continue, even from home. Bolder voices have called for remote voting for committees and for the floors of both chambers.
For weeks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., squashed any movement on remote voting. They've chalked their resistance up to security and constitutional concerns.
But groups on both the right and the left say these concerns may be overstated.
Cully Stimson, manager of the Heritage Foundation's National Security Law Program, said it is absolutely within Congress' prerogative to work remotely. "They can make up any rule they want that's germaine," he said.
As far as security risks, he pointed out lawmakers in leadership or on committees with access to classified information already have secure communication lines. Lawmakers also have access to secure, encrypted emails. "This will not be a heavy lift to get," Stimson said.
He acknowledged that much of leadership's reluctance to move to a remote system could boil down to tradition, but noted that even the change-resistant U.S. Supreme Court recently announced it would hear cases via teleconference. Many members of Congress are "on the older side," he pointed, and could be especially vulnerable to COVID-19: "You don't want to put vulnerable people together."
Marci Harris, founder of POPVOX, a nonpartisan online platform that tracks legislation, said potential risks should be kept in perspective. She acknowledged security concerns with the popular videoconferencing application Zoom but said administrators password protecting meetings on the front end discourages easy hacking. From there, hearings or votes via Zoom or another videoconferencing application could be broadcast to Youtube or C-Span to preserve accessibility.
"We're talking about public hearings. We're not talking about anything anybody is trying to keep private," Harris said.
She also emphasized changing the rules to allow for remote work would not have to be permanent to be effective. "It wouldn't mean that the old rules are gone, it would just mean that right now ... something has got to be different."
The left-leaning organization Demand Progress also called for Congress to vote on a rules change the next time they are in town.
"They've taken themselves out of the game when they're needed the most," Daniel Schuman, Policy Director for Demand Progress, told me. "It means that all those members of Congress have become a Greek chorus with little voice and no power because they can't be there."
In some respects, members of Congress accomplished a good deal before (and since) they left town March 26. They responded to the coronavirus pandemic by passing four pieces of legislation. All garnered broad, bipartisan support.
But as congressional leadership has taken the lead on negotiating these massive relief bills with the Trump administration's team, many rank-and-file lawmakers have little ways to influence the process. American Enterprise Institute scholars Yuval Levin and Adam White noted in a National Review op-ed that when the CARES Act came out, some Republicans raised concerns last minute about a provision allowing people drawing unemployment benefits to receive more than they would from working a minimum wage job. But leaders gave them no real chance to amend the text.
The longer lawmakers stall on moving toward allowing more remote-work, the longer their list of items to tackle once they can meet again grows. Like Hercules' labors, 12 annual spending bills must be conquered, with markups and voting that currently must be done in person. So too, Trump's political appointees and judicial picks remain in limbo. The Senate announced plans to return to Capitol Hill on May 4. But the House on Tuesday canceled its return due to coronavirus fears.
Congressional leaders have taken some small steps toward a more 21st-century Congress. Pelosi announced that members can now submit floor documents, including bills and resolutions, electronically to a secure email. Lawmakers can also co-sponsor or make comments to legislation electronically. Pelosi recently softened to the idea of proxy voting. It's a step short of fully remote voting, but would allow some lawmakers in person to vote on behalf of absent lawmakers. House Republican leaders remain opposed.
Harvest Prude
Harvest is a political reporter for WORLD's Washington Bureau. She is a World Journalism Institute and Patrick Henry College graduate. Harvest resides in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter @HarvestPrude.
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Link Building in 2014: What Kind of Links Should You Build for Your Website?
Link building is done for the sake of Google, since if you are doing it for the Bing/Yahoo alliance then they may as well join the rebel alliance and await a daring rescue by Ewoks. The tips you are about to read on this article are also for Google.
The buzzword for the decade is "useful" and Google are still on that useful trip. First your website had to be useful, then its content did, then your exterior content did, then your URLs did, then your anchor text, and now your backlinks have to be useful.
Google don't seem to realize that we create websites because they are supposed to be useful for us. Still, Google now wants your backlinks to be useful. They are well aware that you create backlinks in order to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but now they are saying they are sick of people just putting backlinks anywhere and they want them in places where they are useful.
This is the cheesy carrot way for Google to say they want you to pander to your target audience instead of just anybody. The notion is fair enough, but they sound pretentious when they say it. They want you to create a backlink profile and they want you to have long term goals in mind. The long term goal should be to attract your target audience and yours alone.
This is the snippet of information that had to be checked twice. Now Google are saying that the theme of the website you link from is of no consequence. No doubt some time in the future one of the engineers will post something clarifying the process.
One assumes that what they meant was that if you run a pork lovers website aimed at people who actually have souls, then it is okay if you link from a website about shoes, if that website happens to have a sub section on how bacon is simply delicious and how it makes you live longer despite Jewish propaganda that it does not.
So, do not take it as a swipe saying that the theme of the page you link from is not important. Take it as a sign that the overall theme does not matter but the pages you link from do.
This is not a new thing. We all know it is better to get a link from a site that is established and well attended instead of from a new website that is scarcely attended at all.
This is older school advice that is still relevant in the year 2014. It is better to get links from websites that have your niche audience in mind. It is more a matter of common sense in the same way you know that picking your teeth with a live parrot's beak is not a great idea. If you can get links from websites that attract the same type of viewer as your website, then you are in a better position to attract said target audience. This also plays into the long-term backlink profile stuff too.
They don't want you to do it for social media links because Google says they are not worth anything, but Google are friendly but vague so don't trust that little snippet. They say you should use social media in order to draw attention to your content so that other people will willingly link to it. That way you get your links but you get them from people who are interested in your website (organically).
This concept has never really reconciled with real life. For example, if a fan of your gardening website decides to link from his website about matchboxes, then how does that help your SEO in any way? The most unpredictable backlinks are the ones that come from complete strangers and yet for years Google has said the organic links are the best ones.
Yes, somebody in the Google stratosphere won 100 points in the game called "Google vague" by saying we should get links from real websites. Vagueness aside, the mind boggling way that the tip may be interpreted is enough to give a nun a nose bleed.
One can only assume that they meant get links from websites that have long term goals and are maintained instead of from websites that were content management system built in a day and that are soon to be forgotten until their domains expire.
Author's bio – My name is Sonia Jackson. I write for http://www.royal-essay.com that provides well-written and quality essays and research papers for college and university students.
https://seocustomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Link-Building.jpg 225 300 Henrik Sandberg https://seocustomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LogoSeocustomer.png Henrik Sandberg2014-03-16 21:53:022016-12-27 18:25:55Link Building in 2014: What Kind of Links Should You Build for Your Website?