Remember that airline commercial that asks “Want to get away?” from those embarrassing moments in life? In the Internet age, there is no getting away when somebody comes up with a truly dumb, ridiculous or just plain bad idea.
Obama kills Keystone, again
1| Lobbied Senate to vote against pipeline
The details: President Obama personally called multiple senators, asking them to vote against legislation that would fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The bill fell two short of the necessary 60 votes.
Obama congratulates Putin
2| Mixed signals on questionable victory
The details: President Obama gave his imprimatur to Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia, calling to congratulate him for supposedly winning the Russian presidential election, even though the U.S. State Department has called for an investigation into widespread reports of voter fraud.
Housing crisis claiming churches
3| Record number of foreclosures
The details: Banks have foreclosed on churches in record numbers since 2010, as 270 churches have sold their buildings, with the vast majority of sales coming after “lender-triggered” foreclosure, according to Reuters.
Couple sues over “wrongful birth”
4| Wishes they could have aborted
The details: Ariel and Sandra Levy of Oregon are suing Legacy Health Center for failing to tell them their daughter had the birth defect Down syndrome, saying they would have aborted if they had known in time.
Unemployment still at 8.3 percent
5| Job creation down from January
The Details: Job creation fell to 233,000 jobs in February, down from 284,000 in January, and the unemployment rating remained above 8 percent — a level President Obama said it would never reach if Congress passed the 2009 stimulus.
Medicaid overpayments
6| Dead people got benefits
The details: An inspector general’s report said that the D.C. government paid nearly $700,000 in Medicaid benefits to dead people and may have overpaid health care providers $22.6 million in 2009. The Department of Health Care Finance blamed the overpayments on clerical and data processing errors.
Brake failure
7| Metro knew back in 2006
The details: Metro officials acknowledged they knew six years ago about the same kind of brake failure that stranded 300 Orange and Blue line riders underground for more than two hours in December, claiming “underinvestment” forced them to keep expired brake parts in service.
Pay-to-work plan
8| Mayor’s proposal costs $2 million
The details: D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s new $2 million jobs proposal, which expands a federal on-the-job training program, would force District taxpayers to subsidize the pay of workers earning as must as $70,720 annually.
Spike in violence
9| More melees at youth detention center
The details: Assaults between youthful offenders spiked 67 percent at Prince George’s County’s troubled Cheltenham Youth Facility, with injuries up 40 percent. That’s the same facility where an instructor was sexually assaulted and murdered by a 13-year-old in 2010.
Cheating scandal
10| Probe expands to 30 D.C. schools
The details: An investigation into an abnormal number of erasures on standardized tests has been expanded from 18 D.C. Public Schools classrooms in 2010 to 60 last year, representing 30 schools. So far, one teacher whose scores were thrown out was fired and two more resigned.
