Sooo…I have a very weird British sense of humor. So when Dodge rolled out their new commercial campaign for their tent event, I thought the dry introduction of the monkey at the end was absolutely hilarious.  However, the ever omnipresent watchdogs of PETA didn’t think the monkey in the suit was a knee slapper, so they issued a complaint against Dodge and told them to pull the ad or else. Dodge’s response? See below:

Original commercial:

New commercial:

Washington (CNN) — President Obama on Tuesday signed into law a sweeping health care reform bill, the nation’s most substantial social legislation in four decades, achieving a top priority of his administration.

The jubilant signing ceremony capped a political victory for Obama that supporters hope could guarantee his place in history with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson as one of the most successful social reforming presidents.

While Republicans and social conservatives vow to try to undermine or even repeal the bill, Obama and Democratic leaders celebrated Tuesday’s signing as historic progress for the nation.

“It’s been easy at times to doubt our ability to do such a big thing, such a complicated thing, to wonder if there are limits to what we as a people can still achieve,” Obama said.

“We are not a nation that scales back its aspirations,” he continued. “We are not a nation that falls prey to doubt or mistrust. We don’t fall prey to fear.”

Rather, “we are a nation that does what is hard, what is necessary, what is right,” Obama said.

In the end, he said, the bill shows that America believes in the “core principle” that “everybody should have some basic security when it comes to health care.”

Was it all worth it for Obama?

The crowd stood to cheer when Obama and Vice President Joe Biden entered the packed East Room of the White House, then chanted Obama’s campaign slogan of “Fired up! Ready to go!” as Obama and Biden applauded and smiled.

Among those on hand for the signing ceremony was Vicki Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who championed health care reform for decades before his death last year.

Also present were several people who wrote Obama in the past year about their personal woes over losing or being unable to get health insurance. Obama had told their stories when campaigning for the health care bill in recent months.

He also noted some private citizens attending Tuesday’s ceremony, including 11-year-old Marcelas Owens of Washington state and Ryan Smith, a small-business owner from California, who supported the bill.

And he said, “I’m signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother, who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.”

iReport: What will health care reform mean to you?

Democratic senators and representatives filled the crowd, and all stood to cheer and applaud after Obama used 20 pens to sign the bill.

The new law narrowly passed the House of Representatives late Sunday night. It was approved by the Senate in December. In both votes, no Republicans supported the measure.

A separate compromise package of changes also was passed by the House on Sunday and still needs to be approved by the Senate. If the compromise measure also becomes law, it would raise the total cost of the health care bill to $940 billion.

The measure is projected to extend insurance coverage to roughly 32 million additional Americans, in part by expanding Medicaid assistance for the poor while creating an insurance exchange to increase competition. It also will require most Americans to have health insurance or pay a fine.

“You have turned the right of every American to have access to decent health care into reality for the first time in American history,” Biden said in introducing Obama.

iReport: Share your views on health care reform

Larger employers are required to provide coverage to employees or risk financial penalties, and the law bans lifetime coverage limits by insurers or denial of health insurance for pre-existing conditions.

Republicans complained the bill cost too much and was too ambitious, but Democrats responded that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cut the federal deficit by $143 billion in the first 10 years.

Obama will hit the road to sell the measure to a still-skeptical public, giving a speech Thursday in Iowa City, Iowa, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. Obama launched his grass-roots drive for health care reform in Iowa City in May 2007, according to Gibbs.

Passage of the bill was a huge boost for Obama. Aides said Monday that Obama exchanged handshakes, hugs and “high-fives” with staffers when the outcome of the House vote became apparent.

“I haven’t seen the president so happy about anything other than his family since I’ve known him,” said senior adviser David Axelrod, adding that Obama’s jubilation Sunday night exceeded his election victory in November 2008. “He was excited that night, but not like last night.”

Republicans promised to continue fighting the reforms, with 11 state attorneys general — all Republican — planning lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bill’s mandate for people to buy health insurance and requirements for states to comply with its provisions.

Senior Republicans in Congress warned that voters will judge Democrats harshly in November’s midterm elections, with Sen. John McCain of Arizona saying the Democratic-passed bill killed any chance of bipartisan support on legislation for the rest of the year.

“There will be no cooperation for the rest of this year,” McCain said in an interview with KFYI radio in Arizona. “They have poisoned the well in what they have done and how they have done it.”

Gibbs, however, said the administration expects to win any lawsuits filed against the bill, and he challenged McCain and other Republicans to campaign for the November election against benefits of the health care bill such as tax credits for small businesses and an end to insurance company practices such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

House Democrats are expected to celebrate passage of the bill at a news conference with reform advocates Tuesday afternoon. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded her husband’s failed health reform effort in the 1990s, said earlier in the day that Obama’s success was an example of the president’s tenacity.

“If you ever doubt the resolve of President Obama to stay with a job, look at what we got done for the United States last night when it came to passing quality, affordable health care for everyone,” Clinton said during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Observers warn, however, that the road ahead for health care reform in the Senate may be rocky. Democratic leaders are using a legislative maneuver called reconciliation, which allowed the compromise plan to clear the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes. But according to Senate rules, members are still allowed to offer unlimited amendments and challenges.

In one of the first of many attempts Republicans say they will make to try to amend or kill the package, GOP aides went to Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin on Monday to argue that the compromise bill violates rules of the reconciliation process because of the way it affects Social Security. For that reason, GOP aides said they argued, the bill should not even be allowed to be debated.

However, Frumin, according to a senior Republican and a Democratic aide, informed both parties he disagreed with the GOP assessment, and would not block the bill from reaching the Senate floor.

“There’s hope that [the vote] would be done within a short period of time, like a week or so,” said Tim McBride, a health economist and associate dean of public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“But the Senate is complicated and doesn’t have the discipline that the House does.”

Once the package hits the Senate floor, the chamber’s rules stipulate that there must be 20 hours of debate. But that 20 hours may prove to be more of a suggestion than an indicator of what will happen, according to Cheryl Block, a law professor at Washington University’s School of Law.

“It could get all messy and could go on forever if [Republicans] threw up amendment after amendment,” Block said.

“Theoretically, it should only take 20 hours, but it will likely take longer because Republicans have things up their sleeve.”

If any provision in the package of changes is rejected or changed, the entire package would then have to go back to the House for another vote.

CNN’s Ed Henry, Ed Hornick, Josh Levs, Alan Silverleib and Tom Cohen contributed to this report.

MICHELLE FAUL | Associated Press|

“They grabbed me, put their hands over my mouth and then the three of them took turns,” the slender 21-year-old said, wriggling with discomfort as she nursed her baby girl, born three days before Haiti’s devastating quake.

“I am so ashamed. We’re scared people will find out and shun us,” said the woman, who suffers from abdominal pain and itching, likely from an infection contracted during the attack.

Women and children as young as 2, already traumatized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 catastrophe, are now falling victim to rapists in the sprawling tent cities that have become home to hundreds of thousands of people.

With no lighting and no security, they are menacing places after sunset. Sexual assaults are daily occurrences in the biggest camps, aid workers say – and most attacks go unreported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attackers.

Rape was a big problem in Haiti even before the earthquake and frequently was used as a political weapon in times of upheaval. Both times the first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted, his enemies assassinated his male supporters and raped their wives and daughters.

But the quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people has made women and girls ever more vulnerable. They have lost their homes and are forced to sleep in flimsy tents or tarp-covered lean-tos. They’ve lost male protection with the deaths of husbands, brothers and sons. And they are living in close quarters with strangers.

Story continues below

At the camp on Monday where the young mother was gang-raped, a woman in shorts tried to bathe discreetly. Stripped to her waist, she faced her blue tarp tent, her back to the rows of other shelters.

Nearby, a teenage girl squatted behind a pile of garbage, trying to avoid the stench and clouds of flies around tarp-covered latrines that provide the only privacy, but also are places where women are attacked.

In this camp, some 47,000 people live crowded into what used to be a sports ground in a neighborhood that always has been dangerous. Residents include a dozen escaped prisoners, among them a man accused of a notorious murder, according to Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate who lives at the camp.

“But nobody says anything because they’re scared, scared of the criminals and scared of the police,” he said.

Pierre has documented three other gang rapes in the camp, including of a 17-year-old who says she was a virgin before six men attacked her and raped her repeatedly.

“I really worry about the teenager because she has no one to look out for her. She says she sees her attackers but is afraid to report them because she would then have to leave the camp and she has nowhere to go,” Pierre said.

Investigators for Human Rights Watch reported the first three gang rapes to U.N. officials. Then, two weeks later, on Feb. 27, the 21-year-old mother was gang-raped.

Only a week later did U.N. police officers begin patrolling.

“For me it seems completely bizarre that for this one camp that everyone knows is unsafe, it’s taken them three weeks to get a patrol going,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the agency’s women’s rights division. “It’s unrealistic to expect patrols in camps all the time, but I think they can identify hotspots and provide security to those spots.”

Pierre complained that the U.N. patrols are ineffective. “They only drive their cars down the one road that covers only a small portion of the camp. They never get out of their cars,” he said.

In the hilltop suburb of Petionville, where plush mansions look out over slums on hillsides and in ravines, a 7-year-old rape victim was being treated Monday in the hospital of a tent camp set up on a golf course. Another child, a 2-year-old, had been raped in the same camp two weeks earlier.

The toddler is taking antibiotics for a gonorrhea infection of the mouth, according to Alison Thompson, who is the volunteer medical coordinator for a Haitian relief group created by Sean Penn. She helped treat both children.

“Women aren’t being protected,” Thompson said. “So when the lights go down is when the rapes increase, and it’s happening daily in all the camps in Port-au-Prince.”

Besides sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, victims face possible HIV infection. Haiti has the highest infection rate for the virus that causes AIDS in the Western hemisphere, with one in 50 people infected.

Among the many rape victims is an 18-year-old girl who lost her parents, grandmother, a sister and three cousins to the quake. She was roaming the streets distraught when a man approached her, promising her his wife would look after her, she said.

The middle-aged man took her to a house, then left and came back with two men. The three raped her repeatedly until she managed to escape.

The teen is among dozens of rape victims who have sought help from KOFAVIV, a group of Haitian women who survived political rapes in 2004. Their offices were destroyed in the quake and they now operate from a tent.

They brought the victims to American volunteer lawyers who came to Port-au-Prince a week ago to identify Haitians who may qualify for humanitarian parole to live in the United States.

“I’ve been here five days and have spoken to 30 (rape) survivors including a dozen under 18. Their stories are horrific. I would be catatonic,” said San Francisco lawyer Jayne Fleming.

Few rapes are reported because women often face humiliating scrutiny from police officers who suggest they invited the attacks and even nurses who contend young girls were “too hot” in their dress style, according to Delva Marie Eramithe, a KOFAVIV leader.

Her own 18-year-old daughter was saved from an attacker who dragged the girl into a dark alley between tents at the downtown camp sprawling across Champs de Mars plaza. The assailant did not see the teen’s three sisters, who had been walking behind her, and all four of them managed to beat him and run him off.

Soon after, he returned to their tent with three other men and a gun, Eramithe said.

While a male neighbor argued with the men, Eramithe and her daughters went to a nearby police station to report the attempted rape.

“We told them the man who attacked her was right there at our tent, just two blocks away,” Eramithe said. “But one policeman said they had received reports of nothing but raping, thefts and domestic beatings all day and there’s nothing they can do. The other police officer said the only person who can do anything is President (Rene) Preval.”

When she insisted, they gave her the license plate of a police van patrolling the camp perimeter. Eventually she found the patrol car but that officer “told us to go and get the attacker and bring him to them.”

Police spokesman Gary Desrosiers said only 24 rapes have been reported to Haitian authorities this year. Several suspects were detained, but many escaped when prisons collapsed in the quake, he said.

Police Chief Mario Andresol blamed the attacks on the more than 7,000 prisoners who escaped. “Bandits are taking advantage to harass and rape women and young girls under the tents,” he told reporters two weeks after the quake.

“We are aware of problem … but it’s not a priority,” Information Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said last month.

Haitian police officers with stations minutes from some of the largest camps do not patrol – a fact that spokesman Desrosiers blames on the loss of dozens of officers killed in the quake, as well as scores who remain missing and more than 250 who were injured.

Still, that leaves some 9,600 Haitian police officers and 2,000 U.N. police officers.

The first signs of action came when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived Sunday, and a contingent of female U.N. and Haitian police officers set up a tent at the camp.

Ban promised the camps will be “safe and secure.”

He praised the security offered by Haitian and U.N. police and told the women officers: “We must protect these women and girls. … If they are sexually abused and attacked and raped, that is totally unacceptable and intolerable, and we must stop it.”

On Monday, a man with a bullhorn was at the camp during a food distribution, saying “We don’t want men raping women, do we?”

No, the women waiting in line yelled back.

Still, the fear was palpable among the most vulnerable. The 18-year-old orphaned rape victim was nervous about the time, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

“I have to find somewhere to sleep, near some people who might help me if there’s trouble,” she said.

“It scares me, the way the men look at me, and they know I’m all alone.”

___

Associated Press Television News reporter Pierre Richard Luxama contributed to this report from Port-au-Prince.

Chicago ministers group to play hardball on Wal-Mart
 

By Monée Fields-White
March 01, 2010

If, as appears likely, more Wal-Marts don’t get the green light this year, the ministers say they’ll mount a campaign against aldermen who oppose the big retailer’s expansion. Taking a page from union groups that have held Wal-Mart back, the ministers say they will support candidates in favor of the store with political advertising and urge their congregants to vote against dissenters.

From left to right, the Revs. Thomas Barclay, Larry Roberts, Herbert Lee and Alan Ragland are part of a more than 200-member coalition looking to bring more Wal-Marts to Chicago. Photo: Stephen J. Serio

“The pressure must be applied, starting with the mayor,” says the Rev. Larry Roberts of Trinity All Nations Ministries on the South Side. “The procrastination is just bringing more damage to the city and the communities.”Rev. Roberts is leading the coalition, which also includes prominent clergymen the Rev. Roosevelt Watkins of Bethlehem Star M.B. Church; the Rev. Simon Gordon of Triedstone Full Gospel Baptist Church; the Rev. Alan Ragland of Third Baptist Church of Chicago; the Rev. D. Darrell Griffin of Oakdale Covenant Church; the Rev. Herbert Lee of New Progressive Missionary Baptist Church; the Rev. Thomas Barclay of Progressive Beulah Pentecostal Church, and the Rev. Walter Turner of New Spiritual Light Missionary Baptist Church.

The pastors are betting that community sentiment in favor of Wal-Mart has grown immensely as store closings and job losses have piled up, leaving Wal-Mart the only viable hope in many poor neighborhoods.

Retail insiders say the ministers could lend moral authority to the pro-expansion movement, countering labor’s argument that Wal-Mart pays low wages and otherwise mistreats its employees. Of course, the prospect of mobilizing their congregations is the group’s most powerful weapon.

“What aldermen respond to is votes, and what churches have is lots of congregants and lots of votes,” says Neil Stern, a partner at Chicago retail consultancy McMillan Doolittle LLP.

Some of the ministers originally opposed Wal-Mart’s encroachment but changed positions in the past year as the recession took its toll. “The landscape of these communities isn’t the same,” says Rev. Ragland, who four years ago spoke against Wal-Mart. “We don’t have the luxury of saying no to Wal-Mart now.”

The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer has only one store in the city, in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side.Since 2004, Alderman Howard Brookins (21st) has sought to put another in his ward at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue. The project has been held up in the city’s Finance Committee, chaired by Alderman Edward Burke (14th).

Mr. Burke, who didn’t return calls for comment, last month stalled a vote on an amendment to the Chatham shopping center development agreement by attaching a measure that would require retailers with more than 50 employees to pay an hourly wage of at least $11.03 to receive city subsidies. Without agreement on that, he has said, he won’t take action on the Chatham store.

Unions, led by the Chicago Federation of Labor, will fight to keep Wal-Mart out. In the last aldermanic election, in 2007, labor backed several successful candidates who tipped the vote count against the big discounter.

The City Council must approve zoning changes required to build stores and has other ways to block Wal-Mart expansion, as in Mr. Burke’s committee. So-called “living wage ordinances” have been aimed squarely at Wal-Mart.

To attempt to turn the council back in Wal-Mart’s favor, the ministers say they will advertise, hold community rallies and find aldermanic candidates to challenge anti-Wal-Mart incumbents.

Funding for the campaign is still being ironed out. In the fight over the big-box ordinance, Wal-Mart has financed ads for various community groups. A Wal-Mart spokesman says the company isn’t involved in the coalition.

“We’re starting by putting wood in the fire to put more steam in the engine to move this train,” Rev. Roberts says. “We’re bringing out the heavy artillery.”

©2010 by Crain Communications Inc.

Boy Directs Air Traffic From JFK Airport

By SHELLEY NG

wpix.com

NEW YORK (WPIX)

An air traffic controller and his supervisor have been relieved from their duties after the Federal Aviation Administration discovered the controller allowed his young son to give directions to pilots at John F. Kennedy International Airport last month.

The boy’s father is a veteran air traffic controller and apparently brought his son, who was home from school, to work.

The FAA says the boy was heard on five different transmissions on February 17.

He appeared to be supervised when he got onto the headsets and spoke to the pilots.

The transmissions were posted online on a website for air traffic control enthusiasts last month.

The FAA stated only licensed controllers or controller trainees under direct supervision of certified controllers are allowed to communicate with pilots.

The pilots, however, seemed to be amused and one even says “awesome job” to the child.

Another pilot said to the controller at the JFK tower, “I wish I could bring my kid to the office.”

But the FAA said in a statement, “Pending the outcome of our investigation, the employees involved in this incident are not controlling air traffic. This behavior is not acceptable and does not demonstrate the kind of professionalism expected from all FAA employees.”

A union representing air traffic controllers also stated, “We do not condone this type of behavior in any way, and it is not indicative of the highest professional standards that controllers set for themselves and exceed each and every day in the advancement of aviation safety.”

It is unclear how long the FAA’s investigation will take.

The name and age of the child, as well as the names of the controller and controller-in-charge were not immediately released.

New York City school children experienced two snow days this year on February 10 and 26. Also unclear is if the child was off from school due to the snow storms.

Hear Audio here: JFK