Sonny Bono was a great record producer. He was also…nah, that’s pretty much it.

Mary Bono served in Congress after her husband Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. It was bad enough California sent Sonny Bono to Washington. But then Sonny Bono’s wife? How does this happen? Oh yeah, she’s a Republican. In the GOP you don’t have to be smart. You just have to know how to follow orders.

They were married in 2007 after dating for two years and stirring Washington buzz. Connie Mack is the son of the former U.S. senator and Mary Bono had been married to late singer-turned-politician Sonny Bono.

via Divorcing: Connie Mack and Mary Bono Mack | Tampa Bay Times.

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Haynes Johnson was a terrific journalist who went on to become a terrific historian. I’ve always felt that journalists make great historians because they know how to write and keep a reader’s attention. From the Times obit…

Haynes Bonner Johnson was born in New York City on July 9, 1931. His mother, the former Emmie Ludie Adams, was a pianist; his father, Malcolm, was a newspaperman with The New York Sun. For The Sun, the elder Mr. Johnson won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for his 24-part series, “Crime on the Waterfront.”

This was turned into the greatly overrated movie “On The Waterfront.” Brando was great. But the director, Elia Kazan, is one of the worst “humans” ever to populate Hollywood. I suggest you read about all the careers Kazan destroyed by naming innocent names before H.U.A.C. Budd Shulman who wrote the screenplay also named names. Sucky movie made by even suckier people. More from obit…

That series, which exposed the unsavory, often violent alliance of labor unions and organized crime on New York’s docks, inspired “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 film starring Marlon Brando.

via Haynes Johnson, Journalist and Author, Dies at 81 – NYTimes.com.

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Children are our future. Education is more important than money. We can’t compete with China unless more kids go to college. Those are American values, right? And yet we lend money to bankers at far lower rates than we do students. Why? Because bankers control Washington and bankers want every educated American to start their adulthood being $100,000 indebted to bankers. How much of a fight can you put up against the system when your entire career is spent paying off college debt. College debt is turning our most educated into indentured servants who are too broke and too exhausted to fight these loansharks. Banks destroyed America in 2007, and instead of punishing them, we make them stronger. They create nothing and destroy everything. From USA Today…

A proposal by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to reduce interest rates on student loans has one big economic backer: Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

via Nobel winner: Cut student loan rates.

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