USA Plunges Into Poverty!

Back during the Cold War, kids, I used to listen to Radio Moscow on the old short wave. They were rather entertaining. (Radio Peking was just sad, constantly listing statistics about the number of trucks produced in the last two quarters.)

Radio Moscow would play lots of great symphonic music and interesting folk music from all over the Soviet Union. But the most entertaining segments were "Moscow Mailbag" (where an announcer read letters from CPUSA members scragging the US and praising the workers paradise of the USSR) and the world news segments on the US.

Radio Moscow of course had nothing good to say about the US. They would breathlessly report crime statistics and news of obscure civil rights trials. Every report of a trial would mispronounce the term "prosecuting" to "persecuting."

Well, Putin's Russia has fallen back into this "no good news" pattern, posting this story with the graphic above:

"USA plunges into poverty"

The number of Washington residents living in poverty is up sharply since 2001, with increases in every county except Garfield, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The agency reported this week that 12 percent of the people in the state were living in poverty in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. In 2001, just 9.9 percent of the state's population was in poverty.

The state had 732,049 people living in poverty in 2005, compared with 586,456 people in 2001, the bureau said. The federal poverty line in 2005 was $19,350 for a family of four, the AP reports.

That photo, though...I think that's the line up to get the "Halo 3" release.

But then, they also offer this breaking news:

Extraterrestrial beings caught on tape for the first time ever

Extraterrestrial beings have finally been taped on video, the head of the Turkish UFO Center, Haktan Agdogan said.

The ufologist said at a special press conference in Istanbul that a local resident, a watchman from one of cottage townships, managed to film an extraterrestrial spaceship and two aliens. The lucky man, named as Yalcin Yalman, presented his 22-minute video to reporters.