Water Bottle Tax
I give a lot of credit to Mayor Daley of Chicago for his most recent environmental move, a tax on water bottles. According to this article from the Sun Times, taxes of 10 – 25 cents will be added to every bottle of water sold. Go Mayor Daley!!
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Smokey the Bear website
This may not be new but it’s new to me. The National Forest Service and Smokey the Bear have a website dedicated to Smokey’s message that “only you can prevent forest fires.” It doesn’t cover everything, although I suppose it would be a little more complicated message if they had to go into the global climactic changes behind the desertification of California and the resultant fire-friendly conditions. Still, for a kid-oriented conservation page it’s not too bad, and you can always join Smokey kids or play campfire games. Regardless of what you do on the site, be sure to catch the creepy intro video on the main page and remember, only YOU can prevent forest fires.
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Mercenaries and more
To understand Iraq, we need to know more than the headlines and the sound bites. We need to hear what people there have to say and what they think is happening. Well here’s part of that puzzle. If you care at all about what’s happening in the world, you need to watch this video:
Incensed? Outraged? Well, you probably should be. A lot of what’s going on in Iraq with private contractors is still coming to the surface. I didn’t know that one of the big reasons for poor soldier retention is contractor presence in Iraq, I didn’t even know about the contractors. If you find yourself looking for more information, the rest of the documentary can be found here and of course there’s the new award-winning book from Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater.
Via Truthdig
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"Video Vets" complete
I posted a few weeks ago about the Video Vets commercial being made by MoveOn.org and director Oliver Stone and wanted to update you on that project. The commercial has been finished and is embedded below, although you can also find it here. More than the ad, I found the interview= with Oliver Stone to be very interesting, although not surprisingly on the wordy side.
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VideoVets: interviews with veterans
Oliver Stone and MoveOn.org have teamed up to create a 30-second TV spot focusing on “bringing the troops home” from Iraq. The project, called VideoVets will be composed by Stone, himself a veteran, from the most popular interview voted on by the viewing public. My personal favorite interview is with Sgt Sam Schultz of the Indiana National Guard. When he arrived in Iraq, he was given a white Chevy pickup truck as his primary fighting vehicle which he later modified to carry a machine gun in the bed. Says Sgt Schultz: “It’s important to end this war, because we are the wrong people to fight this war… we’re doing more harm than good.”
Thanks to the folks at Truthdig for their article about this project.
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Maryland leads the charge for electoral college reform
In an historical decision, the state of Maryland may be changing the criteria for how their electors would vote for the president. Instead of representing the popular vote in Maryland itself, MD electors would vote for which ever candidate won the national popular vote. The condition? Maryland’s revision will only go into effect if enough states pass similar legislation as to represent an electoral majority, or 270 votes. So far the only other state considering the move is Hawaii, making the count—combined with Maryland’s 10—a total of 14 votes. Before you write the whole thing off as a populist pipe-dream, California (55 electoral votes) legislators voted for a similar resolution last year only to see it vetoed by Governator Schwarzenegger.
A CNN article and a New York Times op-ed about the change.
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The RIAA? Not in MY Democratic Party.
Boing Boing today posted an extremely disappointing article revealing that one of the people heading up public affairs and relations for the Democratic National Convention in Denver will be Jenni Engebretsen, the Director of Communications for the Recording Industry Association of America. For me, as a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, this link to the RIAA, an organization made famous by glorified bullying and deceptive legal practices, makes me much more cautious to support the party.
From Boing Boing: “The liberal blogosophere is united on many fronts — not just disliking US foreign policy. We also hate the RIAA — for suing our friends, for lobbying for laws that suspend due process rights of the accused (the RIAA’s favorite law, the DMCA, was used by Diebold to suppress information about failures in its voting machines), and for demanding the right to “pretext” (commit wire fraud) in order to catch “pirates.”“
Read the full article here, and more quotes from her here. Don’t like the news? Contact the DNC here.
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Our President looks like a monkey
So it’s no secret. He does. Not only does he look like a monkey, but sometimes he probably smells like one too, although I wouldn’t know because I’ve never been that close to him. To celebrate his looking a bit more simian than the rest of us, I’m glad that the internet has produced bushorchimp.com in which pictures of President Bush are put right next to pictures of chimpanzees. Almost 5 million people have visited since the site went up in 2000, join them. Here are some of my favorites:
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The starting gun goes off for another nuclear arms race
Despite being the single largest nuclear power in the world, the United States is building more missiles. Maybe it’s an echo of the saber-rattling going on in Iran or North Korea off the Oval Office door, but this is just disgusting. The goal is, according to this NYT article , to replace the arsenal of aging warheads with a generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft. Nuclear weaponry has absolutely no place at all on the modern ‘battlefield’, if we can use such a term. Is the US actually considering using these weapons, and if not why would billions of tax dollars go to such a program? Does anyone remember what happened last time somebody used a nuclear weapon?
As if the US re-arming wasn’t enough to get the whole world back in the nuclear market, Col. Khadafi of Libya adds another disincentive. In a rare interview with the BBC, Khadafi complains that western countries never followed-through on their promises of development aid in exchange for his country’s nuclear disarming. For more on that story go here
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The fate of the internet
Check out this brilliant video about net neutrality from the directors of ‘Four Eyed Monsters.’ Their website is a bit confusing so I couldn’t figure out exactly who ‘they’ are except that their names are Arin and Susan and they host one of the best videos I’ve seen on the subject of net neutrality and the future of the internet. Please see this clip (it’s a little over 10 minutes long) and show it to others. This is a very important issue and it’s critical that we educate ourselves about what’s going on. Let’s exercise some democracy!!
Save the Internet | Rock the Vote
Thanks for the link Jeff
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No red carpet for most recent Newberry winner
The most recent recipient of the Newberry Medal (the Pulitzer for children’s literature) is not being greeted with open arms as most have been in the past. The reason? On the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky” the 10 year-old main character hears the word scrotum in reference to another character’s dog getting a snake bite in that most sensitive area.
“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”
All over the country now there is a debate raging among school and local librarians as to whether they should stock the book, despite “the word” that graces its first page. To include the book would force librarians and teachers into an awkward vocabulary lesson, but to not do so would be censoring what must otherwise be a very good book. The age old debate takes another turn.
Here is a NYT article on the story.
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Iraq war predictions were a little off
The National Security Archives have just secured a pre-Iraq war slideshow by the US military given to civilian leaders detailing their projections on how Iraq would look 3, 12, 45 months after invasion. At this point in the conflict (we are just beginning the 47th month of the war) we are beyond their scope of prediction. The last prediction given in the slide show is 45 months at which point we should be completely disengaged with direct military action, with a possibility of 5,000 troops in the area just in case.
Surprise! Last month President Bush approved another troop increase of 20,000 troops which would bring the total number above 150,000.
Thanks to the National Security Archives for their work in securing the information. I’‘m just glad people still now what the Freedom of Information Act is. For more detail, check out the New York Times article that led me to this interesting revelation.
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For the MPAA it's Republicans over refugees
Actor/director Clint Eastwood is set to receive the first humanitarian award ever given by the MPAA. The reason given for the award is "decades… of decency and goodness of spirit in his movie making" which I’‘ll admit is true. Eastwood’‘s recent movies have been heartwarming and admittedly both decent and good, but should this award be going to someone more rewarding?
In the last 6 years Angelina Jolie has exemplified humanitarianism bringing millions of dollars, an international spotlight, and legislative attention as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador to the problem of refugees and displaced persons. Eastwood, the former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA is hardly in the same league.
BBC Article on Eastwood’‘s upcoming award and another to an Angelina Jolie fan site that I may or may not have spent two hours exploring.
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Kudos Gov. Perry
Texas Governor Rick Perry has just mandated that all female students aged 11 and 12 be vaccinated against HPV, the leading cause of cervical cancer.
\n\n Cervical cancer is one of the worst diseases out there and it has only recently become preventable with the development of a vaccine. Governor Perry’s decisive move to support a comprehensive vaccination program for girls in Texas shines as an example of visionary executive leadership and I’ve written him a letter and you can find it in the letters section of my website.comment | permalink | +del.icio.us | +digg | +reddit