Ok guys today is my first Saturday here at blog spot and It's Take Action Saturday!
I use Saturday to post all those pesky emails we get all week asking us to sign petitions. By putting them here it makes it easy to do them all from one page. If you have an action alert/petition you want to post just put it in the comments and I'll post it for you all week.
After the Action Alerts I'll post the Links of the Day.
First off lets start with that traitor Steny Hoyer. Even after Nancy Pelosi said she would stop the Senate version of the FISA Bill Hoyer sent the damn thing to committee.
Now take action to stop it!
Emergency Petition to Stop Telecom Immunity
http://www.kintera.org/site/apps/ka/ct/contactcustom.asp?c=feIJKQMEF&b=3908519
PFAW has several more Action Alerts
http://actions.pfaw.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionCenter.aspx?c=enJHKINrFqG&b=848149&sid=113287519
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Bhopal survivors march to Delhi
On Feb. 20, survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal began a 500-mile padyatra (pilgrimage by foot) "to assert their fundamental rights to justice and a life of dignity and health."
Dow Chemical (the site's owner since it bought Union Carbide) and the Indian government have failed to address the fact that 20,000 people still drink contaminated water and 10-15 people a day are dying from chemical exposure. The marchers are demanding clean drinking water, medical care, economic rehabilitation, and a full environmental cleanup. Other demands include the extradition of former Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson, who faces criminal charges in India's courts. The marchers also want the government to ban four dangerous pesticides that were approved after U.S. companies bribed Agriculture Ministry officials (including Dursban, Dow's chlorpyrifos product for the home, withdrawn in the U.S. in 2001).
Support the march: You can put pressure on India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to meet with the marchers and address their demands. Please sign this e-mail petition, and we will handwrite your name and city on a postcard that will be sent directly to the Prime Minister.
Thank you!
Take Action http://action.panna.org/t/5185/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=931
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PAN ALERT: Tell FDA lindane has got to go!
EPA has stopped the use of the pesticide lindane in agriculture, calling it "one of the most toxic, persistent, bioaccumulative pesticides ever registered." Yet the Food and Drug Administration continues to allow lindane use in shampoos and lotions used on children. Lindane has been banned for use on pets and on seeds, why are we still allowing it on children's heads?
Take Action Now!
Pharmaceutical uses of lindane for lice and scabies have been banned in California since 2002, and legislation promoting similar bans is moving forward in other states. Lindane has already been banned in 52 countries, including most recently Mexico, and the long-lasting pesticide is now being targeted for a global ban under an international treaty called the Stockholm Convention. Effective alternatives to lindane are clearly available.
Lindane is an organochlorine insecticide and a known neurotoxin that can cause seizures, damage the nervous system, and weaken the immune system. Exposure may also cause cancer and disrupt hormone systems. Since lindane is highly persistent and travels globally via air and water, its use poses an exposure risk to people far from the source. Lindane is one of the most abundant pesticides in Arctic air and water, and indigenous people in the Arctic are faced with excessive exposure to lindane through their traditional diet.
FDA is stubbornly continuing to support lindane use. Tell FDA's Commissioner that it is time his agency caught up with the rest of the world and banned this dangerous pesticide. The FDA must prioritize the health and safety of our children over and above the interests of corporations that profit from lindane sales in the U.S.
Take Action http://action.panna.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=790
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Pesticide Contamination in California Residents' Bodies
Tired of seeing their children ill during pesticide spraying season, residents of Lindsay, Tulare County tested the air and their own bodies for highly toxic chlorpyrifos. The results were alarming: Over 91% of the people tested had above average levels of breakdown products of the pesticide chlorpyrifos in their urine, and most of the women had amounts above the level calculated from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data to be safe for pregnant and nursing women.
Read a summary of the study results and recommendations in English or Spanish.
Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate pesticide used on apples, oranges, almonds, broccoli, grapes, and other foods.
What can you do?
Take Action
http://action.panna.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=603
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Welcome to Students for Bhopal!
Lots to do here to help the students.
Tell the Indian Government NOT to sell out to Dow
Bhopal, the "Hiroshima of the chemical industry," is the world's worst-ever industrial disaster. "Students here are like students elsewhere," says Janine Jacques, a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. "When we learned about the ongoing catastrophe in Bhopal, we were outraged. We decided we had to act." You can too! Good YouTube video just use the direct link to see it.
URGENT ACTION: DOW SETS ARMED POLICE UPON INDIAN VILLAGERS
Direct link http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/
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Take Action
Help Save America's Wolves! Click on one of the links below to take action to save wolves.
Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies...
Oppose Delisting of Wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies Call the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and let them know that you oppose the Bush/Cheney Administration's elimination of vital federal protections for wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies.
Outrageous -- Feds Greenlight Northern Rockies Wolf Slaughter
Despite the opposition of tens of thousands of Defenders supporters, the Fish & Wildlife Service just made it much easier to kill wolves in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Rockies region -- even while they remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Take Action http://action.defenders.org/site/PageServer?pagename=savewolves_takeaction
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Over 40,000 5 and 6 year olds home alone because their minimum wage working Mom's can't afford daycare! That's what will happen if Bush gets his way.
Dear MomsRising member,
We are thrilled to report that MomsRising members have sent over 25,000 letters in the last few days opposing President Bush's proposed cuts to federal afterschool funds.
Can you help us get to 40,000 letters to represent the 40,000 kindergarteners who are home alone each day after school? My kindergarten-aged five year old son recently asked if the Easter Bunny is a chicken. Clearly, this is not a child who should be left alone after school. But many parents have no choice.
We need more quality afterschool programs, yet President Bush is proposing the opposite. Bush is proposing to cut federal afterschool funds by $300 million and to turn the federal afterschool initiative into a voucher program next year. If Congress agrees, then hundreds of thousands of children would lose their afterschool programs, and families would have vouchers but in many cases no place to use them as more and more programs close. It would be a terrible mistake.
The Bush Administration is proposing $300 million in funding cuts for Afterschool programs. If Congress approves this proposal, hundreds of thousands of children will lose the programs they participate in. Email Congress today to tell them not to approve these harmful budget cuts.
*Click here to send a letter to your Congresspeople now and tell them to stop these cuts:
http://www.moms rising.org/afte rschool
Have I mentioned lately how much I really hate Bush lately?
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Now onto Links of the Day!
I read all 4 pages. What a hoot I had a good laugh!
A Liberal Goes Undercover to Brave America's Premiere Right-Wing Gathering
By Mister Leonard Pierce, AlterNet. Posted March 1, 2008.
Posing as a lobbyist for the American Milk Solids Council, one lefty blogger entered the belly of the CPAC beast.
So I decided to go to the 2008 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC -- America's foremost gathering of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. Why did I do it? For years, I'd been writing snotty articles about the reactionary right as a contributor to the blog Sadly, No! but aside from family reunions, I never spent much time with them. So, with a hotly contested presidential election in the offing and rumors of the retreat of modern neoconservativism being whispered in the corridors of punditry, I decided there was no better time than the present to worm my way into the midst of the right wing's true believers. Using the generous donations of Sadly, No! readers and other well-wishers, and posing as a lobbyist for the American Milk Solids Council, I made my way to Washington in early February and sat through every moment of CPAC 2008. Herewith, a highly abridged version of my copious notes from the belly of the beast.
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WEDNESDAY NIGHT. When I arrive at the hotel, two members of the Young America's Foundation -- the omnipresent youth league that superceded the hippie-punching Young Americans for Freedom -- are trying to check in using a credit card not belonging to them. Rules are for poor people, and they seem to think that if they berate the poor West African guy working the front desk, they'll get what they want eventually. They may be wrong, but damn it, no late-shift immigrant is going to tell them that. Modern Washington, the Washington of Bush and CPAC, was built to keep people like him from telling people like them what to do.
The convention will be attended, largely, by two groups of people: the mainline Republican rump of 19-percenters, who think George W. Bush is doing a Brownian heck of a job, and the radical right, who think that the problem with George is that he's not heartlessly conservative enough. To put it another way, here we have the people who look at the wreckage of the American 2000s and pronounce it a wonderful thing and the people who look at it and say, "Yeah, it's pretty awful, but if we tried, we could make it a whole lot worse."
In the elevator up to my floor, two men in golf hats (golf hats? at 8 p.m.?) talk about how high taxes will cause the rich to flee the country and stop producing if Hillary gets into office. (They're apparently laboring under the misapprehension that Americans still produce things.) This is a real threat in the world of CPAC, while things like massive healthcare shortages, an increasingly ill-educated population, dependence on dwindling natural resources and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor are the stuff of fairy tales.
I've arrived too late for the pre-CPAC Diamond Reception and too early for the expensive hookers to start roaming the halls. The soda machine costs a buck and a quarter a can, so I decide to just wait for the boy to bring my bottle of gin. Then, before the pills kick in -- I need a little help to get through this -- a moment of imperialist panic: What if there is no boy? What if there is no gin?
THURSDAY MORNING. Here's a description of Hell they never give you: a huge room full of all the people you hate most, and they're all having a wonderful time.
Yes, it's all smiles and sunshine here at CPAC: lively young ladies with skillfully applied layers of makeup are here to greet you at every turn and correct your every confusion. Hopelessly earnest collegiate nerds hand out Mitt Romney stickers and hope against hope that John McCain has some sort of campaign trail meltdown: perhaps it will occur to him that the last 30 years have all been a fever dream brought on by bad fish paste, that he is still in some VC labor camp wearing a tin can around his head, and he will savagely turn on his campaign manager with a broken bottle while at a Kiwanis breakfast.
A rail-thin brunette in the row in front of me tests my cover for the first time.
"Hi! Are these seats taken?"
"Help yourself."
"Oh, thanks, sir!" Sir. So much for getting laid. "I'm (name redacted) from the University of Small Midwestern State's Conservative Student Alliance."
"Leonard Pierce, American Milk Solids Council."
"I'm sorry? What is that?"
"It's an industry group for milk solids manufacturers. We lobby Washington lawmakers to lessen regulations on the export of milk solids. The problem is that the government blames us for the incompetence of African mothers."
"That is so unfair."
"Tell me about it."
American Conservative Union leader David Keene interrupts a panel dedicated, like most things here at CPAC, to the beatification of Ronald Reagan, to report that Vice President Cheney has arrived early. I brace myself: I am about to be a few yards away from the Worst Man in America.
Continue to page 2 http://www.alternet.org/stories/77888/
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George Bush Is Engaged in an Epic Battle to Cover His Ass
By Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast. Posted March 1, 2008.
Bush's showdown with the Dems in Congress over granting telecoms immunity for spying has big implications.
Something astonishing happened the other day in the House: The Democratic leadership found some courage. After over a year of demoralizing, often inexplicable capitulation, they actually gathered the fortitude to push back slightly against Republicans on so-called national security issues. The Republicans' response was swift: They took their ball and went home, after a brief stop at a prearranged press conference on the Capitol steps.
Two issues caused the dispute: One, in a stunning display of rudimentary oversight, the House issued contempt citations for two former Bush staffers, Harriet Meiers and Josh Bolten, who've been ducking House subpoenas for months now. This was predictably dismissed by weepy Minority Whip John Boehner as a "partisan fishing expedition," a boilerplate clich if ever there was one.
The second issue, which the indignant Republicans preferred to discuss, for obvious reasons, was the House Democrats' refusal to cave on retroactive immunity for telecom companies, like AT&T and Sprint, for collaborating with the White House in spying on domestic internet and phone communications, which, to be clear, was tremendously illegal.
What's less encouraging, but interesting, is that the Democrats were ready to sign off on extending the repugnantly named Protect America Act, except for telecom immunity. To Bush, this made the bill dead on arrival. That's right; Bush promised to veto the bill if it reached his desk without a get out of jail free card for Comcast.
It's hard to line that up with the apocalyptic tenor of Bush's exhortations regarding the bill. If the warrantless domestic spying provisions of the Act were not renewed, Bush warned, Osama bin Laden would rain fire upon us all. But he was planning to veto them if they came to him without immunity. Naturally, this makes no fucking sense. Either Bush is willing to risk another 9/11 to embarrass the Democrats, or he's lying when it comes to the threat posed by having to get a FISA warrant -- retroactively, after the fact -- for domestic surveillance. I think he's lying, but I suppose it could be both.
It's interesting that these issues are what it takes to really outrage Republicans -- threaten huge corporate giants with lawsuits, or exercise congress's constitutional oversight powers. Of course, it's only natural that the Republicans would shudder at the prospect of effective investigations being conducted in the House. If the Democrats actually start following through on the legal options to compel testimony, it's only a matter of time before everyone's implicated. But telecom immunity?
Republicans are, of course, fundamentally pro-corporate, even more so than modern Democrats. But to go to bat this hard on behalf of an industry seems anomalous even for them. All a congressman usually has to do for his biennial bribe is vote in a corporation's interests, not engage in tantrum theatrics. There's more than pedestrian corruption at work here.
Of course, there is the terror issue, and in a most perilous election year, Republicans would like nothing more than to be able to run on the "Dems are sissies" platform. If they can keep people frightened and badly misinformed, they may manage to make telecom amnesty into a winning issue for them come November.
But to do that, they have to lie. A lot. They have to feign outrage, and actual concern for the wellbeing of their fellow Americans. They're doing their level best. To hear Republicans tell it, requiring a rubber-stamp warrant, after the fact, to spy on Americans is like mailing plutonium to Iran. Bush's spiel was grade A horseshit from start to finish:
"Because Congress failed to act, it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack. At midnight, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad. This means that as terrorists change their tactics to avoid our surveillance, we may not have the tools we need to continue tracking them--and we may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America…. Instead, the House held partisan votes that do nothing to keep our country safer. House leaders chose politics over protecting the country--and our country is at greater risk as a result."
Now go read page 2 it's a must. http://www.alternet.org/rights/78032/
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Al Jazeera has a bunch of great article to read today go check them out.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/55ABE840-AC30-41D2-BDC9-06BBE2A36665.htm
Including a video of revenge!
Al-Zawahiri vows revenge in video!
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/54C82DF8-1C9C-4288-88B7-00CEE0B3459F.htm
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03/01/08 BBC: Iraq violence jumps in February The number of Iraqis killed by violence rose in February for the first time in several months, official figures show. At least 633 civilians died, according to data from several ministries - up from more than 460 deaths in January.
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Well well well haven't I been saying Turkey is taking their orders from Bush when it comes to attacking the Kurds!
03/01/08 BBC: Iraq troop withdrawal baffles Turks
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And of course the Turks have deny Bush is pulling their strings
03/01/08 AFP: Turkish army chief denies US pressure led to Iraq pull-out
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If you've never been to BushFlash you have got to see all the great flash video's he's done.
Eric Bloomrich is one of my favorite people on the internet. I have watched all his flashes and Eric lets to save everyone of them to your computer.
http://www.bushflash.com/animation.html
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