Eideard

Is your mayor in the picture?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Mayors of about 80 U.S. cities from New York to Los Angeles to Houston are backing a campaign to remove legal barriers to same-sex marriage nationwide.

“The more support we build in our cities and states, the stronger case we can make for extending the freedom to marry to loving couples no matter where they live,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said…at a news briefing on the issue. Same-sex marriage is illegal under California law.

Legislators in Washington, New Jersey and Maryland are pushing measures to permit the practice, while voters in North Carolina and Minnesota will face ballot questions this year on banning it. Federal law doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, which are legal in New York, Iowa, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

“Law-abiding, tax-paying families and their children deserve the same opportunities, the same rights and the same responsibilities afforded to every other family,” said Villaraigosa, a Democrat, at the briefing in Washington, where the U.S. Conference of Mayors is meeting. He spoke in support of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group that says bans discriminate against homosexuals and infringe on their rights…

“On average in New York City, 700 gay and lesbian couples are now getting married at the city clerk’s offices” each month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “That means every month, hundreds of more parents and children are gaining the economic stability and protections that come with being a formal family unit.”

The mayor added that the change has been an economic boon for the largest U.S. city. He has said that the new law helps companies attract top talent and draws same-sex couples as tourists, including some who intend to marry while in New York…

Efforts to make the practice legal gained momentum in 2003, when the top Massachusetts court ruled 4-3 that a ban was unconstitutional. In 2004, the city of San Francisco initiated a court battle by letting gay couples wed. Massachusetts became the first state to permit same-sex marriage in May of that year.

Like so many civil rights struggles, though religious fundamentalists form the bastion of reactionary opposition, the issue of marriage equality encourages many more people to rethink the bigotry that props up the intellectual dishonesty and fear that denies equal opportunities to all citizens of this nation.

The “Mobile Informational Call Act” is an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 and will allow political organizations, committees, and action groups to contact you on your mobile phone. The new bill…would allow political organizations to use automated dialers and robocall-systems to dial your cell phone and hand you off to a live person or play automated messages asking you to contribute to political campaigns or take surveys.

The result, should the bill pass and become law, is that you’ll be able to opt-out of specific campaigns and group calling lists, but political organizations that get your number through petitions, calling lists, or affiliated organizations will be able to call your mobile phone whenever they choose.

With the fall political campaign heating up and next year’s campaign starting over a year early, that can add up to a lot of unsolicited phone calls from various campaigns and political action committees, all looking for your help or money…

That includes you being charged for the minutes used.

As always, the best thing to do is contact your congressional representatives and let them know that you oppose the bill and would like them to oppose the bill as well. The National Political Do Not Contact Registry has a petition that you can sign to make your opposition to the bill known to your specific representatives…

Beyond signing the petition, standard rules for contacting your Congressional representatives apply: even if you sign the petition, you’ll have the most success if you reach out to your specific representatives and senators with a personal message (the petition linked to above allows you to personalize the message you send for this purpose).

Congress-critters are getting hip to the cyberworld. Some of them can even send and receive their own email without clicking on the link to Nigeria. Now, the self-serving creeps want you to pay for a new intrusion.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Carl Paladino’s campaign stiffed about a dozen consultants, vendors and staff members for some $130,000 in salaries, fees and expenses, according to numerous veterans of his failed gubernatorial bid.

They are pressing for payment from a campaign committee, Paladino for the People, that is deep in debt. Public records show the committee has a balance of only $5,305 and debts of $6.1 million, most of them loans from the candidate.

“I would have expected a nice thank-you from Carl for all the hard work I had contributed, but instead I got screwed,” said Tim Suereth, who first served as manager of internal operations and later as an unpaid volunteer…

“There are a lot of people who didn’t get paid, and for many of the people who got paid, it took a while, and some did not get full payment,” he said. “It’s outrageous.”

William Rey said he is one of them.

The Paladino campaign paid him only $9,205 of the $14,031 he billed in late October for video production, Rey said. The check, he said, noted a “credit” to explain the difference.

“I don’t know if it’s a credit; it’s more like thievery if you ask me,” Rey said.

What more would you expect? When democracy speaks and you lose, beancounters and reactionaries think it’s perfectly OK to pick up their marbles – and maybe some of yours – and go home.

Squeaky-clean Singapore needs cleaner toilets and public awareness is one way to achieve this, a civic group said at the launch of the latest stage of its LOO campaign — Let’s Observe Ourselves.

The city-state has 30,000 public restrooms and is pushing to make 70 percent of them at least “three-star” clean by 2013.

But a survey by the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS) found that only some 500 of the island’s public toilets overall were up to its standards of working facilities, lack of litter and odor, and the provision of basic amenities such as hand soap and toilet paper.

“For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singaporeans’ culture. It tells people how civilized we are,” RAS President Tan Puay Hoon told reporters on Thursday, when the association unveiled its 70-page report on public restrooms as part of a campaign to improve island-wide toilet cleanliness.

“We are a First World country and we want a gracious society to reflect that.”

Under the RAS Happy Toilet Programme, toilets are rated from three to five stars. A four-star toilet should have a diaper changing station or urinal for children and a five-star should have eco-friendly features such as water-saving taps…

The LOO Campaign began in 2008. The RAS has also conducted the Happy Toilet School Education program and is a founding member of the World Toilet Organization and the Keep Singapore Beautiful Movement.

I hope no one ever lets these kind folks know what public toilets in Western First World nations are really like.

An [phony] activist group in Nevada – “Latinos for Reform”- is running an ad on television, radio and the Internet telling Nevada’s Hispanic population not to vote on election day so as to teach Democrats a lesson for failing on the promise to deliver on immigration reform.

But this is not some liberal PAC fed up with the lack of progress on a hot button issue for the state’s Hispanic population.

‘Latinos for Reform’ is headed by Robert De Posada, a conservative political analyst who makes occasional appearances on the spanish-speaking television network, Univision. The treasurer for the group is a high-powered Republican lobbyist named Juan Carlos Benitez who was named a special counsel for immigration related unfair employment practices in the Bush Administration…

The television ad imploring Hispanics not to vote should be taken down immediately. No voter should have their right to vote suppressed or denied.”

It has been taken down by some. Univision – at least – is refusing to carry the advert. Other Hispanic marketers are choosing to come down on the side of voters rights. They didn’t work for years to get Hispanic-Americans to register and vote just to sit one out on behalf of the Republican Party.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard from the group. In an effort to exploit distrust between the Latino and African American communities during the 2008 presidential campaign, ‘Latinos For Reform’ ran ads accusing Barack Obama of putting the interest of African Americans before Latinos and the interest of the African continent ahead of nations of Latin America.

Over half their budget for the Don’t Vote campaign came from John Finn, a wealthy anti-abortion campaigner. The rest of the line-up includes the usual rightwing cruds and cohorts from Dick Armey to Roy Hoffman of Swift Boat infamy.

Clean government doesn’t flow from dirty politics.

The Southern white Democrat, long on the endangered list, is at risk of being pushed one step closer to extinction.

From Virginia to Florida and South Carolina to Texas, nearly two dozen Democratic seats are susceptible to a potential Republican surge in Congressional races on Election Day, leaving the party facing a situation where its only safe presence in the South is in urban and predominantly black districts.

The swing has been under way since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that his fellow Democrats would face a backlash of white voters that would cost the party the South. It continued with Ronald Reagan’s election and reached a tipping point in the Republican sweep of 1994, with more than one-third of the victories coming from previously Democratic seats in the South…

And, uh, Nixon’s decision to make the Republican Party the official party of racism in the South.

The vulnerable Democrats across the South have moved to distance themselves from the party’s agenda and President Obama. Several candidates have declared they would not support keeping Nancy Pelosi of California as House speaker if the party holds its majority…

There are 59 Democrats in House seats across the South from the 11 states of the old Confederacy, totaling 43 white representatives and 16 black ones. Of those seats in predominantly white districts, nine are leaning Republican, eight are tossups and at least five more are competitive, according to the latest rankings by The New York Times, creating the prospect of the biggest Democratic losses since 1994, when 19 seats fell…

Former President Bill Clinton, who spent his career navigating between his party’s liberal sensibilities and the far more centrist instincts of Democrats in his home region, visited the district last week, passing through Batesville and Paragould before arriving for a rally in Jonesboro. He warned voters, “You are being played,” and urged people to cast ballots with their economic self interest in mind…

Except that Democrats who are afraid to vote for bread-and-butter issues in Congress are even less likely to confront them on the campaign trail. Republicans would destroy populist left-wing ideals like social security, medicare, public education. Democrats are too spineless to defend the issues that would show they have principles which respond to working families’ needs.

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After serving up 38 million ads from a group supporting the legalization of marijuana since August 7, Facebook told the group on August 16 that it could no longer use a pot leaf in its ad, since it might promote smoking.

“The image in question was no longer acceptable for use in Facebook ads,” wrote Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes in an e-mail to Wired.com. “The image of a marijuana leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies.”

But the Just Say Now campaign contests that Facebook isn’t harshing on their mellow — it’s censoring them, especially given that marijuana legalization is on the ballot in the upcoming election in California. And it’s calling on its supporters — some 6,000 fans on its Facebook page — to swap out their profile picture for an image of a pot leaf with a banned box over it:

The ads were entitled “End the war on marijuana” and called on users to sign a petition asking President Obama to support the right of states to legalize marijuana.

Facebook’s core audience supports drug legalization, according to polls, and a large number of young adults say they are more likely to vote if legalization is on the ballot, according to Jane Hamsher, the co-founder of the Firedoglake blog, whose helping run the campaign in concert with Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.

“We aren’t trying to sell people pot. This is a policy issue,” Hamsher told Wired.com, noting that more than 50 percent of inmates in the federal prison system were there on drug charges and that law-and-order types like former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein support decriminalization. “The time is right for this and Facebook shutting this down is a real blow when we are trying to open up a conversation…”

“It seems like a decision made to appease somebody’s grandma,” Hamsher said.

More like a decision made to appease some reactionary investor. Or reactionary potential investor.

Republican Flag of Freedom

In a blow to President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats, Republicans blocked a bill on Tuesday to require an unprecedented level of public disclosure of who pays for political campaign advertising.

On a Senate vote of 57-41, Democrats fell short of the needed 60 to clear a procedural hurdle Republicans set up against The Disclose Act, likely killing the measure for the year…

Transparency and democracy fail once again in the U.S. Senate.

With Obama’s support, Democrats crafted the campaign finance bill in response to a Supreme Court decision in January that overturned federal and state limits on independent expenditures by corporations to support or oppose candidates.

The Democratic-backed bill would require corporate as well as union and advocacy group leaders to disclose their names in campaign ads rather than allow so-called front groups to take responsibility for the political advertising.

Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin pointedly noted that many Republicans had earlier favored more disclosure.

But this year, Durbin said, “They’re betting that most of these ads are going to be on behalf of their candidates and against Democrats. That’s what it comes down to…”

Voters will be left clueless as to who is funding the ‘independent’ TV ads promoting and attacking candidates and how much these secretive funders are paying for these ads,” Public Citizen’s Craig Holman said. The non-partisan advocacy group urged the Senate to reconsider the bill after the August recess.

The measure would also ban election spending by companies with more than 20 percent foreign ownership and recipients of U.S. bank bailouts…

Polls show broad public support for the aim of the bill to provide greater disclosure of donors to campaigns. But Republicans dismiss such surveys, saying they were conducted before Democrats drafted their bill behind closed doors.

Every bill in Congress is drafted behind closed doors. They keep the public out – and the stink in.

The issue is that the Republicans, once again, use 19th Century century rules to prevent a democratic vote on the issue.

McDonald’s is recalling 12 million drinking glasses it is selling to promote the new “Shrek” movie because painted designs on the cheap collectables contain the toxic metal cadmium.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission warned consumers to immediately stop using the glasses; McDonald’s said it would post instructions on its website next week regarding refunds.

The glasses, which are being sold for about $2 each as part of a promotional campaign for the movie Shrek Forever After, were available in four designs depicting the characters Shrek, Princess Fiona, Puss in Boots and Donkey…

The CPSC noted in its recall notice that “long-term exposure to cadmium can cause adverse health effects.” Research has shown it can cause problems to the kidneys and can cause bone softening.

In the case of the Shrek-themed glassware, the potential danger would be long-term exposure to low levels of cadmium, which could leach from the paint on to a child’s hand, then enter the body if the child puts that unwashed hand to his or her mouth.

Though the amount of cadmium leaching from the paint is only a fraction above limits – which the CPSC is still developing – McDonalds is cooperating in the recall from the gitgo. Fortunately.

You may not see much of a political flap over this. The glasses weren’t made in China.

Gillian Duffy talking to whatsis’name
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Labour’s election campaign was in disarray tonight after Gordon Brown was forced to apologise to a pensioner and lifelong party supporter whom he had described as “a bigoted woman” for questioning him over the scale of immigration from eastern Europe.

His contemptuous dismissal of Gillian Duffy, made in private but caught by a live broadcast feed, again raised questions about his volatile character and, more importantly, whether the Labour core vote would be repelled by his apparent indifference to their concerns.

Morale in the Labour campaign slumped as even some of Brown’s closest aides vented their fury at him, with one describing him as “a pathetic blame shifter”. Others voiced concern that it would appear that he was two-faced…

Brown had met Duffy, 65, on the streets of Rochdale when she accosted him over a range of issues including the scale of debt, taxes and tuition fees. At one point during the discussion she referred to eastern Europeans “flocking” to Britain.

After an apparently pleasant conclusion to the conversation and closing his car door, Brown turned to his director of strategic communications, Justin Forsyth, declaring the event a “disaster” and demanding to know who was responsible for him meeting Duffy. He appeared to blame his longstanding aide Sue Nye.

Asked by Forsyth what Duffy had said he replied: “Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous.”

The separation between professional politicians and the rest of us isn’t limited to any particular creed. It’s the rare individual politician who seeks and maintains contact with the lives of ordinary working people.

I may be a cynic; but, I doubt I am very far from describing the core principles of those representing real power in most nations.