Pay Attention

If you’re like me, you were probably pretty pissed off when Prop 8 passed in California this year. The Mormon community played the largest role in getting that proposition passed, and many of us took to the streets (or the web) in outrage, demanding that something be done–or at least that the church be taxed!

So the Mormon church is now saying that they’re not anti-gay and that they do support civil unions–just not “marriage.” So the Human Rights Campaign is giving them a chance to prove they mean it by supporting civil unions in their home state of Utah! Click here to learn more and to urge the church to live up to its words.

Did you know that the Saturday before Christmas is the biggest puppy-buying day of the year? Having never bought a dog (mine have always been “mutts” we found or got from a friend whose dog had puppies), I never even think of buying them from the store. There are always so many around already who need good homes.

So please, this Christmas, do these two things if you are considering getting a dog:

1. Adopt from a shelter. Don’t spend big bucks on a pet that may have come from a puppy mill. Instead, support your local humane shelter.

2. Attend an “Adopt, Don’t Shop!” event if there is one near you.

For more info on puppy mills and how you can help, visit In Defense of Animals .

Click here to write your local paper in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Click here to protest the U.S. government-sponsored Colombian police and military agencies spying on human rights groups, journalists, environmental activists, and peace advocates.

Concordia Coffee, the supplier for Harvard, Princeton, Purdue, the University of California, and Stanford, has refused to support its striking truck drivers from Oak Harbor. Oak Harbor Freight Lines workers are protesting the labor violations of its company, as well as its use of intimidation on the workers themselves. Instead of listening to the workers’ voices, Oak Harbor hired a strike breaking firm to help intimidate employees even further.

If Concordia Coffee were to support this strike, the workers would truly have a strong ally.  Please ask Concordia to support the strike and help these workers get their benefits back!

Oh, man.

Ran across this Roy Zimmerman song today and laughed so hard I had to share it. Roy’s stuff is always hilarious; if you like this one, check out the rest of the stuff on his YouTube channel.

We pretty much all know by now that we’re bathing in, slathering ourselves with, inhaling, or ingesting millions of chemicals every day that are just gonna give us cancer or melanoma or two left feet. From lead to arsenic to lead to asbestos to lead and lead and…lead, we’re pretty much surrounded. But we can still fight back. We can still choose some cosmetics, foods, clothing, and furnishings that don’t contain a molotov chemical cocktail of death–or, at least, the lesser of the evils.

So we should also feel more than comfortable demanding products without these chemicals. One such chemical, triclosan, is found in everything from toys to toothpaste to detergent to clothes. We’ve probably all got a little on us right now.

Do you know what triclosan is? It’s a freaking pesticide–marketed as an antimicrobial. I don’t think I’m alone when I say, “Hey you manufacturing people, I don’t want pesticide in my clothes and toothpaste, thank you very much.”

And according to the Food & Water Watch website, it has a ton of averse affects:

“Triclosan is washed down the drain and accumulates in waterways and sediment harming algae and fish. Triclosan has been identified as an endocrine and thyroid disruptor and is detectable in human blood, breast milk and urine. Furthermore, the frequent use of triclosan has been linked to antibiotic resistance.”

Um, yeah. It’s bad news.

So the EPA was supposed to publish a study about what the effects of triclosan are. They were due last fall. So let’s ask these fine fellows (and gals, I’m sure) to get those findings to us, like, ASAP, so we can find out what triclosan has done to us–and if it’s something super awful, let’s ask them to adios it entirely.

So I dub thee… unorganic! Metallica allusions aside, mislabeling foods is a serious crime. It’s not cool to say something is organic when it isn’t. I know the USDA is just hella busy these days with all the food scares going around–and why shouldn’t they be? With only about 1% of food that enters the U.S. being inspected, there’s bound to be little critters or pieces of glass or radioactive pudding somewhere. But don’t you think they could spend just an incy wincy bit of time enforcing some basic organic standards in dairy farms so we could, like, buy what we pay for instead of what we think we’re paying for?

See, factory farms (shudder) don’t allow much grazing time–or any grazing time at all. When you think “organic,” you think of happy cows getting some fresh air and some sweet grass in all those bellies. But by now, we all know what a factory farm is. And it ain’t Old McDonald. It’s more like Animal Farm meets Hostel. So “Organic Factory Farms” are like “Kind Union-Supporting Equality-Enforcing Fair Trade Walmarts.”

If you think that consumers deserve more than lip service, and that factory farms just can’t be really organic, click here to tell them to quit letting them label themselves happy cow people.

Canada’s boreal forest is being destroyed by tar sands mining. Millions of birds are having their nesting grounds threatened or destroyed completely from the mining and drilling in these wetlands. Up to 166 million birds are at risk. This project is also producing a huge amount of global warming, causing some to dub it the “most destructive project on earth.”  Please ask Minister Jim Prentice to put a stop to the mining.

The Utah Bureau of Land Management just finalized some plans to open up millions of wilderness acres to off-road vehicle use and energy development. Please ask President Elect Obama to reverse this decision and protect these wild lands.