May 2008 archive

Off the rails

Service was disrupted after a passenger was spotted jumping off a speeding bullet train between Hamamatsu and Kakegawa stations in Shizuoka Prefecture.

A drunken man injured his leg after being hit by a train while staggering on the edge of a platform at Tokyo’s Okachimachi Station.

STATS

62

Lawmakers who paid their respects at Yasukuni Shrine, one day after leaders of Japan and South Korea urged to end their disputes over historical issues

3,119

Traffic accidents caused by drunk drivers across Japan for the six-month period from Sep 19, a drop of 22.5 percent from a year before, according to the National Police Agency

What is the meaning of Boogie? Wikipedia has one answer. I (unsurprisingly) have another. Boogie is what makes me boogie. Or…..alternatively….songs that have boogie in the title.

i. e.

Abraham hung out at his father Terah’s idol store one day, while Terah was out doing some errand or another.  Abraham wasn’t terribly impressed by the idols.  He had some other ideas about what made the world go round.  The story goes that while Terah was gone, Abraham smashed all the idols except the largest one.

When Terah came home, he asked Abraham, “What happened?”  Abraham replied that all the idols had gotten into a big fight and the largest idol won!

Now of course Terah knew this was hogwash but he couldn’t very well respond that it was impossible for idols to get into fistfights without admitting that idols were not real and not worth worshipping.

I like Biblical stories.  Even though I am hardly a Biblical scholar of any kind, I find them useful as basic descriptions of so many of the joys and miseries of humanity.

our very own masslass would really like to do a pony or two every once-in-a-while. but she’s just too damned shy. so i offer this v.v.v. funny list on her behalf.

enjoy………………

During the primary race in Oregon there have been a number of signs that Republican Gordon Smith fears his possible Democratic opponent House Speaker Jeff Merkley. Whether it was his campaign’s decision to release their fundraising numbers early to counter the positive fundraising press the Merkley Campaign was receiving or his ridiculous email blast I wrote about yesterday. Now, Smith’s campaign is on the attack like never before and they’ve got their sights set on Oregon Senate candidate Merkley. Could this be another indication that the Smith Campaign does not want to face Jeff Merkley in November?

1. From The Guardian comes news of Another record as oil passes $126. OPEC is going to try to increase production… to take advantage of the high prices. “The price of crude was up by around $2 a barrel in trading, reaching a new peak of $126.20, amid concerns about shortages of diesel in the United States, the weakness of the dollar and the possibility of geopolitical tensions in oil producing countries.”

   Of course, Bush has done what he could to increase “geopolitical tensions in oil producing countries”. Jerome a Paris predicts $200 a barrel oil will happen on January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day. A day when “a new president that has not prepared the ground for serious action will be blamed for everything that transpires”.

   Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Big Oil launches advertising campaign.

   Faced with a national outcry over the high price of gasoline and soaring profits for energy companies, the oil and gas industry is waging an unusually pricey campaign to burnish its image.

   The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main lobby, has embarked on a multiyear, multimedia, multimillion-dollar campaign, which includes advertising in the nation’s largest newspapers, news conferences in many state capitals and trips for bloggers out to drilling platforms at sea.

   The intended audience is elected officials and the public, with an emphasis on the latter. The industry is trying to convince voters — who, in turn, will make the case to their members of Congress — that rising energy prices are not the producers’ fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse.

   Just what we need is oil-industry astroturfing in blogs.

   The lobby has started courting online journalists as well. In November, the institute said it invited bloggers to Shell’s facilities in New Orleans and then took them to visit the offshore platform Brutus. The same month, the institute also brought bloggers to Chevron’s offices in Houston and its Blind Faith platform under construction in Corpus Christi, Tex. There are more tours in the works.

   Blind Faith: big oil is our friend.

Four at Four continues with 2 corrupt senators, Army “stop loss”, and Pelosi’s war funding bill.

John Edwards has joined with several organizations to try to cut poverty in America in half in the next 10 years.

Watch the video with John Edwards and join the movement here: http://www.halfinten.org/

One in eight Americans now lives in poverty.  A family of four is considered poor if the family’s income is below $19,971-a bar far below what most people believe a family needs to get by. Still, using this measure, 12.6 percent of all Americans were poor in 2005, and more than 90 million people (31 percent of all Americans) had incomes below 200 percent of federal poverty thresholds.

Millions of Americans will spend at least one year in poverty at some point in their lives.  One third of all Americans will experience poverty within a 13-year period. In that period, one in 10 Americans are poor for most of the time, and one in 20 are poor for 10 or more years.  

Poverty in the United States is far higher than in many other developed nations. At the turn of the 21st century, the United States ranked 24th among 25 countries when measuring the share of the population below 50 percent of median income.

Inequality has reached record highs. The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 held the largest share of the nation’s income (19 percent) since 1929. At the same time, the poorest 20 percent of Americans held only 3.4 percent of the nation’s income.

It does not have to be this way.  Our nation need not tolerate persistent poverty alongside great wealth.

http://www.americanprogress.or…

Do you care?  Do something and join this effort.

Half in Ten: From Poverty to Prosperity

The Center for American Progress Action Fund is committed to cutting poverty in half in 10 years. Under the leadership of Senator John Edwards, CAPAF has joined with ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to create the Half in Ten campaign.

In 2006, the Center for American Progress-our partner organization-convened a diverse group of national experts and leaders to examine the causes and consequences of poverty in America and make recommendations for national action. The resulting report from the Task Force on Poverty calls for a national goal of cutting poverty in half in the next 10 years and proposes a strategy to reach that goal, guided by the following four principles:

Promote Decent Work. People should work and work should pay enough to ensure that workers and their families can avoid poverty, meet basic needs, and save for the future.

Provide Opportunity for All. Children should grow up in conditions that maximize their opportunities for success; adults should have opportunities throughout their lives to connect to work, get more education, live in a good neighborhood, and move up in the workforce.

Ensure Economic Security. Americans should not fall into poverty when they cannot work or work is unavailable, unstable, or pays so little that they cannot make ends meet.

Help People Build Wealth. All Americans should have the opportunity to build assets that allow them to weather periods of flux and volatility, and to have the resources that may be essential to advancement and upwardmobility.

http://www.americanprogressact…

The Report (Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half by the Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty) is here:  http://www.americanprogress.or…

Join here:  http://www.halfinten.org/

More after the fold.