Day: October 2, 2007

What’s Your Walk Score?

Trish

No, it has nothing to do with heart-rate monitors. Your walk score is determined by analyzing your proximity to stores and services.

We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

In my case, the results were a bit disappointing.

Despite the fact that I am about midway between a full-service grocery store and the main branch of the public library, my walk score was a weak 43 on a scale of 1 to 100. But when I clicked around the results screen a little, I noticed the grocery had disappeared, and a movie theater that is actually several miles from my side of town was shown on the next block. The popular sushi restaurant on the corner was listed as a catering service, while Arnold’s, the diviest dive bar I know, was featured prominently.

Maybe your results will be more accurate. Check it out and see how your address rates. If nothing else, you will see all the great reasons you have to walk instead of driving. Unless you’re trying to catch a movie. In that case, you’ll definitely want to crank up the roadster.

Newt Gingrich is Such a Loser

Buck Banks

When Newt Gingrich announced last weekend that he would not be running for president, I wasn’t too surprised. See, for the past several weeks, I have subscribed to Newt’s e-newsletter, Winning the Future Through Human Events.

Now I know I’m going to catch it from co-editor Trish for that confession, but I just wanted to know what Newt was up to. Call it research.

Two weeks ago, he announced in his newsletter (which carries really pathetic adverts, but more on that in a minute) that he would be announcing his American Solutions for the Future agenda in Second Life on Thursday, Sept. 27. I signed up, mainly because I wanted to see what kind of avatar Newt would choose (my guess: tall, dark, slender, handsome — after all, you can be who you want to be in Second Life, and why would he choose to be a short, chunky Georgian?).

This Free Report Reveals How You Can Reverse 50 Years of Artery Plaque With Just Four Tiny Capsules a Day!

Didn’t happen. I was supposed to get a notice about where in Second Life Newt would be ‘splaining his solutions for the future, but didn’t get one. I went to Second Life at the appointed time, but could get nothing from the virtual child molesters, pickpockets and perverts that I encountered there. And I didn’t want to spend any Linden dollars tracking the Newt down.

Then, last weekend, Newt announced that he would not run for president because he couldn’t do that and run American Solutions, due to it being a 527 organization. In other words, Newt would be prevented from running for prez while heading up his cash cow that falls into that gray area outside election finance laws:

According to the IRS, a Section 527 (§527) organization is an organization that is created to receive and disburse funds to influence or attempt to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office.

On the face of the above definition, a §527 Organization sounds like a PAC. In effect that is what a §527 organization is—a PAC by another name. However, there is one key difference, a §527 organization does not fall within the regulator realm of the Federal Election Commission and therefore it is not subject to the same limits as FEC-regulated PACs.

Often called “soft money” PACs or organizations, a §527 organization is permitted to accept contributions in any amount from any source. However, the organization is required to make regular reports to the Internal Revenue Service of its funding and expenditures.

Except not all 527s are required to report to the IRS. Is American Solutions? Who knows?

I received an e-mail yesterday in which Newt tries to explain why he simply can’t run for president. His explanation? Those Blue Meanies, McCain-Feingold, the campaign finance reform legislation, which rightly draws a line between shadow organizations like American Solutions and political action committees and legitimate campaign organizations.

Co-Editor Jon nailed it Sunday when he said Newt is just too damn unpopular to win the presidency and that the Newtster is more interested in maintaining a cushy source of revenue than doing the hard work of campaigning and governing.

And, man, the dough must be rolling in, given the kinds of adverts Newt is running in his newsletter. There’s this snake-oil pitch:

FREE Report
THE 23-CENT LIFE-SAVER Heart Surgeons NEVER TELL YOU ABOUT!

This Free Report Reveals How You Can Reverse 50 Years of Artery
Plaque With Just Four Tiny Capsules a Day!

Scientific studies have proven this one nutrient is up to 82%
effective at eliminating rogue calcium from plaque, causing
clogs to soften, and be flushed away. As plaque is flushed away,
healthy blood flow is restored to the heart, brain, muscles, and
every organ in your body.

This report reveals the astonishing health miracle 1.5 million
grateful patients swear by. So safe, it’s FDA-APPROVED for use
in baby food. So effective, you can actually SEE it working. So
Cheap, it’s JUST 23 cents per capsule.

I wonder how you can see it working INSIDE YOUR ARTERIES!

And this one:

NEVADA WATER DEAL SET TO PAY 381%

The fight for water in the Southwest is heating up faster than a
blow torch. The Arizona Republic calls it “a classic Western
showdown.” And right now one small company is about to turn this vicious demand into millions of dollars on one of the most
important water deals in decades — at near record prices.

This company is about turn its holdings into a 102,000% gain.
Investors have only a short time to get in on this deal before
the hedge funds or private equity gobble it up …

Wow! A 102,000 percent gain! I wonder if Fed Chair Ben Bernanke knows about that.

And then there’s this gem:

IF DEMOCRATS HAD ANY BRAINS, THEY’D BE REPUBLICANS

Ann Coulter at her funniest and most outrageous

Who knew Ann Coulter was funny?

So, not only is Newt getting dough from the 1,200 misguided individuals who actually showed up at the the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, Ga., Saturday — so many more than the Newt expected, they had to “expand the ballroom we were in by removing a wall and setting up more chairs” — he’s raking it in off Web ads for Ann Coulter books. Ew!

No wonder a run for president seemed like too much work. “Winning the Future” indeed — one click at a time.

Michael Medved: Six Reasons Slavery Wasn’t So Bad

Jon Ponder

In a remarkable piece of sophistry titled Six Inconvenient Truths about Slavery, right-wing movie and social critic Michael Medved lays out a clear and concise justification for the slavery of Africans in America.

What is unclear is why he felt such a justification was necessary:

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

Yes, Michael, slavery was excused, or at least not condemned, in the Bible, but that doesn’t make it right. Besides, who said it was a uniquely American innovation, and what difference does that make in the greater scheme of things? The fact that the Brits and the Spanish did it too is hardly an excuse.

2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic — involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

This is bizarre. Yes, slavery ended in the North not long after the republic was founded but slavery of Africans was present in various locales along America’s Eastern Seaboard from around 1670 until 1865.

3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.

Got that, black Americans? You’re lucky we didn’t kill you.Where’s your gratitude for that!

4. It’s not true that the U.S.became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

This is historical revisionism, at best. The Southern colonies were more prosperous than the north for much of our pre-revolutionary history. Charleston, S.C., was the largest city in the colonies for years. Even after the North’s ascendancy in the early Industrial Era, the majority of the vast wealth generated by the states that would comprise the Confederacy was generated by slave labor. To ignore that fact is disingenuous and not a little reprehensible.

5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

All it took was the deaths of 500,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, and the complete destruction of the slave economy in the South — a loss we are only just now starting to recover from in many ways.

6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African-Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

It is impossible to game out what would have happened in Africa if so much of its population hadn’t been captured and exported into servitude, especially since the descendants of these people have proven to be enterprising, innovative, intelligent and talented.

This article is a real head-scratcher. It appears to be a preemptive argument against paying reparations to the descendants of African slaves, but if the reparations movement has made significant inroads lately, it is news to me.

On the other hand, if Medved’s piece was intended to open a new dialog on racism in America, it is clear that liberals and conservatives are as far apart as ever on this issue.

Iran Designates CIA, U.S. Army As Terrorist Organizations

Jon Ponder

Last week, the Democratically controlled U.S. Congress was caught red-handed aiding and abetting the Cheney-Bush drumbeat for war in Iran — just as they helped the administration in its run-up to the war in Iraq when Republicans controlled both houses.

On Tuesday, the House voted 397 to 16 to endorse the Cheney cabal’s assertion that the Iranian military’s Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. In a 76-22 vote on Wednesday, the Senate agreed to similar language.

On Saturday, the Iranian parliament countered with an in-kind declaration that elite U.S. institutions to be terrorist organizations, a move that was backed by Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday:

Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in his weekly brief that he agreed with the symbolic resolution passed by Iran’s hardline parliament Saturday, which condemned the two American institutions for its actions in Japan in World War II, as well as more recently in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The label of terrorist is suitable for the military and security forces of the United States,” he said.

Seymour Hersh reported last week in the New Yorker that the administration has shifted the rationale for war because the public was not buying an earlier assertion it floated that Iran’s deployment of nuclear weapons was imminent.

Now Bush and Cheney are trying to convince Americans that Iran is responsible for the violence in Iraq because Iranian Shias are supplying weapons to Iraqi Shia insurgents in their civil war against Sunnis. This is ironic, of course, because it is the United States who invaded and is occupying Iraq — and because U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is also supplying weapons to Sunni insurgents in the sectarian civil war.

By voting for the Cheney-Bush designation of the Iranian military’s elite guard as a terrorist organization, Democrats in Congress have given the administration their tacit approval to escalate the U.S. war in the Middle East.