Some of the items on this year’s Sierra Club list of the 10 Dumbest Consumer Goods I had thought of, others I missed. Either way, I agree with them all. I hope this settles once and for all the controversy over what a total waste leaf blowers are. As I tell my friend Ray, who loves them, I think it’s a guy thing. Women reach for a broom. Men want something with some horsepower.

O.K., enough sexist stereotypes, here are the ones I would have put on the list myself:

…”Only ten?” OK, it was a tough choice. Some waste exorbitant amounts of energy, others turn precious natural resources into trivial junk, while still others encourage us to consume for the sake of consumption…

2. Leaf blowers. Using a leaf blower for half an hour is equivalent to driving a car 110 miles. And all it gets you is leaves on the other side of the driveway.

3. Disposable DVDs. Disney and Flexplay are marketing DVDs that become unplayable 48 hours after the seal is broken. They can be mailed in for recycling, but would people who couldn’t be bothered to mail in a rental really do so?

4. Lunchables. Processed meat, fatty cheese, and crackers in an unrecyclable plastic tray, wrapped in more plastic and then cardboard. Kids deserve better.

5. Disposable toilet cleaners. Instead of a brush that lasts for years, you can now spend a lot of money for flushable toilet brushes.

8. Swiffers. “You can just throw away the dust with the cloth!” exults the Web site for these rags-on-a-stick. Somehow it doesn’t sound like progress.

10. The Hummer. Ostentatious energy waste as a reason for being. A special lifetime achievement award.

Check out the rest of the list. Disposable underwear?

TV Newser:

An aside by Tucker Carlson on Crossfire today perked up the ears of CNN fans. “This, by the way, is the last day James and I are on television together. I want you to know that I’m enjoying every moment of it,” Carlson said. A few minutes later, Rahm Emanuel suggested Carlson invite John Kerry on the show “before you leave CNN.”

But it wasn’t necessarily an indication that Carlson is leaving CNN. Carlson’s last day on Crossfire is coming this Thursday. Today was his last day with Carville; Paula Begala will be “on the left” tomorrow and Thursday. Klein may offer Carlson a deal to stay at CNN later this week — but it won’t be on Crossfire.

> “The wait is excruciating — even worse than the show itself!,” Wonkette smirks.

Mike Taibbi in New York Press:

Carlson occupies the same role for conservatives in the media landscape that Colmes does for liberals. Colmes is a pale-faced, paint-by-numbers loser whose only job is to be a believable liberal for people who live in trailers. Carlson is CNN’s idea of a conservative. His right-wing ideas come from his changeable, expensive brains instead of his stomach. In the same way that the helpless, ineffectual Colmes is a reassuring image to hardcore conservatives, Carlson puts a soothing face on conservatism for educated East-coast progressives—because even the biggest neo-Marxist wanker from Brown takes one look at Carlson and sees the one man in America he would feel sure of being able to kick the shit out of in a back alley.

That same wanker could probably take Savage or O’Reilly, too, but those guys have supplicants and constituents by the millions who would come rushing to their aid. Not Carlson. In a bar fight, no 35-year-old man with a bow tie has friends. Especially not a smart-aleck closet case like Carlson. You would be hard-pressed to find an American who would not leap to his feet to cheer the sight of Tucker Carlson getting his teeth kicked down an alley, which I suspect is the reason CNN picked him to be their champion of conservatism. He is a patsy and a fraud—the kind of public personality totalitarian regimes used to nurture for years in order to execute for a lack of orthodoxy at some opportune historical moment much later on. That MSNBC hires him thinking they’re getting the real thing, a big ticket to red-state ratings, just shows how clueless that network really is.

For years, Hillary has been pilloried for suggesting that there was a rightwing conspiracy against Bill (even though there was – and many of the same rightwingers who excoriated her were part of it). Now let’s see if the SCLM goes after Bush for suggesting his opponents are conspiring against him. Odds are, they won’t.

AP via Yahoo:

President Bush (news – web sites)’s re-election campaign asked the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court on Monday to throw out a challenge of the election in this swing state, saying the case resembles “a poorly drafted script for a late night conspiracy-theory movie.”

The court filing was made as the Rev. Jesse Jackson (news – web sites) held a rally before hundreds of people in Columbus to support the challenge and urge the U.S. Senate to debate Ohio’s results on Thursday when Congress is in joint session for the official tally of the electoral votes.

Thirty-seven Ohio voters who filed the challenge are asking Chief Justice Thomas Moyer to set aside the election results. Some of the voters are suspicious of Bush’s victory over Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites), while others say hours-long waits in heavily black neighborhoods caused voters to leave in frustration without casting a ballot.

“In 2000, if Al Gore (news – web sites) had just held on and fought to the bitter end, he would have been president,” said Mark Lomax, a black Columbus musician challenging the vote. “I kind of have the same feeling now — whether or not you like John Kerry, that’s not the issue. It’s just that your vote counts.”

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said there’s no reason to prolong the election.

Planet Out News:

Jeff Cotter, a San Francisco psychiatric social worker, says he started Rainbow World Fund (RWF) four years ago because none of the traditional relief organizations were developing philanthropy and consciousness in the LGBT community. It is that dual mission — direct relief hand in hand with changing opinions and beliefs — that moves RWF. Cotter calls it a solidarity model, rather than a charity model.

“As with our community’s response to HIV, we can’t wait for the rest of the world to take leadership,” Cotter said. “And as a gay man, I thought, if I want to change the world, I should start where I’m at, in the community I live in. And the gay and lesbian community was a huge untapped market.”

In the past year, RWF has teamed up with relief organizations to increase access to safe drinking water in Central America, eradicate land mines in Cambodia, provide food for victims of hurricane Jeanne in Haiti and save the next generation of Africans from HIV/AIDS. The group works closely with larger charity organizations (such as CARE) to give aid immediately, where it’s needed.

Cotter balances his time between Rainbow and his “day job”: counseling rape victims and gunshot wound survivors for the city of San Francisco. He has spent the past three years building the infrastructure for RWF, and has begun helping victims around the world this year.

Because administrative costs are covered by the board of directors and grants from various organizations (including the Catholic Church), RWF can ensure that 100 percent of every charitable dollar goes directly to field service work overseas. In the case of Sunday’s quake and tsunami survivors, aid will go to food, water, vitamins and medical supplies for many months, and possibly years, to come.

But why doesn’t an LGBT relief organization give to LGBT causes? Why enlist gays and lesbians to help victims they know nothing about? The question, Cotter says, should really be: why not?

“Suffering is universal, and the LGBT community knows more than a little bit about that,” Cotter says. “When we took the aid trip to Guatemala earlier this year, it was clear that we (the LGBT community) had a shared history of oppression with the Mayan population there. There was a systematic genocide there, and the government invalidated their marriage relationships, among other atrocities.”

The excursion to Guatemala had another benefit as well. In the primarily Catholic and socially conservative country, Rainbow’s outreach was the first contact most citizens had with gays or lesbians. Promoting tolerance and understanding of differences among people and cultures, and at the same time providing much-needed assistance to impoverished and developing areas, is a win-win, according to Cotter.

“We’re about changing attitudes toward gays and lesbians,” Cotter said. “Many of the places we visit and help have very little LGBT presence. Everyone we’ve worked with has been surprised by our commitment, and very open and accepting to our presence.”