Clear Channel billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin warn folks that voter fraud is a felony and you can spend up to 3 1/2 years in jail and be fined $10,000 for it. But the billboards have only gone up in neighborhoods with high poor and/or minority populations! I wonder why! Of course, Clear Channel will just say, hey, voter fraud is a felony; we're not saying anything that isn't true. But then why only say it to poor, black and Hispanic folks? Thus Color of Change helps you tell Clear Channel to take these billboards down. After all, they've taken other billboards down for reasons of political sensitivity. Usually they've taken them down because they've somehow offended right-wing sensitivities, but given that, Clear Channel can't claim they're being oppressed by our will to shame them. And they're just as susceptible to bad PR as anyone else, whether they think so or not.
Meanwhile, you may not have heard that Halliburton lost a radioactive rod used for prospecting hydrofracturing well locations. For almost a month. Because it fell off a truck. At least, that's the story. Thank God all those oppressive big gummint regulations forced them to label the rod "Danger Radioactive: Do not handle. Notify civil authorities if found" or they might never have found the damn thing! And praise the Lord it didn't get lost in someone's backyard, because if it had sat unnoticed in someone's backyard for a few weeks, there's a slim chance they might now be dead. So CREDO helps you tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to punish Halliburton for its lapse. We need not recount Halliburton's multitudinous sins to call for punishment. We need only note that a society that won't punish its most powerful members for their screw-ups is a sick, immoral, and decadent society.
In other news, a Russian appeals court has released one of Pussy Riot's members -- who, you may recall, got two-year hard-labor sentences for reciting an anti-Putin "prayer" in an Orthodox church -- but has upheld the convictions of two others, which is a little like King Solomon actually cutting the baby in half. I've heard from some Christians that Pussy Riot "defiled" the church (though the church's sacristan says they didn't), to which I feel compelled to respond: we are the church -- not an altar, not a piece of ground, but we, the people, and we manifest our faith not through slavish adherence to dogma, but through good works and love for one another. Is that too much to ask? How about this, then: if you, right-wing Christian, were on the outs in Russia, and you'd had enough of all that, you'd be in jail, and then we'd fight for you. Amnesty International helps you tell Russia to release the last two Pussy Riot members.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to issue a strong soot pollution standard, the Sierra Club helps you do that. In June, the EPA announced its intention to mandate that corporations reduce their fine soot particle emissions from 15 micrograms to "between 12 and 13," but with the Sierra Club's tool you'll be advocating a reduction to 11 micrograms. As we know, soot consists of smoke, liquid droplets, and metal particles, all less than a fifth of the width of a human hair, and these particles can get in your lungs and your bloodstream and give you breathing and heart problems. Really, you don't want any of that in the air, but the EPA standard will make matters a lot better. And coal corporations shouldn't complain that they won't be able to hire people if they have to make their plants cleaner. Who do they think is going to do all the work to refit their plants? Robots?
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