Some Republicans in Congress still want to make the Department of Agriculture's school lunch nutrition standards "flexible," because, you know, one in 10 school districts is lagging behind the other nine in implementing the standards and also because one Congressman heard that one kid somewhere threw away an apple he got at school. Figures that the one thing the USDA has done right during President Obama's tenure finds itself in Republican crosshairs. Why do these fools continue to have jobs? It can't all be because of gerrymandering, or else the Democrat wave of 2006 wouldn't have happened. I suspect it's also because Democratic candidates are too weak to run ads calling their opponents objectively pro-childhood obesity and objectively pro-junk food and objectively pro-diabetes, like they deserve if they want to let school districts "opt out" of the standards. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut school lunch nutrition standards. We fought for them, after all, and when you fight for something, there's always a chance you're going to have to defend it later.
Meanwhile, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell President Obama and Secretary of the Interior Jewell to protect Alaska's Bristol Bay from oil and gas drilling. While it is true that drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean is very dangerous (it's much harder to clean up a spill in those frigid waters than in the relatively warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico), and that we don't know enough about the ecosystems up there to fully comprehend what damage we'll do to them, it is also true that the Bristol Bay area in Alaska is home to a thriving salmon industry, an industry that would be seriously threatened by a Spillageddon of the order of the one in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 -- a Spillageddon that, given just what we know of oil corporation spill management practices, or of Shell's various misadventures in the Arctic, will happen sooner rather than later. And we're always much better protecting an industry that creates jobs for people, and which we can manage sustainably, than we are drilling for oil or gas in a scheme that will enrich a few CEOs and do little-if-anything for anyone else.
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