New Orleans Councilwoman Shelley Midura on announcing her decision not to seek reelection:

She then issued a challenge to the city’s other elected leaders.

“What troubles me most about New Orleans is the democracy gap between the priorities of the people and the priorities of the decision-makers in power,” she wrote. “Too many of our elected officials and influential citizens continue to do the public wrong by protecting the status quo or their own self-interest.

“Rather than using data or best practices or evidence of success, policy and budget decisions with long-term consequences for the city’s future are too often made in the absence of sufficient public input, and instead on the basis of personal whim, anecdotal evidence, or alliance with entrenched institutions that have much to lose or gain by a given decision.“

I don’t pretend to be an expert or an insider in New Orleans politics, but this strikes me as one of the most succinct and honest observations I have ever read.

In what will surely be a major setback to anyone hoping to genetically engineer the world’s first mermaid or centaur, today, Senator Mary Landrieu joined 19 Republicans in co-sponsoring Senator Brownback’s Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, a piece of policy that, as Politico points out, is modeled after a bill recently signed by our very own Governor, Bobby Jindal.

Politico also points out that the legislation fails to give a specific example of what these human-animal hybrids would look like, but isn’t it obvious?

Mermaid:

Centaur:

Planet of the Apes:

Goatboy:

I agree with this legislation. No hybrids! It would get way too confusing.

I have one suggestion, however. While we’re at it, why don’t we amend the bill to include a ban on reanimating corpses?

Oyster’s been covering this woman’s antics for a few years now, and recently, she made national headlines after seemingly endorsing an overtly racist comment about President Obama.

Her name is Audra Shay, and on Saturday, she was elected as the next Chairperson of the Young Republicans.

Some people may question whether or not a 38-year-old is truly a “young Republican.” That’s not fair. Clearly, this woman is immature beyond her years. John Avlon of The Daily Beast has been on her trail, and on Friday, he posted a scathing article uncovering some of Shay’s most absurd comments on the social networking site Facebook.

Young Republicans, meet your new leader:

* In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay replied, returning to the “LOL” style that she employed after the “coons” comment: “What no ‘Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol.”

She picked up the thread again the next morning with a clarification and a new insight. “Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”

* Posting and endorsing a conspiracy-theory video that attempts to prove that Obama believes he can only “ensure his own salvation” and “fate” if he helps African Americans above whites, complete with Barnum-esque captions (“LISTEN AS HE ATTACKS WHITE PEOPLE”).

* Numerous posts in which Shay says that President Obama is “anti-American” and has “disdain of this country.”

….

A newly discovered Facebook thread from June 30 shows her Obama Derangement Syndrome in full bluster, when she reacted with extreme displeasure with Obama’s cautious stance on the Honduran crisis.

“This is an outrage and I CAN NOT believe this nation has him as our leader! It makes me sick!” She posted a few minutes later: “My disdain for Obama is directly proportionate for his disdain of this country.”

By the way, Shay was endorsed by Governor Bobby Jindal (as well as Congressman Cao and Congressman Cassidy), and as Oyster points out, in 2006, Shay was the Chairperson of the Greater New Orleans Republicans, which publicly endorsed Democrat Ray Nagin for Mayor of New Orleans.

Here’s a picture of Ms. Shay with Congressman Steve Scalise:

As I have mentioned in several other entries, our dollars as consumers are by far our biggest tool for affecting change and ensuring the companies we buy from (or choose not to buy from) act in a responsible and ethical manner.

When a company does wrong, the best thing we can do is take our dollars elsewhere and if possible make sure the company and as many of their potential customers know exactly why we no longer give that firm our money.

I believe this is an effective tool. I haven’t eaten at a Burger King for around 15 years due to a couple of really horrible customer service incidents and I don’t miss them one bit. I also boycotted Wendy’s until a few years after Dave Thomas’ death because he directed the philanthropic arm of the company to give millions each year to anti-gay reprogramming camps. Seriously, millions of bucks to fund those guys that kidnap GLBT people and then hold them against their will while subjecting them to psychological torture until they “repent” And just think you may have thought the movie “Saved” was a joke lol. Dave Thomas didn’t think so, and he made sure your hamburger purchases funded every victim they could find. After his death, Wendy’s discontinued this financial support, due largely to pressure from GLBT groups and today has one of the most progressive partner benefits programs in the industry.

Anyway, I ran across this online. Dave Carroll is the lead singer of Sons of Maxwell, a Canadian based band. Dave describes his experience with United Airlines below:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.

Carroll’s musical response to his mistreatment by United Airlines is a gloriously comical retort to what is sadly a system which gives seemingly weak consumers the brush off more often than not. It’s also quite catchy, and more than anything I would think it’s much more than United thought.

This is only the first of three promised songs regarding the incident. And, I would think that UAL will end up taking a PR hit worth much more than the $3500 they should have paid Mr. Carroll in the first place.

Read the full story at Carroll’s site: http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story/united-breaks-guitars/

I truly think this sort of activism is great. I encourage you all to link this post to as many sites as possible and email it to your friends. Let’s help David Carroll send a strong message about proper treatment of customers.

I know I’ve been MIA for a while now, and may continue to be for a week or so while my store gets up and running, but I just wanted to jump out of the woods for a moment with this little snippet about our dear old state.

Has anyone else heard about this? How did I manage to miss this? I don’t really have the brainpower right now to analyze what it means, but it doesn’t seem like a good thing – from the intro that the poster gives to the state’s political realm, right up through the video snippet, we don’t come off too well. There’s a brief writeup of the event on the New York Magazine’s website as well.

Blatantly false “Associated Press report” posted as a comment on both stories about local Teabag Parties:

Uncontested for hours.

You would think they would pay more attention to deliberately misleading and completely false reports attributed to the Associated Press. One has to also wonder if the AP has safeguards against this in their agreement with Gannett.

Either way, this also proves the extent to which the intellectually dishonest Birthers will lie and manipulate the facts in order to continually undermine President Obama’s legitimacy.

For anyone interested in knowing more about where our food comes from and what’s in the products we eat, I highly recommend watching this documentary:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food

It’s about an hour and a half and even if you watch only the first 20 minutes you will definitely be shocked.

This is also quite relevant to our local area seeing as many of the companies and products mentioned are grown and sprayed all around us everyday.

Very interesting snippet in an automatically generated email I received from VOA (Voice of America):

2. BLOCKED FROM OUR SITE?

If you are denied access, you can try to enter our site through
a proxy server.

In Iran, try https://isna47shabab87.com (when you see “voanews.com/persian”
change it to “voanews.com/specialenglish”)

I think it’s really neat that although most people are unaware, that we are providing news to Iranians.

BTW, that’s an instruction set for using a Proxy server. Proxies tell the internet you’re one place when you’re really another. I use one here to watch BBC programming online that tells the BBC website that I’m in Wolverhampton, UK

We have also had quite a few Republican operatives post on here over the years using proxies that showed them being in Louisiana but since it’s all traceable, it was easy to call them out as Lamar did more than once.

Alexandria needs more bike lanes:

This community was not designed for bicyclists (or pedestrians). Old and new neighborhoods alike, for the most part, were designed with only cars in mind — no bike lanes and few sidewalks. Our quality of life would take a quantum leap forward by changing that, and some of us might even lose a few more pounds.