Free Radio!

	I don’t listen to Pandora much. However, I do listen to: Last.fm, Songza, and other platforms that can be construed as internet radio. The idea of Clear Channel – clear because it’s vacuous – quashing internet radio deserves a major thumbs down. Save internet radio! Contact your congressional representatives or call John Campbell: 202-225-5611!

 

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora;

After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio. But just as we’ve gotten close, large traditional broadcast radio companies have launched a covert lobbying campaign to sabotage our progress.

Friday, Congressman Jay Inslee, and several co-sponsors, introduced legislation to give us the extra time we need but the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which represents radio broadcasters such as Clear Channel, has begun intensively pressuring lawmakers to kill the bill. We have just days to keep this from collapsing.

This is a blatant attempt by large radio companies to suffocate the webcasting industry that is just beginning to offer an alternative to their monopoly of the airwaves.

Please call your Congressperson right now and ask them to support H.R. 7084, the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 – and to not capitulate to pressure from the NAB. Congress is currently working extended hours, so even calls this evening and over the weekend should get answered.

If the phone is busy, please try again until you get through. These calls really do make a difference.

Representative John Campbell: 202-225-5611

Thanks so much for you ongoing support.

Tim

Dr. Pan for POTUS!

Yes. Obviously I’m being hyperbolic. Besides, yes, I know. He’s ineligible since he’s neither an American citizen nor a natural born one. But find out why I would feel impelled to nominate him for POTUS.

Need a break from trying to decide whether or not the boy who cried wolf is crying for real this time? From trying to decide whether to laugh or cry at the sheer embarrassment that is the American federal government, primarily the White House but the other two hallowed halls aren’t so sacrosanct themselves?

Our leaders can learn a thing or two from Dr. Pan Wenshi, one man who is singlehandedly saving a species from extinction, a village from the poverty that had driven them to cannibalize their natural resources, and humanity’s tenuous faith in its own perfectibility which Mencius propounded.

Read on and enjoy the warm fuzzies! You’ll need it to get back to watching the tragicomedy that is becoming an epic by the day.

A breakthrough in protecting the species came in 1997 when he helped local villagers build a pipeline to secure clean drinking water. Shortly thereafter, a farmer from the village freed a trapped langur and brought it to Dr. Pan.

“When you help the villagers, they would like to help you back,” he said.

As self-appointed local advocate, Dr. Pan raised money for a new school in another village, oversaw the construction of health clinics in two neighboring towns and organized physicals for women throughout the area.

“Now, when outsiders try to trap langurs,” Dr. Pan said, “the locals stop them from coming in.”

– It Takes Just One Village to Save a Species:
By helping a Chinese village out of poverty, Pan Wenshi protects the endangered langur
– The New York Times

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves!

I chanced upon this firsthand account of the Alaskan women’s rally against Palin’s nomination. It was heartening.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage.  The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators).  This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state.  I was absolutely stunned.  The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by.  And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute.  This just doesn’t happen here. – ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally is HUGE!

Alaska Women Say She Be Failin’

A couple of hours after Gov. Sarah Palin returned to the Outside, as Alaskans call the Lower 48, her local critics swarmed an Anchorage intersection to correct the widespread impression that the whole of the Last Frontier endorses her candidacy.
…
“The whole thing grew out of frustration,” said Charla Sterne, one of the organizers, who like several people at the rally declined to say where they worked (several said they were state employees and feared retribution). – In Anchorage, an Anti-Palin Protest – Washington Post

I couldn’t resist including a sample of the signs:

• Bush In A Skirt
• Palin: She Be Failin’
• Jesus Was a Community Organizer
• Palin: Thanks But No Thanks
• Smearing Alaska’s Good Name One Scandal @ a Time
• Candidate To Nowhere
• Rape Kits Should Be Free
• Voted For Her Once: Never Again!
• Community Organizers are the Real Patriots
• Barbies for War
• I Shall Not Be Pandered To
• Give Palin Your Vote AND Your Draft Age Child
• Sarah Palin: So Far Right She’s Wrong
• Coat Hangers for McCain
• Sarah Palin, Undoing 150 Years of American Feminism
• Hockey Mama for Obama (on a hockey stick)

 

Fear and Loathing – Let Us Not Indulge

I hadn’t realized until yesterday that some Obama supporters have been regarding HRC to be conspicuously absent from the campaign because, in large part, my political radar had been tuned to pick up Obama‘s presence. Although now I can’t find the specific Salon.com article through which I became aware of this acrimony, the eagerness and vehemence with which some Salon.com‘s readers thrashed HRC with charges of being a selfish saboteur and traitor were alarming. Especially in light of the fact that HRC has been out there campaigning on Obama‘s behalf:

• Hillary Clinton: Sarah Palin Exciting But Not Vote Worthy, ABC News, September 16, 2008
• Clinton Stumps for Obama, but With Little Fire at Palin, The New York Times, September 8, 2008
• Obama Camp Turns to Clinton to Counter Palin, The New York Times, September 4, 2008

While I too share the anxieties resulting from the past two weeks’ surreality, it does no good to to cast unfounded aspersions on HRC, insisting she isn’t doing enough to win it for Obama. Besides the fact that winning this election is the responsibility of Obama, his campaign, and his supporters (by which I mean me and you, that is if you want to see Obama in the office), we can do better. We can start by stepping back so that we can get a better view of what actually is happening and what needs to happen.

Collective Consuming Power! Dangling the Carrot…

(For the full, funnier 10 minute version, go to Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.)

Environmental activism via consumerism: Carrotmob mobilizes the good people of San Francisco to shop en masse at a convenience store that agrees to spend 22% of the generated revenue on energy efficient retrofits to the store.

Wildly successful would be an understatement.

CBS5 Eye Witness News’s segment on the event.
(Note the lazy journalism.
Nearly all of the footage featured is from Carrotmob‘s youtube video.)

I raised my eyebrow at Carrotmob’s presentation of environmental activism via consumerism as if it were some radically new notion. Anyone older than a Millennial certainly remembers the impact had by The Body Shop and the environmental consumerist activism of the late 80s and early 90s. The really nice part about this Carrotmob effort, however, is that the impact was immediately evident and local. As they say, it’s a win-win situation.