Bye, bye Japan

David Suzuki has issued a scary warning about Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, saying that if it falls in a future earthquake, it's "bye bye Japan" and the entire west coast of North America should be evacuated.

David Suzuki's Fukushima Warning Is Dire And Scary

Earth Under Water in the Next 20 Years

Earth Under Water explains the science behind the prediction of sea level rise and shows what will happen if the levels rise with increasing speed. Then, we fast forward to the twenty-third century to see how resourceful humans fight back and adapt using hyper engineering, vast dams, and even the construction of floating cities to cope with the after-effects.

Earth Under Water - DVD

GOP secretly changes the rules

The GOP's little rule change they hoped you wouldn't notice

Late in the evening on September 30, 2013, the House Rules Committee Republicans changed the Rules of the House so that the ONLY Member allowed to call up the Senate's clean CR for a vote was Majority Leader Eric Cantor or his designee -- all but guaranteeing the government would shut down a few hours later and would stay shut down. Previously, any Member would have had the right to bring the CR up for a vote. Democracy has been suspended in the House of Representatives.

The Fight Remains About Obamacare

The Republicans just don't seem to understand that Obamacare is already law but keep calling it a Bill.   These morons are lost to another world and will eventually find themselves there all by themselves.

This week's government shutdown has consequences for all of us, costing an estimated $300 million each day that the government is closed for business. Many Americans have voiced their frustrations with the fallout from the shutdown on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hash tag #DearCongress. Here, Bill Moyers shares his own frustrations, admonishing the Republican Party for holding the country hostage via an irrational "ransom list" of demands — while sabotaging democracy in the process. "When the President refused to buckle to this extortion, they threw their tantrum," Bill says. "Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship." He goes on to tell us where the "reckless ambition" of the Republicans could lead us.

The Fight Remains About Obamacare - from the Red State Website

Surrender should not be an option. This fight has been and remains about Obamacare. A Republican Party fretting over polling should consider that polling will rebound in their direction with a victory. The GOP should also consider that some of the negatives in the polls are from their own side angry at their reluctance to actually fight the good fight.

Republican leaders who have never wanted this fight have tried at all costs to avoid fighting it. They have tried to wrap the continuing resolution into the debt ceiling then into a grand bargain.

Conservatives should keep the fight squarely on Obamacare.

What is most eye opening is that the Republican leaders have grown so detatched from their base that they will willingly push a medical device tax repeal on behalf of K Street lobbyists while ignoring the very people who actually vote for them.

Republicans reeling from polls should consider what the reaction of their base will be if they have gone this far and surrender with nothing — or with only a sop to special interests on K Street.

Speaker Boehner has previously said he would stop doing back room deals with the White House. He should do as he said. He should keep the government closed until Democrats agree to delay Obamacare.

The Fight Remains About Obamacare - from the Red State Website

City of Seattle goes insane

Public information officers for the City of Seattle have been advised they might want to avoid using the terms "brown bag" and "citizen" because some find these words offensive.

KIRO Radio's Dori Monson couldn't figure out why these words were being targeted so he asked the man that drafted the memo to the city's PIO's for an explanation.

Elliott Bronstein, with the Office for Civil Rights, began by addressing the offensiveness of "brown bag."

"For a lot of particularly African American community members, the phrase brown bag does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people's skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home."

Dori, who considers himself a pretty historically and culturally aware person, said he's never heard of this practice or association and wonders how many others have.

Bronstein also hadn't heard of it until recently, but as a white man, he said there are likely a lot of aspects to African American culture he wasn't aware of growing up.

Next, Bronstein had to clue Dori into why "citizen" should be avoided.

"A lot of people who live in Seattle aren't citizens, but they are residents," said Bronstein. "They are legal residents of the United States and they are residents of Seattle. They pay taxes and if we use a term like citizens in common use, then it doesn't include a lot of folks."

While there may have been complaints about the phrasing, Dori thinks they likely came from people who are too easily offended, and questions the city trying to accommodate all the concerns of this small percentage of people.

"I just think that this obsession with sanitizing our language for the easily offended is a silly pursuit," said Dori. "This comes closely on the heels of a law that was just implemented, I believe this last weekend, where we're changing manhole covers to person-hole covers and we can't call a fireman a fireman anymore. There just seems to be this steady trend in our region for doing this to language."

'Brown bag' and 'citizen' too offensive for use in Seattle