TakePart bloggers and the participants of last night’s Town Hall debate aren’t the only ones who have questions for the candidates. Voters from all across the State of California submitted questions for Republican Vice Presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin via text message to the California Democratic Party (CDP).

The CDP then rented an electronic billboard - conveniently situated directly across the street from the site of a rally where Palin appear in Los Angeles last Saturday where the questions were displayed.

You can check out some of the questions posed by California voters in the video below:
Live streaming video by Ustream

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Houston has joined Los Angeles in being classified as having a severe smog problem by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). LA and Houston, America’s second largest and fourth largest cities, respectively, are the only such areas in the country to be so designated by the EPA.

The reclassfication of Houston is a bit of a bureaucratic tango however between the State of Texas and the, frighteningly, still Bush-controlled EPA.  Texas Governor Rick Perry had essentially run out of time to improve the air quality of Houston based on a 1997 assessment by the EPA which at the time ranked Texas’ biggest city as having “moderate” air quality, but is today considered unsafe for public health.  So Perry petitioned the EPA to reclassify the city as severe, which under EPA rules would give the state another 10 years in order to improve its air quality. 

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Los Angeles area residents can breath a bit easier now that the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles have banned pre-1989 diesel-spewing trucks as part of an exemplary pollution-control project.  Removing 350 million tons of diesel emissions from the air will go a long way to reducing child asthma rates, drivers risk for cancer and hopefully the 1,200 annual deaths associated with the pollution.

Unfortunately, Governor Schwarznegger, another brawny relic of the 80’s, has vetoed a bill that would have raised $300 million annually for congestion relief and clean-air technologies.  It seems Governor Sarah Palin, along with other corporate interests,  strong-armed Schwarznegger into shutting down this bipartisan clean-air effort, by claiming it was a threat to the state’s fragile economy.  Let’s hope he’ll be back (sorry, couldn’t help it) with a plan that goes even further in helping clear up pollution and health hazards, and doesn’t continue to bow to conservative and corporate interests.

takepart by learning more from the Coalition for Clean Air and demand that Gov. Schwarznegger support clean-air legislation.

(now with an update from the LA Times: 100 goats turned loose on a downtown L.A. plot)

Yes my friends, 100 goats were brought into town by the Community Redevelopment Agency to chew on weeds and brush on a steep portion of Angels Knoll Park.

Lawn-mowers? Who needs them! Not only are the goats cleaning the hillside naturally, they are saving the Community Redevelopment Agency “several thousand dollars.”

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Leave something extra on your plate? Unused eggshells from cooking? What about all those coffee grounds? Los Angeles is asking a group of residents to recycle these and other leftovers for an experimental garbage pickup program.

Here is how it works:

The Bureau of Sanitation will distribute 2-gallon kitchen pails to 5000 households in Harbor Gateway, Lincoln Heights and South Los Angeles and residents are asked to dispose of food and “food-soiled” materials like pizza boxes.

A 2002 survey found that single-family homes generate 230,000 tons of food waste annually that could be turned into compost. That survey found nearly 27% of the garbage in the black bins was food waste.

If this program becomes citywide, it could divert as much as 600 tons of waste from landfills.

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

TakePart Gang:

Before He Was Indicted, Ted Stevens Was “Tubed” by Blair Golson

Strawberry Fields Forever by Wendy Cohen

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Nicole Hughes:

Green Video of the Week: Crazy Alien Plants

Fat Princess Video Game: The Joke’s Not Really That Funny

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Andy Kondrat:

Alaska’s Northwest Passage to Open For Second Straight Year

Stephen Colbert Interview’s Brendan Koerner, Slate’s Green Lantern

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Jon Popham:

L.A. Bans New Fast Food Joints

Flint Michigan Seeks Sponsors…For Police Surveillance Cameras

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Gina Telaroli:

Veganism in Ohio: Update #2, Photo Diary

An Apology for Slavery and Jim Crow? We Shall See…

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted today to put a ban on new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. City Officials are hoping the ban will help slow the rapidly growing obesity rate in this impoverished area of the city. Thirty percent of South L.A. adults are obese compared with 19.1 percent of adults in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and 14.1 percent on the more affluent west side of town. This comes as little surprise when you consider that 73 percent of all restaurants in South L.A. are fast food compared with 42 percent in West Los Angeles. The moratorium will last for one year and is intended to attract other types of restaurants to an area desperately in need of healthier choices. The bill requires the signature of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to become law. The California Restaurant Association is considering a legal challenge to the city ordinance.

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The Los Angeles City Council has voted unanimously to ban plastic bags from stores effective July 1, 2010.  After the ban goes into effect, LA shoppers will have the choice of either bringing their own bag or purchasing a biodegradable bag for 25 cents.

The City of Los Angeles estimates that over 5 billion plastic bags are used each year within the nation’s second largest city, but only 5% of plastic bags in California are recycled.  Said Councilman Ed Reyes who proposed the ban, “We’ve gotten to a point where we need to act as a city, where we can have real results. We’re trying to do it in a way where we can educate and inform the public of what we’re doing.”

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A new documentary that focuses on the controversy surrounding famed director Roman Polanski, his statutory rape trial and eventual fleeing to Europe, may be cause enough to finally close the case:

In a phone interview on Tuesday, his (Polanski’s) lawyer, Douglas Dalton, said Mr. Wells’s (former prosecutor) self-described contacts with the judge appeared to violate California law and legal ethics. At the time, Mr. Wells worked in the Santa Monica courthouse of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, but, after some initial involvement, he was not assigned to the Polanski case.

“There could be a motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct,” Mr. Dalton said. [NYTimes]

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Sometimes we forget that even with all our technology and high-techery and the like, still a huge amount of our consumer goods arrive in the United States through plain old ships.  In fact, a whopping 40% of our goods arrive through the ports of Long Beach, Oakland, and Los Angeles.  And now, it looks like California legislators are close to imposing a $60 fee on every container coming through these ports, expecting to raise $400 million a year.  Some of this money, say the legislators, would go towards fighting pollution.

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