While it remains my dream that problems with voter registration, pollworker training, and statewide voter databases be eliminated in every state, I must admit that I’d most prefer that they first be dealt with in swing states. I know, I know swing states get all the attention. The red state voter in Kansas and the blue state voter in California are no less important than the swing state voter in Ohio. And electoral reform should be done for its own sake, not just when it’s convenient for our candidate, right? Right.

Yet, the worst outcome of a troubled electoral process would be if the will of the people was subverted and the aforementioned problems thwarted voter intent. Which is why we ought to pay special attention to problems in the states where the vote will be close.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Carter to Bush in 2004, a new JAMA study suggests an increased risk of car crashes on voting days (except in Oregon, where they vote-by-mail).   The solution: drive safer on voting days.

Here’s the original article on NPR and link to the audio feed discussing the story.   You can takepart by visiting the Global Road Safety Partnership.

Related:
Another Reason to Vote on Weekends from Why Tuesday?

Allyson Kapin wrote a fabulous piece for Fast Company about Andy Carvin’s new project: The Hurricane Information Center which includes that hurricanes08.org and the wiki hurricanewiki.org. Combined, they  houses the latest information on hurricanes threatening the US and what you can do to help.

Carvin is the social media strategist at NPR and some of his friends that helped build the site include Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark who promoted the site and Deanna Zandt, a media technologist for progressive and grassroots activist organizations was instrumental in developing the wiki.

Essentially, we’ve got the wiki as our reference desk, our social network as our operations center and our Twitter feeds as our news wire service, Carvin told Kapin.

Read the rest of this entry »

The light at the end of a very dark tunnel this year for Republicans has been their call to lift the offshore drilling ban.   Mired in the most unpopular Presidential administration in modern history and dogged by outright failures of leadership including the Iraq War, the sinking economy, Katrina, Guantanamo etc. etc. prospects for the GOP looked very, very dim this year unless they found some way, somehow to reinvent themselves.   As luck would have it, that way turned out to be not much of a stretch at all, as Congressional Republicans took back to their familiar tactic of misleading rather than leading the American public over the need to lift the offshore oil drilling ban currently in place in light of record gas prices.

The facts are the facts, despite the spin and bluster that has been floating around.   As noted by Robert Kauffman of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University in a recent interview with National Public Radio, nobody knows how much oil is available in the portions of the continental shelf covered by the drilling ban until they start drilling but the optimistic projections have the number at 19 billion barrels, or slightly over two years worth at present domestic consumption rates.   What we do know for certain however is that in the best of all possible worlds - if drilling started today - not a drop of oil would come out of these areas until at least five years and it would take a decade for full production to come online.

Read the rest of this entry »

Folks are going to have a lot more opportunities to see movies from India’s famed Bollywood as an Indian conglomerate names Reliance has purchased some 200 movie theaters here in the US. Reliance plans on screening more Indian films and may even have some sort of deal with Steven Spielberg.

There has been serious talk of Reliance teaming up with Speilberg’s Dreamworks this allowing them to split from Viacom.

So what does it all mean - well big dollars exchanging hands and hopefully - hopefully a chance for more Americans to see films from another part of the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a feeling things like this don’t happen very often.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s gorilla experts say that they’ve found a group of previously undiscovered western lowland gorillas in the Republic of Congo. What makes this news so exciting is that these gorillas are critically endangered. How big is a group do you ask? Well in this case, the group makes up 125,000 gorillas, which is almost double what the worldwide population was thought to be.

It doesn’t get much more awesome than that..

However, there is of course some bad news to report with the excitement.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the election heats up and folks begin to take things more personally, I was relieved to see a story on NPR that looked beyond the party lines and the mud being slung between the two. The piece, called “A Conversation: How Race Influences Two Voters” features a conversation between Greg Harden of Rochester, N.Y., and Trish Callahan of Portland, Maine - two people with very different backgrounds. Harden is white and has spent most of his life in the suburbs, while Callahan has a black biological father and a white biological mother but was raised by a white adopted family.

takepart to listen to the discussion now and takepart to join the discussion yourself and talk this issue through.

Race is of course a big issue this go around because Barack Obama is the first African-American presidential candidate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Man on Wire, a documentary that tells the story of Frenchman Philippe Petit and his walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, opens today in select cities and is garnering lot’s of praise. For years people have focused on why Petit did what he did, whereas director James Marsh asks how - a question that seems to make the film all the more interesting

It’s always interesting to me how we place so much value on the question of why and likewise what does it mean. For me, that questions like that always come up when 1) I’ve made a film and showed it to folks or 2) when people see my tattoo. With films, people ask why/what does it mean when they don’t get it or have nothing else to say. When it comes to my tattoos, I’m fairly certain the asking of these questions is simply masking most folks desire to say “why the hell did you put that on your arm?”

Man on Wire is a refreshing change and I can’t help but appreciate Petit’s point of view:

“I did something magnificent and mysterious, and I got a ‘why?’” Petit says, “and the beauty of it is that I don’t have a ‘why.’” [NPR]

Read the rest of this entry »

Cpl. Jason Bogar was killed in action on July 13 in Afghanistan. When he died though, his experience in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t go with him thanks to photographs Bogar took while he served.

NPR has a piece up on Bogar, his three tours of duty and the photographs he took while on them. After he was killed his family looked back at all of the photos he had sent them:

portraits of Afghan children, many of them with eyes rimmed black with kohl that stare right into yours. In others, women peer suspiciously through jewel-colored headscarves. A baby clutches a fistful of his mother’s pleated burqa in his dimpled fist.

takepart to support the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and takepart again to read more on Bolgar and to listen to the NPR piece. Also go below the jump for more of Bolgar’s images.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been 4 months since The Wire season finale aired and television hasn’t been as good since. That might change though, now that HBO is airing Generation Kill, a mini-series about the first wave of Marines that engaged in combat in the Iraq war. The mini-series was created by non other than David Simon, the amazing creator of The Wire.

Read the rest of this entry »