Today’s charming love comes from Robert J. Lee of Norman, Oklahoma:

Why is everything Bush’s fault? Are you that short of ideas? The answer is obvious. How could Bush cause all of the things that you proclaim and still be such an ineffective President? Take responsibility for your own life. You are probably bitter because you have an A.R.M. Interest only loan and can’t make payments. And now you want someone to bail you out.

Gee. Actually, I rent.

But, golly, you’re right. We never ever ever ever suggest ways that people take responsibility for themselves and the world around them. We’re all just waiting for Lenin to give us more of that yummy yeasty chleb. Hail, Lenin! Say, has anyone seen Lenin around lately?

Notice the sweet-n-cuddly use of the straw man. See, if we buy into the extreme and off-kilter depiction of what we say — that George W. Bush is at fault for everything — then all Robert has to do is identify one thing that’s not Bush’s fault and all of a sudden his Best President Evah is off the hook. But I’m not hurt. Actually, I’m touched. I think this is Robert’s romantic opening, kind of like how middle schoolers tease the kid they secretly have a crush on. Sorry, Robert, I’m taken. But I’m honored you would think of me that way.

Since we now sell American Apparel shirts through Skreened and Union-made shirts through Zazzle, I thought it might be a good idea to compare the print quality of the two print outfits on the two shirts. So I put this image…

onto an American Apparel shirt at Skreened and a Union-made shirt at Zazzle. Then I bought both.

Here is a close-up image of the American Apparel shirt printed by Skreened:

And here is a close-up image of the Union shirt printed by Zazzle:

By my eye, the edges of the text on the Skreened shirt is a bit less smudgy, and the interior of the text on the Skreened shirt is a bit more fully filled-in. Overall, I am really quite happy with the printing on both shirts. When I look at both shirts on the whole, the design on them appears crisp and distinct.

Rising Tide has established itself as an umbrella group for a variety of actions against the dominance of fossil fuels economy. These actions, to be taken tomorrow under the banner of Fossil Fools Day, will occur in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and North America.

What events are planned in your neck of the woods? It’s hard to winkle that out from the website itself, which refers obliquely to a number of “surprise actions.” Given the list of suggested activist targets and activities, it’s not surprising that the efforts seem to have a semi-underground nature. Rising Tide suggests the following actions (among others; these are excerpted):

Stop the pumps

Consider such tactics as blockading the entrance to a gas station, locking down to gas pumps, or having a die-in in front of the gas station. It is quite easy to gain access to the roof for a banner drop with the use of a extension ladder. It should also be noted that all gas stations have safety shut off buttons that will shut off gas pumps in case of an emergency, which are generally located on the outside of the station.

Stick it to the Biofools

While we’re on the topic, agrofuel expansion is being touted as a solution to climate change, but agrofuels are actually a distraction from rejecting car culture at best. At their worst they use massive amounts of fossil fuels and pesticides to produce, waste enormous quantities of fresh water, and are one of the leading causes of deforestation in the global south.

In addition to going after research institutions taking corporate money to expand the production of industrial agrofuels, target your local large-scale industrial bio-refinery, be it for ethanol, biodiesel, or other proposed biomass facility. Try finding them at www.ethanolrfa.org/industry/locations/
or www.distill.com/usa.html.

Spank a bank

In the United States, groups such as Rainforest Action Network, Mountain Justice Summer, and Rising Tide North America have been targeting Bank of America and Citi for their financial support of the coal industry, and in particular companies practicing mountaintop removal coal mining. There have been over 100 actions against these banks ranging from branch occupations, to street theater, and banner drops. In England activists have targeted the Royal Bank of Scotland in similar fashion for its funding of the oil and gas industry. Even if you can’t pull a crowd together for a protest, a few people with “out of order” signs can shut down dozens of ATM machines owned by these banks in a matter of hours. Make sure there is a message in fine print on these signs about the banks role in climate change.

For additional resources check out http://dirtymoney.org/

Deflate or die

People in Sweden and France have developed a creative means of protest against gas guzzling SUVs. They simply let the air out of the tires, rendering them immobile. Thousands of tires have been deflated immobilizing hundreds of vehicles which has generated much media attention and awareness on global warming. The act is pretty simple and does not involve property damage. All one does is take off the valve cap and place a small pebble on top of the valve and screw the cap back on. If the pebble is placed correctly, it will press down on the air valve when you screw down the cap, thus releasing the air.

Fry the friendly skies

Travel agencies are a great, easy place to do an action; activists in the UK regularly U-lock their doors or otherwise blockade them. Due to the danger to both airplane passengers and yourself we discourage doing anything to interfere with airport runways. While this is largely uncharted territory in the US, activists in Europe have been at it for years. Let’s bring that trend on over here!

Resist road expansion

In Indiana activists have mounted fierce opposition to Interstate 69, otherwise known as the NAFTA superhighway. They have disrupted public meetings, held street demos, and even evicted the planning offices for the highway by throwing all of their contents on the curb!

Bikes not Buicks

Critical Mass is a time honored protest against car culture and an excellent way to get large crowds out for mass civil disobedience with relatively low risk. For a Critical Mass, all you have to do is get together a group of bikers and take to the streets. The idea is to take over all lanes of traffic to create an empowering atmosphere for bicycles while temporarily impeding automobile traffic.

This is not your standard Mom & Pop police-approved protest march. This is real disruption we’re talking about; disruption that could have a noticeable effect if accompanied with press releases. Rising Tide takes pains to say that they only support non-violent disruptive activities that do not directly injure human beings, but this kind of protest is sure to cause controversy at the least if successful. Perhaps that’s the idea.

The Fossil Fools Day of Action offers ideas for action that are huge (occupying a bank) and small (putting an “OUT OF ORDER” sign with information on energy policy on an ATM). Is this a call to action you plan to heed?

Why are we having a War On Terror when no one has been killed, or even injured, in the United States by any terrorist in years?

Is it because, seven years ago, three thousand Americans were killed in a terrorist attack?

Big whoop.

A lot more Americans than that are dying all the time. Take brain cancer as an example. About 13,000 people die of primary brain cancer in the United States every year. Approximately 100,000 Americans are diagnosed with secondary brain cancer, and many of them die too, whether from cancer in the brain, from the effects of cancer elsewhere in the body, or as a result of treatment.

There’s a new metastudy that’s been released by a researcher in Australia that links brain cancer with cell phone usage. The researcher, Vini Khurana, concludes that there are strong suggestions that cell phone usage creates a substantially increased risk of brain cancer, though the long-term research projects that will best be able to establish causality will be completed over the next four years.

Why should we be asked to sacrifice our freedoms in the name of protection from extremely rare terrorist attacks when so many more American lives could be saved by removing more causes of cancer (like cell phones, perhaps - wait for the definitive research) from our environment?

It isn’t just death that we have to worry about, anyway. There’s also prolonged suffering, of the kind that comes with Parkinson’s Disease.

Is it just a mystery why some people get Parkinson’s Disease, and why others don’t? To some extent, yes, but the mysterious element of Parkinson’s became significantly smaller this week, with the release of a study that found that people who had reported exposure to pesticides had a much greater chance of getting Parkinson’s than people who did not.

Write this one down in your notebook as one more reason to eat more organic food and to buy more organic clothes. Pesticides are poisons, and not just for the animals we’ve identified as vermin.

People are indeed in danger, but mostly we’re not in danger because of terrorism. Far greater are the threats that come from the way that our lives have been redesigned in order to support a large population through technology. Many more lives would be saved, and much more suffering would be eliminated, if our federal government spent less time worrying about Homeland Security, and more time considering how to make our homes more secure from the dangers of day-to-day exposure to the dangerous artifacts of our technological society.

We’ve made a surprising number of sales of Election 2008 bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, magnets, lawn signs and such to people who live outside the United States. It turns out that our sales of gear supporting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to residents of Canada and Europe is in the high hundreds.

Both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have asserted that a priority in their administrations would be to reach out again to other countries, to jettison the militaristic and aggressively binary approach of the Bush administration, and to renew diplomatic efforts around the world. How do these candidates appeal to people living in those other countries? Here are the distributions of sales so far this year for Clinton and Obama in Canada and Europe, the places to where most of our international sales were shipped.

Canada
Hillary Clinton: 8.2%
Barack Obama: 91.8%

Europe
Hillary Clinton: 25.4%
Barack Obama: 74.6%

Our sales to Africa, Asia, Australia and South America aren’t in numbers large enough for me to make a numerical report with any confidence, but I can tell you that items supporting Barack Obama have accounted for very nearly all of the few sales we have made to people living on those continents.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the beginning of my sage project - a group of seeds of the common sage herb I’ve planted in the hopes of replacing areas of my lawn with them.

I am happy to report that almost all the sage seeds have germinated and as of this morning, are putting out their first pair of secondary leaves. The plants are already over an inch tall, and showing the thick leaves characteristic of sage.

Now comes the tricky part, however. Even on the cusp of April, it’s not safe to put these sage seedlings outside to get the strengthening springtime sun. Though sage are perennials that can withstand long winters with lots of snow and ice, I’m not confident in the ability of these youngsters to survive those conditions yet. We’re still having nighttime freezes, and the air is often taking until the middle of the afternoon to get above 32 degrees. A few excursions in the late afternoon sun may be possible now and then, on days when the wind is not strong, for what they call “hardening off”, but by and large these sage seedlings will be indoor plants until the end of May.

While the sage sprouts are comfy inside, in terms of temperature, there isn’t as much light as they’d like, even near the south-facing window where I’ve put them. For that reason, they’re growing spindly and floppy.

It’s an awkward stage in a young sage’s life. Will they survive? I have high hopes that they will, although it may take a while for them to grow out of their gawky habits.

Unity08 filed its lawsuit against the FEC, trying to sue for the right to take donations of unlimited size, on January 10, 2007. The last substantive filing in the case was in May of 2007. Unity08 continues to profess its meager existence if for no other reason than to reach some resolution with the case. But public records reveal that Judge Richard W. Roberts of the DC District Court has failed to make any ruling in the case.

Rulings in federal elections law are time-dependent, and the case has large implications for how campaigns and campaign support structures are run. Can someone explain to me why Judge Roberts would sit on this case for 10 months and give it no resolution? If you’re a lawyer, can you explain to someone like me who lacks a law degree whether this is at all unusual, and if not, why?

I’m interested in developing a garden that grows vegetables, some seeds from which can be saved to plant in the next year. To be blunt, I have no idea how to do this. I mean, OK, I can pluck the seeds out of a marigold flower and toss them in a coffee can, but that’s about it. I imagine that just tossing some peas in a coffee can would result in a bunch of moldy peas, not some good seeds for planting in the spring. I’ve also heard that harvesting seeds from some commercial plants would be fruitless, because they’re sterile hybrids.

Where should I go to learn to learn about growing an annual vegetable garden that sustains itself from year to year through harvesting and use seeds? Is there a really good book on the subject? A website with reliable information? What are the steps I should take that would transform me from clueless to clueful on the subject?

People of Goodale Park, I’m calling you out. I’ve had it. This, the largest city park in the downtown/Short North area of Columbus, Ohio, is the focus of a variety of people. It has tennis courts, a meeting area, a lily pond, a basketball court, and two playgrounds. During the summer it is a center of attention for the awesome people-watching, music-listening, incense-sniffing, chow-eating Comfest. It’s a park in my neighborhood, a park I enjoy seeing on regular walks.

It is also the meeting place for large numbers of people who like to let their dogs run free.

I have a dog. I like my dog. I like dogs in general. But I understand that dogs are domesticated wolves, creatures dedicated to defending the pack from outsiders and establishing domination/subordination ranks within the pack through challenge. Dogs are animals with sharp teeth and claws. Dogs will take a crap on the grass. Anybody who has a dog must understand this to establish a healthy relationship between themselves and their dog, and to maintain reasonable relationships with their dog and the surrounding environment.

The City of Columbus, Ohio recognizes the nature of dogs and consequently sets expectations for the behavior of dogs and the behavior of dog owners within city limits. Columbus City Code 919.16 (C) states:

No pet owner shall fail to clean up after their pets by collecting and removing feces from park or reservoir property. Pets shall include dogs, cats, or other animals whose owners knowingly bring them into park or reservoir property.

Columbus City Code 2327.11 (A-C) states:

No owner of any animal shall permit such animal to run large on any property not his own. No owner of any animal, shall permit the animal to enter upon any property not that of his owner, when it is not securely leashed or under direct control. It shall be prima-facie evidence that a dog is not under direct control if it chases, injures or kills any person or domestic animal or damages or commits any nuisance upon property other than that of its owner. Whoever violates this section is guilty of permitting animals running at large, a minor misdemeanor. If the animal is a dog, a violation of this section is a misdemeanor of the third degree.

I am sure (because I have seen it with my own eyes) that there are people who come to Goodale Park with their dogs and are committed to sharing the park responsibly with other citizens. If you’re one of these people, I want to make it clear I’m not talking to you.

I’m talking to the people who let their dogs take craps in the two playground areas of the park and don’t have the basic decency or commitment to public health to clean up after them. I’m talking to the people who let their dogs turn the rest of Goodale park into a fecal minefield, making a game of catch or frisbee untenable. I’m talking to the people like the three people who let their dogs charge my 3-year-old daughter during our last trip to Goodale Park. Don’t tell me “it’s OK!” as I pick up my screaming child and you tell me that your dog, which has its tail dominantly raised in the air, is a “nice puppy.” Don’t tell me this is the way nature intended things to be. “Nature” didn’t put people in cities and build public parks.

Don’t tell me you’re being discriminated against, either. Columbus has more than one dog park where you can let poochiekins run free. While there are dog owners who want to make it legal for dogs to be leashless at Goodale Park, that is not the current state of law. The law is not important just because it is the law. It is important because it is a representation of the commitment that we citizens should have to each other: to enjoy our freedoms but to do so with the commitment not to harm or impinge upon the freedoms of others.

What’s happened at Goodale Park is that for some time now a community of (some) dog owners has decided to enjoy the freedom to let their dogs run free around the park without accountability or responsibility. Because of the irresponsible attitude toward park usage by these dog owners, I can’t use the playground or surrounding areas with my children without being exposed to unhealthy deposits. I’ve had to launder out the remains. Because of the those people within the Goodale Park community of people with dogs who act irresponsibly, my daughter is justifiably afraid to go to Goodale Park.

The conduct of dog owners who don’t control and clean after their dogs is abusive, aggressive, and arrogant. It’s time for this conduct to stop. I’m not telling you that dogs shouldn’t be welcome at Goodale Park. They should be welcome at Goodale Park, but they and their owners should be just as responsible as I am for my children. My children are not permitted to use the park as a latrine, and my children are not permitted to to behave aggressively toward others at the park. I am expected to control and clean after my children. You should be, and are, expected to control and clean after your dogs. If you can do so, you are welcome to use Goodale Park. If you can not manage to do so, you should not bring your dog to Goodale Park. This standard is what responsible citizenship is all about. Be a responsible citizen. That’s all I ask.

Since Election Day 2004, we’ve kept track of committed support for various 2008 presidential contenders, indicated by sales of Election 2008 bumper stickers, magnets, campaign buttons, and American Apparel t-shirts. Lately we’ve added yard signs, lapel stickers and union made t-shirts for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well. While polls measure fickle opinions, our measure tracks the stronger commitment marked by the laying down of cash to promote a candidate in public. The more strongly committed are more likely to actually get out there and vote. The following is the percent share of sales of our Election 2008 gear in the past week of March 23 to March 29, 2008:

Barack Obama 2008: 90.2%
Hillary Clinton 2008: 8.1%
Mike Gravel 2008: 0%
Others: 1.6%

Compared to the previous week, Barack Obama has gained almost 5 percent in his share of sales, and Hillary Clinton has lost more than 5 percent in share. Despite his brief grab of the spotlight with his switch to the Libertarian Party, Mike Gravel accounted for absolutely none of our sales of Election 2008 stickers, shirts and such. Who, then, accounts for the 1.6% in the “Others” category? Why, Al Gore. Some unnamed “Senior Democrats” have been trying to float a trial balloon lately that would have Al Gore waltz into the Democratic nominating convention and take the votes of the assembled delegates. It seems a few people out there are jumping in praise of this notion, but only a very few.

The Democratic presidential race just became very clear. Hillary Clinton says that she’s staying in the campaign for the long haul. Barack Obama says that’s fine by him. We’re not going to know who the official Democratic nominee for President will be for quite some time.

So, what’s a progressive American to do? The answer is actually very simple: Focus on what we do know. Focus on the campaign of John McCain.

You may believe that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the better choice for President, but the fact is that there’s not much you can do to lead that selection one way or the other. That decision is up to superdelegates and to voters in a small number of states.

The decision of the general election, however, will have no superdelegates, only the members of the Electoral College that are elected by voters, the equivalent of the pledged delegates in the primary elections.

The general election is very much up in the air, especially considering John McCain’s recent rise in the poll.

For that reason, I’ve developed the following bumper sticker, with a simple message that supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should be able to agree upon: Anybody But McCain. That’s ABM 2008, shorthand.

You’ve probably heard about the Fitna movie by now. It’s a short movie made by a right wing Dutch legislator who is angry at Islam. Muslims say that the movie is insulting to them, and have demanded that it be censored. Some Muslim extremists have made threats of violence against companies that could possibly have been involved in making a web site for the Fitna movie available online.

Network Solutions has refused to allow anyone to visit the web site developed for the distribution of the Fitna movie. YouTube, and now LiveLeak, have decided to censor anyone who tries to post part of the Fitna movie, because they’re afraid of the threats of Muslim extremists.

Well, I am proud to announce that I have found a copy of a Fitna movie, and can make it available to you right here at Irregular Times. Of course, this isn’t a copy of THE Fitna movie. That’s been censored very effectively. I just can’t find it anywhere.

Not being able to see and judge the original Fitna movie for myself, I went ahead and made my own Fitna movie, which you see here. The text of this new version of the Fitna movie, for those of you who might be afraid to watch it, is as follows:

This is the true story of the Koran, and as such, it may offend some Muslims. So be it. You can’t make everyone happy all the time.

The Koran was not written by the Arabs, as modern day Muslim scholars would have you believe. In fact, the Koran was written on the planet Fitna in the Andromeda Galaxy.

It seems that someone on the planet Fitna had made, and posted on the Internet, a short video about the blahblahs, a species of gigantic interplanetary beings from the nearby Blah Blah Nebula. The video said that the blahblahs were smelly.

When the blahblahs heard about this Internet video, they got very upset, and sent messages to the government of Fitna, saying that if the video was not censored, a big blahblah would come over to the planet Fitna and crush it in its jaws.

Some people on Fitna said that the video needed to come down right away, for the sake of Fitnaland Security. Calmer voices reminded the others that there was such a thing as freedom of speech on Fitna, and that if the video were censored, the people of Fitna would have to live in fear of the blahblahs forever.

So, the video stayed online, and a big blahblah came. The blahblah grabbed the planet Fitna in its jaws and tried to crush it, but nothing happened.

It turns out that the blahblahs didn’t have any teeth.

The people of Fitna celebrated, and decided to write a new epic romance novel. That is the true story of how the Koran came to be. If you don’t believe me, that’s your business. I won’t send a blahblah over to bite you.

Free speech activists, given the online media blackout of the Fitna movie, we may not be able to view the original Fitna movie, but we can still make ourselves heard on the issue of censorship of unpopular ideas. That’s why I encourage anyone who has the inclination and the resources necessary to create and post their own Fitna movie online in protest of the restriction of free expression by religious extremists and cowardly media corporations.

No, you don’t have to make a hateful Fitna movie to make your point. Just make a movie that in some way talks about the Koran and has the name Fitna in it. Maybe you could make an advertisement for Mohammed’s Fitna and Yoga Studio. Just have fun, and above all, don’t be part of the silence!

I just now found the following list next to my laptop, in classic 8-year-old boy handwriting:

WHAT I WANT

• peace
• clean air
• Pleo® jirassic pet
• Robopanda™
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars

Lately, CafePress and Zazzle started selling round lapel stickers in sheets of 48. We started adding designs for those lapel stickers (here, for instance, are some Hillary Clinton lapel stickers; our Zazzle lapel sticker collection for the two candidates is over thisaway). But we abruptly stopped work on these collections when we noticed the high cost for these stickers. You might say we had a case of sticker shock.

At Zazzle, a sheet of 48 lapel stickers with one of our designs would cost you $48.59 including shipping and handling costs. At CafePress, a sheet of 48 lapel stickers would cost you less — $34.50 including shipping and handling. But that’s still a lot. Way too much. Extravagantly expensive. Stratospheric for what’s being sold here, which is a lapel sticker. These are not waterproof, UV-protected, big vinyl bumper stickers you can see from 30 feet away, after all. They’re lapel stickers that can be weatherproofed with a can of spray, but without that they’re ephemeral and intimate. They’ll last on backpacks, or on notebooks, or on… well, we’re sure you can think of some places they’ll last. But they’re not your uncle’s rugged bumper sticker. There’s no excuse for this kind of charge, although there is an explanation: it involves a multiple-step process with two big corporations who have employees and administrative staff and subcontracting designers, all of whom take a cut. That, and the allure of a really big profit margin, explain the high cost.

To keep a short story short, we looked at the economics of it and realize that we, not a corporation, with no administrative staff and no employees and no designing subcontractors or any of that jazz, could offer you the same product at a much lower cost. So as of right now, we’re selling sheets of lapel labels with dozens of designs on them at a much lower cost. You can buy 48 lapel stickers from us for just $12.00. That’s a quarter of what Zazzle charges and only a bit more than a third of what CafePress wants you to pay. We also sell lapel stickers in a variety of quantities (48, 40, 24, 20, 12) and sizes (2.5 inches and 1.5 inches in diameter) to match your desire. As with all the other stuff we make ourselves, we ship it to you direct from our little shops in our attics and basements to directly using the U.S. Postal Service.

Here are links to our brand spanking new galleries of lapel stickers:

Barack Obama Lapel Stickers

Hillary Clinton Lapel Stickers

Anti-Bush Lapel Stickers

Pro-Constitution Lapel Stickers

Environment Lapel Stickers

Liberal Lapel Stickers

LGBT Lapel Stickers

Peace Lapel Stickers

Religious Freedom Lapel Stickers

If you have any ideas for lapel stickers you’d like to see and perhaps put on your lapel (or, ahem, somewhere else), let us know.