Innocent Blood on the Ice

Canada's annual seal hunt is set to begin at the end of next month. An estimated 300,000 baby seals will be shot and bludgeoned to death for
their fur by fishermen.

Take action!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/566342047
http://www.harpseals.org/

In just a few weeks, the largest commercial slaughter of marine mammals is set to begin on the ice off Canada's East Coast.

By the end of the hunt, it's predicted that more than 300,000 seals will be clubbed or shot to death by Canadian fishermen seeking to pick up a
few extra dollars by selling their fur.

Almost all of these seals will be babies - some as young as 12 days old.

Last year, The Humane Society of the United States documented the carnage firsthand and what they saw was shocking: Most of these baby seals were cut open while they were conscious and still struggling.

While most Canadians surveyed are against the hunt, the Canadian government and fishing industry refuse to end it.

But this year, there is new hope on the ice. Canada recently elected a new prime minister. With enough public support, there's a good chance they may end this terrible hunt forever.

Tell Canada's new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, that you do not support the annual slaughter of seals for their fur. Join The Humane Society of the United States in fighting to end the seal hunt now and forever by signing the petition!

It's time to stop this horrific cruelty against Canada's seals...Are you with me?

Lauren Alvarez
Care2 and ThePetitionSite Team

The Cost of Republican Corruption

A letter from Rep. Louise M. Slaughter:

Last week, my office from the House Rules Committee released a report, America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption , which explains how the Republican culture of corruption is harming our country. For the first time, this report tries to quantify the damage the Republican Congress and Bush White House have inflicted on our country. It shows how the harmful policies Republicans have passed into law over the past few years are the result of a corrupt process that gives "K Street Project" lobbyists [corporations] more power to shape legislation...

I urge you to read this report, and share it with your family, friends, and neighbors who might not be as politically plugged in as you. Invite
them to read this important report today by using this link:
http://www.votelouise.com/page/invite/AmericaforSale

They have a right to know that their government is working on behalf of the special interests, not the public interest. Our report clearly demonstrates that when the GOP Congressional leaders allow Republican lobbyists to set the agenda and write the bills, the American people suffer the consequences. While the special interests walk away with billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and federal contracts, Americans must live with the bad laws this system produces. The political corruption we associate with now-notorious figures such as Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff comes at a very real cost to each and every one of us.

"America for Sale" explains in detail how, under the control of the Republican party:

14.2 million American seniors (including millions of our sickest and most vulnerable) are stuck in a complicated, expensive, and inefficient Medicare prescription drug program. This is because the Republican Congress and the Bush Administration allowed lobbyists from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to design this program.

Sixty million American families who heat with natural gas and eight million who heat with heating oil are paying higher bills this winter,even though the Republican Congress recently passed their "national energy plan" into law. Although this plan gives the energy industry billions in new tax breaks and subsidies, it doesn't lower prices for consumers or make our country more energy independent.

The 150,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq do not have the equipment that they need because of waste, fraud and cronyism by the Republican Congress. While Halliburton and other companies with Republican connections get their contracts, our soldiers still don't have the body armor and armored vehicles they need to fight the war.

Seven hundred fifty thousand households in the Gulf regions are still displaced today, more than five months after Hurricane Katrina hit that region. This is so at least in part because the political hacks that the Bush Administration put in charge of crucial homeland security were not adequately prepared to respond to this disaster.

More than ten million students and their families will have larger student loans to repay. This serious disabling of education occurred because House Republicans, led by John Boehner, working hand-in-hand with his commercial-loan industry allies, cut twelve billion dollars from the student loan program.

These are just some of the examples from the report which shows how the recent unprecedented, subversion of our legislative process and federal government is not simply an "inside the beltway" problem.

Thank you again for all you do to restore faith in our democracy.

In Solidarity,

Rep. Louise M. Slaughter

"Weight of the Soul"?

*******

Some empirical observations imply that there is a weight loss at the time of death. Some have said this is a few ounces (figures vary). But this in no way reflects the "weight" of the soul. The soul is intangible and possesses no physical attributes such as weight. In fact, the soul is a deep level of mind, even deeper than the personal unconscious. So, then, what is the source of this weight loss? At times it may have been due to imprecise measurements. There might also have been other factors, but I am not qualified to pass scientific judgments on these technical matters. But I do not believe that the weight-experiment is replicable; therefore it is not "scientific."

Stop Billions in Medicare Spending Cuts

Does George Bush really expect American seniors, and other Americans, to sacrifice desperately needed medical supplies so that he can continue to finance his obscene war? He has already murdered 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Isn't that enough to satisfy his bloodlust and his greed or will there ever be enough?

Tell the Congress to protect seniors from these harmful Medicare cuts

(from Care2.com and thePetitionSite, sponsored by the Democratic Congressonal Campaign Committee)

The Bush Administration released its fiscal year 2007 budget which slashed Medicare by $36 billion over the next five years and $105 billion over the next ten years.

These are cuts to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, ambulance services, and other providers and increases in Medicare premiums for certain beneficiaries. At the same time that the budget slashes Medicare funding, it protects the special interests, leaving intact the $10 billion Medicare slush fund for HMOs. We can't let our parents and grandparents pay the price for Republican corruption.

We must stop the reckless Bush Administration agenda. Join the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in sending this petition to tell Congress to put our seniors ahead of their big industry donors. Democrats are ready to act but need Republicans to vote against it as well. There are simply not enough Democrats to stop it without bipartisan support. Helping elect Democrats in the November election will ensure a Democratic Majority who would restore the People's House once again to the people putting our seniors first.

Sign the petition and tell Congress to Protect our Seniors from Billions In Harmful Medicare Cuts!

Who Would Jesus Torture?

From Faithful America:

New photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and a blistering United Nations Report calling on the U.S. to shut down the Guantanamo Prison in Cuba have once again reminded us that this chapter in our nation's history is a moral disgrace and must end.

A few days ago the National Council of Churches' General Secretary, the Rev. Dr. Bob Edgar, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging compliance with the United Nations recommendations. Edgar also renewed a request to allow an interfaith delegation to Guantanamo to monitor the physical, mental, and spiritual condition of the detainees.

We are asking for your endorsement of this important letter. Please read, then sign. Your name, with thousands of others, will be forwarded to the U.S. State Department supporting the NCC letter.

Read the letter and Sign the endorsement

Stop AOL's Email Scheme

AOL is threatening the Internet as we know it. They want to charge an "email tax" for sending email. Those who don't pay would risk their emails not being delivered.Can you help change AOL's mind by signing this emergency petition?

The very existence of online civic participation and the free Internet as we know it are under attack by America Online.

AOL recently announced what amounts to an "email tax." Under this pay-to-send system, large emailers willing to pay an "email tax" can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people's inboxes—with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation. 1

Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups, and even families with mailing lists will inevitably be left with inferior Internet service unless they are willing to pay the "email tax" to AOL. We need to stop AOL immediately so other email hosts know that following AOL's lead would be a mistake.

Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your friends?

Sign here:
http://civic.moveon.org/emailtax/

Petition statement: "AOL, don't auction off preferential access to people's inboxes to giant emailers, while leaving people's friends, families, and favorite causes wondering if their emails are being delivered at all. The Internet is a force for democracy and economic innovation only because it is open to all Internet users equally—we must not let it become an unlevel playing field."

AOL is one of the biggest email hosts in the world—if we stop them from unleashing this threat to the Internet, others will know not to try it. Everyone who signs this petition will be sent information on how to contact AOL directly, as well as future steps that can be taken until AOL drops its new "email tax" policy.

AOL's proposed pay-to-send system is the first step down the slippery slope toward dividing the Internet into two classes of users—those who get preferential treatment and those who are left behind. AOL pretends nothing would change for senders who don't pay, but that's not reality. The moment AOL switches to a world where giant emailers pay for preferential treatment, AOL faces this internal choice: spend money to keep spam filters up-to-date so legitimate email isn't identified as spam, or make money by neglecting their spam filters and pushing more senders to pay for guaranteed delivery. Which do you think they'll choose?

If AOL has its way, the big loser will be regular email users—whose email from friends, family, and favorite causes will increasingly go undelivered and disappear into the black hole of a neglected spam filter. Another loser will be democracy and economic innovation on the Internet—where small ideas become big ideas specifically because regular people can spread ideas freely on a level playing field.

If an "email tax" existed when MoveOn began, we never would have gotten off the ground—indeed, AOL's proposal will hurt every membership group, regardless of political affiliation. That's why groups all across the political spectrum are joining together with charities, non-profits, small businesses, labor unions, and Internet watchdog groups in opposition to AOL's "email tax."

The president of the Association for Cancer Online Resources (ACOR) points out the real-world urgency of this issue:

In essence, this is going to block every AOL subscriber suffering from any form of cancer from receiving potentially life-saving information they may not be able to get from any other source, simply because a non-profit like ACOR—which serves more than 55,000 cancer patients and caregivers every day—cannot afford to pay the fee. 2

Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your friends?

Thank you for all you do.
–Eli Pariser, Noah T. Winer, Adam Green, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action team, Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006

P.S. The Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the "email tax" issue beautifully:

Email being basically free isn't a bug. It's a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll...

Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay...3

Sources:
1. "Postage is due for companies sending e-mail," New York Times, February 4, 2006

2. "AOL's New Email Certification Program: Good Mail or Goodfellas?" L-Soft Release, February 2, 2006

3. "AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit," Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 2006

CDC Warning

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior. It is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him."

Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed daily for the previous four years. Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to
incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography, history, and English, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, and Categorical all-or-nothing behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists say this disase spread with unusual rapidity after originating only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.

(Thanks to Teresa Ramsey)

Brother Pig: A Sunless Hell

Brother Pig: A Sunless Hell
Confronting the cruel facts of factory-farmed meat

Is there absolutely nothing that people will not do to increase profits? And the gov is supporting this monstrous nightmare. You can fall on your knees and thank Love if you are a vegetarian! For this treatment fills human-consumed meat with some horrific chemicals!

Thanks to Matthew Scully.
Special for the Arizona Republic
Feb. 19, 2006 12:00 AM

Arizona voters will be asked this fall to weigh in on a ballot measure called the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act, which is now in the signature-gathering stage but, by November, is certain to be one of our livelier election-year debates.

The initiative, modeled on a reform passed by Florida voters, would prohibit the factory-farming practice of confining pigs and veal calves in crates so small that the animals cannot even turn around or extend their limbs.

Factory farming, in general, is no one's favorite subject, and the details here are particularly unpleasant to think about: masses of creatures enduring lives of unrelieved confinement and deprivation. But if you're in need of reasons to sign the petitions and vote for the initiative, they are easy to find, and our discomfort with the subject is a good place to start.

Known in the trade as "intensive confinement" or "mass confinement," it sounds pretty rough. And as we're seeing already, pork producers and the PR firms in their hire do not take well to criticism of what they regard as "standard practice."

Just this month, the industry's allies in the Arizona Legislature proposed a constitutional amendment to bar the public from passing any laws promoting the humane treatment of farm animals, effective Jan. 1, 2006. Nice to have a fallback position: Even if the humane-farming initiative passes by vote of the people, as industry lobbyists apparently fear it will, they plan to nullify the law retroactively.

Basically, pork producers figured out some years ago that if they packed the maximum number of pigs into the minimum amount of space, if they pinned the creatures down into fit-to-size iron crates above slatted floors and carved out giant "lagoons" to contain the manure - if they turned the "farm," in short, into a sunless hell of metal and concrete -it made everything so much more efficient. An obvious cost-saver, and from the industry's standpoint, that should settle the matter.

Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats. And if you think people can get too sentimental about animals, try listening sometime to chefs and gourmands going on about the "velvety smooth succulence" of their favorite fare.

"Cost-saver" in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean "moral shortcut." For all of its "science-based" pretensions, factory farming is really just an elaborate, endless series of evasions from the most elementary duties of honest animal husbandry. Man, the rationalizing creature, can justify just about anything when there is money in sight. It's only easier when your victims are so completely out of sight and unable to speak for themselves.

Over the years, one miserly deprivation led to another, ever harsher methods were applied to force costs lower and lower, and so on until the animals ceased to be understood as living creatures at all. Pigs, for example, aren't even "raised" anymore, a term that once conveyed some human attention and care. These days, in America's 395,000-kills-per-day pork industry, pigs are "grown," crowded together by the hundreds in the automated, scientifically based intensive-confinement facilities formerly known as barns.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are "production units," and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests. As conservative commentator Fred Barnes put it in the Wall Street Journal, "On the old family farms, pigs and cattle and chickens were raised for food, but they were free for a time; they mated, raised piglets, calves and chicks and were protected by the farmers . . . . They had a life. On industrial farms, they don't."

Among the more disreputable claims made to justify intensive confinement is that it's actually for the benefit of the pigs. They "prefer" confinement to grazing outdoors. They need "protection" from each other's aggression.

If you know absolutely nothing about pigs, this has a vaguely comforting ring to it - that is, until the moment you step into a factory farm, as I have had occasion to do. Inside, it becomes dramatically obvious that their ceaseless, merciless confinement is the cause of the pigs' aggression, and by no stretch a protective measure. It turns out that when you trap intelligent, 400- to 500-pound mammals in gestation crates 22 inches wide and 7 feet long, when their limbs are broken from trying to turn or escape and they are covered in sores, blood, tumors, "pus pockets," and their own urine and excrement, they tend to act up a bit.

Indeed, the most notable thing is how the appearance of any human being causes a violent panic. A mere opening of the door brings on a horrific wave of roars, squeals and cage-rattling from the sows. Another memorable sight is the "cull pen," wherein each and every day, the dead or dying bodies of the weak are placed, the ones who expired from the sheer, unrelenting agony of it.

It takes a well-practiced dishonesty to insist with a straight face that intensive confinement is "for their own good," and almost as brazen is the libertarian case for factory farming, which may be summed up as "mind your own business." Along with this comes a haughty little reminder that we're all the beneficiaries of factory farming, and where do you think all that cheap meat comes from, and why don't we just be
grateful and let them manage their own affairs?

The argument has a certain practical appeal, provided you forget that factory farming is propped up by tens of billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies, which are very definitely our business. Much as the immiserated animals are kept on four legs by hormones and antibiotics, the entire enterprise is sustained by those federal subsidies and billions more paid by government to repair industrial farming's immense collateral damage to land, water and air.

The illusion of consumer savings depends not only on unscrupulous corporate farmers, but also on complaisant citizens and blithely indifferent consumers who don't ask too many questions - least of all moral questions. And the industry wants to keep it that way. Just buy the "cheap" meat, forget the damned animals, and keep the subsidies coming.

Once the details are known, in short, it all becomes a very tough sell for factory farmers. And so far their quaint-sounding "Campaign for Arizona Farmers and Ranchers" (brought to you by the National Pork Producers Council and other agribusiness trade groups) is not going
well.

Industry lobbyist Jim Klinker, now director of the Arizona Farm Bureau and lead spokesman against the humane-farming initiative, started things off with a blunt reminder that farm animals aren't pets, and so our sympathy for them is misplaced. "These people," Klinker told Tucson Weekly, "want these animals raised the same way we raise our dogs and cats. I think most people understand that's not how food is produced."

When you want people to harden their hearts, however, it's probably not such a good idea to invite comparisons between farm animals and dogs or cats. How would your dog react if you stuffed her into a crate in which she could not even stretch or turn around, and never let her out? No human attention or companionship with other animals. No bedding, straw to lie on. No single moment outdoors, ever, to feel the breeze or the warmth of the sun.

What if it were a dog?

Your dog, a being of intelligence and emotional capacities entirely comparable to those of a pig, would beg and wail and whimper and finally fall silent into a state of complete brokenness. And anyone who inflicted such tortures on that animal, no matter what excuses might be offered, would be guilty of a felony. If the creatures are comparable, and the conditions identical, and the suffering equal, how can the one be "standard practice" and the other a crime?

Next, in an interview with Arizona Capitol Times, Klinker tried out the "sentimentalist" line. The initiative, he scoffed, is based on "pure emotions" - as opposed to factory farming itself, which we are to assume is guided at every grim stage by the light of pure reason.

He followed up with a little warning that the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act is all the doing of "outsiders" anyway, by which he means various cranks, subversives, and social misfits who apparently are conspiring at this very moment to "impose the values of a vegetarian society on all Arizonans."

One problem here is that if Klinker is going to be our defender of true Arizona values against "outsiders," then he needs to hear from a broader range of outside opinion. And it may surprise him to learn that the problems of factory farming are becoming more apparent, and more abhorrent, to people of every political stripe.

When the conservative columnist George Will, for example, calls cruelty to animals "an intrinsic evil," citing the "pain-inflicting confinements and mutilations" of factory farming, you know it can no longer be shrugged off as the concern of a faint-hearted few.

Factory farming, Mr. Will observed in Newsweek not long ago, has become a "serious issue of public policy." And conservatives in particular, applying that uncompromising moral clarity on which they pride themselves, should not be afraid to call "vicious" things what they are.

Another conservative writer, Andrew Ferguson of Bloomberg News, challenged the "hyper-efficient agricultural economy" and "the cruel innovations the modern industrial farm depends upon." And Father Richard John Neuhaus, writing in the conservative National Review, expressed his disgust at "the horrors perpetuated against pigs on industrial farms," a matter "that warrants public and governmental attention."

Neuhaus could cite, if he needed further authority, Pope Benedict XVI, who has warned against the "degrading of living creatures to a commodity" entailed in factory farming. And Protestant Christians could hear a similar message from one of their own most respected figures, Charles Colson, the conservative evangelist who cautions that "When it comes to animal welfare today, Christians have allowed the secular world to set the agenda. ... We need to get involved in shaping laws that determine animal treatment. But first we must make it our business to
find out how the ... cattle of the earth are treated on factory farms."

Christians especially, declared Colson, "have a duty to prevent the needless torment of animals."

"Outsiders," all of them, but not to my knowledge collaborators in any effort, [are not trying] to impose "the values of a vegetarian society" on Arizona. For Klinker and other lobbyists for factory farming, surely the lesson is that they should spend a little less time warning about other people's values, and a little more time examining their own.

It is true, as he reminds us, that other states have far larger "herds" than in Arizona's $40 million-a-year pork industry. But this is hardly a thought to put one's mind at rest. The same was also true, until recently, of Utah, now home to a sprawling network of nightmarish "mega-farms," all of them built and run by giant corporations like Smithfield Foods, the real outsiders in all of this. The largest of these places, a sort of gulag for pigs, holds 1.3 million in confinement and produces more waste every year than metropolitan Los Angeles.

Why, Klinker wonders, enact a law here instead of in Iowa, North Carolina or Utah? Well, for starters, maybe Arizonans do not want to go the way of Utah. And in that case, now would be a good time to bar the door.

Prepare yourself to hear, in the coming months, these arguments and similar rubbish from industry lobbyists, their shill veterinarians, and
anyone else they can trot out to make something pernicious and contemptible seem decent and praiseworthy. Then in the quiet of the voting booth ask yourself why any creature of God, however humble, should be made to endure the dark, lonely, tortured existence of the factory farm, and what kind of people build their fortunes upon such misery.

The answer will send an unequivocal message, to factory farmers here and to all concerned, that unbridled arrogance, bad faith, and rank cruelty are not Arizona values.

Matthew Scully worked for Arizona governors Mecham, Mofford, and Symington. A former special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting for President Bush, he is the author of "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy."

Jake Oster
Grassroots Coordinator
Government Affairs
The Humane Society of the United States
519 C Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
202-955-3672 voice
301-529-2987 cell
202-676-2301 fax
www.hsus.org

Interested in a Lobby 101 in your area, let us know and maybe we willcome to your town.
Interested in taking action online to help animals? Then join our online
community and sign up for our Humane Action Network. Go to
www.hsus.org/join.

Bush's Budget: A Weapon of Mass Destruction

From Women’s Action for New Direction, Care2 and ThePetitionSite Team

Often in his speeches, President Bush stresses the dangers of terrorist attacks – using the “War on Terror” as a justification for the biggest increase in military expenditures since the Cold War.

But to sustain the exorbitant $28 billion increase he has proposed this year, Bush is placing an undue burden on Americans. Some of his most notable cuts affect our nation’s children by slashing funding for public education. Take action!

Think about this:

For the cost of one F-22 fighter jet, we could build 31 new elementaryschools.

Instead of buying two aircraft carriers, we could hire 65,000 newteachers.

For the amount spent on ballistic missile defense, nearly 6 million children could be receiving health care.

The message is clear: by crippling public education and social services to funnel more money into the Pentagon, Bush's budget will not secure the future of our nation.

Join Women’s Action for New Directions and urge Congress and the President to retool the budget, to reflect our values and priorities.

Tell your lawmakers that you don’t want your tax dollars to fund $28 billion dollars worth of new weaponry when the lives and futures of
America’s families are the compromise.

Here's to securing America at home…Are you with me?

More Bombs and Death, or More Schools?

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