Month: January 2005

Disturbing news from Russia

Per Yahoo News:

A group of nationalist Russian lawmakers called Monday for a sweeping investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.

In a letter dated Jan. 13, about 20 members of the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, asked Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate their claims and to launch proceedings “on the prohibition in our country of all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations as extremist.”

Just because a handful of legislators proposes something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, of course, but still, quite disturbing to see.

This is Stupid

Apparently the city of San Francisco, where I reside, is considering imposing a bag tax on grocery bags in an attempt to “eliminate waste” and recoup some of the costs of waste management.

As a shopper on a budget, I’m pissed off. Scott and I generally go grocery shopping two times a month, and we tend to stock up on stuff when we go. Our groceries get packed into anything from 8 to 12 bags – some of them double-bagged to take the weight. My rough calculation is that this new tax would cost us about $6 a month. And that’s just the cost for our Safeway trips. It goes higher when you add in the odds and ends we pick up from other local stores, runs to the greengrocer, etc. All told this bag tax could cost us $100 a year. That’s not chump change anymore. Especially when I’ve just cut back my work hours for school.

Big grocery stores will also hate this because it will slow down their lines and increase their labor costs. If they have to count exactly how many bags are used for each customer and then charge for them, you won’t be able to close out one transaction and start the next one until after all the groceries are bagged. Plus, self-bagging will no longer be an option unless you bring all your own bags. That’s workable when all you’re buying is a few items, but not when you’re buying two weeks’ worth of stuff.

And need I point out that this is a classic regressive tax? People with even smaller budgets than ours will be hit harder by this.

It’s great that the city of San Francisco is trying to be a good manager of our natural resources, but this is a crappy way of doing it.

WTF?

Supposedly it’s the “hook ’em, horns” of the Texas Longhorns, but who knows for sure. It’s definitely not a very Presidential thing to do.

Interesting Development

Clear Channel Communications Inc. on Wednesday said it converted three stations to a liberal talk format and this year could double to 44 the number of stations carrying such programming.

After offering mostly conservative-leaning talk for the past decade, Clear Channel and other broadcasters are now embracing “progressive” talk to woo a listener base that is growing increasingly fragmented due to satellite, Internet radio and devices like iPods.

The nation’s biggest radio operator said it switched underperforming stations in Washington, D.C., Detroit and Cincinnati carrying nostalgic or sports programming with talkers like Jerry Springer, Ed Schultz, Lionel, Phil Hendrie, Randi Rhodes and Al Franken.

[snip]

In other efforts to reinvent itself, Clear Channel is cutting down on commercials and is converting 1,000 stations to high-definition digital broadcasting in the next three years.

HD radio will enable radio broadcasts to achieve “near-CD” quality and allow two or even three digital audio streams to be broadcast using a single carrier frequency.

If Clear Channel sees that there’s a market for ‘liberal’ talk radio, then that is a good sign for the future, in my book. And the digital move is also an interesting one.

Happy MLK Day

The Rude Pundit has a really good take on the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. It’s worth a read (unless you’re at work and your employer has a profanity filter in place). Here’s a snippet:

Democrats oughta take a look at King beyond his having had a dream and his having been to the mountaintop and his having been assassinated. Because King knew – he f—ing knew – that one thing that made him a leader of the disenfranchised is that he spoke their language. Even as those around him believed (and some still believe) that King made a mistake in his expansion of his movement, King knew that no one is truly free until we all are free. He had to bring whites into the movement on a broad basis or the fight was never going to end. He had to undercut the trump card of the powerful in their ability to divide the underclasses, and that meant owning the rhetorical God to the point that whenever God is mentioned, the automatic association is with the civil rights, economic justice, and anti-war movements (think of how successful the right is in the use of the word “Christian”).