In Monochrome

climateadaptation:

I’ve been warning y’all all month. This is serious business. There is an environmental regulatory slaughter coming, and you all need to step up and email your reps. See my previous posts:

• Enviro’s this is the story to watch
• BREAKING: GOP TO GUT ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS IN LEGISLATION BLITZ.
• BREAKING: HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS APPROVES FUNDING FOR NASA, NSF, NOAA. SLASHES BILLIONS. BANS CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH.

This is how you contact your representatives: How to contact your elected officials. I’ve included some tips and tricks in the above posts to help you write your emails.

Trust me, you’re going to be busy these coming months because you’re going to read about cuts to environmental programs that will absolutely enrage you. This is what you do: Stop your damn tumbling and whining and write an email:

Keep ‘em short. Keep ‘em hella tight. Most importantly, clearly demand the politician support your well versed case. If you send a rant or a hippie-dippy long-winded tome about mother earth’s dying soul, it will get deleted! Make every word count. No fluff. No philosophies. A politician does not care if you love bunnies, s/he cares if you love the bill that supports bunnies. Write about the bill. I usually fire off something like this to John Kerry and Senator Scott Brown:

Example email:

Subject line: “From your voter”

Dear Representative/Senator ___, 

I voted for you. You represent me. I oppose any and all GOP cuts to environmental regulations, such as preventing any new animals from being put on the Endangered Species list in HR 2584. I oppose similar riders to defund the EPA, and prevent money from going to Climate Change research. While I agree these programs need to be efficient, gutting their intent, suppressing science, and deleting the original legislation’s purpose does not meet that call.

Oppose the cuts, or we oppose you. 

Sincerely, 

Michael Cote

Access to transportation is key to connecting the poor, seniors and those with disabilities to jobs, schools, health care and other resources. It is essential to widening opportunities for all. Many of us take our mobility for granted, but getting around can be a real challenge for millions of Americans. This is a key issue as Congress considers the surface transportation reauthorization bill, which essentially maps out federal transportation spending and priorities for the next six years.

One-third of low-income African-American households do not have access to an automobile. That figure is 25 percent among low-income Latino families and 12.1 percent for whites. Racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to use public transit to get to work.

Yet the federal government allocates 80 percent of its transportation funding to highways.

“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it,” the report states. “Traditional nondiscrimination protections cannot protect people for whom opportunities are literally out of reach.”

robertreich:

How did we get into this mess?

I thought I’d seen Washington at its worst. I was there just after Watergate. I was there when Jimmy Carter imploded. I was there during the government shut-down of 1995.

But I hadn’t seen the worst. This is the worst.

How can it be that with over 9 percent…

shortformblog:

• FREE Macbooks for kids in Kentucky! source

» We were generally supportive of the 2009 stimulus package, but aspects of it are starting to seem a bit questionable, to say the least. Case in point: 2,200 students and staff in the town of Owensboro, Kentucky will soon be enjoying a free…