Who knew! Maybe I was named after some tasty tuna, not a lovely gem. 😉
This picture was taken with my phone when I was in New York last month. I’m experimenting with Flickr to send this from my phone to my blog.
Author: Ruby Sinreich
Employee FIRED for not supporting Bush
An incredible story posted on AMERICAblog today says that this woman was fired from her job after her boss told her to remove a John Kerry sticker from her car. She rightly told him that he couldn’t tell her who to vote for. So he gave her the boot. She was told she “could either work for him or John Kerry.” This same guy had previously included a letter in everyone’s paychecks arguing that they all benefitted from Bush’s tax cuts because he was a recipient of them.
Please go visit the site to read the whole story, and make a donation to support this woman who “must do without income for three weeks while the state unemployment commission decides if she is eligible for compensation.” By the way, the criminal Bush supporter who is her boss is named Phil Gaddis.
Hmmm, let’s see if any Republicans denouce this economic intimidation. Freedom from political intimidation is the foundation of our (supposedly) democratic system. Think any officials will call for investigation of his illegal strongarming of employees?
Fun with Flickr
One of the cool things you can do with Flickr is to browse by the tags you and other users apply to each of your photos. This allows very cool things like this:
collection of photos marked RNC (ie: from the demonstrations in NYC).
Another cool thing it does is the random photoroll that I now have on the right side of the screen here. I held out for a while, but I have really been going in for the bloggy whistles and bells lately. what’s come over me?
Jesus is Soft on Crime
I made the paper
Yesterday the Chapel Hill News published a story about OrangePolitics.org, my personal project-obsession-cross-soapbox. It was a good story, oriented toward explaining the site as a community intended to inform and activate local progressives. You can read the story online, but you won’t get to see the crazy picture of me that took up the whole top half of the B section! Here’s an excerpt:
“I wanted to connect local progressive people to local issues as a way of helping them get actively involved in those issues,” Sinreich said. “What I “pictured was a groundswell of young, progressive activists who could be sort of energized and informed by OP. I wanted people flooding Town Hall to talk about the issues.
“That hasn’t happened. But it does seem to have sort of unintentionally filled a niche. It seems to have become established as a place for a lot of politically aware people to discuss local issues. All the local decision-makers seem to know about it. I think it’s playing a role, even if it’s not actually quite the role I had planned.”
OrangePolitics, which touches on a huge array of local issues — and, despite Sinreich’s best efforts to keep things purely local, a few national ones — has become a regular Web stop for many officials and politically involved residents.
Yer Out
Presidential Baby Eating
Peace Vigil
Good turnout at tonight’s Vigil to honor the 1,000 dead in Iraq*. I would call it about 150 people (including a photographer from TIME magazine!). Here’s a lousy picture (by my phone, pardon the lack of fidelity).
I think we challenged a lot of passersby, especially students, who otherwise would have easily avoided the reality of this war.
* What’s up with just counting dead Americans? There must be 10 times as many dead Iraqis, not to mention the countless whose lives will be ruined.
Treo 650
NPOblogs.org
The fine folks who started NPOblogs.org have decided that they cannot maintain the site, and I have offerred to host it here at lotusmedia.org .
Soon I hope to receive the files from Kathy and Carnet and start re-building the site.
Meanwhile, here is a post and discussion Announcing the launch of NPOBlogs.org (TechSoup.org).
And here is some more thinking about Non-profits and Blogging (Groundspring.org).