Republicans vote to cut public brodcastingand they aim to cut where it hurts the most

He's big. He's yellow. He's a bird. He's Big Bird. He sings songs about the alphabet and flowers, brought to you the letter Q and the number 7. And he sits squarely in the sights of Dick Cheney's double-barreled shotgun.
The House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies voted on June 7 to cut $115 million from the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a reduction of 23 percent. Just last year, Republicans tried to cut $223 million from the budget, before tremendous public outcry and Democratic outrage forced them to restore full funding. If the budget passes and funding is not restored, the cuts could have a resoundingly negative effect for public broadcasting stations nationwide.
"These cuts are targeted to inflict maximum damage, and they contradict other goals of Congress," said President and CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations John Lawson, in a press release. "They eliminate funds for educational, commercial-free children's programming the same week the House is voting to curb TV indecency. They cut funds for public television stations to convert to digital broadcasting just six months after Congress voted to mandate that stations turn off analog broadcasting. They directly target funds for national programming production by PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), NPR (National Public Radio) and independent producers, and they eliminate the funds we need to distribute our programming by satellite to local stations."
Kevin Klose, CEO of NPR, said the cuts would hurt radio listeners everywhere.
"The subcommittee's vote ignores the critical role public radio holds in informing and strengthening our democracy," Klose said. "The decision threatens the very existence of nearly 200 stations in 43 states who are the sole broadcasters to remote, rural and minority communities that face an even greater challenge in connecting with the world."
Representative Ralph Regula, a Republican from Ohio's Sixteenth Congressional District, chairs the committee that recomended the cuts.
"We've got to keep our priorities straight," Regula told The Boston Globe. "You're going to choose between giving a little more money to handicapped children versus providing appropriations for public broadcasting."
However, funding for the handicapped wasn't the only thing on Regula's list of priorities. As he was slashing funding for public broadcasting stations nationwide, Regula was showering his sixteenth district with millions of dollars-worth of pet projects, including:

• $2,000,000 for road construction projects in Stark County, Ohio.
• $1,100,000 to connect Quadral Drive to County Highway 16 in Wadsworth, Ohio.
• $900,000 for replacement of two bridges in Wayne County, Ohio.
• $500,000 for Green, Ohio to purchase a farm.
• $500,000 for a 110-acre land acquisition in Bethlehem Township, Ohio.

That's $5 million for one tiny district in one out of 50 states. If Regula can come up with $5 million to waste on his district and the Republican Congress can spend $278 billion on Iraq, coming up with $115 million to spend on one of the most important sources of independent news and children's entertainment should be a cinch.
Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts' Seventh Congressional District, says it's not about whether Republicans are able to fund CPB or not - they are choosing not to.
"PBS is right at the top of [the Republicans'] hit list," he said. "Always has been, always will be, until they can destroy it."

Email your representatives and senators. Let them know what you think.

Even with the lights on, milk drinkers are in the dark

Milk - "the perfect food." It's good. It's wholsome. It'll strengthen our bones, ...right?

Wrong.
There is ample research to show that milk and dairy products are bad for us in so many ways. "Research" funded by the Naitonal Dairy Council aside, no outside, independent study has ever concluded that milk helps our bone density. Many credible studys, in fact, suggest the opposite.
A report released by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) entitled "what's wrong with dairy products" lists the numerous ways in which milk-based foods hurt human beings.
According to a wide range of credible medical studies cited by the report, milk can cause illnesses and disease. High dairy intake is even linked to higher risk for osteoporosis, the bone disease the dairy industry would have us believe milk prevents.
"A Harvard Nurses's Health Study which followed 77,000 women for 12 years showed no protective effect of increased milk consumption on fracture risk. In fact, increased intake of calcium from dairy products was associated with a higher fracture risk," the PCRM report reads.
That's no typo. It's true that cow's milk has high calcum levels (nearly four times the levels found in human breast milk), but it also contains a lot of phosphorous. In humans' digestive tracts, phosphorous combines with calcium, preventing its absorption. Cow's milk is also low in magnesium, a necessary ingredient for human metabolization of calcium.
Add to that the fact that milk is high in animal proteins, which the body metabolizes into acids. When levels of acid in the bloodstream rise, as they do when we digest animal proteins, the body responds by leeching calcium (a basic substance) from our bones, weakening them.
"The U.S. has only 4% of the world's population but it consumes more dairy than the other 96% combined. If milk was good for our bones, we would have the strongest bones in the world. Instead we have one of the highest osteoporosis rates in the world," writes Raymond Francis, an M.I.T.-trained scientist and registered nutrition consultant, in a report entitled, "MILK - Does A Body Good?"
Yale University researchers back up Francis' claim. After looking at 34 studies published in 16 countries, the researchers found that the highest rates of osteoporosis occurred in nations where inhabitants consumed the most milk, meat and other animal foods. The United States, Sweden and Finland topped the list. The Yale researchers dubbed their study, entitled "Cross-cultural Association Between Dietary Animal Protein and Hip Fracture: A Hypothesis," significant enough for further study.
Along with osteoporosis, you can throw increased risk for heart disease (high fat and cholesterol in milk), heightened risk for cancer (especially breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers), and greater incidence of childhood-onset diabedes onto the pile of side effects, not to mention the contaminants milk introduces into our bodies: Synthetic hormones (including bovine growth hormone, or Bovine Somatotropin (BST), which can affect people, too), antibiotics (used to treat infections of cows' overworked mammary glands), pus, pesticides, and IGF-1, a hormone linked to acceleration of cancer in humans.

Damn that's gross.

2004 election - stolen?

Probably. It's ugly and it's enraging, but it's probably so.
"Was the 2004 Election Stolen," Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s aptly entitled article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, is an exhaustive account of the efforts of the Republican Party to throw the election in favor of Bush, even in the face of a Kerry landslide. And it worked.
"As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed [John] Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states, including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida, and winning by 1.5 million votes nationally," Kennedy writes. "Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000."
Even Fox News, the almighty fist of the right, could see the train at the end of the tunnel, lights blazing and whistles howling, barreling towards them at a million miles a minute.
"Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong, or George Bush loses," a correspondent said.
Who knew that at the end of the night, the Fox News team's wildest, wettest dreams would come true?
"As the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities, as much as 9.5 percent, with the exit polls. In 10 of the 11 battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted, and in every case, the shift favored Bush."
Exit polls are some of the most statistically accurate polls possible, since you're asking people to report on what they've just done, says Kennedy in his report. "Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent."

It was stolen. We've had to put up with Bush for 6 years now, and there's still no proof that he's ever won an election, period. The corporate media watched the election(s) happen and stayed mum on the whole issue, just dismissing the exit poll results as anomylous. Even worse, we Americans continue to sit idly by as George Bush and his cronies foul our air, pillage at the gas pumps, and send our citizens to die for no good reason.

Shame.