this takes like 5 minutes and unlike most petitions and stuff circulating around your www inbox, this might actually work.

• read.
• act.

You can now send emails, faxes and print to congresspeople and world leaders, automatically from amnesty international USA’s online action center. You need to enter your address, and it will automatically determine who your senators and representatives are and send it to them.

I sent a bunch in the last few days supporting Amnesty’s recent report on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, against making John Bolton UN ambassador, and some others to representatives and senators and I actually got replies back. At least one of the replies was not completely automatically generated, as it responded to the topic of the email (John Bolton). It may have been replied to by some intern or something, but generally when congresspeople reply with a specific topic it means they are keeping track of how many letter they got on these issues in their constituencies.

This editorial covers a story that hasn’t seen much light in the mainstream media. The story’s fairly new and came to my attention through this video clip from Bill Maher’s show, which I saw on robin’s blog. Paraphrasing Maher’s comments, if this had happened under Clinton, he would have been lynched. But clearly, Republican presidents receive special attention, which we know given the whole missing munitions scandal, the little Abu Ghraib boo boo, and the minor fact that the main reason for going to war turned out to be incorrect. Clearly, all of these things were nothing compared to lying about sexual relations with an intern, an act which undermines the trust and the very fabric of American society–much moreso than male prostitutes with FBI/CIA clearance in the Whitehouse.

But at least somethings are getting out there, like the failure of Bush’s education policy

This is a pretty sweet visualization of the words used in each of Bush’s State of the Union addresses. Click the more link, or visit the nytimes.
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