MAY ELECTION 101 Wave your flags, have a drink or two, and get ready to cast your ballot for the May 15th Special Elections!

WHERE:

Eugene City Brewery-844 Olive Street, Eugene, OR

WHEN:

7:00 PM

DEBATE! -Bus Style of course.

Tony McCown, former LCC student body president, and Stefan Ostrach, union organizer, (both Bus Project members) will duke-it-out over Position 2 of the LCC College Board race.

PLUS! -
Community pro & con presenters will give us the low down on the spicy new county income tax ballot measure. A hot topic indeed.

Beer. Food. Music. Politics with a Twist.
** This event will be sign language interpreted.**
All AGES & FREE!

Wear a Hawaiian shirt and get a FREE PINT of BEER!

Questions or suggestions?
Contact Lynn Moracco at the Lane Co. Bus Office. 541.344.9999. Lynn.Moracco@Busproject.org

Legitimate news source the ONION reported today in their “National News Highlights” Features section today:

PENDLETON, OR—Calamity was narrowly averted when Dairy Queen employee Adam Petkun heroically extinguished a grease fire with the icy flavor-avalanche of the new Wild Berry Blizzard.

We couldn’t be prouder of Adam! That Salem to Pendleton commute must be rough, but hey, people need their Blizzards!

See more about what Adam does HERE when not putting out fires with milkshakes.

I spent some time over the weekend in Coos Bay, Oregon with a local anti-Liquefied Natural Gas activist. Oregonians should be aware of the threat of LNG facilities; there are four proposed sites along the Oregon coast and Columbia River. LNG is a green washed version of fossil fuel use. If anyone has ever seen video of huge fires in extraction sites like Nigeria, it was probably natural gas. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling. Usually, companies set it ablaze to get rid of it, however, the newest thing to do is to catch it, compress to liquid form, ship it to a LNG facility, return it to its gaseous state and then send in via pipeline to California for use.

Originally, the proposed facility sites were in California. However, mass citizen (and celebrity) outcry has nearly terminated any chance for LNG processing in the state. The obvious next step for LNG corporations is Oregon’s logging communities and developing nations like Peru. These communities have been targeted because they are historically resource extraction based and the city politicians are eager to revitalize the local economy from the boom-bust logging era to LNG processing. To give you a hint of the money trail of this project, the Port board and other influential members of this pro-LNG group in Coos Bay alone have direct ties to the Regan administration and the Iran Contra Scandal.
Why is LNG bad? First, it isn’t a sustainable resource.

Providing LNG is only sustaining, not reducing or eliminating our oil addiction, providing this as an “answer” will only suspend the real sustainable energy projects. Second, while LNG itself might be a cleaner fuel, the process is far far from it. The natural gas will first be turned into liquid form, put on a ship (from Russia or Nigeria most likely), taken across the ocean to a port along the NW coast, returned to a gaseous state and then piped down to California. This doesn’t even take into account the implications of building the facilities to do this work (in Coos Bay the facility would fill in a natural wetland with sand from the tsunami protection dune that has to be destroyed for the site. Also, the bay would have to be dredged and expanded hundreds of feet to accommodate the ships, 1200 feet in length).

The Columbia sites would also require mass dredging, multiple times a year to keep the river big enough for the ships. I want to remind everyone of the disastrous dredging in the 70’s near Vancouver where so much mercury and other noxious chemicals were brought up from the bottom of the Columbia that rare cases of cancer and polio took the lives of many young people of that generation growing up in the area.

Well, that is a pretty brief overview of the subject. It’s hard to find Oregon information about this because it is relativly new, but here are a few links:

California based: http://www.coastaladvocates.com/

RG article: http://www.onwardoregon.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ffIOIRMEG&b=440777&ct=577065%20

Green washed pro LNG site: http://www.lngfacts.org/About-LNG/Environment.asp

RISING TIDE, great organization, they are going to be doing a lot of direct action around this issue including a bike tour to the proposed sites in Oregon before their Convergence in August. I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing it if any is interested in joining: http://risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/liquified-natural-gas/

We don’t need these cruising the Columbia…

Download this Wallpaper Here

And many other great “Nature” images here

Instant Messaging has been around for quite a while and has since become an integral part of my work and social life.  Since I hate talking on the phone, it is one of my favorite inventions to get a quick communication accross.  With options such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, AOL, GoogleChat and Trillian, you can be in touch with anyone at anytime when both are at their computer. (Unfortunately for me, that is a lot!)

A friend in the advertising business has been working on an initiative called I’M making a difference. 

The concept is pretty simple.  If you use Windows Live Messenger (download here), you can insert a code after your display name and donations will be made to your chosen charity every time you chat.  If you are going to be IM’ing anyway, no sense not helping out a good cause in the process!  Since it is Earth Weekend, Sierra Club or StopGlobalWarming.org might be nice choices.

Some Saturday Morning humor…

To anyone interested in helping find a proper home for some of the moop (matter out of place) in our west downtown neighborhoods, we have the event for you! We’re meeting up at Scobert park (on 4th near Blair) at 10:30 on Sunday April 22nd for a shared community space cleanup extravaganza. Bring gardening gloves and a bag for moop collection.

Fox news: Did the devil make him do it?

This is a fair and balanced look at whether he was possessed by the devil or not. Fair as in carnival. And balanced as in getting both sides of every story. Like roundgate: they would get both sides on the issue about whether the world is round or not and present them equal time.

It is great to see a giant internet corporation like Yahoo! taking such steps toward environmental consciousness

…Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment.

Read the announcement here and also check out the other Yahoo! Earth Day page about going Green.

I’ve never met Ali Edwards, but I know her husband Chris from high school and reconnected with him during his campaign for State Representative in 2006. Chris told me that Ali was becoming quite an accomplished blogger in the crafting world and a little research confirmed it to be true.

It is when Kevin Bacon comes into the picture that this story takes a heartwarming turn.

We all know Kevin Bacon from his “Footloose” and “A Few Good Men” performances, but he is probably most famous for the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game.

To his credit, Kevin has turned this into a charitable cause, creating Six Degrees, a site where you can create a badge to donate to any charity. Kevin Bacon is also going to donate a $10,000 matching donation to each of the six charities who had the most donations between 1/18 and 3/31. I am not positive, but Ali’s charity has to be one of those.

Ali and Chris’s son Simon is autistic, so Ali got one started for the charity Autism Speaks and posted it to her blog. After great success in raising donations, Ali got her story out with a TV story on KVAL, as well as political blog BlueOregon doing a story on it and posting the badge to their site. Since then, this charity has consistently been the #1 donation leader on all of Six Degrees, currently at over $58,000.

Great work Ali! It is great to see a new and innovative way to help a good cause. See a message from Kevin Bacon about Six Degrees here. (You know you want to be 1 degree from Kevin Bacon!)