Help return Kilroy to Washington

Kilroy for Congress has opportunities every day to help get Mary Jo reelected. A phone bank gets started around 5 p.m. Monday-Friday at the campaign office at 747 Chambers Road. And you can canvas every weekend, starting around 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Call 614-545-4070 or sign up online.

Human illness is now linked to factory farming practices. Salmonella levels are over 5x higher in factory farm eggs than organic, and when medical researchers at the University of Minnesota took more than 1,000 food samples from multiple retail markets that sold factory farmed food, they found evidence of fecal contamination in 69% of the pork and beef and 92% of the poultry samples. Nine out of ten chicken carcasses in the store may be contaminated with fecal matter.

Great news for progressives in today's Dispatch on two fronts: a defeat for the attempt to repeal health care reform in Ohio and the Humane Society is fast closing in on the number of signatures required to get the farm-animal care amendment on the ballot.

Grassroots political action really works! 

With the real threat of a farm-animal amendment on the November ballot, the Humane Society now has the bargaining power with the Livestock Board to get the job done with or without a constitutional amendment. Which way it goes depends on whether the Livestock Board and state officials will agree to minimum care standards (Columbus Dispatch, June 23, 2010: "Health-care repeal won't be on Ohio ballot, but farm-animal amendment remains on track"):

Pacelle [the Humane Society's president and CEO] said the only reason the petition would not be filed is if the Humane Society reaches an agreement with state officials and the newly formed Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board to enact the proposed reforms without going the route of a constitutional amendment. The biggest stumbling block undoubtedly is a proposal to eliminate the practice of keeping farm animals in very confining cages and pens for long periods.

The minimum standards the Humane Society requires include prohibiting a farm operator from confining a calf, pig or hen on a farm for all or most of the day in a manner that prevents the animal from lying down, standing up, fully extending his or her limbs or turning around freely; and prohibit the killing of cows and pigs on farms by strangulation.

The proposed amendment is designed as a countermeasure to last year’s Ohio Livestock Care Standards, which was Issue 2 on the ballot. That measure — pushed for mostly by agribusiness and large corporate-owned farms — created a board where 12 of the 13 board members are political appointees, meaning they likely will be vulnerable to political influence from big donors like agribusiness, which generally wants looser standards.

Pretty cool when progressives and libertarians agree on protecting the commons --- Reason is on-board with fishing caps and quotas.  Watch it.

A disaster, not a spill:

"A 'spill' is what you get when you tip over a glass"

Environmentalist Dennis Henize, an Ohio native who has lived in Florida for decades, gives insight into the BP oil situation. A hurricane expert, he retired as station chief of the NOAA weather station in the Florida Keys. His report:

I'm trying to be objective, but I cannot help some of my cynicism escaping -- this whole thing has been characterized by lying and more lying. The honcho from the Coast Guard STILL sounds like his scripts are written by BP.

Here's a web blog by a non-professional scientist who has been doing an excellent job of tracking oil using satellite imagery ( http://www.skytruth.org/ ). His analyses early-on gave the first indications that oil was getting close to, and then some entrained in, the Loop Current. And his analyses yielded the first estimates, later validated by other scientists and eventually admitted by BP and the government agencies, that the amount gushed was far greater than first admitted. (I don't call this disaster a spill; a "spill" is what you get when you tip over a glass.)

The cruelty is shocking. Unspeakable. So brutal that it has sparked outrage, anger, and action worldwide.

Last week Mercy For Animals released heartbreaking footage of malicious and sadistic abuse to cows and calves at a Central Ohio dairy farm. Workers were captured on film violently stabbing cows with pitchforks, mercilessly beating them in the face with crowbars, and punching, kicking, and body-slamming baby calves.

The agriculture industry wants you to believe this is an isolated incident. But it's not.

On factory farms, animals regularly live out their short lives in confinement so extreme that they can't stand up, turn around, stretch their limbs, or lie down comfortably. It's an industry where abuse has become normal.

And Ohio is among the worst. Only four states in this country have weaker animal protection laws than Ohio.

You don't have to be an animal advocate, much less a vegetarian, to want to reform the way we raise our farm animals in Ohio. All it takes is a modicum of compassion and the acknowledgment that animals should not endure unnecessary trauma or abuse while in our care.

Take action now

Here's what you can do:

1. Sign the petition and join the more than 30,000 Change.org members who have already taken action to demand that those involved in the Conklin Dairy abuse case are brought to justice.
2. Volunteer to gather signatures by  attending a ballot signature gathering event. Deadline is June 30, 2010 to get 600,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of State.
3. Donate to Ohioans for Humane Farms: your donation will help get the signatures needed for the ballot initiative

Imagine loaded guns in family restaurants and in crowded bars. Imagine loaded guns at a sold-out Ohio State football game or Cincinnati Reds baseball game. 

Last week a bill allowing permit holders to carry concealed guns into bars, restaurants and sporting events that serve alcohol passed the Ohio Senate.

It's now in the hands of Ohio House members --- including our Representative in the 24th District, Ted Celeste --- to kill this bill.

Please sign our online petition below, so we can let Ted Celeste and the other members of the Ohio House know that you don't think guns and alcohol mix and that the Ohio House should bury Senate Bill 239.

The Ohio Restaurant Association opposes the measure, as does the state's Fraternal Order of Police.

Editorial staffs of major Ohio newspapers have come out against the measure:

1. Columbus Dispatch: The right-leaning Columbus Dispatch came out against the bill yesterday, and last month they also argued persuasively against the bill.
2. The Plain Dealer Editorial Board: "Booze and guns: A stupider idea and deadlier mix can hardly be imagined."
3. Toledo Blade: "Guns-in-bars legislation is a bad idea because firearms don't belong in any place that serves alcohol."

A couple other interesting viewpoints:

• Huffington Post: Another Month, Another Batch of CCW Killings: "...at least 166 individuals that have been killed by concealed handgun permit holders since May 2007. Included in this number are nine law enforcement officers. Not included are incidents where concealed handgun permit holders have tried to kill law enforcement personnel and failed..."
• The Athens News: "the bill is intended to exclusively benefit that rare individual who patronizes a bar but declines to drink. And how is that provision going to be enforced anyway?

From the Department of Colossally Stupid Ideas comes the Tea Party's quest to repeal the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct popular election of U.S. senators. And it has support from Republican candidate for the Ohio's 15th Congressional District, Steve Stivers.

Stivers said in a 9-12 Project questionnaire last year that he supported repealing the 17th Amendment. He reasserted that same position in a January 2010 interview with The Hill.  And in a January news story, Stivers was receptive to the idea of repealing the amendment, calling it a states' rights issue.

Here is Stiver's unconditional answer in his response in the Tea Party questionnaire:

Under the original Constitution, U.S. Senators were chosen not by the people, but by state legislators. By the early 1900s, bribery and corruption by corporate interests became widespread among state legislators and backroom deals effectively drove the selection of U.S. Senators. As Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar writes in America’s Constitution: A Biography, the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U.S. Senators by the people they represent, had the effect of improving legislative accountability at both the state and federal levels.

A May 31, 2010, NYTimes Op-Ed mentions Stivers' almost immediate flip-flop --- Stivers now claims he didn't really mean it when he called for an end to Senators elected directly by the people they represent:

Around the country, Tea Party affiliates and some candidates have been pressing for repeal — though there also has been a lot of hasty backtracking by politicians once the voters realized the implications. .... Steve Stivers, the Republican candidate in an Ohio Congressional race, said he wanted to repeal the amendment, until his Democratic opponent, Representative Mary Jo Kilroy, made an issue of it, after which he seemed to back off.

Stivers also “disagrees” with the statement that global warming is a scientific fact and that catastrophe will ensue if carbon emissions aren’t lowered. In addition, he suggests that any of the federal departments not mandated under the Constitution — everything except State, Defense, Justice and Treasury — could be eliminated to return to a “constitutionally pure government.”

Imagine repealing away voting rights that citizens of the United States have enjoyed for nearly a hundred years --- the right to vote directly for one's representative in the U.S. Senate.

Countdown's Keith Olbermann weighed in on 17th amendment repeal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9sl45u-MFI. As he says, "Don't tread on me -- just take away my vote!"

Check out "The Truth About John Kasich" from the Ohio Democratic Party.

Former Congressman, Fox News personality, and investment banker John Kasich is running on the Republican ticket for governor of Ohio.

During his 18 years in Congress, Kasich was an architect of the failed Washington-Wall Street trickle-down policies that got us into this economic mess. He voted to give China favored trade status and supported free trade agreements like NAFTA, both of which cost Ohio thousands of jobs.

Then he went to Wall Street and cashed in on these policies at Lehman Brothers, the firm whose collapse marked the beginning of the global economic crisis.

Now Congressman Kasich wants to bring these failed policies–and his radical agenda–to Ohio.