bapifar01: Open thread for night owls: Harper's Index

Monday, 16 May 2011

Open thread for night owls: Harper's Index

Here are some excerpts from the latest Harper's Index, (not yet online):

? Number of homes whose mortgages a U.S. advertising firm offered to pay in exchange for converting the homes to billboards: 10
? Number of applications the firm received in the first week after making the offer: 11,575

? Amount of federal money that went to National Public Radio in 2010: $2,700,000

? To Jerry Falwell's Liberty University: $446,000,000

? Number of free condoms handed out by the Brazilian government in advance of Carnival this year: 84,740,000

? Average age at which women consider themselves to be "old," according to a study by a British funeral planning company: 29

? At which men do: 58

? ? ? ? ?

At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:

I like this story:
Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy.

The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012.

I like it for a whole bunch of reasons. First, this is a good, concrete step toward actually helping the environment (even if it is a small one). Second, the bipartisan nature of this group is a great rebuff to the radical right-wing/Bushista fantasy that global warming has been dreamed up by a conspiracy of patient nerds. And third, I see no apparent reason why enterprising governors (or aspiring governors) could not sign on as well. I think this could be a great move for a guy like Eliot Spitzer, who has successfully brought a number of important environmental lawsuits.