Annie Leonard warns us about toxic cosmetics

Well-informed Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) is back with a new video on the completely unregulated toxic crap many manufacturers pump into the shampoos and cosmetics we use. The new video is called "The Story of Cosmetics." It's an important story that touches a theme common to all too many of today's tragedies: The unwillingness of the federal government to regulate business that feed large amounts of money into the the campaigns of politicians.

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Sex education in Texas

Huffpo offers some disturbing information from the Texas approach to "sex education."

Texas lawmakers cut sex ed from two six-month courses to a single unit of "abstinence only" education. But early indications showed that the program wasn't working. In fact, teens in almost all high school grades were having more sex after undergoing the abstinence only program. By 2007, Texas had the highest teen birth rate in the nation.
Texas now has the highest teen birth rate in the nation, and Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas who is leading the abstinence crusade in Texas, now wants to be President of the U.S. The Huffpo article mentions a segment of the abstinence-only training some of the young Texans are receiving in a PUBLIC school:
"Things to Look for in a Mate:" I. How they relate to God A. Is Jesus their first love? B. Trying to impress people or serve God?

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Ralph Nader: Obama is spineless

At Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman asked Ralph Nader for his thoughts on Obama's passing over of Elizabeth Warren regarding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

RALPH NADER: Well, our spineless president speaks again with a forked tongue. He talks about a tough agency, and he’s just thrown overboard the toughest federal cop on corporate crime, fraud and abuse against millions of Americans’ pensions and savings, and then tries to convince people that he’s really being tough against Wall Street. He’s basically a political coward. And the problem with that is not just detonating Elizabeth Warren’s career culmination of heading the agency that she conceived and built out of the Treasury Department in the last few months, but he’s signaling once again to the rogue Republicans in Congress that he has no backbone, that he’s going to cave. And that’s what he’s been doing. He threw Van Jones overboard, because Glenn Beck attacked—of all people—attacked Van Jones, his assistant in the White House. He doesn’t stand by his people, unless these people stand for Wall Street, like William Daley, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers. You’d think he’d give at least one post—one post—to the consumer constituency, the liberals and progressives, that brought him to the White House. But that is not the way he calculates it.

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