Free Tap Water: For a "Service Fee" of Just $4.18 a Minute

Water, water, everywhere, but so is the need to curb speculators

The $15 billion-plus bottled-water industry has grown out of nothing over the last couple of decades. The water used to supply it amounts to far less than 1% of supply. However, the idea that water itself can be owned is disturbing.
We can only survive about three days without water. Like air, it should be made available to us as part of what many organizations call the "commons." We don't pay for air, why water?

The amount of private water providers has grown more than 100-fold since 1990 and they now supply about 10% of the world's population, according to water activist Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project. And water ownership is growing with people, and investors seeing it as a ripe commodity.

T. Boone Pickens, the famous oil investor, for example, is betting big on water, buying up rights in the Southwest.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the right to buy premium water (some wingnuts have opened oxygen bars after all), but there should be a limit on the amount of water profiteers can own, then let speculators have at it.
We need look no further than our food supply to see the dangers speculation has on prices -- and therefore those who cannot afford to pay; they starve.
We should set a water policy that assures people have ready access to it as part of their right to exist. Sure we trade taxes for rights all the time. And I think that is exactly the point of the U.S. mayors who voted to end taxpayer funding of bottled water: It's ours to begin with.

Water should not be made into a total commodity. That would have life and death consequences, and markets don't care; they operate without conscience.

The Planet is Fine. Us? Not so much.

Bush Impeached

But have you heard a SINGLE word about it in the mainstream? Of course not. And as usual, guess who our humble, courageous, and persistent American hero is ... yet again ...

Hannity Hounds McCain

Hannity is the best caricature of the immortally immature little school yard dickhead bully that we've seen in decades and the very embodiment of the entire Fox News mentality. I try to not even give him the ink because he thrives on it, even when it reveals his own bombastic histrionic hypocrisy. Below is a great clip of him INCRIMINATING and BADGERING his own political party's candidate as somehow not qualified because he actually works well with others. Nice job, Shawny boy, this is great campaigning for Obama. Keep up the great typical Christian work of eating your own.

On the Surface ...

... is a deeper impact for infectively interactive computing.

Republicans the Most Economically Reckless and Destructive

MarketWatch reports that by Republicans own account, in 2004:

Nixon's secretary of commerce. In "Running on Empty," Peter Peterson says: "This administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of America's finances in history" creating a "bankrupt nation."

Yep, that's a Nixon man ... surely the most Republican of the Republicans, if ever there were such one.