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By Sarah Burris, Salon

When Larry David was on “Saturday Night Live” he only got one sketch on the air and the audience didn’t laugh. Thirty years later, the Seinfeld creator returned as Bernie Sanders and the Internet lost its mind with David trending on Twitter well into this morning. If you thought Colbert’s Sanders haggling over the brunch check was good, David crushed it.

The sketch mocked the first democratic debate with a smiley Lincoln Chafee talking about how fun it was to be a senator, Alec Baldwin as Jim Webb who was angry, of course, because he didn’t get to talk before he was introduced, the Hillary Clinton her staff put together for the debate, and Bernie “We’re Doomed” Sanders.

With a perfect Sanders accent and broad hand gestures and finger points, David shouted about revolution asking why the hell the big banks chain all their pens to the desk. His solution for Wall Street reform was to break up the big banks into little pieces and then flush them down the toilet. “Then ya make the bankers pay for college for everyone, and America is fixed! Hey!” he said shrugging and gesticulating wildly. Hillary puts a damper on the idealism saying Bernie is promising a “golden goose” but Bernie assured the debate audience he’s found geese before and he can find them again. “They congregate near ponds. It’s not rocket science!”

By Reynard Loki, AlterNet

Every five years, the U.S. federal government releases its “Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” a joint production of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS). The new one is scheduled to be released in December.

According to the last one, released in 2010, sugary beverages are extremely popular, with soda, energy drinks and sports drinks making up the fourth highest source of calories among Americans overall — and the third highest source for children and adolescents up to the age of 18. These sweetened drinks also make up the lion's share (almost 36 percent) of the sources of added sugars in the American diet.

But tastes appear to be changing. As The New York Times recently noted, sales in full calorie soda in the U.S. have declined more than 25 percent over the last two decades, while bottled water sales have increased. Still, the overall dietary picture isn't great, as the majority of Americans continue to get their calories from unhealthy sources, including processed foods, grain-based desserts and alcohol. Pizza, often washed down with soda, is the fifth-highest source of Americans' caloric intake.

Looking more closely at the statistics reveals striking socioeconomic forces at work. In her new book Soda Politics:Taking on Big Soda (and Winning), Marion Nestle, chair of New York University's Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, points out that soda drinking is split across race and class lines, with African and Hispanic Americans drinking more soda than their white counterparts, adding that their soda drinking habits “are strongly influenced by television advertising, especially when commercials feature celebrities of their own race and ethnicity.” She also notes that “this diversity — in income, social status, and outlook — complicates efforts to reduce soda intake in minority communities.”

And while the sharpest declines in soda consumption have occurred “among richer, white populations,” according to the New York Times, Nestle said she expected “poor and minority customers would also reduce their soda intake over time, …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Reynard Loki, AlterNet

Did you know that the U.S. city with the highest percentage of commuters who drive is Corpus Christi? Or that the best city in the nation for biking is Minneapolis? What about the fact that San Francisco has the largest number of farmers markets per capita? These are some of the many eye-opening facts that came out of a recent analysis of 100 of America's most populous cities and their environmental friendliness.

A strong majority of Americans favor living sustainably. According to a Pew Research poll, 71 percent said the U.S. “should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” And as more than 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, examining the environmental friendliness of cities is an excellent way to take the nation's overall “sustainability pulse.”

Conducted by the personal finance website Wallethub, 2015's Greenest Cities in America analyzes each the 100 cities across 13 key metrics (including percent of green space, number of smart-energy policies and per capita greenhouse gas emissions) to identify those cities that most encourage an environmentally friendly lifestyle — and the ones that are lagging behind.

Champs and chumps

The researchers found that the nation's greenest city is New York City, followed by Portland, San Francisco and Washington, DC. The least green cities are Louisville; Indianapolis; Gilbert, Arizona; and — in last place — Baton Rouge.

Honolulu fared well. With the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions and the highest percentage of green space, the Hawaiian capital ranked first in environmental quality and scored fifth overall. Jacksonville, on the other hand, was found to have the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions and was ranked 94th overall.

This is an ideal time to be filling out the nation's sustainability scorecard: October is National Energy Awareness Month, which was created in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush to highlight the important of energy sustainability. According to the White House website, every October marks a “national effort to underscore how central energy is to our national …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Jack Mirkinson, Salon

It’s no surprise that “Truth,” the new movie about the journalistic firestorm that took down Dan Rather, has caused so much controversy. In its retelling of the scandal that engulfed Rather, his producer Mary Mapes and CBS News after their botched story about George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard blew up in their faces, “Truth” touches on one of the most politically and personally charged moments in recent media history. CBS is incensed enough about the film that it has refused to air any ads for it on its network. The people behind “Truth” have defended it as a movie that seeks to go beyond the particulars of the saga and raise broader questions about reporting and corporate America.

The reality is that neither side has covered itself in glory. CBS is guilty of, at the very least, massive corporate overreach, but “Truth” is so conspicuously one-sided that it was bound to provoke a heated reaction.

The outline of the story “Truth” tells is familiar enough to anybody who was around in 2004. Mapes, a star producer for Rather at CBS, got her hands on memos that seemingly confirmed rumors about the special treatment Bush had received during his military days, and built a “60 Minutes” report for Rather around them. The memos, however, were torn to shreds almost instantly, with both conservative bloggers and experts disputing their authenticity. CBS ultimately retracted the story, apologized, fired Mapes, made three other producers resign, and forced Rather out of his anchor chair at the “CBS Evening News.”

Ever since then, the toxicity of the scandal has lingered. Rather and Mapes insist to this day that the central contention of their story–that Bush shirked his military duties and got away with it because of his connections–is true, and that they were railroaded by a panicked team of corporate suits. Mapes recently said the errors fell within the range of “normal journalistic bungle.”

That, of course, is a quite …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Bethania Palma Markus, Raw Story

A sex worker who claims she had a long-standing relationship with married, family values Republican senator and candidate for Louisiana governor David Vitter dropped a bombshell accusation one week before voters go to the polls.

Wendy Ellis claims she had an affair with Vitter, he impregnated her and then asked her to abort the baby. Ellis says she did not, instead putting the child up for legal adoption, according to WDSU.

In a video interview by Jason Berry, who posted it to his American Zombie blog, Ellis said she maintained a relationship with Vitter for three years after meeting him when he was a state representative in the 1990s.

She said the two of them stopped seeing each other when she was six months pregnant, and she knows he was the father because she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else at the time.

“But you can sit there, walk across the grassy knoll holding your wife and your children s’ hand screaming family values,” Ellis said. “But you want me to go abort my baby.”

Ellis told Berry she wants to set the record straight because she has Lupus and is dying.

H/T Clancy Dubos, Best of New Orleans

Watch Ellis talk about the pregnancy, as posted to American Zombie, here:

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…read more

Source: ALTERNET