Introducing Train Action

Ranting about how much certain members of congress suck is all well and good, but we've been looking for more ways to increase the activism on the blog.

Train Action will be a clearinghouse of candidates endorsed by the blog, ones that we feel are worthy of sending a few dollars to help their cause. If you feel the urge to donate, doing so though our site will allow us to see how much Train readers raised for a certain candidate.

I've never given a sizable amount to a candidate (I think $20, multiple times to Donna Edwards is my record), and there's no pressure to do so (my job as a low level cog in a labor union hardly gives me that kind of income, either). But in the current era of fund-raising, a few contributions of 5 or 10 dollars can make a huge difference in boosting a candidate's ability to get more money from the people who actually do make those 100 and 500 dollar donations.

The nuts and bolts of this effort will be done by Act Blue, which is a great site that exists for the purpose of allowing site's like ours do things that are out of our league technical ability wise.

We'll be introducing our first candidates soon, and we're open to suggestions. Let me know if you have any questions/ideas suggestions in the comments, or at thetrainofthought @ gmail.com

The Yes Men do it again (Updated)

These newspapers were distributed throughout New York City early today:(Via the albany project)

John Lennon's "War is over, if you want it" line comes to mind. I'm sure some people ridicule it (as the idiotic comments on the gawker link prove), but I find activism like this is genuinely powerful stuff, and these days no one does it better than the Yes Men.

Update: Even better, they made a full online edition filled with articles, although none are even close to as funny as this fake Thomas Friedman column:

The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write.

I know, you’re thinking I’m going too far. I haven’t always been wrong about everything. I recently made some sense on global warming and what we needed to do about it, for instance.

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)

Baffled? I don’t blame you. So I’ll cite some facts to support my decision — a practice, I must admit, I have too seldom followed.

Amazing.