Good News Friday

I’ve been super busy this week so the weekly progress report is somewhat sparse. I will probably add to it throughout the day so keep checking back….

• Bipartisanship! Senate bill introduced by Elizabeth Warren and John McCain would split up big banks by reinstating the Glass-Steagall era firewall between traditional banking and casino-style finance.

• Good news on the retail front.

• Ireland legalizes abortion.

• See, they’re not all crazy: the wife of the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Madisonville, KY, wrote a newspaper column in which she called out the Southern Baptist Convention’s homopobia. She called the SBC “raging Shiite Baptists” who are “the crazy old paranoid uncle of evangelical Christians.” Naturally, this has caused quite a stir, but I find it hard to believe a pastor’s wife would have written such words in the local paper without her husband’s knowledge and/or blessing.

• Something powerful is happening in North Carolina. The mainstream media has been ignoring this important story — protestors need to wear tricorner hats or something before they’re deemed worthy of coverage — but it’s getting harder and harder for the national media to pretend thousands of citizens aren’t taking their outrage to the streets.

• David Vitter will reportedly drop his filibuster threat of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s pick to head the EPA.

• The Washington, D.C. city council has told Wal-mart to suckit and approved a living wage law.

• PA’s attorney general says she won’t defend the state’s same sex marriage ban in court.

• Filibuster reform is back, bitches! I’m so old, I remember when “the president’s nominees deserve an up or down vote.” You?

• Congratulations George Lucas on receiving the National Medal of Arts.

• Check out this awesome kid who started a GMO labeling movement:

Since attending a Right to Know meeting with her mom on a whim, Brigid, 10, has launched Kids Care, an effort to label — and eventually ban — genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. She has written letters to Gov. Peter Shumlin and her state Rep. Teo Zagar, D-Barnard, and put together a pamphlet of information on GMOs that she distributed yesterday.

• Nelson Mandela is doing better.

Good News, Tennessee Edition:

• Nashville’s Bridge Building has received Platinum LEED certification, one of only four in the whole world.

• The cash-strapped Campbell County school district finds rooftop solar systems an easy source of income.

• Three Tennessee sites have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

This week’s cool video: meet Ron Finley, “gangsta gardener.” This guy just blew my mind a hundreds ways: