A big victory for longtime Salsa users Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood made the New York Times on Friday:

the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those "Baby Einstein" videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

"We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds," said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

If you're not wise to the scam, what you do is take a dubious connection between music and early childhood intelligence, overstate its conclusion beyond any bounds of plausibility, and sponge up a few hundred million dollars. (Ironically, the real baby Einstein was a late bloomer.)

CCFC, as noted, has been on this for ages, like this (now-outdated) action. You can find what they're working on today in CCFC's action center.

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Very nice piece in the New York Times today on Step It Up 2007's National Day of Climate Action Apr. 14 and the general attempt to get lawmakers to take climate change seriously. Step It Up is currently the gargantuan Distributed Event in the DIA universe, closing in on 1,000 separate local actions a month out from the action. (There's a short description of what the Meetup-like tool does on this page.) And the seamless blending of online components with in-the-flesh activities testifies to the capacity for creative activism to inspire passion and get big in a hurry:

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