Some pet-owning web users reacted with shock this week to a Swedish insurance company’s new advertisement featuring cats skydiving, set to the soothing sounds of artist R. Kelly. The uproar was actually enough to get CNN’s attention.

Reached by reporters, the insurance company Folksam assured the network that the cats didn’t really go skydiving.

The company claimed ad was created for a customer named Eve, who insures her cat through Folksam, using green screen technology to digitally place the cats into a video of people doing the real skydiving.

Still, it is pretty cute.

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Unsurprisingly, most of the American Buddhist action is concentrated on the coasts, with big numbers in California, Hawaii, and Colorado. But look at some of those orange pockets across the country—in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas! It's hard to tell from this map, but it looks like Kentucky and West Virginia might be the least Buddhist states in the U.S., closely followed by North Dakota. Alaska's lookin' pretty gray out there, too. According to HuffPo's analysis of the survey results, the top ten Buddhist cities are San Jose, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Las Vegas (who knew there were Buddhists in Sin City?), Oklahoma City, Denver, and Raleigh (another surprise!). They seemed to have left out any cities in Hawaii, however, for no discernible reason. The least Buddhist city is Birmingham, Alabama.

A day before a Friday deadline, Gov. Rick Perry announced Texas would not set up a key component of the Affordable Care Act, a health-insurance exchange that would allow individuals and small businesses to find coverage online at the most favorable price.
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"As long as the federal government has the ability to force unknown mandates and costs upon our citizens, while retaining the sole power in approving what an exchange looks like, the notion of a state exchange is merely an illusion," Perry said in the letter. "It would not be fiscally responsible to put hard-working Texans on the financial hook for an unknown amount of money to operate a system under rules that have not even been written."

Proponents of the exchange contend it will allow the state to significantly reduce the size of its uninsured population, the largest in the United States.
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A federal appeals court has refused to grant another hearing to Planned Parenthood, clearing the way for Texas to assume full responsibility for health care of low-income women next week without clinics that previously provided almost half of those services and without federal funding.

In a statement issued Thursday, Gov. Rick Perry said Texas will immediately "defund" the health organization's affiliates.

"Today's ruling affirms yet again that in Texas the Women's Health Program has no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or promote abortion. In Texas we choose life, and we will immediately begin defunding all abortion affiliates to honor and uphold that choice."
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That’s precisely what Perry is doing, passing on more than $40 million in federal assistance and directing the state to exclude Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services to more than 130,000 low-income women in Texas. Planned Parenthood has 49 health centers across Texas, many of which will be forced to close due to Perry’s decision.

As an experiment, pro-choice activist Andrea Grimes said in September that she spent six hours trying to locate a women’s health clinic in Austin that isn’t Planned Parenthood but does accept Medicaid. Despite a list of 181 clinics on the state’s website, Grimes said she found just 13 actual doctors in the whole state who perform the necessary procedures and accept Medicaid, explaining that the other listings were repeats, radiology centers, labs and doctors who didn’t take Medicaid at all.

To make matters worse for many low-income women, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that Texas has one of the most restrictive Medicaid programs in the country, requiring that a family of three earn less than $188 a month to qualify for assistance. Under the president’s Affordable Care Act, however, Medicaid was slated to expand dramatically to cover nearly all low-income Americans, but Perry also said he will turn down more than $164 billion in federal money that would have been used to provide health care to 1.2 million Texans through 2023.
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ColorOfChange and CREDO Action members began calling Walgreens' corporate offices last week to express concern about the company's relationship with ALEC. On Tuesday, Debbie Garza, Walgreens' divisional vice president of government relations, told ColorOfChange that Walgreens will not renew its membership. Garza emailed ColorOfChange the following statement:

Walgreens will not be renewing its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”) where we have participated on ALEC’s Health and Human Services Task Force. Walgreens will continue to be an active presence on critical health care and pharmacy issues facing the country and looks forward to continuing to work across the political spectrum in the public policy arena.

On Monday, Bryan Roosa, General Motors' regional director of state government relations, told a ColorOfChange staffer via email that, "GM has communicated to ALEC that we will no longer fund nor participate going forward."

"Walgreens' and GM's recent announcements that they have cut ties with ALEC is further proof that everyday people working together to hold corporations accountable can achieve tremendous change," said ColorOfChange.org Executive Director Rashad Robinson. "The ColorOfChange community applauds these companies' willingness to end their relationships with this right-wing policy group that has worked to suppress the Black vote."

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Full episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are no longer available on Comedy Central’s websites thanks to a fight between parent company Viacom and satellite TV provider DirectTV.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Viacom has opted to cut back on the number of full television episodes it offers on the Internet after pressure from DirecTV, which stopped carrying 26 Viacom channels this week, including MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET and others.

Viacom did not announce the plan to remove full episodes of some of its most popular shows, including Spongebob Squarepants and Jersey Shore, leaving hopeful viewers confounded at an apology message on Thursday morning that encouraged them to watch brief clips of the shows instead. Strangely enough, while full episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were unavailable via their own websites, they were still being offered through Hulu.com.

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ColorOfChange.org announced today that it has received word from five new companies that say they will no longer fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC): John Deere, CVS Caremark, MillerCoors, HP, and Best Buy.

"We want to thank these companies for making the right decision, and we continue to call on all major corporations to stop funding ALEC given its involvement in voter suppression and its work pushing policies designed to benefit rich and powerful corporations at the expense of people of color, workers, and the environment," said Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.org.

"We're continuing to reach out to corporations directly to tell them that now is the time to leave ALEC, and that our members are prepared to hold them publicly accountable if they refuse," Robinson said.

More than 100,000 ColorOfChange members have signed a petition calling on companies to stop funding ALEC. ColorOfChange members have made thousands of calls to companies supporting ALEC, and funded radio ads highlighting companies that continue to fund the group.
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