Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

When the nuclear industry looks at the Bush administration’s initiatives to promote a new generation of nuclear power plants, it sees a giant dollar sign. Critics see a giant mushroom cloud. For investors and taxpayers, who will have to pony up the cash, the sign may be a giant question mark.

Click here for link.

Get a load of this quote from a Washington Post article (click here for link):

“Perhaps out of the Social Security debate, we will come out with a consensus on creating retirement security out of the other legs of the retirement savings stool,” said Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), one of the few Ways and Means Committee Democrats who still consults closely with Republicans. “We may bear fruit this Congress. ” [emphasis added by me]

Just who’s this we Ben? Your Republican colleagues?

You can tell from this article (click here for link) just which industry it is that butters the bread at the Washington Post….

Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, in an interview published in Managua’s La Prensa newspaper, said that the Bush administration would do everything legally possible to prevent the leftist Sandinistas from returning to power .

Saying that Nicaragua “would sink like a rock and reach the depths of Cuba” (which country, by the way, is the only Caribbean country that is self sufficient in food production and not dragged down by World Bank and IMF debt–editorial note), Noriega said,

We will do everything we can to provide alternatives so that Nicaraguans can choose the government they deserve, and the country doesn’t end managed by Cuba or subsidized by Venezuela.

The present ruling party split a few years ago so that the Sandinistas are now the largest single party in the country. In last year’s municipality elections, the Sandinistas racked up wins in 70% of all the municipalities. They look to be the favorites to win the November 2006 presidential elections as well (assuming a free and fair election.)

This story bear close attention since we’ve already seen that the administration believes that anything that it does outside our borders is legal.

The DailyKos blog has a story about the latest White House attempts to have their cake and eat it, too.

There are two things going on:

1) A court ordered the latest most horrific Abu Ghraib photos and videos to be released by yesterday (July 22nd), but on that day the government filed an 11th hour motion requesting exemption in order to continue to suppress knowledge of inhumane treatment of prisoners. They really don’t want this story out there; by filing the motion late on a Friday, it will likely be missed by most of the press.

2) When lawmakers, including John McCain (R-Az.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) begin work on amendments to defense spending bills “on the standard treatment of prisoners,” the Bush administration resorts to threats: “If legislation is presented that would restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.

Apparently it’s not enough to torture and degrade America’s image in the eyes of the world; anyone who wants to legislate on the matter, for example, a former POW Republican senator, which may have the affect of improving America’s image by reaffirming values such as fair treatment and opposition to cruel and inhumane punishment, is told to back off.

In this interview (click here for link) a couple discusses their love for each other and the Wife’s (very) forseeable death. A very captivating, engrossing and emotional piece.

A few weeks ago, out of curiousity, I signed up to get the World Bank’s quarterly journal. I wanted to find out how the well heeled “experts” were able to justify that institution’s performance.

I recieved my first issue this week and, much to my surprise, the issue contained an article titled “Can We Discern the Effect of Globalization on Income Distribution?” by Branko Milanovic. Using houshold surveys and an arcane mathematical formula to normalize for outside variables (which I didn’t even try to understand), Milanovic found that in the 113 countries he studied the bottom 80% lost ground relative to the mean national income between 1988 and 1998, with the poorest ten percent losing the most, dropping from 30% of the mean to 23% of the mean. In 1988 the top 10 percent averaged 9 times the income of the bottom 10%; by 1998 that had grown to a factor of 13.

Milanovic concludes that “the poorest deciles in poor countries-those who should benefit most from increased trade according to both economic theory and the policy prescriptions of international organizations–appear to be the losers in relative terms.”

So, even the World Bank’s own journal is running articles showing that their fundamental policies and theories have failed. Only the rich benefit from World Bank policies.

It’s time for them to go!

Judge Throws Out Teens’ Immigration Case
(click here for link)

Check out the last sentence of this article…. (click here for link)

A lot of Senators verbally acknowledged global warming. Interesting…. (click here for link)

–Nathan