Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

As per Ken Sain, here is a link to an interesting column.

And here’s another column that Ken Sain declares a “must-read”.

Climate Change Could Have Wide-Ranging Effects in the Arctic, Study Says

The earlier snowmelt, itself a product of a warming climate, is one of the “positive feedback” factors that accelerate warming in the far north, said Terry Chapin, a professor of ecology at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Each of these changes seems to trigger other changes that mean more changes will occur,” said Chapin, the study’s lead author.

The National Science Foundation-funded study published in the online journal Science Express found spring snowmelt had been occurring about 2 1/2 days earlier per decade, exposing dark ground to solar heat earlier in the season.

Heat absorbed by the ground releases energy into the local atmosphere, about three watts per cubic meter each decade, a change that is heating the local atmosphere and adding incrementally to global warming, Chapin said.

“This heat is added to the atmosphere, so the atmosphere in the north becomes warmer and is mixed with the global atmosphere,” Chapin said.

Summer warming will be amplified two to seven times if trees and bushes continue their northern migration into Alaska’s Arctic, the study also said.

Click here for link.

Pa. Trial Will Ask Whether ‘Alternatives’ Can Pass as Science

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans’ closest cousins.
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Evolution’s repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with “alternative” explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

Click here for link.

On a clear day, San Joaquin looks like a bucolic farming community, complete with almond groves, cornfields and orange trees. But most of the time the valley — trapped between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, with two major highways running north to south through it — is smoggy, filled with air that has fostered widespread respiratory disease.

Click here for link.

This march was different from any other one I’ve seen; it had the most diverse population of any protest I’ve ever been to before. The number of whole families who came out was amazing; kids of all ages were there. Seeing 11 year olds sporting Che Guevera buttons was very impressive. There was every age and ethnic group there, from all over the country (I was doing some petitioning in the crowd so I got a good idea of just haw many states were represented.) The guy in the wheelchair with the “World War II Veterans Against The War” sign was great. Seeing a bunch of goth teens groving on Joan Baez was something too!

I missed the Green Party feeder march, but the GP table was doing a good business:

Sadly, there was a reminder that the war is still doing a good business too:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is facing questions from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in his family’s hospital company one month before its price fell sharply.

The Tennessee lawmaker, who is the Senate’s top Republican and a likely candidate for president in 2008, ordered his portfolio managers in June to sell his family’s shares in HCA Inc., the nation’s largest hospital chain, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother.

A month later, the stock’s price dropped 9 percent in a single day because of a warning from the company about weakening earnings. Stockholders are not permitted to trade stock based on inside information; whether Frist possessed any appears to be at the heart of the probes.

Click here for link.

So what exactly constitutes “unnecessary spending,” in Bush’s spectacularly vague phrase?

Finally, we’re easing our way into a real debate on the subject.

You want to spend a couple hundred billion dollars on Katrina and Rita and the damage done by any other killer storms this season? Great. What would you cut?

Click here for link.

Unusually large numbers of birth defects began to be reported in southern Iraq after the first Gulf War, with Basra particularly hard hit.

Now, as feared, a rising incidence of birth defects has spread north from Najaf to Baghdad.

According to Dr Nawar Ali, at the University of Baghdad, who works in the newborn babies research department:

There have been 650 cases in total since August 2003 reported in government hospitals - that is a 20 percent increase from the previous regime. Private hospitals were not included in the study, so the number could be higher.

Dr Ali blamed the rise on polluted groundwater, contaminated with radiation from depleted uranium used in the two Gulf Wars. Babies are being born with multiple fingers, unusually large heads, unilateral lips or no arms or legs.

The news comes amid reports that the number of deaths of Gulf War I Veterans from exposure to DU has topped 11,000.

Of the 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, more than 300,000 are on permanent medical disability. Terry Johnson, public affairs specialist at the VA, recently reported that veterans of both Persian Gulf wars now on disability total 518,739.

It turns out that the only weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are the ones we brought there ourselves.

You should read Sebastian Mallaby’s column.

It’s hard to say what’s worse: The incompetence of the administration’s initial hurricane response or the cowardice of its follow-up. Faced with a small hit to his ratings, the president who once boasted of ignoring polls is rushing to spend billions of other people’s dollars on saving his political skin. His philosophy is, “It’s going to cost whatever it costs.” That phrase should be the title of some future history of the Bush era.

Click here for link.