Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

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Ehrlich (R) acknowledged that he will meet resistance from civil libertarians, comparing the trade-off to the one made when Congress passed the USA Patriot Act.

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Party Links Environmental Law to Delay, Paperwork, Lawsuits

House Republicans are hoping to rewrite one of the nation’s most sweeping environmental laws –in a way that could change how the government gauges the impact of its actions on the land, sea and air.

For 36 years the government has relied on the National Environmental Policy Act to serve as a check on federal activities that have a “significant impact” on the environment. The law requires federal officials to determine whether such things as highway construction and flood-control projects will alter the surrounding landscape. And it allows citizens to challenge the government’s conclusions. Its scope is so broad, the government conducts 50,000 “environmental assessments” a year.

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Here’s an interesting take on Abramoff (Robin Givhan has come far since her days with the Detroit Free Press.)

After pleading guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials with luxury golf outings, free food and tickets to sporting events, Abramoff emerged from U.S. District Court in Washington on Tuesday dressed like a crime boss. He could not have appeared more guilty, more menacing and more unsympathetic than if he had walked out wielding a baseball bat and muttering something about so-and-so sleeping with the fishes.

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I got this from Scott Loughrey’s blog (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/News_Junkie_GP/message/546)

For the second time, President George W. Bush has circumvented Congress to seat two members of the Amtrak board, the White House said on Wednesday.
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Both [Floyd] Hall and [Enrique] Sosa were nominated in 2004 and again in 2005 but the Senate failed to act on their appointments both times. Neither has support among Amtrak backers on Capitol Hill, which has resisted much of the administration’s plan to dismantle the federally subsidized passenger rail service and open routes to competition.

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*CINEMA*

Good evening, Mr. Wallenberg (1990):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099673/

(excellent biographical portrait of the legendary, incomparable Raol
Wallenberg. NJS likes the use of expressionism early on which
elevates Wallenberg’s legacy. We see a man discussing Wallenberg
years after his murder while in captivity. Then we dissolve back to
the narrative. This helps remind the viewer that no one film could be
a definitive portrait of such a man like Wallenberg.)

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Editorial titled: The New Red, White and Blue
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: January 6, 2006

From today’s New York Times

What’s so disturbing about President Bush and Dick Cheney is that they talk tough about the necessity of invading Iraq, torturing terror suspects and engaging in domestic spying - all to defend our way of life and promote democracy around the globe.

But when it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today - making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green - they ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

Living green is not just a “personal virtue,” as Mr. Cheney says. It’s a national security imperative.

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It’s petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one’s citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one’s enemies, and using oil profits to build up one’s internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.

When a nation’s leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people’s energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people’s ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry - so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses.

Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro’s Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses.

No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil - thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.

That’s because there is a huge difference in what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared with the current $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves.

We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can’t afford. I can’t think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green.

Green is the new red, white and blue.

The State and Federal Highway Administrations has completed the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Intercounty Connector (ICC). The comprehensive document will be available at the State Highway Administration website this Saturday for viewing and download with a formal notice in the Federal Register on Jan. 13. It will also be available at selected libraries, community centers and government facilities.

The final EIS document will be available for public review until Feb. 27, after which time the “Record of Decision” will be issued. Local, state and federal agency representatives participated in the study under President George Bush’s streamlined environmental review process.

Following the review period, FHWA plans to issue a “Record of Decision” that will be the final determination between the study alternatives: Corridor One the preferred alignment (the southern-most of the two proposed corridors), Corridor Two (the northern corridor), or the “no build” option.

There is very little time for review and comment on this very lengthy document. Save Our Communities is a good source of information about the ICC and will probably have more once the study is released.