Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

A new Zogby poll, of soldiers in Iraq shows that 72% want US troops to be withdrawn this year. 29% want troops withdrawn immediately, 22% said they should leave in the next six months, and 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months. Only 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

42% said that the U.S. mission in Iraq is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure.

Three quarters of the troops had served multiple tours and had a longer exposure to the conflict: 26% were on their first tour of duty, 45% were on their second tour, and 29% were in Iraq for a third time or more.

The United Nations’ outgoing human rights chief in Iraq, John Pace, has told reporters that hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone. Three-quarters of the corpses coming into the city’s mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Pace blames Shia death squads under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

In 2005, the Baghdad morgue received some 1,100 corpses a month, with around 900 of them showing signs of torture.

Between the death squads and the insurgent groups that are trying to ignite a civil war, the U.S. occupation forces are finding it difficult to accomplish anything.

One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.

In Mr Pace’s view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. “The vast majority are innocent,” he said, “but they very often don’t get released for months. You don’t eliminate terrorism by what they’re doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians … The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention.”

The “stay the course” mentality of the Bush administration is becoming more and more disastrous. The likelihood of finding an good exit strategy is becoming slimmer. U.S. troops are little more than targets of convenience is a hopelessly lost cause.

Job Tracker is an interesting site. Put in your zip code and it lists all companies in your area who are exporting jobs, violating health and safety laws, and violating labor laws. (At least those that have beem caught!)

This winter I thought it was just me, but I see that I’m not the only one who misses the snow…

This year, Sophia spent her birthday inside, playing video games with friends. “It’s really boring here without ice,” she said.

For the first time that anyone in Put-in-Bay could remember, the Great Lakes were ice-free in the middle of winter. Even Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five lakes and usually the first to freeze over, was clear.

Click here for link.

This is typical of the New York Times: Offer some — but not a lot of — credence to an issue and then claim that their coverage is “Fair and balanced.”

Leaning low into the microphone, Mr. Perkins affects a deep conspiratorial whisper as he sets the scene for the imagined encounter between the new president and the representative of the multinational corporate interests Mr. Morales had vilified during his campaign.

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Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi River lapped at the steps of the Gateway Arch during the 1993 flood, more than 14,000 acres of flood plain have been developed since then. That has reduced the region’s ability to store water during future floods and potentially put more people in harm’s way, said Adolphus Busch IV, a scion of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family who is chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance.

Similar development has occurred around Dallas, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Omaha, Neb., and Sacramento, Calif., said Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.

“The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short. You can already hear it in Washington, D.C.: New Orleans where?” Galloway said of the lack of action in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last summer.

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If the city of Cambridge has its way, a new residential golf course development overlooking the Little Blackwater River will lure 10,000 new residents — nearly doubling the city’s population — over the next two decades. For Cambridge leaders, Blackwater Resort means needed tax revenue and new life for a hard-luck area that hasn’t grown much in three decades.

But the view from across the bay, at the headquarters of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is different. Environmentalists there see an outsize development that would be built upriver from a wildlife refuge considered a national treasure, adding more sewage and polluted runoff to an already unhealthy bay.

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I am not holding my breath on this…

Since its inception, the bank has talked about reducing poverty. But for more than 15 years it has focused on market reform policies, offering loans to countries that promised to lift trade barriers, deregulate and privatize industry, and adopt austerity plans to stop deficit spending and reduce inflation. These reforms, which became known as the Washington Consensus, were supposed to unleash the economic potential of developing countries and spur growth. Growth, in turn, was to create opportunity for the destitute and lift them out of poverty.

Many Latin American countries took the loans and adopted the reforms, but they did not have the intended consequences. Latin America’s performance has been disappointing, particularly in comparison with the dynamic economic growth and poverty reduction in Asian countries. The region now has “the highest measures of inequality in the world,” with one-quarter of the population living on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.

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In coordinated attacks, Nigerian rebels launched a wave of attacks today across the oil rich southern Delta, blowing up oil installations and seizing nine foreign oil workers.

Royal Dutch Shell was forced to shut down a facility that moves 400,000 barrels of oil a day, 16% of Nigeria’s output. Other attacks targeted a tanker berth and a major Shell crude oil pipeline

The militants are fighting for more autonomy, a greater share of oil wealth and compensation for environmentla degredation for the region’s 8 million Ijaw people.

Express Toll Lanes Promoted in Study
The fact that mass transit is not being mentioned at all just goes to demonstrate — yet again — just how thoroughly the developer lobby dominates the transportation issue…

Highway congestion has grown so severe that virtually all of the Washington region’s main commuter routes are chronically clogged and unable to move motorists efficiently, according to a regional study released yesterday.

Drivers on some highways designed for mile-a-minute travel are lucky to make five miles in an hour. Freeways that were manageable three years ago, such as the Dulles Toll Road, are now bumper-to-bumper at peak times. Congestion on some highways has doubled in three years, when the last study was released.

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