Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

As President Bush calls on Americans to break their addiction to oil and increase energy efficiency in the face of soaring prices, perhaps no people serve as better role models than the energy-miser Japanese.
*
*
*
That has contributed to the fact that Japan’s energy consumption per person is now almost half that of the United States. Conservation fever swept the nation after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty written in Japan that aims to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States has not ratified the treaty.
*
*
*
The country embarked on a major effort to wean itself off oil. Japan now imports 16 percent less oil than it did in 1973, although the economy has more than doubled. Billions of dollars were invested in converting oil-reliant electricity-generation systems into ones powered by natural gas, coal, nuclear energy or alternative fuels. Japan, for instance, now accounts for 48 percent of the globe’s solar power generation — compared with 15 percent in the United States.

Click here for link.

Democrats Shoot Their Own, Too
I should note that my primary reason for leaving the Democratic Party was that my wing — the progressive wing — is always getting beaten up by the centrists. Thanks to Dennis Kobray on the Green_All_Views (Yahoogroups) Listserv for pointing out this article.

Party leaders, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) recently pressured Cindy Sheehan not to mount a primary campaign against California Senator Diane Feinstein, a woman who has betrayed party principles, such as they are, at almost every turn and deserves to go down to defeat. (It was only after Sheehan said she was considering a primary fight that Feinstein announced she would support a filibuster on Alito.) Now they’ve killed the campaign of Paul Hackett, an Iraq War vet and sharp critic of the war and the president and a candidate who had a strong shot at snatching a Senate seat for the Democrats this fall in Ohio.

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff02152006.html

Professor Paul Rogers told delegates at the Royal United Services Institute that the Iraq war was a gift for al-Qaeda, providing them with the perfect urban terrorist training ground.

He told the conference on politics and terrorism:

“Iraq is very slowly becoming something of a Jihadist training zone for a new generation of Jihadists, rather like Afghanistan was in the 1980s against the Soviets. You get young Jihadists from Afghanistan travelling to Iraq, getting combats training against the American troops in urban environments and then taking their skills elsewhere. The real gift to al-Qaeda is a long-term urban combat training zone, not a rural one as previously. That is going to come back and haunt us over the next 20 to 30 years.

This shows the need for the Federal Government to step in and negotiate directly with drug manufacturers.

Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year.

Click here for link.

The Nerdy Romeo of ‘Say Anything’ Still Has a Place in Women’s Hearts
This article is undoubtedly schmalzy, but on the other hand, it *is* kinda cute…

Heaps of devotional words have been written about Lloyd Dobler. The early stages of a popularized Internet seemed to exist for people to make Lloyd Dobler references, and Lloyd Dobler tribute pages that linger (”Last updated on July 1, 1997″). There’s a fairly successful Wheaton-based band called the Lloyd Dobler Effect, which has toured forever. (Sadly, a Hootie and the Blowfish comparison in a review of the Lloyd Dobler Effect’s work prevents us from going any further.)
*
*
*
In lore, he will be forever holding his boombox tape player high above his head, solemnly blasting the Peter Gabriel ballad “In Your Eyes.” That’s his song, their song. She chooses him in the end, mostly because her father is convicted for tax fraud.

“Jake Ryan is dessert, and Lloyd Dobler is like the vegetables you need,” says Sasha Johnson, 29, a Washington TV producer. “Lloyd Dobler ruined men forever. I can’t take total credit for this, an ex-boyfriend said this to me once. He contended that Lloyd Dobler’s boombox moment became the pinnacle of romance — the standard that no man could ever meet no matter how hard he tried. I’ve always loved Lloyd Dobler and have grown to appreciate him more as the years have gone on . . . the guy in high school that no woman wanted but ultimately now the kind of man we want to marry.

“He had that right mix of self-assuredness, sensitivity and geekiness. He was willing to make an insanely bold gesture to get the woman of his dreams back — something every woman wishes could happen to her.”
*
*
*
“Fake love is a very powerful thing,” Klosterman observes. “I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. . . . It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. . . . But here’s what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They don’t love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in ‘Say Anything.’ . . .

“I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don’t want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that’s all I want, and that’s why I can’t have it.”

Click here for link.

HR 4694, ironicly called the “Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act”, is a bipartisan bill that would effectively bar third party congressional candidates from spending any money on their campaigns.

The bill would grant nominees of parties that had averaged 25% of the vote for House races in a given district in the last two elections full public funding. All others would be required to submit petitions signed by 10% of the last vote cast for partial funding, and 20% petitions for full funding, a prohibitively large number.

While third parties have raised the alarm about this bill, what has gone unnoticed is that it would effectively institutionalize incumbancy in the House. The 2004 election was the least competitive in history. The average margin of victory was 40%–meaning 70% to 30% in a two way race. Scores of races were uncontested.

The sponsors of this bill are attempting to establish permanent incumbancy, even to the point of deliberately cutting themselves out of uncompetative races. For all practical purposes, this would be the end of a democratic Hosue of Representatives.

If this bill becomes law, Greens should wage a massive civil disobedience campaign against it. We should stand candidates in every district we possible can, and each one of them should publicly take a $1 donation in violation of the bill.

Lets see if the Republocrats have the guts to face that kind of publicity.

This just goes to show you how conservative the National Democratic Party leadership is…

Hackett alleged that several party leaders — including Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) — had made calls to donors discouraging them from contributing to his campaign, an allegation that DSCC spokesman Phil Singer denied.

Click here for link.

I’m hunting six foot, seventy-eight year old wabbit!

According to intelligence sources, the CIA’s top counter-terrorism official, Robert Grenier, was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding.”

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism, claimed the Grenier was fired because “he wasn’t with the program. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Since Porter Goss has taken control of the agency, almost all of its high level directors have left amid growing turmoil and plummeting morale.

AB “Buzzy” Krongard, a former executive director who rresigned shortly after Goss arrived commented that “History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place.”

With Bush’s military adventures breaking the Army and his political appointees destroying the intelligence community, the administration might just as well hand their budgets directly over to the contractors. They’re the only ones benefiting from the money.

Only a week after George Bush proclaimed that we were “addicted to oil”, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)–the nation’s premeir renewable energy lab–has bee forced to reduce its staff to make up for a $28 million budget shortfall. Programs that will be affected include biomass, hydrogen and basic research.

The NREL has been hit with a double blow: slashes in its budget by the Bush administration, and Congressional earmarks that mandate DOE spending in other areas.

The federal government is massively disfunctional under this administration. Perhaps you’ve noticed. This is another blatent example; the President’s most notable line in his entire state of the union speach is undercut a week later by his own budget.

Worse yet, where is the opposition party calling the administration on it?