Hello there everyone! Good to see you here tonight surfin' the Progressive Blue! Welcome to the Monday Night Twilight!
(photo by LaEscapee)
Hey everyone! Well, it's another new week to get through. Hope the first day of the workweek was good for everyone! So let's start the evening week well!
Just in case ya didn't know, this is an open thread where everyone is welcome to congregate and post links and/or other stuff as well as just chatter about whatever's on their mind.
So, I'll start: So many little news bites tonight!
Let the world know that you disagree with the Supreme Court decision giving unfettered voice to corporations through the use of their money to influence elections. Their decision threatens the very bedrock of our democracy, "We the People". The bailout pales by comparison to this wrongheaded, very destructive, overpowering decision.
Answer the Supreme court with the only voice that should count!
There are a number of ideas out there: public Financing, Amendment, Impeachment, Making Corporate Board's sign on in agreement before trying to purchase a given campaign/election. Let's get on with the full debate, because all progressive causes are wiped out with this one decision. We can not rest for a minute on this one.
Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence
Disclaimer: Nothing said here should be taken to imply that airport/train connections are the primary transport task for either light rail, mass transit, conventional intercity rail, or high speed intercity rail. In other words, the focus of an essay in a regular weekly series on one particular topic does not imply anything along the lines of "most important thing".
However, recently, I keep running into the issue of taking the train to the airport. I read an recent article in an air travel industry publication that focused on the airport connections associated with the projects funded in the $8b HSR funding. I read an older piece about the proposed intermodal station in Chicago that would allow our Ohio trains to get to O'Hare. And the proposal to terminate the California HSR at the redesigned Lindbergh Field came up as part of the discussion at the California HSR blog.
So with the Super Bowl coming up to distract things, I succumbed to what was clearly fate, and am going to discuss taking the train to the airport.
Hello to everyone out there surfin' the Progressive Blue tonight. I'm extra, EXTRA excited to bring you our Sunday Sunset on this chilly New Orleans Saints evening!
(Grand Crescent Moon Sunset by Fort Photo.)
I bid you welcome to the last vestige of frivolity until (gasp) you have to go back to work tomorrow. So we will end our weekend properly with The Sunday Sunset. This open thread is meant to try to keep the weekend alive a little longer with our own late night farewell. I'll also post the weekly sunset photo in the body.
The floor for the Sunday Sunset is open to any stories about your weekend, as well as to any ranting, whining, crying, bitching, moaning, kvetching, and venting any of you would like to do. Laughing is of course definitely allowed and even encouraged, even if it's just desperate hysteria that's causing it.
There are only 2 rules in this particular open thread:
1. Be Good To One Another
2. Vote in the Poll
Notes on the poll: It's really single choice, but you can pick more than one... ;>
In case you haven't already seen it, this article on President Obama's inner circle is a must read.
The Obama Administration has done some great things. There is no question about that. But the Democratic Party and it's core values are going to suffer a dramatic setback if the White House and Congressional Dems don't get their act together. If we don't make more progress on strengthening the Middle Class (read: jobs and finishing health care), this will go down in history as the moment elected Democrats let the future slip away.
David Axelrod has every reason to be very proud of the work he did in mayoral campaigns in the late 1980. But that was 20 years ago. Attitudes have changes, and the Great Recession demands urgency. The fierce urgency of now. Not the timid mediocrity of "that's not the way we roll."
As far as Rahm Emanuel goes, actions speak letter than expletive - heavy words. And once again, the 90's really are over. The country is different. The Democratic Party is different. Avoiding a much more powerful grassroots coalition and a winning message is not the mark of a "pragmatist" or a "realist." It's the mark of someone whose Beltway Goggles have blinded them to the changes that have taken place in front of them.
There is no shortage of talent that could be elevated or tapped into on a much more regular basis.
David Plouffe's recent op - ed was right on the money.
Austan Goolsbee is a very effective surrogate.
Jared Bernstein and Melody Barnes are already working in the administration. Mike Lux worked in the Clinton Administration.
Robert Kuttner and Jacob Hacker are respected policy wonks who are also politically savvy.
President Obama has all of the potential in the world, but it's just not coming together. The Administration's needs to change, and soon. It's hard to see how that happens without something of a staff shake - up.
Dealing with this issue is essential policy. It's also very good politics because it puts us in position to get our economic priorities straight, and deliver something our country desperately needs -- infrastructure and the jobs that come with it.
President Obama showed an investment deficit hawk streak in his SOTU speech, and this issue is right in Vice President Biden's wheelhouse. We have the ability to make this a winning contrast. If elected Democrats want a meaningful deficit to be hawkish about right now, here it is. Being an investment deficit hawk is real patriotism in action.
The main obstacle here is the same handful of weak Senate Dems responsible for watering down the recovery package.
What is it they object to?
Investing in America's future?
Basic economic competence?
Democratic majorities in Congress?
They can either make Main Street recovery issue #1, or they'll lose so bad this November that even Jon Stewart will say that they got TURBO DESTROYERIZED (hybrid of destroyed and pulverized).
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who has been on a roll lately, shows how it's done in this documentary about our crumbling infrastructure from the History Channel.
First, before we jump into the text of the article from WSJ, let me see if I can't help a bit with the answer to the Tea Baggers ponderings.
STOP being full time assholes on purpose. STOP worrying that you might not die with the most toys. STOP whining about paying taxes. STOP the religious nonsense. STOP talking about family values and then having sex with people from someone else's family. Just STOP being who you are and take up macrame or something equally useless and harmless.
Everywhere I travel in Africa, there's increasing acknowledgement about the importance of nutrition when it comes to treating HIV/AIDS. Many retroviral and HIV/AIDS drugs don't work if patients aren't getting enough vitamins and nutrients in their diets or accumulating enough body fat.
According to Dr. Rosa Costa, Director of the Kyeema Foundation in Mozambique, many farmers are often too sick to grow crops, but "chickens are easy."
Unlike many crops, raising free-range birds can require few outside inputs and very little maintenance from farmers. Birds can forage for insects and eat kitchen scraps, instead of expensive grains. They provide not only meat and eggs for household use and income, but also pest control and manure for fertilizer.
President Obama's Q&A with Senate Democrats showed that the disconnect between the mindset of elected Democrats in general and what needs to happen over the few months is still far too wide. Thanks in large part to a handful of fundamentally lame Senators, the caucus as a whole has been seriously undermined. There are a lot of words that could be used to describe what the Senate has done over the last year, but "leadership" -- a word that was used Wednesday-- isn't one of them.
Just in case ya didn't know, this is an open thread where everyone is welcome to congregate and post links and/or other stuff as well as just chatter about whatever's on their mind.
So, I'll start: So, did ya hear that the Senate GOPers don't want to do an Obama question and answer session?
Jessica Milgroom isn't your typical graduate student. Rather than spending her days in the library of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, her research is done in the field-literally. Since 2006, Jessica has been working with farming communities living inside Limpopo National Park, in southern Mozambique.
When the park was established in 2001, it was essentially "parked on top of 27,000 people," says Jessica. Some 7,000 of the residents needed to be resettled to other areas, including within the park, which affected their access to food and farmland. Jessica's job is to see what can be done to improve resettlement food security.
But rather than simply recommending intensified agriculture in the park to make better use of less land, Jessica worked with the local community to collect and identify local seed varieties. One of the major problems in Mozambique, as well as other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, is the lack of seed. As a result, farmers are forced to buy low-quality seed because nothing else is available.
In addition to identifying and collecting seeds, Jessica is working with a farmer's association on seed trials, testing varieties to see what people like best. In addition, farmers are learning how to purify and store seeds (see Innovation of the Week: Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa).
Weevils, the farmers tell Jessica, are worse than ever, destroying both the seed and crops they store in traditional open-air, granaries. But the farmers are now building newer granaries that are more tightly sealed and help prevent not only weevils but also mold and aflatoxins from damaging crops.
Today, farmers and breeders alike have a greater respect for Mozambique's indigenous seed varieties. According to Jessica, one of the biggest accomplishments of the project has been getting breeders and farmers to talk to each other. "It's been interesting for both groups," says Jessica, "and it needs to be a regular discussion" between them.
Disclaimer: Nothing said here should be taken to imply that airport/train connections are the primary transport task for either light rail, mass transit, conventional intercity rail, or high speed intercity rail. In other words, the focus of an essay in a regular weekly series on one particular topic does not imply anything along the lines of "most important thing".
Jessica Milgroom isn't your typical graduate student. Rather than spending her days in the library of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, her research is done in the field-literally. Since 2006, Jessica has been working with farming communities living inside Limpopo National Park, in southern Mozambique.
