I opened my Free Press this AM to see the AP story about a new plan for economic recovery in Haiti that would harness the devastated Haitian population as a cheap labor pool for the garment industry.  The workers would earn $3.09 for eight hours of toil, allowing the factory owners a profit of 22%.    Under the plan, which would expand an existing sweatshop industry in Haiti, the goods would then be imported to the U.S. for resale at substantial profit to the corporate beneficiaries. The example given in the AP story was a $500. suit sold by Jos. A. Banks.  Nice; really nice.

Apparently, our esteemed President Obama has endorsed this plan and proposes that U.S. retailers commit to obtaining at least 1% of the clothing they sell from Haiti(as opposed to other sweatshop economies.)  The plan is the brainchild of Oxford University Professor Paul Collier and is getting a boost from that perennial friend of “free” trade (as opposed to fair trade) Bill Clinton. Am I the only one who finds this idea the least bit disturbing?

I cannot dispute that it will, in the short-run, create jobs for people who do not currently have them; but I can’t help wondering what are the long-term consequences for workers everywhere of officially reinforcing the loathsome practice of labor exploitation.  There have been countless studies documenting the “race to the bottom” that has resulted from the unrestricted “free trade” practice of chasing the most desperate workforce from island to island in the relentless pursuit of cheaper goods and greater profits.  “This will not end well,” they all seem to say; and yet, the first economic recovery model that even our U.S. Democratic leaders put forward for this desperately poor population is to further reinforce the pattern of exploitation that has held them powerless in their own country almost since its inception.

Surely there is something else that could employ all those people without extending the local impact of their poverty to all the other exploited labor populations throughout the world!  How about getting all of those resort, cruise ship, and luxury vacation venues, as well as the corporations that have historically mined Haiti for cheap labor,  to pony-up for some serious infrastructure and land-improvement work that could employ as many people as the expanded sweatshops and leave them with some real value for their labor? Stabilization of agricultural lands, further development of tourism and expanded markets for traditional  products should be the goal rather than systemic reinforcement of impoverishing practices.

When did we become so callous as a nation that we simply accept sweatshop labor as the solution to any kind of economic problem?

Edgar native one of Malawi’s miracle workers

Husband and his wife are helping an African nation farm its was out of poverty

By Danielle Nierenberg

For the Wausau Daily Herald

Stacia and Kristof Nordin have an unusual backyard, and it looks a lot different from the Edgar yard in which Kristof grew up.

Rather than the typical bare dirt patch of land that most Malawians sweep “clean” every day, the Nordins have more than 200 varieties of mostly indigenous vegetables growing organically around their house. They came to Malawi in 1997 as Peace Corps volunteers, but now call Malawi home. Stacia is a technical adviser to the Malawi Ministry of Education, working to sensitize both policymakers and citizens about the importance of using indigenous foods and permaculture to improve livelihoods and nutrition. Kristof is a community educator who works to train people at all levels of Malawian society in low-input and sustainable agricultural practices.

The Nordins use their home as a demonstration plot for permaculture methods that incorporate composting, water harvesting, intercropping and other methods that help build organic matter in soils, conserve water, and protect agricultural diversity. Most Malawians think of traditional foods, such as amaranth and African eggplant, as poor-people foods grown by “bad” farmers. But these crops might hold the key for solving hunger, malnutrition and poverty in Malawi — as well as in other African countries.

Nowhere needs the help more than Malawi, a nation of 14 million in southeast Africa that is among the least developed and most densely populated on Earth.

The country might be best known for the so-called “Malawi Miracle.” Five years ago, the government decided to do something controversial and provide fertilizer subsidies to farmers to grow maize. Since then, maize production has tripled and Malawi has been touted as an agricultural success story.

But the way they are refining that corn, says Kristof, makes it “kind of like Wonder Bread,” leaving it with just two or three nutrients. Traditional varieties of corn, which aren’t usually so highly processed, are more nutritious and don’t require as much artificial fertilizer as do hybrid varieties.

“Forty-eight percent of the country’s children are still nutritionally stunted, even with the so-called miracle,” Kristof says.

Rather than focusing on just planting maize — a crop that is not native to Africa — the Nordins advise farmers with whom they work that there is “no miracle plant — just plant them all.” Research has shown that Malawi has more than 600 indigenous and naturalized food plants to choose from. Maize, ironically, is one of the least suited to this region because it’s highly susceptible to pests, disease and erratic rainfall patterns.

Unfortunately, the “fixation on just one crop,” says Kristof, means that traditional varieties of foods are going extinct — crops that already are adapted to drought and heat, traits that become especially important as agriculture copes with climate change.

“Design,” says Kristof, “is key in permaculture,” meaning that everything from garden beds to the edible fish pond to the composting toilet have an important role on their property. And although their neighbors have been skeptical, they’re impressed by the quantity — and diversity — of food grown by the family. More than 200 indigenous fruits and vegetables are grown on their small plot of land, providing a year-round supply of food to the Nordins and their neighbors.

In addition, they’re creating a “model village” by training several families who rent houses on the property,) to practice and teach others about the permaculture techniques that they use around their homes. They also have built an “edible playground,” where children can play, eat and learn about various indigenous fruits.

More important, the Nordins are showing that by not sweeping, burning and removing all organic matter, people can get more out of the land than just maize and reduce their dependence on high-cost agricultural inputs in the process.

And indigenous crops can be an important source of income for farmers. Rather than import amaranth, sorghum, spices, tamarinds and other products from India, South Africa and other countries, the Nordins are helping farmers find ways to market seeds, as well as value-added products, from local resources. These efforts not only provide income and nutrition, but fight the “stigma that anything Malawian isn’t good enough,” says Kristof. “The solutions,” he says, “are literally staring us in the face.”

And as a visitor walked around seeing and tasting the various crops at the Nordins’ home, it became obvious that maize is not Malawi’s only miracle.

Danielle Nierenberg is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, blogging daily from Africa

athttp://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/. She can be reached at dnierenberg@worldwatch.org.  

Scott Brown Became the Darling of the Republican Party After His Stunning Upset Victory in Massachusetts’ Special Election to Fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate Seat, But Now Hard-Line Social Conservatives Are Blasting Him For Being Pro-Choice, Despite His Support for Existing Ban on Late-Term Abortions

It was perhaps inevitable that Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts), who scored a stunning upset victory over Democrat Martha Coakley in the January 19 special election to serve out the remaining two years of the late Edward Kennedy’s term — becoming the first Republican to represent the Bay State in the U.S. Senate in 31 years — would come under fire from hard-line social conservatives once they learned of his position on abortion. Brown says that a decision whether or not to have an abortion “should ultimately be made by a woman in consultation with her doctor” — although he does support the existing federal ban on late-term abortions. (Photo: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EST Monday, February 22, 2010)

(Updated 2:00 a.m. EST Tuesday, February 23, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Did hard-line social conservatives — those who believe that women have no right to reproductive choice and that gays and lesbians are “the scum of the Earth” who have no right to marry — really expect the voters of Massachusetts to actually vote in as their next U.S. senator a person who shares the hard-liners’ vehement anti-choice and anti-gay views?

Get real. This is Massachusetts — which, along with Vermont, is not only one of the most deep-blue states in the nation, but also the most socially liberal.

If Scott Brown, the Republican who scored a stunning upset victory over Democrat Martha Coakley in the January 19 special Senate election to serve out the remaining two years of the late Edward Kennedy‘s term, were a hard-line social conservative, he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected.

1990: A MODERATE REPUBLICAN DEFEATED A HARD-LINE CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRAT FOR GOVERNOR

Just ask John Silber, the ultra-conservative former president of Boston University, who ran for governor in 1990 as a Democrat — in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than three to one — only to end up losing to a moderate Republican, William Weld, a former federal prosecutor.

Silber — whose 20-year tenure as BU president was marked by one controversy after another — alienated many Democrats and independent voters with his often-incendiary conservative rhetoric on the campaign trail, ultimately prompting many Democrats to cross party lines and vote for Weld, whose liberal social views appealed to them.

Weld became the most popular governor in the modern history of Massachusetts, going on to re-election in 1994 by a record 71 percent landslide.

Now, it appears, Brown my turn out to to be another Bill Weld. That hard-line conservatives have found this out now is something of a surprise, given that Brown has never made any secret of his pro-choice stance on abortion. Indeed, you can’t win a statewide election in Massachusetts if you’re not pro-choice.

When Republican Mitt Romney successfully ran for governor in 2002, he held moderate to liberal views on abortion, and stated that the legislature should be the driving force behind policy decisions on that issue. During his tenure, however, he became increasingly “pro-life” and — combined with his staunch opposition to both same-gender marriage and civil unions for gay and lesbian couples — had a difficult time maintaining his job-approval ratings, which likely factored in Romney’s  decision to not seek a second term in 2006.  

But while Brown made it clear on his campaign Web site that he believes that the decision on whether or not to have an abortion is “should ultimately be made by a woman in consultation with her doctor,” he does favor the federal ban on late-term — so-called “partial-birth” — abortions. He also believes that parents should be notified when a teen-aged daughter obtains one, but significantly, does not favor requiring parental consent.

BARBOUR: ‘WE DON’T NEED PURITY’ — HARD-LINERS SHARPLY DISAGREE

Governor Haley Barbour (R-Mississippi), chair of the Republican Governors Association, recognized as much. Appearing January 31 on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Barbour acknowlegded that Brown is “very much a moderate Republican, and I think it’s a reminder to Republicans that we don’t need purity.”

Barbour, a former GOP national chairman, told CBS’s Bob Scheiffer that Republicans “need the best we can elect, and Scott Brown is the best senator for Massachusetts. . . He’s certainly not as conservative as I am. And that’s healthy and good.”

But a number of hard-line social conservatives sharply disagree. Alan Keyes, who ran unsuccessfully against Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004, was quick to condemn Brown. Writing on the right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily, Keyes branded Brown “a typical RINO [Republican-in-name-only] who . . . embraces the substance of Obama’s socialist agenda, but ‘opposes’ Obama by criticizing his implementation of socialism . . .”

Keyes tore into Brown’s position on abortion: “[Brown] agrees in principle with the Democrats on the fundamental issues of justice and morality but employs the deceptive rhetoric of personal opinion to evade the questions of public law and policy they involve,” Keyes wrote. “Such issues include child-murder and other abrogations of the unalienable right to life, as well as the rejection of the God-endowed rights of the natural family.”

SANTORUM: ‘BROWN CONFUSED’ — TERRY: ‘HE MUST BE REPLACED’

In a January 17 Twitter posting picked up by Politico.com, former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) branded Brown “confused” in his position on abortion vis-a-vis the Senate version of the health-care reform bill that’s now in limbo.

“Brown campaign confused on conscience clause in health care bills. House bill good, Sen[ate] bill bad, Coakley worst,” Santorum wrote.

Not to be outdone, anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry branded Brown “a ‘moderate’ child-killer.” In an incendiary message posted on a conservative Catholic Web forum, Terry wrote that because Brown supports Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, “he supports the brutal murder of children in the womb for any reason; he defends the barbaric practice of those babies being decapitated, or chemically burned to death, and then casting their mangled bodies into sewers and landfills for graves.”

Terry concluded his message with an appeal that “We need to replace Scott Brown as soon as we can with a true defender of babies’ lives, not a phony who supports their murder.”

SOME TEA PARTY ACTIVISTS ARE NO FANS OF BROWN, EITHER

But anti-abortion hard-liners are hardly the only ones on the far right side of the political spectrum in lambasting Brown.

A week before the election, Massachusetts Tea Party activists Carla Howell and Michael Cloud, posted a “Warning!” message on the Meetup.com Web site under “The 9/12 Project,” in which they warned that Brown “is an 11-year Big Government Republican state legislator who regularly and repeatedly voted for bigger state government budgets, voted for expanded and new Big Government programs, voted for tax increases, and voted against tax cuts!”

Howell and Cloud accuse Brown of being “a smooth-talking chameleon” on the issue of taxes and government spending. “We know every single real tax cutter in Massachusetts,” they write. “We know every major phony and fake friend of taxpayers. Every slick, smooth-talking chameleon who tries to blend in with tax-cutters — while he votes for tax hikes, votes for property tax increases and campaigns against and votes against a major tax cut!”

The pair branded Brown, a state lawmaker for 11 years, “the worst fake tax-cutter in the Massachusetts Legislature. And a fake ally is more dangerous than an open enemy.”

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report was unable to determine if Howell and Cloud’s “9/12 Project” Meetup site was related to the namesake campaign of Fox News commentator and radio talk-show host Glenn Beck; a review of the Web site of Beck’s 9/12 Project found no similar criticisms of the Republican.

ATTACKS LATEST SYMPTOM OF RIGHT-WING ‘POLITICAL CANNIBALISM’ IN GOP

The attacks on Brown from the far-right fringe should come as no surprise, for it is only the latest manifestation of an ongoing political cannibalism going on inside the Republican Party.

John Avlon, a former columnist and associate editor at The New York Sun, notes that the ongoing debate now roiling the GOP of ideological purity issues “is getting out of control.”

In a commentary posted on TheDailyBeast.com, Avlon notes that even GOP icons such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt are coming under attack as so-called “RINOs” and “progressive plutocrats” from right-wing hard-liners.

“This RINO-hunting impulse is getting out of control,” writes Avlon, whose new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, is now on sale. “It has been indulged by the party leadership it now seeks to consume.

“Scott Brown’s victory offers Republicans a window in how to win again outside the party’s base,” Avlon continues. “But when overheated praise . . . quickly dissolves into bitter intra-party inquisitions, it’s a sign of a deeper instability — a discomfort with representative democracy when it conflicts with ideology.”

In other words, what’s going on in the Republican Party poses a serious threat to its long-term electoral survival at a time when America’s population is changing — and that, in turn, could have serious consequences for the future of American democracy itself.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

From a Bartlett campaign press release/email:

Why are we rushing to a vote on Vermont Yankee?

Holding a vote on Wednesday means we will ignore the thoughtful, methodical process we already have in place to consider the facts.  It means that 30 people instead of 180 people will make a statement.  It’s more political theater than making good public policy.  If we really want Vermont Yankee closed, we should make the decision as an entire legislature.

It’s the oddest example of “have your cake and eat it too” political rhetoric I’ve seen. She repeats in the release that she opposes relicensing – but she then opposes the opportunity to vote on that conviction? Or will she vote against the relicense after all? She doesn’t explicitly say that she won’t.

For a candidate who seemed to be building a reputation as a no-BS straight-talker, this uncoordinated press release seems pretty self-destructive.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Bartlett is apparently parroting Entergy’s lines about “rushing” a vote (and thereby empowering them – especially if she is successful), her reasoning is a scrambled mess on its face, and I’m not just referring to the strange message that the legislature should function in some sort of mass joint session, rather than through the normal, centuries-old procedure of one body acting on legislation and sending it to the other. The cognitive dissonance runs deeper than that:

This vote is being pushed through without the benefit of two reports due in the next six weeks.  One is a forecast on the economic impact of Vermont Yankee from the Joint Fiscal Office; the other is the “vertical audit” on reliability that we asked for.  These are important studies that should be considered before taking a vote.

I have watched closely as Entergy has made one mistake after another.  From where I sit, the place is a mess.  Entergy has lied under oath.  They said they don’t have underground pipes carrying nuclear material and now those pipes are leaking. I really don’t think there is much Entergy can do to regain my confidence or that of most Vermonters.

[…] I am on record as wanting to close Vermont Yankee in 2012.  Their behavior in the past few months has only confirmed my opinion.  This isn’t about my vote, it’s about doing the job right.

So she’s made up her mind? So much for this process she seems to be defending, then. In fact, by pushing for more process, she is implicitly suggesting that she jumps to premature conclusions. Is that a good quality in a Governor?

On the other hand, she could be suggesting that she doesn’t jump to conclusions at all, and that she has enough information and has heard enough evidence to conclude the plant must be closed. In that case, she casts herself as a champion of bureacratic red tape and busy work, as this “process” she is defending is simply process for its own sake. Is that a good quality in a Governor?

Or perhaps we’re just to conclude that this intellectual disconnect is a sign that she’s simply trying to pander to everyone on both sides simultaneously. Is that what we’re looking for in a Governor?

There is no possible way to slice this that leaves Bartlett looking good to anyone. If this is a political calculation, its a poor one that’s liable to leave an impression of weakness and a lack of conviction in the face of a powerful corporate bully. If it’s a straight-up opinion, it just leaves an impression of confusion.

In any event, one wonders if, when we look back on this period, this press release will be remembered as the epitaph for her campaign. That would be a real shame.

At the very least, she’s going to find she needs to make up even more primary ground after this move.

As chairman of the National Governors Association (NGA), Governor Douglas lead the nation’s governors at their annual winter meeting in Washington this weekend. Healthcare availability and affordability were one focus point.    

Yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union show, Douglas asserted that regardless of whether it’s a publicly funded program or private health insurance company we’re going to go broke if costs are not reduced.  He also noted his pride in the steps taken here in Vermont (Catamount Health) and promised as NGA chairman to help lead the way nationally.    

Douglas’ pride should be tempered somewhat from the findings of some research into Vermont’s Catamount Health plan. Douglas demanded the private/public structure as part of his support of the plan established in 2007 and the legislature included requirements for an outside efficiency study. Some study results are quoted in the Burlington Free Press. The research results find that   Catamount Health could save $1 million a year if the state had been running it exclusively rather than the Douglas private/public arrangement that exists. Unfortunately no link to the study was provided.  

Researchers suggested if the same state office that administers Medicaid and the Vermont Health Access Program also ran Catamount, administrative costs would decrease by about $1 million a year.  Peter Sterling, executive director of the Vermont Campaign for Health Care Security Education Fund, called the researchers’ finding significant: “We have overpaid at least $2 million to let private insurance do what the state could have done.”;

[emphasis added]

Eating up more redundant front page space, but another VY thought burning to get out. Tim Newcomb has a political cartoon today depicting a battered Vermont Yankee being pushed off a plank by Peter Shumlin, who muses on his leadership qualities while the Yankee character asks “Is this vote about me or all about you?”

I love ya Tim, and you’re not the only one peddling this line, obviously – but its not only unfair, its bunk. Politicians have agendas. They run for office based on them – openly. We elect them based on our collective assessment of those agendas. We expect them to be consistent and effective in acting on those agendas if elected. It is, in fact, the job.

Of course Shumlin has an agenda. And of course voters for governor will judge the quality of that agenda, as well as judge him based on how consistent and effective he has been in pushing it. What on earth is the problem?

Shumlin has been nothing but consistent on this issue. And he did not bring VY to this moment of truth – the calendar and Entergy’s own incompetence and deceitfulness did. To suggest otherwise is to grant Shumlin weird, reality-bending powers (see Governor Salmon).

On this issue over the years, Shumlin has been consistent, and now he is attempting to be effective. He didn’t create this critical moment, he is showing leadership by acting on it. Yes, most Democrats seem to believe that the best way to get elected is do as little as possible, so perhaps he’s going against the zeitgeist here – but to suggest he should be taken to task for being consistent and effective – all because one shouldn’t do that if one is running for governor is as clear an example of the dysfunctional pathology gripping american politics as I can think of.

Not to eat up unnecessary front page space, but does it occur to anyone else that in Governor Douglas’s constant defense of Vermont Yankee in terms of “safety” isn’t an attempt to bait legislators (and lobbyists) into an explicit discussion on the plant’s safety – the one criterion that they are explicitly prohibited from basing a decision on?

Think maybe he’s trying to help his corporate pals at Entergy build a public record to support their inevitable lawsuit against the State of Vermont when relicensing is rejected?

In case it hasn’t been obvious, I’ve been in a serious slump in the whole writing/blogging thing. And its a bad kind of slump, too. Everyday I find things I really want to write up, but then I get to the computer and I just go flat. Big drag.

So today, after reading all the Vermont Yankee discussions in the paper, I was struck by an increasingly bizarre irrationality on the part of Yankee proponents. As though all the arguments and concerns that have piled up have become too much, and supporters are just covering their eyes and ears.

It almost seems like a pathology at this point. Yankee Dementia Disease.

You hear Peg Flory on the radio or in hearings so clearly furious at Yankee opponents, angrily (and futilely) throwing out “gotcha” points that she has to know are easily countered by whatever bits of information she has chosen to withhold in order to play Entergy cheerleader (and thankfully, there’s always someone standing right next to her to call her out on her deceptively selective informational tidbits.)

Back to today’s paper, there’s the piece by former Governor Salmon, but this problem isn’t really anything new with him, as his irrationality is – as usual – worn on his sleeve. He offers little more than a truly ironic rant about the “shrill voices of ideologues”, along with the bizarre statement that it “strikes (him) as odd, if not downright unexplainable” why “anti-nuclear activists” would time their shut-down efforts during a recession.

“Timing” their efforts during a recession? Seriously?

I mean, its hard to know how to respond to that, except to wonder if Governor Salmon’s tether to reality hasn’t come loose. I suppose the upcoming relicensing, a potential new power contract, tritium leaks into the groundwater, the bustling low-cost energy market, the recent cooling tower collapse, security breach, and the lies from Entergy execs to the state of Vermont – they’re all part of a delicately balanced, meticulously planned plot by the all-powerful Greenpeace, and those damn dirty hippies didn’t have the decency to wait another year to have all their well-placed corporate stooges and saboteurs commence with their master plan.

Seriously. This is apparently what he is saying. I’m not sure how anyone who could make such an argument could even be taken seriously. In fact, the only response that comes to mind are the immortal words of Buzz Lightyear.

But Salmon and Flory are too easy. What really got my attention, and that I thought was worth a long, carefully considered response was the piece by Richard Mallary, who calls for a “rational assessment,” and then – with great deliberation – completely avoids even mentioning (let alone “assessing”) the most damning rational arguments against relicensing. And the few almost meaninglessly broad approaches to the anti-VY argument he does take, he quickly dispenses with by casting them generally into a trust-the-Nuclear-Regulatory-Commission catch-all (as if there isn’t a “rational risk assessment” associated with that right there).

So that’s what I was gonna write. Except now I guess I just did, sans the meticulous point-by-point dissection of Mallary’s piece. This stream of consciousness blogging is weird. Guess I have to go back and fill in the links now. Grumble.

What I was going to suggest, rather than write an actual post, was to have a little fun. And I suppose I still can. This morning, I was following one link after another – as one does on the web – and ended up with this oddly inspirational combination of text and google advertising at the bottom of a passing page:

Now that was inspiring. A Yankee haiku. There’s a worthy topic for a Sunday post.

I’ll start:

VY forever!

Leaks, Lies, Collapses, Breaches

It’s only business.

Tritium fine, they say.

Cobalt, Zinc-65, just

to cleanse the palate.

Woo-hoo! I could do this all day!

Next?

It is a Spring ritual of mine to pay attention to the rivers as soon as they start to open up.  A lot of birds that have been gone for awhile tend to come back, and some that stick around, but hidden in small corners, tend to show up more openly.  In the past two days, I have seen five red-tailed hawks and three bald eagles in spots on or near the Connecticut River (in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire, on the border between the two states).

After the fold, you’ll see some photos of birds (most from this year; a few from last).  You’ll also hear a little bit about where I’ve been and why I haven’t been posting so much lately.

I’m going to start with an apology.  I’ve grown out of the habit of blogging as much as I used to; not as much photography either.  The reason is good, and valid, but I still feel like I’ve lost something.  Well, in the very specific sense I have.  Precisely, I’ve lost a bit of weight and finally started moving in the direction I need to for proper control of the diabetes.  Being a complete and total geek I, of course, have to create a tool to track things, so I built a simple php graphing tool that tracks my steps per day, looking at averages over the previous 1-week, 2-week, 4-week & 8-week periods.

Since I started tracking all this walking (mostly at home, on the treadmill, but a bit of it outdoors as well) 133 days ago, I’ve walked over 3 million steps and over 1,125 miles.  Considering that prior to doing this, I almost never walked more than 15,000 steps in a single day, and since I’ve started tracking, I’ve only gotten below 15,000 8% of the time, I think this is good progress.  

But it, combined with one full time job and a part-time job as well, makes it more difficult to blog and, more importantly, takes time away from birding (not to mention my other passion, which is music, and what apparently is the CD project that will not die, as I keep working on it and it keeps not being done).  

So I’m doing my best, blogging when I can, posting from time to time, but sometimes just feeling completely out of touch with what’s going on.  I stopped in the other day on Kos and noticed that my TU status was gone.  That’s only happened once before, so it was a bit of a surprise, but it makes sense that it would happen.

But tonight, I’m posting about birds.  And I’m really happy to be doing so.  

Below are some of the birds you can expect to find in New England as the waters open wide.  I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed taking them.  

A quick note: these are all smaller versions of the photos.  Full sized versions are available as click-through links on the photos shown here.

One more thing: it looks as though I may be doing an exhibit this summer at the the Parker River visitor’s center in Newburyport, MA.  I will post more if/when I have confirmation.

American Bald Eagles

Common Goldeneyes

Common Loon

Common Mergansers

Great Cormorant in flight

Oh, and this Northern Harrier can be seen all winter, but I’m including it just for the value of its awesomeness:

The tritium plume emanating from the allegedly nonexistent underground leaking pipes has now reached the Connecticut River according to the State of Vermont Department of Health (DOH) website.  DOH http://healthvermont.gov/envir…

Lawrence Auclair, webmaster of evacuationplans.org has a number of links on his website to all the recent news regarding Vermont Yankee’s aging managment issues:  http://www.evacuationplans.org/

On Feb. 4, 2010, well number GZ-14, which is only 30 feet from the Connecticut River, was measured at 70,000 pCi/L of tritium.  Yesterday that well registered 119,000 pCi/L tritium, which is six times the maximum level the EPA regulations allow for drinking water.  Other states like California and Colorado limit the levels they allow to 400 pCi/L in California and 500 pCi/L in Colorado.

Dr. Arjun Makajani, a physicist with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (ieer.org) discusses tritium, Nuclear Information Resource Services (NIRS) has a Tritium: Health Consequences fact sheet from July 2006 that may be found here: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets… and Dr. Rosalie Bertell’s scientific analysis may be found at here at Beyond Nuclear: http://www.beyondnuclear.org/d…

Finally, every media outlet in the state has been covering this issue.  The pro-nuke websites were first claiming that there was no tritium, then that it does not matter, and stating that it had not reached the river.  The DOH website and pictures contradict all that information.