Month: September 2013

Climate Smart Southwest: Are YOU Ready for Climate Change?

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Climate-smart-southwest-logoby Pamela Powers Hannley

Is it hot enough for ya?

In the coming years, as temperatures rise, weather patterns evolve, and plant and animal species become extinct, that wry, old country greeting will lose it’s quaint humor. Thanks to global warming.

The Southwest is already the hottest and driest part of the US. And our region is already experiencing longer and more intense heat waves, a dramatic spike in forest fires and severe dust storms, and changes in rainfall and seasonal snowmelt. These changes threaten water resources, food security, and public health.  As extreme weather events continue to increase, we will see higher rates of heat stress, newly emerging infectious diseases, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses.

How will the Sonoran Desert change as climate change progresses? Will we have enough water? What will our air quality be like if Arizona’s dirty coal-fired power plants continue to balk at environmental regulations?  How will Arizona cope with rolling brown outs if electrical demand spikes? How will Tucson’s vulnerable populations fare with more days over 100 degrees? What can we do NOW to lessen the impact of climate change on our fragile environment?

This coming weekend, Sept. 20-21, the Arizona Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is sponsoring an important conference for us desert dwellers:Climate Smart Southwest, Ready or Hot? Check out the details after the jump.

Common Core: Strange bedfellows edition

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by David Safier I don't often see eye to eye with the conservative blog, Seeing Red AZ. Actually, we don't see eye to eye this time either. But we both wrote about Huppenthal's attempt to rename Common Core — he's decided on “Arizona College and Career Ready Standards" — with the same level of disdain. … Read more

Oh, SNAP! The GOP War on the Poor vote is Thursday

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The House is expected to pass a Tea-Publican bill Thursday night that would reduce spending for food stamps by $39 billion over 10 years, according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office. The Washington Post reports, House to vote on deep cuts to food-stamp program:

The GOP measure would slash about $39 billion over the next decade for food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is providing an average of $133 in monthly aid to more than 47 million Americans, according to a recent government report.
The proposal differs sharply from a Senate plan passed this summer that
would cut roughly $4.5 billion in SNAP money mostly by reducing
administrative expenses.

Thursday’s vote will be a key test for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor
(R-Va.), who abandoned four decades of congressional tradition this
summer by splitting apart the farm bill to consider the nutrition
funding separately. In July, the House narrowly approved a package
that includes about $195 billion in crop subsidies over the next 10
years; that legislation proposes a wholesale overhaul for many
agricultural and conservation programs and an end to direct payments to
farmers.

The agriculture part of the plan mirrors provisions in a Senate farm bill passed in June.

Idolatrous gun worship now the official state religion of Arizona

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

This is going to lead to wailing and the gnashing of teeth by the idolatrous gun worshipers and fetishists. The day before their idolatrous religion became the legislature-sanctioned official state religion of Arizona, the Phoenix police department destroyed almost 2,000 holy relics unwanted firearms. Oh the horrors! Phoenix destroys 2,000 guns before ban:

False IdolsThe goal of the popular gun buybacks held last spring in Phoenix was
clear: purchase and destroy as many unwanted weapons as possible before a
new state law requiring police to sell firearms instead of melting them
down took effect.

The program collected nearly 2,000 weapons, and Phoenix police worked
nearly 175 hours of overtime — at a cost of about $10,000 — to ensure
the guns were destroyed before the law kicked in last Friday.

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“I’m very happy we were able to get these destroyed before the law took
effect,” said Hildy Saizow, president of Arizonans for Gun Safety.. “That’s what we promised the public, and no matter
what the Legislature did, we needed to meet that objective.”

AIRC Update: Are Nixon’s Plumbers back in business?

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I don't know . . . the cops may want to interview G. Gordon Liddy to see if he alibis out. This sounds an awful lot like Nixon's White House Plumbers. I wouldn't put anything past the Tea-Publican operatives who are behind the effort to destroy the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC). Thieves steal computers from redistricting panel:

Burglars hit the offices of the Arizona Independent Redistricting
Commission over the weekend, stealing portable computers, paperwork and a
staffer’s personal effects.

Ray Bladine, the commission’s executive director, said staffers
discovered the burglary Monday morning, when they arrived at work. The
burglar or burglars entered through a ground-floor sash window on the
north side of the commission’s office, which is in a 120-year-old Queen
Anne-style building. An alarm system apparently did not work.

“Some of the files were turned over on the floor,” Bladine said. “All of the portable computers but one were stolen.”

He said he didn’t suspect any political motivation for the break-in,
although the commission has been at the center of heated partisan debate
for more than two years and is the subject of three ongoing lawsuits
challenging the new political boundaries it drew for Congress and the
Legislature. The state Department of Public Safety’s major-crimes unit
is investigating.