GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





TDW Winter Meeting

January 26, 2008
Frittella Italian Cafe
3901 S. Texas Ave. Bryan
10 a.m.

Brunch is available for a $10 donation but you do not need to eat, Just come
Dr. Rich DeVaul will present Health Care in America and the Candidates positions
Bring a friend





TDW State Convention

February 29 and March 1
Austin, Texas

There will be tons of candidates-maybe all the dems on the March ballot
Go to www.tdw.org to make reservations

Hotel is the Wyndham
Dr. Beth Berigan, past president of our local TDW will receive a Star Award
One more surprise Brazos County woman will receive another Star Award—it’s a secret.





Primary Watching Gathering

February 5, 2008
Margarita Rocks
Anytime you get there

We will start gathering around 6
22 states and America Samoa will have primaries that day





Block Walking will commence in February

Several of you have expressed interest. This will be in North Bryan in our target precincts. This isn’t going to happen without help. There will be money set aside for some paid walkers. We need about 2 dozen people. A lot of tennis shoes on the pavement.





Military-industrial Blues

John Young
Waco Tribune-Herald
Tuesday, January 08, 2008

No truer words have been spoken on the presidential campaign trail than by black-sheep Republican Ron Paul.

“The party has been taken over by neoconservatives, and I don’t believe they’re really conservative.”

True conservatives end wars, Paul says. They don’t start them.

His point is self-evident. Conservatives, we are told, don’t trust government. Nothing trusts government like war — in the current case not only to vanquish foes but to stabilize and rebuild whole nations.

Ironic, then, that Paul’s party has become the endless-war party.

These observances aren’t meant as a Ron Paul endorsement. We don’t need a steel-wheel libertarian like him in the White House, not when we need government that works.

We already have enough hate-government types infesting the very institutions that are supposed to work for us. Under George W. Bush they came to office preaching the Reaganesque “government is the problem.” Then they proved it.

With Katrina and “Mission Accomplished” in the rear-view mirror, Americans should ache for a president who comes to office with the faith that government can serve them.

While our nation tries to stabilize/reconstruct two nations, our own infrastructure is becoming an afterthought. More and more of us have no health insurance.

Our national debt stands at $9.1 trillion, yet the endless-war party continues to treat tax cuts as sacrosanct. It says that actually paying for the military missions we’ve purchased is irresponsible.

When U.S. Rep. David Obey floated a bill by which Congress would not authorize new war spending without a surtax to pay for it, White House spokesman Dana Perino responded that Democrats “are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”

Apparently, the endless-war party will refuse to pay for any speculative military endeavor it wages, no matter how costly.

Back to that national debt. It represents $33,000 per U.S. citizen. But current taxpaying U.S. citizens won’t pay it, thanks to Reaganesque, blue-sky, tax-cut politics. That task will fall upon our heirs.

Meanwhile, we who have harvested so much under the American experiment now see an uncertain future.

We have come to invest so heavily in war and its trappings that our economy has become a one-trick pony. Almost a quarter of every dollar the federal government spends is on the military and homeland security. Because we refuse to pay for all that military might, almost a dime of that federal dollar is spent on interest on the debt.

The discretionary domestic spending against which so many politicians rail? It is but 16 percent of the federal budget.

I wonder if anyone will note the matter when interest on the debt exceeds domestic discretionary spending in the not-distant future. Will anyone say, “We have spent too much on our military”? The Soviet Union did, just before it fell to pieces.

By the way, China had a 2007 trade surplus of $179 billion. The United States had a trade deficit of $862 billion.

We have twin problems: (1) a government propped up on debt; (2) an economy that doesn’t make enough of what the outside world needs, except for arms. Candidates?

John Young’s column appears Thursday, Sunday and occasionally Tuesday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.





Trove of fish fossils in northern Pa.

Scientists looking for links in evolution from sea to shore

By Tom Avril
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, January 06, 2008

NORTH BEND, Pa. -- The guy at the equipment-rental place didn't quite understand at first why Ted Daeschler needed the brute force of an electric demolition hammer.

The 1,400-watt power tool is the sort of thing a contractor uses to break through a concrete wall. But Mr. Daeschler would be using it to dig into an ancient formation of red sandstone in north-central Pennsylvania.

"Is there buried treasure up there?" the salesman asked.

The very next morning, the answer would be yes. But it was a kind of treasure that Mr. Daeschler valued more than jewels or gold.

Inch-long teeth. Armor-like scales. Bony bits of fins and skulls. Evidence of creatures that were buried in sediment 365 million years ago, long before dinosaurs ever rumbled across the landscape.

Mr. Daeschler is a paleontologist at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, and the demolition hammer was a new aid in his career-long quest: to decode a pivotal chapter in the history of life on Earth.

The fossils he seeks are from fish -- but fish on the cusp of an extraordinary transition. Over millions of years their fins began to look more limb-like, their gills less gill-like, and their scales began to melt away.

Sure, dinosaurs are nice, but they represent a small chapter in the rich story of evolution. Just one subset of fish, on the other hand -- the bony critters called Osteichthyes -- eventually gave rise to dinosaurs, modern fish and humans, not to mention every other land animal with a spine.

"Bony fish are a very successful group," says Mr. Daeschler, 48.

Today, through a combination of luck and the inexorable forces of geology, there are just a handful of places in the world where he and other sleuths have found fossils from the early stages of this transition.

One is in Australia, another in Canada. A third is here in northern Pennsylvania, the epicenter of which is Red Hill -- a rocky slope laid bare by an ordinary highway road cut, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

The battering force of the electric hammer was just the thing to open a crack in the Clinton County hillside, as trucks whizzed by 20 feet below on Route 120.

Once they got a crack started, Mr. Daeschler and his colleagues -- postdoctoral fellow Jason Downs and amateur paleontologist Doug Rowe -- switched to chisels and pry-bars.

They removed chunks of rock one by one, throwing most to one side. A few that looked intriguing were placed carefully in a box for the trip back to Mr. Daeschler's lab in Philadelphia, where fossils could be extracted with surgical precision.

The scientists find something almost every time they come to Red Hill, and their trip in mid-November was no exception.

Some rocks contained the clear outlines of ancient plants. Others held bits of extinct fish such as Hyneria lindae, an 8- to 12-foot-long predator with muscular "lobe" fins.

Embedded in several rocks were unusual pebbly scales that the team has seen on previous trips -- the remains, they believe, of a new species. But more bones are needed to see just where the unnamed fish fits in.

Often, the researchers were able to break off flat sections of rock in their hands.

"Like pages in a book," says Mr. Rowe, who lives in nearby Renovo and has helped Mr. Daeschler for years.

"A history book," Mr. Daeschler adds.

About 365 million years before history books, actually. The rocks were from the latter part of the Devonian period, often called the Age of Fishes.

A sense of scale: 365 million is the distance from Philadelphia to San Francisco and back. In inches.

Scientists calculate prehistoric dates by measuring the decay in radioactive elements within the rocks. Volcanic rock, for example, contains an isotope of potassium when it first hardens but that decays steadily into argon over millions of years.

By measuring how much argon has accumulated and how much potassium is left, scientists can construct a sort of chemical clock.

Because some fossils at Red Hill match those from other sites that have been dated with radioisotopes, researchers can get a good idea of the time frame.

Paleontologists first looked for fossils at the roadside site in the 1950s and again in the 1960s, with occasional success. Then, in the early 1990s, highway crews widened the roadbed, cutting away tons of rock and exposing a wealth of fossils.

It was more than enough for Mr. Daeschler to get his Ph.D. in 1998. He has been coming back to Red Hill ever since, often for just a day or two at a time.

Besides Pennsylvania, Mr. Daeschler returns periodically to another rich source of Devonian fossils, the Canadian Arctic. Last year, he and colleagues gained worldwide acclaim for their discovery of a new species there: Tiktaalik roseae, a fish with limb-like fins and a very un-fishlike neck, is a key illustration of the transition from water to land.

Mr. Daeschler became interested in science in grade school in northern New Jersey, especially the hands-on stuff like tracing leaves and looking at algae in water samples.

Three relatives were geologists, so that was a natural direction for him to pursue. As an undergraduate at Franklin & Marshall College, he became especially interested in the ancient history of the landscape and the things that lived in it.

"When you add time to what you see on Earth," he says, "then you're developing this historical narrative of why things are the way they are."

Pennsylvania, conveniently, is a treasure trove. Mr. Daeschler is always on the lookout for more places to dig, as sedimentary deposits from the Devonian period cover the northern part of the state.

For a while, he subscribed to a PennDOT newsletter to keep abreast of new road projects that might expose fossils. Lately, he simply drives around with Mr. Downs, the post-doc, and keeps his eyes open.

Hillsides that have been stripped of trees are a good way to tell where the earth-moving equipment is likely to strike next.

Actual trucks are good, too. Mr. Daeschler copies down the names of contractors from vehicle doors, then calls up the owners later.

And nature is an ally, weathering away the Devonian sandstone little by little. Ice, for example, is a great widener of cracks.

There was no ice when the 12-foot Hyneria and its watery cousins inhabited what is now North America. Most of it was underwater, and Pennsylvania was a swampy, subtropical hothouse.

But the landscape changed, and changed again. It is always changing, even today, so a shrewd fossil-hunter knows to come back every month or two. Did that big slab of rock fall down yet? Has that crack gotten wider?

For Ted Daeschler, that's how the story of the Age of Fishes will be revealed.

First published on January 6, 2008 at 12:00 am





BARRIENTOS WITHDRAWS PRIMARY CHALLENGE TO ZAFFIRINI

Says he will not conduct the heavily negative campaign it would take to win

Statement from Rene' Barrientos Regarding Senate District 21 Campaign

"Today, I have decided to withdraw my candidacy for State Senate District 21.

I originally filed for public office because I strongly believe that our political system has been unduly influenced by special interests, that college costs have made higher education too expensive for middle class families, that teachers lack the funding and resources they need to educate our youth, and that we need universal health care.

I have no doubt that I could mount a highly credible campaign, but to succeed, my recent polling data results indicate that my success would come only through repeated and aggressive attacks on the incumbent and her record.

I do not wish to be involved in a campaign where important social and political issues take a back seat to heated, negative attacks. I just will not do it. There needs to be civility in politics and such a campaign would not be healthy or productive for this district or the Democratic Party.

The focus should rather be on the issues that can improve the lives of working families and middle class families in the 21st District.

This campaign would cost significant funds that I feel could be better used elsewhere. I intend to continue to give significant support to the Democratic National Committee, support my Democratic friends like John Edwards and Henry Cuellar and to do my part to help the Democratic party both locally and nationally."

René R. Barrientos

Copyright January 9, 2008 by Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America