Action needed by Monday August 11. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division Of Forestry periodically issues a Bid Prospectus announcing State Forest timber for sale. A July 14, 2008 Bid Prospectus calls for bids on 727,686 board feet International ¼ of hardwood sawtimber and 2008 tons of hardwood pulpwood stumpage located on 89 acres in the Shawnee State Forest. The bid opening is to be Wednesday, August 13, 2008 ay 3:00 p.m.

Among the trees to be cut are included 353 White Oak trees, 374 Black Oak trees, and 537 Scarlet Oak trees. 704 of these trees will be 20” average diameter at breast height (dbh). This bid contains 5 cutting sections and “All sections shall be clearcut for natural regeneration…The purchaser shall make reasonable efforts to leave large snags standing in all cutting sections.”

According to a recent call for action issued by Cheryl Carpenter founder of Voices For the Forest “Shawnee's Day Trail is ranked the 19th best trail in Ohio by Trails.com. The Trails.com team has traveled and explored the outdoors all over North America and internationally in Europe, Asia, and Africa and has received numerous prestigious awards.”

Dear Dr. Barnard,

In the early 1990s, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed a very flawed study funded by Monsanto, the sole manufacturer of the genetically engineered bovine growth-hormone rBGH.  If you want to know just how flawed that study actually was, read the detailed reports from the University of Vermont.  It is clear from their report they feel pretty bad about being duped into complicity with Monsanto and how such a flawed study could be used to support a product causing such clear problems in animals -- over 15 different problems in fact -- from increased rates of painful mastitis (and subsequent overuse of antibiotics to control it, thereby contributing to the ever increasing problem of human antibiotic resistance), to higher rates of teratogenic defects in offspring of injected cows.  Better still, read any of the reports from the scientists of the European Union who unanimously rejected the use of rBGH due to concerns over exactly these animal health concerns, as well as a growing body of human health concerns.  

The ever-weakening economy is driving millions of Americans into the ranks of the country’s highly exploited part-time workers.

Part-timers, generally paid less than full-timers, granted fewer benefits and otherwise treated as second-class workers, have long been a significant part of the workforce. Combined with temporary workers, they’ve made up almost one-fourth of the workforce in some recent years.

Many of the part-timers are women, most of them working to help support their families. Many have no choice but to take part-time jobs because full-time jobs or facilities where they can leave their children for care throughout the workday are not available.

But whether or not they would prefer full-time jobs, all the workers obviously would prefer to be raised from their second-class status. In many places, for instance, part-timers are paid less than full-time workers doing exactly the same jobs. And fewer than half of the part-timers have employer-paid health insurance or pensions.

Most of the part-timers have very little protection from the arbitrary actions of employers, through unions or otherwise. They have very little job

(Manassas, Virginia) The following is a statement by Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, regarding the White House projection of a $482 Billion deficit for Fiscal Year 2009:

The White House has issued figures indicating that President Bush and his enablers in Congress will leave his successor with a budget deficit of $482 Billion for Fiscal Year 2009, which is a record. How’s that for a legacy?

As shocking as this deficit figure is, that’s still not the true scope of our budget woes because it excludes $80 Billion in war costs and $227 Billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund.

The real budget deficit is therefore $789 Billion.

Under accounting trickery that would probably land the top officers of a publicly traded company in jail, the money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund--and spent on anything and everything except Social Security payments--is not counted towards the budget deficit, although it is part of our $9.49 Trillion National Debt.

It's way past time for Washington politicians to have their own Sarbanes-Oxley.

"Health care." In media and politics, the phrase has become a cliche that easily slides into rhetoric and wonkery. The tweaking Washington debate runs parallel to the bottom line of corporate health care. While government officials talk, the principle of health care as a human right goes begging.

Routinely, two contexts -- the macro and the personal -- obscure each other. Numbers may represent people, but people are anything but numbers. Paper, computer screens, claim forms and spreadsheets keep flattening humanity into commodity. But, of course, no one you love can ever be understood as a statistic.

What’s in place is a profit-driven system of health care with devastating effects on human beings. Even the most illuminating stats tend to become glib, abstracting calibration of damage to lives in the United States, where at any moment 47 million people are uninsured and another 50 million are badly under-insured.

In the presidential race, with "health care" a frequent topic, John McCain offers more capitulation to the insurance industry. Speaking in the usual GOP terms, he calls for "ridding the market of both needless and