update: title changed from Stop GOP Oil Mania:National Monument Designation Could Save Ecosystem

A coral ecosystem exists off the southeast coast that is roughly the size of the land area of South Carolina.  

Economically, that ecosystem:

1. Provides food for Millions of Americans

2. Protects our coasts from Hurricanes and Nor'easters(like a winter Hurricane)

3. Protects our ports like Savannah, Wilmington, Morehead City (supports a Marine base) and the nation's most important Hampton Roads where the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay guarding Norfolk Navy Yards, Portsmouth, Newport News and Baltimore.  (Newport News is where the large Navy ships are built like Air Craft carriers)

4. Provides Millions of jobs to American by providing fisheries, deep water ports (including the US Navy's biggest base), tourism nand forestry (much of the USA's pulp wood is grown in the coastal Southeast).

Why even worry about protecting something so important to the well being of the United States of America.  Surely NO USA CITIZEN would threaten such a valuable National Treasure.

This is my first Diary...so forgive if I make rookie moves, also forgive that it will not be a long entry.

A story in the New York Times today highlights efforts at the community level in Baltimore to forestall foreclosures in the East Baltimore neighborhood of Belair-Edison.

As home foreclosure rates rise around the country, they appear to have stabilized or dropped in one neighborhood here, Belair-Edison, providing a model that local housing officials say can be copied in other areas.

For much of the decade, Belair-Edison, a lower- and middle-income neighborhood on the edge of East Baltimore, has had one of the city’s highest foreclosure rates. From 1993 to 2003, one in three homeowners in the neighborhood lost their homes.

But since those peak years, foreclosures have fallen by more than a third, a development that Thomas E. Perez, Maryland’s secretary of labor, licensing and regulation, says can be largely credited to Mr. Miller’s group, the Belair-Edison Neighborhood Initiative, which uses public records and street level marketing to reach high-risk borrowers before they fall too far behind.

I am writing this story from the airport, as I am about to fly to Boston for work, so I won't be able to respond, but I wanted to share a little story that happened to me on the way in to the airport.

On primary day in Maryland, here's some interesting news coming out of Baltimore, with some interesting video.

There are going to be an uncountable amount of diaries about the Potomac primaries today, but I thought I’d make mine more fun by adding some pictures.

Following is my experience voting today in Severna Park, MD

I live in a suburb of Baltimore saw an ad aired during CSI.

I don't watch a lot of network television but I think the ad was dead-on.

I just returned from a holiday visit to my parents and other assorted family members in Baltimore.

These trips are precious to me because my mom and dad are 77 and 85, respectively, and although still in reasonably good health, seem to not be getting any younger. The trips also represent precious opportunities for quality time with my brother's only child, my nine year old niece, Christina.

Christina has been getting into movie musicals lately. My mom has been showing her classics like My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Singin' in the Rain.  She loved the singing and dancing and Deborah Kerr's "big dresses" in The King and I, but she hated it when [SPOILER ALERT!] the King died at the end. "I like it better when they get married," she explained. But far above the rest, as far as Christina is concerned, is the musical adaptation of the John Waters classic "Hairspray," a gift we watched  five times together in as many days. After the first viewing she exclaimed, "I love this movie! If I could I would watch this movie every day for the rest of my life UNTIL I DIE!"

Watching it with her four more times in recent days, I found myself trying to sort out exactly what it was about this picture that was pushing her buttons so effectively.

Announcing MayorTV!
In today's presidential campaign, America is all heartland -- tractor pulls, county fairs, town halls and truck stops. Candidates scramble for photo ops in plaid, stump in wheat fields and scarf down corn dogs. Our country, it seems, is all country.

Yet we are an urban nation. More than 80% of Americans live in cities. Urbanites drive 90% of our economy. In pandering to rural voters, presidential candidates ignore the bread and butter issues that most Americans deal with every day -- housing, transportation, infrastructure, crime, education.

The announcement press conference will be held at Camden Yards (gate F) tomorrow at 10:30 AM.  We will leave from the press conference directly to Ocean City for the Step Up to Living Wages Tour.  The tour concludes with a protest demanding that the cleaners at Camden Yards be included in Maryland's living wage legacy.  More info: http://UnitedWorkers.org

Check out the latest news stories:

You are a cleaner at Camden Yards, a publicly owned baseball stadium. You will work all night - but first you must arrive at least 2 hours before your scheduled time. You get in line and wait.  When a shift is assigned to you, a barcoded wristband is attached to you and you are loaded onto a van.  

The loaded van waits with you and the rest of the crew waiting.  Others are still waiting in the temp agency lobby, in limbo and hoping for a job tonight.  Nobody is on the clock yet, this all unpaid wait time.  Unpaid, but required to wait - if you leave you will be taken off the shift and most likely blacklisted. The unlucky will be sent home, but must wait and lose out on finding another job someplace else.  You are all required to wait, either with your barcoded wristband or with any word.  You wait in the van or in the lobby.  You unpaid for up to two hours for each game you work.

What's in a job title?  In the past week two reporters have written stories that included me as an example of Americans moving to Canada.  In both I am a 34-year old "labour organizer."  But that is not what I told either, and it is not what I wrote in my follow up brief to either and it is not my job description.  Sure, I organize labour, but I am first and foremost a "human rights organizer." I work with human rights organizations, that are part of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. We focus on human rights for a reason, and call ourselves and our groups human rights organizations for the same reason. So what's in a name, and why does it matter so much that reporters get this right?

Today the Balitmore Sun reported on the struggle for living wages at Camden Yards:

For three years, the group representing workers who clean up plastic cups, peanut shells, spilled beer and hot dogs at Oriole Park at Camden Yards has been fighting for higher wages and better working conditions.

There’s a woman in Baltimore who’s dedication and devotion to people she’s never met is nothing short of awe-inspiring.  She’s raised over $10,000 to help people in refugee camps in and around Darfur – and she’s done it $5 at a time...

It all began a year ago when Patricia Crawford read a newspaper story about Darfur.

"There was an article in The New York Times last May around Memorial Day, and it was talking about how the camp was in danger of shutting down due to lack of funds," Crawford said. "So I was like, 'This can't happen.' I then tried to kind of surf my way through [the Web] to figure out who was involved and how I could get involved some way."

Crawford contacted Relief International, which runs the clinic, to find out how she could make a difference and ended up helping herself, too.

Make the jump...

I love reading good news in the morning. The largest port in proximity to Washington DC has been all but forgotten by the President's Department of Homeland Security.

Designated a second-tier port by the Department of Homeland Security, Baltimore will get $1.9 million, a cut of 60 percent from the current year, according to members of the Maryland congressional delegation and a Homeland Security official.

Baltimore ranked 33rd in the latest round of port grants, according to government figures to be made public today. All eight Tier I port areas, such as the New York/New Jersey port, which received $27.3 million, got much larger grants, as did most other Tier II port areas, such as Pittsburgh and Hampton Roads, Va., and several lower-risk Tier III ports, including San Juan, Puerto Rico, which received $4.7 million.

Yeah, the Bush administration doing a bad job at keeping us safe, nothing new right?  The more important issue here is the motivation behind the cuts.

Every person will have his/her own list of qualities needed for the best place to live. Here’s mine: Kooky, Affordable, Progressive, Urbane with Transportation, also known by city planners as the highly transitional KAPUT neighborhood. Okay, I fudged that a little when I realized if I had a K instead of a D, I could spell a clever acronym, but it is true that nearly every wonderful place I have lived started out lowly, had its zenith and then became wildly popular, overpriced, and again went kaput, at least by my standards. Diversity (the lost D) is an important aspect of my best place to live so I include that in kooky, as I’m afraid there are large segments of the population that still find diversity to be a frighteningly kooky concept. Kooky also implies unique. When surrounded by Walmarts and fast-food chains, it all begins to look the same to me. Urbane is not necessarily urban, but a certain amount of street smarts and savvy that respects diversity.

I hope some of you will comment on the best place you ever lived, or still do, as there may be one more move in my future.

Hello everyone, given the fact that most of the political news lately has been about scandal and lies and all of the negative crap that can go on in politics today, I thought I would bring to you a local ray of hope.  Follow me below the fold please.

The ever increasing evidence of voting machine fraud, coupled with the recent firing of US Attorneys, leads me to believe that it's time for Mr William Keisling to follow-up on his book 'The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna'. Luna was the US Attorney from Baltimore when he was murdered in December 2003. Hopefully, a list of coincidences will give Mr Keisling a push.