HR 2082 passed the house of representatives 225 to 197.  This is a good, because it outlaws domestic wiretapping outside of FISA (you know, in accordance with the law).

Everybody knows the honeybee.  Its familiar yellow and black body can be found in nearly every corner the globe.  Its famous product, honey--the original sweetener--has been cultivated for millennia.  Nearly everyone I know has been stung by one (ouch!).  And beeswax is the original candle.  Lastly, and most importantly, it is an integral part of agriculture.  Without the honeybee, there would be no fruits, vegetables, and grain.

The honeybee is the premier pollinator of choice in the Unite States.  It will fly year round and is less picky than other bee species about it pollen and nectar sources.  Each hive comes packed with tens of thousands of bees (65,000 on average), each of whom is capable of pollinating tens of thousands of flowers.

Best of all, hives are easy to manage and easy to propagate.  What's not to like about the world's most famous domesticated insect?

Last time, I talked about how global warming is going to affect our pollinators, and alter our food supply.  Not only are water resources going to shift as average temperatures increase, but also the life cycles of our pollinators are going to change dramatically.

To understand how and what that will mean for our farmers, it's important to know about the insects themselves.  

In this part of the series, I'm going to talk about mason bees.  This gentile gentle pollinator is a new favorite of orchard farmers, owing to their extremely efficient pollination of fruit trees.

Bees, to be specific.

Did you know that everything you eat is dependent on a tiny insect that you seldom see?  And that global warming is threatening their very existence?

I should know, I keep mason bees as a hobby.  Last year, they all died.

You were probably thinking of honeybees, but the number of honeybee hives is declining the US for two reasons. One, the global price of honey plummeted in recent years, driving many US apiarists out of the the business.  And two, the varroa mite is devastating the remaining hives.  The fewer the honeybees, the more reliant we are going to be on alternative pollinators.

But global warming threatens mason bees, and other native pollinators.  Whence go the bees, so goes our food.

Religion are Politics are intertwined ( whether we like it or not) hence the reason why A Rational Being's recent diary, entitled There is No God (And You Know It), stirred the pot here at Daily Kos.  It made it to the top of the recommended this by 10:12 today with over 500 comments.

It's hardly surprising, of course, as the topic of religion enflames our passions and drives rational and irrational people into flurries of convoluted logic.

Many of the comments were supportive of the diary entry (a link to another article by Sam Harris), few posts were neutral, many people felt that their faith was under attack, and still others shared personal, moving tales of their own exploration of the divine.

Few people at all had a clear understand of what atheism is, though, so on the flip I want to elucidate the definition for the dKos community.

On "Marketplace,"  an NPR program thttp://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/donordemographics.asp?cycle=2002hat is carried by KQED San Francisco, I heard a listener's comments on a prior piece.  I didn't hear the original piece, but the gist of it was that Republicans should stop whining about 527's and embrace them if they want to be a party of the people, by the people.

The listener's reply was that, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, the stats for 2002 show that the Republicans were in fact the party of the people, since they pulled in more small donations, and Democrats dominated the big donations categories.  All told, the Republicans took in more individual donations, thus QED, 527's circumvent the normal democratic process and don't reflect "Party of the People"-ness.

I went to their website, and tried to find the relevant documentation, and I presume that the listener had seen this URL.  Clearly, according to this website, the Republicans pulled in more donations 303k to the Democrats 211k.  Yet, according to this website, this resulted in $384M for Republicans, and $351M for Democrats, a difference of a mere $33M.

Arguably, that's a lot of money.  But what I want to know is, what gives?  Why do Republicans, who putatively pull in more corporate donations, also pull in more individual donations as well?  By almost 100k (which seems to equate to $33M)?

Secondly, if you go to this URL you can see the break-down on top indivual doners for 2002.  The Dems clearly come out on top, as the listener correctly noted.  

I'm still not convinced that the Republicans are the party of the people.  I don't know if donation stats are the only way to judge this metric. That said, perhaps there is something populist about the Republicans, and that should worry Democrats.

That all said, the listener failed to mention this URL, the total fundraising showing that overall the Republicans pulled in $442M to the Democrats $217M.  That's certainly double the amount of money for a party that I cited above only leads by a factor of 1.5 in the small donation arena.

What do you all think about this?