The nationally known charity Dogs Deserve Better, headquartered in Tipton, Pa., completed a 12-state tour of the southern states, including North Carolina. They had been inundated with calls for help to visit and videotape some of the many areas in our state with chained, lonely and forgotten dogs. They were amazed at the number of even very small breeds, helpless and frightened at the ends of chains! Please visit the “DDB Visits North Carolina” link at http://www.geocities.com/lgleming/adm/tailofwoe to see some of the heartbreaking stories and pictures and a video of dogs that need our help. The Web site offers more information, as well as a sample letter to legislators.

Dogs should not have to live their entire lives chained or penned like prisoners. Every winter, [dogs] are found frozen to death, while during warmer months they may be left to starve, dehydrate or be eaten alive by fleas. Cities, counties and states (more than 100 ordinances in more than 30 states) have passed laws regulating chaining and penning or banning them altogether. In Hanover, N.C., the chaining of dogs is completely banned.

[Xpress should] consider covering the story of forgotten dogs of North Carolina (many of which live in Asheville and Buncombe County, since neither city nor county currently has an anti-tethering ordinance) to help alert readers to much-needed legislation, as well as what they can do to help chain/penned and forgotten “backyard” dogs.

— Lisa G. Leming
Asheville

Boiled-frog syndrome: That’s where the frog, when it’s put into cold water, seems quite nonchalant as the water heats up to an intolerable degree. When the temperature finally hits 212 F, the frog dies. It’s a metaphor, of course—for us. We have been heating up our world without acknowledging the symptoms, and through denial have planned our own obsolescence.

Over the top? I hope you’re right, but according to too many scientists, we have a very small time frame in which to keep the metaphorical water from boiling. What do we do about it? It’s obvious from President Bush’s latest speech that we will get no help there. But we are in an election year, and that’s a good thing. We can educate ourselves about climate change/global warming, realize that this is priority number one and make sure we vote for as many pro-environmental legislators as possible.

How to start? Mark Lynas has written a compelling book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet [Random House, 2008]. Scientists predict a rise of temperature between one and six degrees over the next century. Each chapter in the book represents an additional degree of warming, and shows us how, when and where life will change. It’s a sobering and chilling book. I now think very differently about each day: How can I lessen my carbon footprint?

Here are some good Web sites for continuing information: http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org, http://www.moveon.org, http://www.wecansolveit.org. The League of Conservation voters (http://www.LCV.org) has a great, easy-to-read National Environmental Scorecard. Take it with you to the voting booth; pick the candidates with the best environmental scores. And, oh yes (nag, nag, nag)—read Chapter 3 of Six Degrees and then think about whether you really need to take that car out again.

— Parrish Rhodes
Asheville

On Dec. 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein was executed for having ordered the suppression of rebellious Kurds in Iraq. That campaign left 180,000 Kurds missing and presumed dead. But an illuminating confession revealed that Hussein said no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] were left after 1991.

Ronald Kessler (The New York Times) interviewed George Piro—the last confidante of Hussein before his execution. Piro was the perfect man for the job. An Arabic speaker born in Beirut, he came to the United States at [12], served in the military, became a police detective, and joined the FBI in 1999.

Being a subject-matter expert, Piro was given the special mission of debriefing Hussein before his execution. Piro became Hussein’s best and only friend for eight months. He wanted to find out Hussein’s thoughts on the initial invasion, the ordering of 300,000 people killed, and WMDs.

Piro found out that Hussein did indeed order the use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja. Hussein [also] confided why he actually had no usable WMDs but pretended he did: Because of Iran’s war of attrition with Iraq, Hussein always felt Iran was a threat. If Iran thought he had serious WMDs, they would be reluctant to attack Iraq, [but] Iran would only believe it if the U.S. thought it was true. So whenever the inspectors visited, Hussein gave them the runaround and acted like he still had WMDs.

The Clinton administration warned profusely of Hussein’s WMDs. [Given] Hussein’s WMD history, Putin’s pronouncement that Hussein had WMDs, Hussein’s 14,000-page “lie” to the United Nations, Hussein’s attempts to shoot down allied aircraft in the no-fly zone and his total disregard for 14 U.N. resolutions, Bush made the correct decision to depose Hussein—not attack Iraq.

Intriguingly, Hussein confided to Piro aspirations to develop nuclear capability in an incremental fashion. From payoffs to key officials, Hussein believed sanctions would be lifted within a year or so, and he could then recreate Iraq’s WMD capability. ... It seems [that] Condoleeza Rice’s words about being too late if you see the mushroom cloud were omniscient. ...

Hussein could have shipped many of his WMDs to neighboring terrorist states like Syria before things became dicey, [thus] having no WMDs at the moment of the U.S. incursion. Likely, many of Hussein’s secrets died with him.

— Kevin Roeten
Asheville

Is Fairview sure that a toxic invasion [that would] severely compromise the quality of our wells and drinking water is not about to happen? Golf courses are water-guzzling, chemical-leaching properties. Right now, deforestation for Phase I of the Tiger Woods golf course for The Cliffs [at High Carolina] has begun—to the bare ground—and we have not been given a clear plan of what is to come next. Shouldn’t the developer realize that the residents below this golf course are concerned about contamination of our life-giving wells and soil?

The developer of the Battlefield Golf Course in Chesapeake, Va., which opened to the public last year, used fly ash as a base. Well water was supposed to be monitored and a number of other “controls” instituted, although few were implemented. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently re-evaluating the use of fly ash as fill, since groundwater tests have indicated that unacceptably high levels of arsenic leach into the ground water. Arsenic is one of a number of heavy metals found in fly ash. It is linked to cancer, according to the EPA. Do we know whether The Cliffs intends to use fly ash? Considered to be a “coal combustion byproduct,” the [substance] would [essentially] make the area an industrial-waste landfill.

Seven years ago, homeowners near the golf course knew fly ash posed a threat to water quality and voiced their concerns to developers in community meetings. Today—and before Phase II—we ask that the developer communicate to us the plan for the golf course. Will safe, organic matter be used? Can they buffer Rocky Fork spring? Will they consider creating a truly nontoxic golf course, if only for the good public relations it would generate? Frankly, the county’s approval of the golf course should have come with a long list of conditions, especially about water. There were conditions attached to development of the Battlefield Golf Course, including receiving a new well if one runs dry or shows signs of contamination, and twice-a-year groundwater tests by the developers to make sure drinking water is safe for neighboring communities. At the very least, these conditions should be applied to The Cliffs’ golf course.

Speak-up Fairview! E-mail your concerns about our wells to our commissioners. At the forum held on April 16 at the Fairview Community Center, they assured me they will work to ensure the safety of our water source. Speak up. I can’t do it alone!

— Francois Manavit
Fairview

Daniel Brazinski, Vice President of Golf Maintenance for The Cliffs Communities, Inc., responds: Since the opening of our first golf course in 1993, The Cliffs Communities have never used fly ash. Studies have shown that the groundwater that runs through a properly maintained golf course can actually emerge cleaner than it was before entering the course. At The Cliffs, we have a commitment to leading by example in environmental practices. In addition to exercising green development and maintenance practices that go well beyond what is required by law, we have also invested significant resources, in cooperation with Clemson University, in developing The Cliffs Center for Environmental Golf Research, an industry-leading turfgrass research facility. The goal of [center] is to create the most environmentally friendly golf courses. We are the first in the country to embark on such a project and intend for all of The Cliffs’ golf courses—including the Tiger Woods design at The Cliffs at High Carolina—to benefit from the best practices already in place through our program, and to incorporate the emerging data from our research that can to help us develop the next generation of green golf courses in America.

Some in the media call it a split decision, but on the whole, May 6 was a win for the Obama campaign. Obama won the considerably bigger state by the considerably bigger (14 percentage points) margin, outperforming the polling that had suggested a Clinton surge and compiling a net gain of about 13 pledged delegates.

Since the Iowa primary, there has been this huge story that everyone could see coming like a ripening fruit hanging low in American springtime, [but] few have been willing to write what has now become clear: In the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, has defeated the inevitable Hillary Clinton. It is one of the greatest upsets in the history of the Democratic Party. ... More uncommitted superdelegates are [now] up for grabs than total of the remaining pledged delegates in the states yet to vote. The ground war of this nomination race is over.

With the guilt-by-association argument played out, only the big-state argument is left. This is where the Clinton campaign says that her wins in California and New York primaries show that she is the stronger candidate against McCain. That argument may fly on the street, but it will never work with the well-informed party insiders ... . The superdelegates understand that those big states aren’t up for grabs in 2008. Hillary is saying that only she can win California? Dennis Kucinich could beat John McCain in California and New York this year.

With so few states left to vote, the only remaining path to the nomination for Clinton involves the so-called nuclear option, which is a cocktail of Obama character assassination and an insistence on changing the rules to include the votes in the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries. That path involves mutually assured destruction and a generational setback for the Democratic Party. ...

Whether Hillary Clinton’s coming exit from the race is graceful or not, focus must turn to the general-election contest that now finally begins to take form. In Raleigh, Obama said of that coming contest: “The question is not what kind of campaign they will run; it’s what kind of campaign we will run.” Obama is calling his supporters, many of them new voters, to a new kind of campaign—and to this point, they have responded.

— Chris Busby
Asheville