Eartha Melzer

Features Eartha Melzer “How many people do you have to kill before you no longer qualify as pro-life?” read a homemade sign carried by one young man.
“Stop depleting my dating pool,” read another carried by a young woman who wanted to draw attention to the U.S. military’s death toll in Iraq -- now approaching 950.
Traverse City has always been known as a Republican stronghold, but last Monday -- in what local historian Larry Wakefield termed the largest demonstration in the city’s history -- over 1,000 people gathered to protest a campaign appearance by George W. Bush.
Captain Morgan of the Traverse City Police Department estimated the crowd of demonstrators at between 1,000 and 1,500.

Region Watch Eartha Melzer There was a pony-tailed man with a pinwheel among the crowd gathered to support multiple sclerosis sufferer and medicinal marijuana user Matthew Barber at the court house on Tuesday, July 6. But there was also a former magistrate, a kindergarten teacher and a retired cop at the rally. And no tie-dye in sight.

Features Eartha Melzer At the age of 29, Matthew Barber, a disabled Gulf War vet, was diagnosed with terminal multiple sclerosis. He became paralyzed, lost his memory, and experienced extreme pain from lesions on his brain.
Barber tried all conventional treatments, with no improvement. Medical bills cost Matthew and his wife Laura everything they owned, and Laura had to quit her job to take care of him.

Other Opinions Eartha Melzer A strange thing happened when I called the Pentagon the other day.
Yes, I called the Pentagon. I had just read an article in Fortune magazine which discussed a Pentagon report that predicted catastrophic climate change would
threaten national security soon. A couple of papers had done stories on the Fortune article, but I wanted to read the whole report, so I e-mailed the reporter
for Fortune and he gave me the name of the guy at the
Pentagon who‘d given him the report.

Features Eartha Melzer A police decal on your car may cause an officer to be lenient on moving violations (which normally run $65 $115 dollars), said a state trooper at the post in Traverse City, though he claimed to not pay much attention to the stickers himself.

Features Eartha Melzer Almost no one is neutral in a small town. In Petoskey where the town‘s largest employer, Northern Michigan Hospital, is the site of the nation‘s longest nursing
strike, the mayor‘s business partner is on the hospital board and the chief of police‘s wife is a strikebreaking nurse.

Features Eartha Melzer Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror it‘s not often that the benefits of marijuana make the news. In an effort to get this message out people in hundreds of cities participated in a Global March for Cannabis Liberation on May 3. Jeff
Fillmore is an organizer with the Michigan Cannabis Action Network (MCAN) which sponsored the Millennium Marijuana March in Traverse City.

Music Eartha Melzer College instructor Craig Swanson recently completed a Master‘s
thesis/book entitled “The Heavy Side of Metal: Metallica‘s Counter-Hegemonic Trilogy.“

Features Eartha Melzer Some 58 million Americans are overweight according to the
The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and
Kidney Diseases, a branch of National Institute of
Health. Obesity-related illnesses are the second
leading cause of premature death in this country.
Despite this health crisis there are limited resources
to help people develop healthy relationships with
food.

Features Eartha Melzer A bluegrass band plays the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies inside a festival tent adorned with red, white and blue balloons. Hundreds of people wait in line in front of a sumptuous catered buffet. It could be a county fair, a wedding, some public fest, but something is odd about this event. Everyone is a winner at carnival games which are staffed by Cub Scouts imported from two counties away. A glossy poster of the hydrologic cycle hangs over the food at the back of the tent. This is the grand opening of the Ice Mountain water bottling plant in Stanwood, Michigan, and the Nestle corporation is buying everyone lunch.

Features Eartha Melzer John Tanton was able to express some extreme views during his career as an
opthamologist in Petoskey because, he says, even if his patients didn‘t
like his views they weren‘t likely to change doctors. The next eye surgeon was hundreds
of miles away.
So the nature-loving small town doctor developed an extremely active
political life. He became a committed environmentalist and used his education and
organizational skills to protect virgin forest in the U.P. and to establish
the Little Traverse Land Conservancy and the Michigan Environmental Defense
Fund.
His work to protect Michigan‘s environment has been immense, but this
guy is not your average tree hugger. He has bigger, national reputation
for a very different type of social activism. In a book recently featured in the
Express on April 4 (1) Tanton says that an “instinctive territorialism“ has driven
him to protect the “national culture“ from the threat of fertile immigrant women.