Elana Schor at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that the economic recovery package being considered in the House of Representatives gives “only $10 billion for rail and other public transportation projects, compared with $30 billion for roads.” The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering even less for mass transit projects: $9.5 billion. In a package projected to cost $825 billion, in a nation where public transit has been shortchanged for over a decade, that just ain’t enough. The U.S. spends about $12 billion each month in Iraq. Ten billion is as much as has been given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each) in the $700 billion bailout for banks and insurers—and only one-fifth of what Citigroup is getting.
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Mark Davis: “We don’t really have a coastal restoration program . . .”
Our name is Levees but we dig wetlands too because Louisiana needs a Multiple Lines of Defense Strategy. That’s why we urge everyone to read Mark Davis’s Times-Picayune op-ed, “Rebuilding Coast Requires Hard Choices” (full text after the jump). Davis, founding director of Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and former director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, is responding to some bad news reported by Mark Schleifstein: A federal-state task force has “voted to close the West Bay diversion on the Mississippi River—the most effective existing sediment diversion in fighting coastal erosion—unless an alternative source of money is found to pay for dredging sediment from anchorages [essentially parking spots for boats].”
Yes We Can Get Out the Vote
This weekend we drove in a carload of Obama volunteers from Brooklyn to North Philadelphia—to the Germantown section of North Philly, to be precise. (McCain is pushing hard to win Pennsylvania.) When we arrived, there were about 100 other volunteers from New York—where Obama’s victory is assured—being coached by a bright and energetic field organizer named Kimeka Campbell. Kimeka runs a tight ship in North Philly, and Obama-Biden’s is the most efficient operation we’ve ever seen.
Calm Down: First He Has to Win
In our last post we urged our readers to keep the pressure on Barack Obama about his commitment to ending the war. We don’t take that back, but we want everyone to read “Playing Down the Middle” by Bill Boyarsky, a former editor for the Los Angeles Times and a lecturer in journalism at USC. Like any Democratic candidate, no matter how special, Obama has to move to the center to win the White House. FDR’s liberal supporters were often disappointed by his playing the middle, but Roosevelt understood that “I cannot go any faster than the people will let me go,” as he once said to Upton Sinclair. And we’ve never met a Democrat who holds a grudge against FDR for having compromised when he had to. Read what Boyarsky has to say. Maybe, just maybe, Obama knows what he’s doing.
Hillary’s Assassination Dream: ‘An X-ray of a Very Dark Soul’
Through this long primary campaign season we have not had much to say about Hillary Clinton, but after her RFK assassination remarks to the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader, we cannot stay silent. This is an outrage. It is sickening—especially as the 40th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination approaches—and to say this just days after the announcement of Senator Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor? There is no excuse for this kind of talk. This is not the first time she has invoked the spectre of assassination. Her meaning is not being misconstrued or ‘taken out of context’: It’s very plain: She is cold-bloodedly anticipating that ‘something might happen,’ and if it does, she’ll be around to pick up the nomination.
Armies of Compassion Aim for New Orleans – City to Host North American Summit in April – Democrats, Show America ‘We Are All Orleanians’
We couldn’t bear to listen to the president’s State of the Union Speech Monday night, but we were happy to find this in the transcript:
Edwards, Fix Your Focus: Economic Security for a Change; ‘Yes We Can, and Here’s Our Plan’
Congratulations to Barack Obama for a strong, kick-ass victory in South Carolina and a beautiful, stirring speech. That refrain “Yes We Can” is just what people need to hear. We just wish he’d kicked one butt instead of two (by coming in second).
John Edwards’s campaign strategists have been calling in to ask our advice, and here’s what we tell them: Johnny, it’s the economy. You were right to capitalize on voters’ fatigue with Obama–Clinton squabbles, but give us specific economic remedies and repeat over and over. Economic Security for a Change.
Interview with Mark Schleifstein
Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of
‘Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans
and the Coming Age of Superstorms’
Mark Schleifstein joined the Times-Picayune in 1984 as an environmental reporter after five years at the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1996 he and his Times-Picayune colleague John McQuaid have written numerous major environmental series for the paper, most recently in January 2006. Schleifstein and McQuaid won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?”—a comprehensive eight-day series about the threats to the world’s fish supply, including the effects of coastal wetlands erosion on fish in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the Picayune published their series “Home Wreckers: How the Formosan Termite Is Devastating New Orleans,” a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer.
In Memoriam – Harry Lee, Sheriff of Jefferson Parish 1980-2007
With respects and condolences to the family and many admirers of Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana-the second-longest-serving sheriff in the parish’s history and an extraordinary politician even by Louisiana standards. Mr. Lee lost a five-month battle with leukemia on Monday, Oct. 1. He was 75. The son of Chinese immigrants, Lee was born in the back room of his family’s laundry on Carondelet Street in 1932. He was a protégé of the late U.S. congressman Hale Boggs. Regularly outspoken, often controversial, sometimes impolitic, but always reelected (in 1994 his approval rating was 84 percent), Harry Lee served seven terms.
Sen. Dodd Calls for Special Envoy to Iran; Tells White House 2002 Vote Doesn’t Pertain to Iran
Becoming the second Democratic presidential candidate (after Barack Obama) to warn the White House away from hostilities against Iran, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has written a letter notifying the White House that the Senate’s 2002 authorization of military force against Iraq does not authorize war against Iran:
Endless war, unpopular war—something’s got to give
Never mind the small token troop reductions the president mentioned Thursday night. The Bush administration has no intention of ever withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq-indeed, Cheney and other neocons want to deepen the blood-quagmire by striking Iran (see below)-but something has got to give. The war is costing $10 to $12 billion per month when the nation is already perilously in debt because of massive high-end tax cuts. But we refuse to be told, “No, you can’t have sturdy infrastructure because the money’s tight-we’re at war.” If that were an honest argument, the White House or Congress would move to reverse some of the Bush tax cuts, share the sacrifice. But no.
Obama Warns Bush, “You Don’t Have Our Authorization” for Iran War
Here is heartening news: The first of the major Democratic presidential candidates tells the White House not to start a war against Iran. Now, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, what say you?
(Reid, Pelosi-care to add your voices? John Warner? Retired generals?)
The Huffington Post presents exclusive excerpts of a major policy speech to be delivered in Iowa today (9/12) by Senator Barack Obama in which the Illinois senator will declare: “George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear-loud and clear-from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”
41 Senators Could End the War
“Congress does not have to pass legislation to bring an end to the war in Iraq—it simply has to block passage of any bill that would continue to fund the war. This requires not 67 or 60 Senate votes, or even 51, but just 41—the number of senators needed to maintain a filibuster and prevent a bill from coming up for a vote. In other words, the Democrats have more than enough votes to end the Iraq War—if they choose to do so.”Media Misrepresent Dems’ Options on Iraq War” FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) 9/13/07
Democrats, Work with Generals to End the War Focus the Debate on Readiness, Broader National Security Issues
War critics, peace activists, read E. J. Dionne’s column “Democrats’ Last, Best Hope” in the Sept. 11 Washington Post. Dionne says that in his opening remarks before the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on Sept.10, Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked whether “Iraq is the war worth the risk of breaking our army and being unable to deal with other risks to our nation.” Skelton said war critics should transcend the narrow question about whether the surge has succeeded or failed, and keep the focus on a broader debate about “the overall security of this nation. . . . [W]ith so many troops in Iraq, I think our response to an unexpected threat would come at a devastating cost.”
No More Blank Checks, Top Dem. Senator Tells White House. Mo War Money without Withdrawal Plan
We like this man, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. In 2002 he voted Nay to authorizing military force against Iraq. On Friday, Sept. 7, Durbin put the White House on notice that he, the Assistant Majority Leader, will not vote for any more Iraq war funding that is not...
Ready to Strike Iran?
The Times of London reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a massive three-day strike against 1,200 targets in Iran to “take out” its military capabilities.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”
Worlds Apart
We do not know quite how to express the quality of gratitude and belongingness we feel when we hear the President of the United States, once again, on his 16th? visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, refer to our stricken area as “this [or that] part of the world,” as he has done in post-Katrina visits going back at least to early 2006. It would be one thing if he were talking about the tsunami in Indonesia . . . Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief and David Kurtz at TPM Café have both noted this seemingly habitual phrasing, which can only be felt as off-putting. And it can only be interpreted as the speaker’s distancing of himself from responsibility for the area described. (In its patent intent to annoy, the locution is similar to Republicans’ machine-like repetition of “the Democrat party” instead of “the Democratic party.”) For a president who claims to be a Texan through and through, this construction of speech doesn’t sound very neighborly.
Viva New Orleans—for Art’s Sake!
One of the happy (re)discoveries at the Rising Tide 2 conference of Katrina bloggers this past weekend was the New Orleanians’ sheer vitality, creativity, and ingenuity-their will to survive, to renew, to make the city better than it was before. We came away reinvigorated, reassured that in at least one American city democracy and citizen activism are alive and well. (If you keep busy, it doesn’t hurt quite as bad-and anyway, struggling for your very survival has a way of concentrating the mind.) In part because some public officials are lame and passive, and others are working but overwhelmed and underfunded, gutsy determined citizens are taking into their own hands the work of rebuilding, forming civic associations, alerting fellow citizens about opportunities and dangers (potential funding, criminal activity on the streets or in City Hall), etc.
Making Blogging Sexy: Rising Tide 2 | New Orleans | Saturday Aug. 25, 2007
See the Rising Tide blog here. Prepare to meet people you’re gonna like.
“In Levees We Trust.” Engineer Timothy Ruppert gave an excellent one-hour overview of Army Corps of Engineers repairs accomplished and planned through 2011. He compared Corps’ Louisiana work to flood protection systems in the Netherlands and London. Tim Ruppert is president of the Louisiana section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Stay tuned-we’ll be writing more about Tim and his report soon.
“The mission here is not accomplished”: N.O. City Council Member Shelley Midura’s Stern, Bracing Letter to President Bush
Here is an eloquent and hard-hitting letter from New Orleans City Council Member Shelley Midura-first seen on Your Right Hand Thief (thanks, Oyster). Please join us in pressing the White House (202-456-1111; comments@whitehouse.gov) to “second” Midura’s motions.
[Note: Midura is now blogging on DailyKos. She writes: “I hope you can take the time to click on the link to my open letter to President Bush, Press Release and Fact Sheet . . . New Orleans will not allow the discussion of our recovery to be anything but factual and done via the reality based community and not through spin and talking points.”]