fraxinus

The Trinity toll road vote

2007-10-25T21:24:00.001-05:00

Attention, you Fraxinus-reading hordes who are (a) still checking in on this thing after more than a year of silence; and (b) Dallas voters: this Trinity toll road vote coming up is important. Fraxinus heartily recommends you vote yes on November 6 or during early voting, which runs through November 2.

(Early voting locations; polling places for the main election on Nov. 6)

In case you haven't been following the debate, a "yes" vote means that you support holding any road built in the Trinity floodway to four lanes and a 35 mph speed limit. A no vote, on the other hand, means you're okay with a six-lane high-speed tollway in between our flood protection levees, cutting through the park that is supposed to become a great civic asset and bring north and south Dallas together.

My view, to summarize what could be a very long conversation if I cornered you at a cocktail party, is that Dallas is not so rich in parkland nor so poor in highways that we should sacrifice a big chunk of green space to build a stupid road we don't need. Plus, building a highway in the floodway is insane.

I could spend hours debunking the claims made by the vote no/pave the Trinity groups, but you can get it all, and read much more detailed and cogent discussions at Trinityvote.com and in the Dallas Observer (particularly the writing of Jim Schutze, who deserves a Pulitzer). There's also some good stuff at the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate's Backtalk blog.

(On the other side, there's a lot of slanted reporting and propagandistic editorials at the Dallas Morning News. Plus the occasional piece of solid journalism. And, to its credit, the News has run some good op-eds by toll road opponents, though not enough to balance out the mountain of pro-paving verbiage in the paper.)

Fraxinus now returns to its previous quiescence.

one small step

2006-06-07T23:13:00.000-05:00

With a bizarre lack of publicity or media coverage, Dallas has apparently signed the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. Almost certainly not due to my tireless advocacy, but still: huzzah!

Oh, and go see An Inconvenient Truth.

Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority

2006-06-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

Pretty good prank.

Reichenbach Falls

2006-01-08T20:35:00.000-06:00

This is the time in the course of this exercise in micropunditry when I decide I've been spending too many hours on it. I'm going to take a vacation from Fraxinus for a while. My apologies to a couple of commenters for bailing out in the midst of our lively discussions. To show you what a magnanimous guy I am, you get to have the last word. (For a while, anyway.)

Thanks for reading.

an opportunity for Texas parks

2006-01-08T17:51:00.000-06:00

International Paper Co. is putting 6.8 million acres of its vast timber holdings up for sale, and apparently more than 400,000 acres of them are in Texas. This is a tremendous opportunity for a public-land-poor state like ours. (About 94% of Texas lands are privately held; only 0.3% of Texas is state park land.) "Wide open spaces" is a phrase Texans like to use, but if you live in Dallas and actually want to get to one you have to drive four hours or more. What parks there are tend to be small, overdeveloped areas clinging to reservoirs, which are fine for certain types of recreation and wildlife but useless for others. When large undeveloped tracts (such as, presumably, most of IP's forest lands) become available, we should do everything possible to acquire them and make them part of the state park system.

The lack of public natural spaces is not the fault of Texas Parks and Wildlife -- we simply don't give them enough money. To deal with the problem in the long run, our legislators need to overcome their anti-tax dogma and impose a new tax, perhaps one on property transactions, the revenues of which would go to open space and parks acquisition and to parks and wildlife management.

Opposition to Alito

2006-01-08T16:47:00.000-06:00

The Alliance for Justice has released a letter from over 500 law professors opposing the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The Alliance opposed the Roberts nomination as well, so it's not that great a surprise that they oppose Alito, but the academic community did not show this level of opposition the last time around. The letter makes a couple of points related to environmental issues -- first, on Alito's record on interpreting the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which is the authority relied on by Congress in enacting most of the nation's federal environmental laws:

Machine Gun Ban. In United States v. Rybar, Judge Alito argued in dissent that the federal ban on machine gun possession – which had been on the books in some form since 1934 – is unconstitutional Commerce Clause legislation. His colleagues accused him of disrespectfully requiring the “coordinate branches of government” to “play ‘Show and Tell’ with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute.” All of the other appeals courts that had considered the law in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1995 ruling in United States v. Lopez agreed with Judge Alito’s colleagues. Every court to have looked at the law since then has done the same, except one, and the Supreme Court summarily vacated that decision this year after issuing its decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which rejected Judge Alito’s cramped view of Congress’ law-making authority.

Also, the letter discusses Alito's position concerning citizens' standing to sue to enforce environmental laws:

Clean Water Act. In Public Interest Research Group, Inc. v. Magnesium Elektron, Inc., Judge Alito voted to make it harder than Congress intended for citizens to establish standing to sue for toxic emissions that violate the Clean Water Act; in fact, he agreed that Congress lacked the authority to authorize certain citizen suits. Several years later, by a 7-2 vote in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, with only Justices Scalia and Thomas dissenting, the Supreme Court effectively rejected Judge Alito’s position.

(Footnotes omitted from both excerpts. You can read the original here.)

monkey redux

2006-01-07T00:15:00.000-06:00

Speaking of monkeys, everyone should take a minute to read the classic Monkeytown, by Scott McCloud.

(And then speak the sacred monkey chant.)

war talk

2006-01-06T23:42:00.000-06:00

Yowza! We’re having some verbal fisticuffs lately at Fraxinus. What I thought was an innocuous post about peace among monkeys led to a rhetorical maelstrom, as loyal reader ABC took issue with, well, a lot. The story so far: my monkey post, ABC comment 1, my response, ABC comment 2, my response 2, ABC comment 3. For the rest, I’m taking the liberty of departing the comment section to respond, because I think forty-page comment sections are ungainly.

(The italicized stuff below is ABC’s.)

We begin with some bickering over name-calling.

Ah, the old reliable ad hominem argument. Any right wing-nut who dares impune the wholesome libertarian motives of the Left is nothing more than a bigoted, jack-booted thug. . . . [T]he people who the Left has allowed to become their de facto . . . spokesmen have rather cornered the market on ad hominemism. Nancy Pelosi, anybody? No? Then how about Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore?

Exactly what ad hominem argument did I make? I know I’ve slung plenty of insults around (though I don’t think I did in the stuff you responded to), but my point was not that no one should use insults. My point was that you merely attacked the speakers (craven, treasonous, etc.) and ignored their arguments.

“Jackbooted thugs,” by the way, is what the noted-non-liberal Tom DeLay called the EPA. (Also, “the Gestapo of government.”)

As for Pelosi, Dean, et al., doubtless they have each said dumb things from time to time, but are you seriously suggesting that none of them makes substantive arguments, or that no one on the Right ever makes a personal attack?

Instead, they do seem craven, power hungry, unable to win at the ballot box, and frankly ashamed of Western civilization or at least too paralyzed by cultural relativism to stand up and fight a menace that has given ample evidence of its contempt for everything we should all hold very dear.

If you think any disagreement with you on national security issues constitutes cowardice, then it will be hard to have a rational discussion.

helping oppressed peoples realize freedom on their own shores was one of the reasons the president has consistently stated for launching this multi-pronged war

Okay, now we’re into some substance. Let’s look a little closer:

An examination of more than 150 of Bush's speeches, radio addresses and responses to reporters' questions reveal a steady progression of language, mostly to reflect changing circumstances such as the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, the lack of ties between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and the growing violence of Iraqi insurgents.

A war that was waged principally to overthrow a dictator who possessed "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised'' has evolved into a mission to rid Iraq of its "weapons-making capabilities'' and to offer democracy and freedom to its 25 million residents.

. . . Most of the rationales were on the table from the beginning. What changed was the emphasis.

Are you any more impressed with the naysayers who repeatedly, even still, claim that the "brutal Afghan winter" will do in the US military just as surely as it has done in all of history's other fools dumb enough to invade Afghanistan?

Haven’t really noticed that naysaying. (I must have forgotten to renew my subscription to Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Monthly.) I did find a 2001 CSM article, but it didn’t predict that the winter would defeat the U.S. (headline: “Afghan winter: US foe or ally?”).

Really, what concerns me about Afghanistan is that we may have failed to follow up the laudable, rapid military victory with a strong enough nation-building effort. Does Karzai’s authority extend beyond Kabul, or is the rest of the country given over to warlords, poppies, Taliban holdouts, and possibly a lurking Bin Laden?

How impressed are you with some of our supposed allies--I have a fine Bourdeaux to go with your spetzle and borscht--and their recent, oily history in Iraq?

First: why is this relevant? Did I say that Putin would be a better president than W.? (Not that I’ve looked deeply into Putin’s eyes or called him Pootie-Poot or anything, but I don’t trust the fellow. He, I suspect, is someone who seriously lusts for power. And who seems to be happy to let Iran get all nuked up.) Or are you saying that if you can identify another Western country that acts from impure motives, anything the U.S. government does is immune from criticism?

But to answer your question: not particularly impressed. And they should be helping out more in Afghanistan. Hmm, maybe if we had actually tried diplomacy instead of gratuitously pissing Europe off in dozens of ways (rejecting treaties, rejecting the idea of treaties, “old Europe,” etc.), we’d have had better luck.

"...but I think it's way too early to claim it as an ultimate victory for freedom." Well, who in the administration has claimed exactly that?

Not exactly those words, but Bush said:

In the coming weeks, the ballots will be counted, a new government formed, and a people who suffered in tyranny for so long will become full members of the free world. This election will not mean the end of violence. But it is the beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East.

I’d say “full members of the free world” is mighty close to “ultimate victory for freedom,” but my point was really that the administration has always disregarded and continues to disregard the likelihood that a democracy in Iraq will put a government in power that will not be friendly to U.S. interests.

The opponents of this effort have from the onset seemed to demand that Iraq be a perfectly functioning society and democracy inside of six weeks from Saddam Hussein's fall.

Actually, what the opponents of the Iraq war really wanted was either that we not go to war, or that we not go to war so precipitately. The unrealistic expectations were more on the part of the neocons and other Administration hawks (e.g., Cheney: “greeted as liberators”).

The self-proclaimed paper of record "breaks" the story that the president has directed the NSA to use all its high-tech means to keep nutheads from blowing us up. Of course, the story is timed curiously to coincide with both the Iraqi election and the release of some hack's book.

I agree, the Times’ timing is odd. Why did they wait a year? We should have known sooner. It seems likely that the Times was forced to release the story because they were about to be scooped by the publication of the book. And speaking of elections, did the Times step on the story until after the U.S. vote in 2004?

Quick quiz: How many presidents over the last century have availed themselves of the secret wiretapping process to thwart our enemies, some of whom haven't been as obvious about their ill-will toward us as al Qaeda?

Because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978, a maximum of five presidents could have used its secret process for wiretapping. The current Bush is the only one I know of who disregarded the requirements of the Act altogether.

How many presidents have taken other, arguably more invasive, steps to secure our safety, like suspending habeas corpus perhaps? Or throwing an entire segment of the citizenry into camps?

I’ve always been willing to cut Lincoln some slack on the habeas suspension, but most other wartime abuses of civil liberties in America – particularly the World War II internments – were tragic, unnecessary, and wrong.

Do you really think that intercepting nefarious attempts by a proven enemy to communicate plans for further destruction is going to lead to the People's Democratic Republic of America?

So as long as it doesn't lead to the PDRA, it's copacetic with you? For the record, the answer to your question is "no." But I think that the president is not above the law, that it is dangerous for the president alone to decide which laws apply to him, and whether we can even have a public debate about it, and that it's not too much to ask that the president follow a legally required secret judicial process to allow him to order a secret spy agency to secretly monitor communications of American citizens. I also – pardon my suspicious nature – doubt that the Administration is limiting its domestic spying to the circumstances you describe.

In having doubts about the FISA-free wiretap program, I stand with noted leftists like Senators Hagel, Snowe, Collins, Spector, Sununu, Lugar, Craig, Graham, and McCain; AEI scholar Norman Ornstein; Reagan admin. deputy AG Bruce Fein; columnists William Safire and George Will.

Glenn Greenwald has eloquently argued that the Administration is abandoning the conservative legal principles it claims to support in making its arguments for why the secret wiretaps are legal:

Listening to the Bush Administration and its defenders try to justify George Bush’s deliberate and ongoing violations of the law, one can’t help but notice that the Constitution and Congressional statutes sure do seem quite "flexible" in the hands of those seeking to defend him -- a particular irony given how stridently Bush followers rail against such legal theories in other contexts.

I suppose strict construction and relativism are in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, the Left seems to consistently ask the wrong questions. Instead of "how come we didn't find any WMD in Iraq?," how about "where are they now?" Because he had them, never accounted for their destruction, and the vaunted weapons inspectors never found them or any evidence of their demise. We all know the answer to the question, but we don't want to admit it because then we'll have to act on it.

Actually, I don't know this one. What weapons are you saying he had at the start of the war, and where did he send them?

Given the UN's impeccable record of getting tyrannical thugs to act nice and play by the rules (12 years and 16 resolutions against Hussein and bupkis), why is the president letting the usual UN-Oil-for-Food Capone-istas broker a deal with that obviously sensible Iranian fellow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Again, I don't know. It could be that (a) repeatedly telling the U.N. to piss off, and (b) putting all our eggs in the Iraq basket have weakened our leverage with the U.N. and reduced our ability to intimidate Iran.

If the Left isn't all-consumed in its loathing of GWB, why then are they so seemingly suicidal when confronted with real and obvious threats to our civilization? I mean, on the whole, Western civilization allows us to live more to our liking then say the visions of the current Islamist threat to the world, right?

It’s not that we’re suicidal; it’s that we disagree with you on the way to avoid disaster.

Here is the very funny and very smart Adam Felber, writing on February 20, 2003, in response to someone who responded to an argument about the wisdom of the Administration’s rush to war by talking about how bad Saddam was:

Let’s put it this way: If Bush’s plan was to launch 25 nuclear missiles at Iraq tomorrow morning, you’d probably oppose it, I’m guessing. That would put you in the position where you found yourself both in favor of stopping Saddam and convinced that the President’s strategy was completely wrongheaded.

That’s where I am. That’s where the majority of rational “anti-war” Americans are. That’s what the debate should be about.

But it isn’t. Just like in the McCarthy era, the debate has been manipulated into a cartoonish either/or context.

("Cartoonish either/or context" = “why is the Left suicidal” and “do they really prefer Islamofascism to Western civilization.”) So. I think that a forceful response to terrorism is appropriate, but that Iraq was not an appropriately-directed blow to deal with the terrorism threat. Which is not to say that Saddam was innocuous. Using force against him (beyond the no-fly-zone force, I mean) could conceivably have been appropriate, but not the way we went about it.

Saddam’s Iraq was not a significant sponsor of international terrorism, and contrary to the Bush Administration’s repeated suggestions was not behind the 9/11 attacks. I can’t say for sure why the Administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq, but I suspect that the main driver was the neocon/PNAC goal of reshaping the entire Middle East.

Which, I think, was a disastrous fantasy. The war in Iraq has been a catastrophic strategic blunder that has reduced our ability to deal with graver threats (Iran, North Korea), to work for a peaceful Middle East (Israel/Palestine), and to respond to humanitarian catastrophes (Darfur). It’s removed a tyrant, which is great, but the world is full of tyrants, and we cannot invade all of their countries. In dealing with tyrants, we have to consider both the costs and how likely we are to make things better than they are at present. The Iraq war has cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Likely outcomes include: national breakup and civil war, an authoritarian secular regime (meet the new boss . . .), or a fundamentalist Islamic regime allied with Iran. The war has strengthened Iran and has strengthened the hand of lunatic fundamentalists within Iran. To reach this point the U.S. government has countenanced the abuse of civil liberties and has played apologist for torture. We have lost the moral high ground we held after 9/11. In Iraq, the war may have created more terrorists than it destroyed. I don’t think it’s made us more secure. It may not even have been a just war.

But most of that is in the past now. I come back to one of my earlier points: what do we do now to get to peace in Iraq? I know you disagree with everything I said above, but what do you think we need to do next?

trashing the state

2005-12-31T10:51:00.000-06:00

It's good that litter on Texas roadsides has dropped by a third since 2001 -- from 1.25 billion pieces in 2001 to 827 million pieces in 2005. Which, alas, still works out to 2757 pieces of trash per mile of road. Ugh. We've got a ways to go yet, especially since 55 percent of Texans admit to littering.

North Texas nature

2005-12-28T22:26:00.000-06:00

Good site I've been meaning to mention for a while: A Natural History of North Central Texas. Links to maps and park/wildlife information.

(I think I learned about this from a post by Sarah Hannan on the DMN blog, which finally has permalinks and an RSS feed. Can't find the link to the post I'm looking for, though.)

lessons from our relations

2005-12-20T22:12:00.000-06:00

Robert Sapolsky has a fascinating article in Foreign Affairs on violence, and the lack of it, in primate communities. Chimps, bonobos, gibbons, baboons, and more. Reference to The Warriors. Nature, nurture, evolution, and the possibility of progress. Think people are biologically incapable of peace? Sapolsky: "Anyone who says, 'No, it is beyond our nature,' knows too little about primates, including ourselves."

no help for the Refuge

2005-12-19T22:00:00.000-06:00

Things are getting ugly in the Senate, with Alaskan oil lackey Ted Stevens inserting a provision allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into the defense spending bill. Dave Roberts has put together a choice collection of remarks regarding this rather craven maneuver. My favorite:

These people would snake a pipeline across one of the great landscapes of the world, the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Some have appropriately compared splitting the Arctic National Wildlife Range by a 48-inch pipeline and haul road with slicing a razor blade across the face of the Mona Lisa.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), 1977.

(I guess Stevens was for saving the Refuge before he was against it.)

Should his current tactic fail, he may want to look into these other honest and democratic ways to get those rigs into the Refuge:

(Via Sierra Club.)

TLCV

2005-12-15T22:14:00.000-06:00

It's weird that I learned this from FrontBurner, but there is a Texas League of Conservation Voters. Excellent! And about time -- any measure at all to hold Texas legislators accountable for their actions is praiseworthy, and it's especially good to see an environmental analysis. Not that the results are always pretty. For instance, my own state rep., Bill Keffer, scored a whopping 15% of a possible 100, which I suppose at least makes him better than the dozen or so zero-percenters. Yippee. And the state Senate held too few recorded votes to support a ranking. Gutless bastards.

Still -- welcome, TLCV.

Not me.

2005-12-15T21:17:00.000-06:00

And not even related, so far as I know. Nonetheless: well done, young doppelganger.

(In my lone season of organized football -- Maroon Wolverines, 4th grade -- I think I earned exactly one star for my helmet. And I distinctly remember that I had no idea what I had done to earn it.)

parking: the Dallas Morning News gets it

2005-12-12T22:27:00.000-06:00

With a fine editorial today on the need -- and opportunity -- to make our city more about people and less about cars:

. . . why is the dominant form for commercial establishments a low-slung box surrounded by an ocean of asphalt? So the cars will have a place to hang out. Any developer will tell you that the first, last and only question that determines whether a given project is feasible is: "Can I park it?" (That's developer-speak for: "Can I meet the city's extremely high requirement for parking spaces?")

Previous Fraxinus criticism of excessive parking-space requirements here and here.

The News editorial goes beyond kvetching to point out that a master plan, one that could actually change things here, is in the works:

. . . [T]he nearly completed comprehensive plan that will go to the City Council next month is very, very important.

The planners start out with a strong case, because the vision at the heart of the plan – of a denser, greener, more architecturally varied, more walkable Dallas – came from the people who live here. The plan reflects what the planners heard in dozens of workshops and meetings with residents all over the city.

Right on.

Plan info here.

things to worry about

2005-12-08T21:34:00.000-06:00

When I was in college, for a couple of weeks I amused myself by making a list of worries: "things that are contributing to the decay of civilization, etc." I say to amuse myself, but really I'm not sure why. I did note "Inspired by Newsweek," which shows that if I was an easily-influenced consumer of mass media, I was at least a self-aware one.

Further caveats:
The list is in no particular order. It's as I wrote it then, except that I've fixed a couple of misspellings and removed a couple of duplicates. Occasional eccentric capitalization may reflect borrowed headlines. In places I was probably reaching a bit just to keep the list going, and obviously in some cases I was just being goofy. (That's my story, anyway.)

So -- from January 1988, the list:

1. Drug-related crime
2. Failure of U.S. electoral system
3. Computer "virus" programs
4. Budget deficits
5. The INF treaty
6. Freeway shootings
7. militant Mormons (renegades)
8. AIDS
9. Failure of U.S. educational system
10. killer bees
11. fire ants
12. Multimillion-dollar Van Gogh paintings
13. holes in the ozone layer
14. economic protectionism
15. dioxins
16. oil slicks
17. functional illiteracy
18. homelessness
19. the unending Palestinian/Israeli issue
20. New Age thinking
21. racism
22. decline of the Great Powers: America's Imperial Overstretch
23. greenhouse effect
24. nuclear war
25. nuclear power (failure)
26. radon in houses
27. crack gangs in L.A.
28. population explosion
29. famine
30. genetic engineering disasters
31. declining originality in pop music
32. lead poisoning
33. Amazon deforestation/resulting climatic change
34. third-world debts
35. Soviet space-based weapons systems
36. Failure of American space programs
37. George Bush
38. Pat Robertson
39. Richard Gephardt
40. cosmic radiation (see ozone layer)
41. exhaustion of Earth's fuel resources
42. drought/dust storms
43. creeping totalitarianism
44. the possibility that the USSR will become, as a result of perestroika, as healthy as Japan economically, but retain evil intention while lulling the West into fatal complacency
45. runaway military technology
46. incurable corruption in the Pentagon's procurement system
47. Nutrasweet
48. The gradual (certainly not in my lifetime, or era) evolution of humanity into something no longer recognizable as human (to us)
49. the possibility that the U.S. space program will never get out of low earth orbit
50. the growing popularity of blood sports
51. America's shift to a financial-services economy
52. the white globs, etc. in beef sticks, sausage, bacon, etc.
53. the national debt
54. Our Polluted Oceans
55. the widespread use of phrases like "the final farewell concert"
56. running out of landfills
57. worldwide deforestation
58. liability insurance and the litigious society
59. Television's destruction of people's minds
60. malnutrition in the inner city

Thoughts:
- I'm still worried about most of this stuff. Thanks a lot for reminding me, younger self.
- Plus ça change department: 2, 37, 38
- What was I thinking department: 7
- There aren't a lot of these where I can confidently say "whew! We conquered that one, didn't we?" I suppose 10 and 26 turned out to be manageable risks, and we've made progress on a few of the others.
- 5: I can only guess that I was afraid the INF treaty would fall apart in the final stages.
- 50: was I thinking of American Gladiators, or what?
- 55: I think I see what I was driving at, but that particular phrase, at least, doesn't seem to have become ubiquitous.
- The quotes I put around "virus" seem quaintly amusing now. (I should've put them around "thinking" in 20 as well.)
- 44: obviously deeply wrong on the economic front (although Japan hit a rough patch after that, I don't think I was suggesting that kind of parallel), but I think Putin's got a bad case of 43.
- 16: might seem prescient, coming a bit more than a year before the Valdez disaster, but (alas) you can hardly go wrong betting that there will be a major oil spill somewhere in the near future.
- 39: ? I'm sure this one was about the eyebrows.
- 22: pretty obviously Paul Kennedy-influenced. I think he was wrong on some major particulars, but maybe right in the big picture: we can't sustain a global reach forever.
- 52: And it only took me 11 years after writing that to go vegetarian.
- My list is not nearly as creative, interesting, or poignant as Michael Bernard Loggins's Fears of Your Life lists, which you can hear on This American Life.
- Really conspicuous (in hindsight, at least) omissions: Islamic fundamentalist extremism/terrorism, right-wing American nut terrorism, global loss of biodiversity.

I'll make another list, soon, of things to add. The potential, in a few decades, for a Terminator-like takeover by AIs will be one -- been mulling that one over lately. Further suggestions welcome.

lobbying and corruption

2005-12-04T20:59:00.000-06:00

Michael Kinsley, commenting on the political culture underlying the current DeLay/Abramoff/Cunningham series of ethical debacles:

Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic senator John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist vs. 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents.

Well observed.

how not to teach Iraqis about a free press and good government

2005-11-30T21:27:00.000-06:00

The story so far:

The Bush administration paid columnist Armstrong Williams to say nice things about it. And columnist Michael McManus. And columnist Maggie Gallagher. EPA paid for a propagandistic advertising campaign for the White House's "Clear Skies" legislation. The Office of National Drug Control Policy produced "Video news releases", which the Government Accountability Office deemed an illegal covert propaganda campaign. And the Department of Health and Human Services did the same thing.

Now this:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

At least some members of our military see the problem with this approach:

The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military's credibility in other nations and with the American public.

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

Unfortunately, in this administration the propagandists hold the upper hand.

what Dallas should be doing

2005-11-28T22:40:00.000-06:00

Good story on Morning Edition today about Seattle's efforts to reduce its contribution to global warming. That city's mayor has taken the lead in convincing 188 American cities to take steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Smart, progressive, responsible.

Dallas Mayor Laura Miller? Not so much.

In other news, studies of Antarctic ice cores show that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere "are 27 percent higher than the highest levels found in the last 650,000 years." And, of course, they're still rising. Methinks we're entering science fiction territory here, and not the fun kind, either. Something more like this, probably:

In memoriam

2005-11-20T20:30:00.000-06:00

Just heard an announcement on KERA that Glenn Mitchell died this morning. A damn shame. He ran a first-rate talk show here for years, classing up the joint by putting authors, thinkers, politicos, and other interesting people in front of a local mic. Seemed like a decent guy to boot. The Star-Telegram has an obit.

Constitution Avenue Freeze-Out

2005-11-19T22:44:00.000-06:00

Now this is just petty.

the matrix

2005-11-14T22:27:00.000-06:00

The Dallas Morning News had a short Q&A with James Howard Kunstler yesterday. Best was his response when they asked him what he thinks of recent developments in Dallas:

[Y]ou've got some decent little streets going. Uptown is pretty impressive. By national standards, there aren't too many in-town places that are that good. The scale of what you guys are doing here is impressive. Even so, it only goes on for two blocks. You've got little pockets of cool embedded in a matrix of crap.

Great line. In fact, I think "Pockets of Cool Embedded in a Matrix of Crap" should be the city's new slogan. (It's way better than "Live Large, Think Big,"which seems to have faded into the obscurity it so richly deserved.)

Either that, or the new name for this blog. www.matrixofcrap.blogspot.com, anyone?

good news on the equine front

2005-11-13T22:03:00.000-06:00

Looks like Congress is going to close down the small-but-unpleasant American horsemeat business. Given the timing, I'm afraid we can't credit this one to the Fraxinian diatribe of a year and a half ago. Nor, probably, was it Frank Deford's recent commentary on NPR. More likely this had something to do with the long effort by horse lovers to bring the slaughter to public attention. It seems that even most members of Congress think that killing horses for food is, well, icky.

One additional argument they may not have considered, which applies to wild horses in particular: we need them running free, not on a plate. Wild horses are part of the first wave in the Pleistocene rewilding of North America, a fearsomely cool idea that will probably never happen but is nonetheless fun to think about.

11-11-05

2005-11-11T15:34:00.000-06:00

A good day to follow Snoopy's example and visit Bill Mauldin. (Root beer optional.)

Dover, mining, Alaska

2005-11-10T22:13:00.000-06:00

High-quality day at Gristmill. Especially:

- The good citizens of Dover PA tossed out the creationists on their school board, so Pat Robertson warns them "don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin." Oh well. At least he didn't explicitly call for their assassination.

- Congress is thinking of ending a moratorium on new patents under the give-the-commonwealth-away General Mining Law of 1872. The basic idea is to sell public lands to fund the government's operations. I know; they can call it the Eating Our Seed Corn Act of 2005.

- Really, really cool use of Google Earth: the Sierra Club's put together a collection of maps of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Here's a screen grab, showing part of the Refuge along with the wells that are already drilled on the rest of the North Slope.

(Yes, the icons exaggerate the relative size of what they represent, as is always true of maps, but the easy scalability of Google Earth helps with that.) Go; check it out.

no, it isn't scientific or representative or anything else much

2005-11-09T21:07:00.000-06:00

But this CNN QuickVote is the most lopsided result I've seen in many a moon.

return of the plastic bag menace: something to try in Dallas

2005-11-08T21:56:00.000-06:00

San Francisco's doing something about plastic bag litter. Hey, we should try that here.

bigotry triumphant

2005-11-08T21:19:00.000-06:00

Burnt Orange Report spots the early AP story: looks like anti-gay-marriage Texas Prop 2 passes, 74-26. Ugh.

I like this reaction from Victoria Loe Hicks (on the DMN blog):

So, in Texas, hate and marriage shall henceforth be irretrievably, forever linked, and let no one put them assunder. I love my husband deeply, but in light of the overwhelming ratification of Prop. 2, being married feels almost dirty -- like sitting down at a segregated lunch counter and eating a hearty meal, while the people who don't look like me stand outside, with their faces pressed against the glass.

And no, I don't think that only bigots voted for Prop 2. I do think that without the bigots, it wouldn't have passed.

I also think that, whatever the bigot turnout, the supporters of bans like these are on the wrong side of history. Check back in ten years and see where we are.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

2005-11-07T20:28:00.000-06:00

I'm having a hard time interpreting President Bush's statement at a press conference today:

Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.
And, therefore, we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible -- more possible to do our job. There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans, and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law. And that's why you're seeing members of my administration go and brief the Congress. We want to work together in this matter. We -- all of us have an obligation, and it's a solemn obligation and a solemn responsibility. And I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've -- they've got more work to do, and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful.

Ah, the inscrutable Bush. What could he have meant? Some possibilities:

We do not torture. Our contractors, agents, allies, quasi-allies, and a tiny minority of poorly-managed low-level military rogues may from time to time engage in torture-related program activities, but "we" do not torture.

We do not torture. As is reasonable and prudent, we may assert the right to employ coercive techniques involving infliction of injuries up to but not including death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions; or, in the case of the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants, we may legally inflict death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions, but we do not torture.

We do not torture. We may commit "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses," but that's not the same thing as torture.

We do not torture. We may have "used every euphemism [we] can think of to avoid the word that clearly characterizes what some of our soldiers and civilian contractors have been doing: torture ." But "water-boarding," "sleep management," "stress positions," and the old reliable, "abuse," aren't the same as "torture."

We do not torture. We may secretly hand over prisoners to foreign countries where they are certain to be tortured, but we do not torture.

We do not torture. You may think we do, just because Amnesty International, Human Rights First, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, a panel convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Physicians for Human Rights, and U.S. Army General Antonio Taguba say we have, but they are all liars or dupes. Or, everything they have cited and reported on is entirely over with and will never happen again, hence we do not (currently) torture.

We do not torture. We may inadvertently or by design use mock executions, sleep deprivation, forced immersion, indefinite confinement in secret prisons, sexual humiliation, attack dogs , rape, four-hour dousings with cold water, and criminal homicide, but we do not "torture."

Unfortunately, we have, in the past, tortured. We and our representatives have done things that most objective observers consider torture, but torture is not the American way. I intend to keep it from ever happening again. Nonetheless, I oppose Senator McCain's amendment prohibiting the U.S. from using torture. I also support Vice-President Cheney's campaign to exempt the CIA from any laws forbidding torture.

We do not torture. Alternatively, anything we may have done is nothing compared to the depredations of Saddam Hussein. Whose side are you on, anyway?

We do not torture. I do, however, get mighty confused sometimes, and even when not confused I tend to lie a lot. More charitably to myself, I sometimes say things I wish were true without considering whether they are true. You have to fact-check me something fierce.

circle of life

2005-11-06T18:39:00.000-06:00

This morning, in the alley behind our house, I watched a hawk methodically pull the feathers out of a great-tailed grackle.

(I'm assuming it went on to eat the featherless remains, but I didn't stay for that part.)

At one point a kestrel dived at it, maybe trying to score a quick and easy meal. No dice. (Didn't catch the kestrel in the pic, but you can pretend it's the leaf above the hawk's head.)

Not sure, but my guess is it's an immature Cooper's hawk. Hope it sticks around for the winter -- we'll have plenty of grackles to spare.

the future of the Gulf Coast

2005-11-04T22:57:00.000-06:00

It pains me to say this, but Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi has done a smart thing. Namely, he put together a commission to guide the redevelopment of his state's coastline, headed by Netscape founder Jim Barksdale. Mission: "to develop a broad vision for a better Gulf Coast and South Mississippi." They're using lots of public meetings to get the locals' input on what their communities should be like, and they've got the immensely talented New Urbanist architect and planner Andres Duany to lead the group making design recommendations.

Mind you, I think the potential success of this effort is greatly limited by the decision to rely so heavily on the casino economy. You don't have to be morally opposed to gambling to see that the states and tribes are engaged in a zero-sum race to exploit mathematical illiteracy and addiction to risk-taking. The only way for the casinos to expand their market is to (1) take customers from each other, or (2) convince more people to throw more of their money away. I'm not sure that's even a workable proposition for the casinos in the long run, but it's definitely not good for the country.

I digress. Another thing I worry about is that the planners and (re-)developers may not be giving enough thought to stepping back from the coast. There are some places it's simply not a good idea to live. Even if you rebuild with hurricane-proof structures, if they sit right on the shoreline they'll be awkward places to live as the coast around them washes away/subsides/is submerged by rising sea levels. Move back a bit; recognize the power of nature.

Duany and the Mississippi effort are drawing some predictable anti-gentrification criticism from the left. They have some decent points, but I think they're too quick to dismiss New Urbanism as a way to build diverse communities that include affordable housing and are decent places to live for rich and poor alike. And though it will no doubt be flawed, the Mississippi rebuilding is vastly more promising than the likely fiasco of New Orleans.

More reading:

An interview with Duany

Architects talk about rebuilding.

Articles on the rebuilding commission: 1, 2, 3

Open Source radio interview with Duany (Open Source is the relatively new show marking the return of the great Christopher Lydon to a regular radio gig. I've been tuning in to some of the podcasts. Great stuff, and they actually seem to be making good on their goal of using the Net to inform the show.)

via Lydon, Duany's list of New Urbanism quotations, his own and others'. E.g., "If what you sell is privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if what you sell is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset." (Vince Graham)

The loyal opposition makes a stink.

2005-11-01T22:11:00.000-06:00

And it's about time. Interesting story today from the Senate. Interesting, at least, in a parliamentary-maneuver-dork way. For some worthwhile (if hyperbolic) commentary from the left, check out John Nichols in The Nation, Ezra Klein, Steven Clemons, Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe, and Kos.

Coolest. Concert Experience. Ever?

2005-10-31T21:41:00.000-06:00

And I'm not even a U2 fanatic.

"thug day": I'm not feeling too proud of the old alma mater

2005-10-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

Back in the day, I don't remember anything like this going on at Highland Park:

Students at Highland Park High School dressed as gang members, rap stars, maids and yard workers this month during homecoming week . . . .

On senior Thug Day, students wore Afro wigs, fake gold teeth and baggy jeans. On Fiesta Day, which was to honor Hispanic heritage, one student brought a leaf blower to school.

"The scary part of something like this is you have to wonder how long these kids will continue to think this way," said Bob Lydia, president of the Dallas chapter of the NAACP. "These kids will be leaders of this country one day."

No students were punished, according to Highland Park High principal Patrick Cates. Fewer than a dozen students were asked to remove some of the clothing – bandanas and gold necklaces. The student with the leaf blower was asked to put the tool in his car.
. . .
Senior Katie Braden, who said she wore a LeBron James jersey that day, said she had heard that other high schools have a "Highland Park Day," when students dress up to make fun of Highland Park students. She considers it all in good fun. "It's not like we called it 'South Dallas Day' or anything," she said.
. . .
Elizabeth Carlock, the senior class president, said there's nothing racist about Thug Day.

"We had a 'Country Club Day' last year, and I don't see any difference between dressing up in country-club style and dressing up thug," she said. "We weren't being racist. It's Highland Park tradition."

At least, I don't remember anything specifically like Thug Day, but that's probably just an accident of fashion trends (gangsta not a big pop culture thing in 1985). The same pig-ignorant offensive ways of thinking prevailed then. No surprise, given the de facto segretated conditions of Highland Park schools.

James Ragland has a decent follow-up column.

know who shot a bald eagle near Canton, Texas?

2005-10-27T20:31:00.000-05:00

Call Texas Parks & Wildlife at 1-800-792-GAME.

bad building

2005-10-26T21:37:00.000-05:00

The Dallas Morning News has a smart architecture critic in David Dillon. Not a thoroughgoing green-design evangelist, but almost as good: someone who's keenly aware of the importance of context. Witness his dissection of Uptown Plaza, a sort of strip mall plunked down just north of downtown Dallas:

And the prize for the most regressive shopping center of 2005 goes to Uptown Plaza. Unfortunately, it's not on a freeway out in Carrollton or McKinney, where its car-and-driver aesthetic would make more sense, but at Pearl and McKinney, the crossroads of Uptown, with the Crescent and the future Ritz Carlton on one side, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Arts District on the other.

And now, smack in the middle of the buzz sits a one-story, skin-deep Mediterranean hodgepodge, surrounded by hundreds of parking spaces, like a fragment of a mall that never got built. While the name hints at a certain urban sophistication – city, public space, street life – the reality is unadulterated suburbia, where the automobile rules and the pedestrian is an endangered species.

Right on. We should be paying more attention. The parking space fetish, especially, is a scourge. As urban planner Donald Shoup says , "everyone understands the advice 'don't build your church for Easter Sunday,' but we build our parking for the week before Christmas." Exactly. Insisting that every office, store, and restaurant have enough parking spaces to handle a full-capacity crowd means that our cities are boring, empty, unfriendly landscapes. It's a big part of why most really interesting cities (a) were laid out before the automobile rose to prominence, and (b) are hard to park in.

Meanwhile, another article in the DMN reports on efforts to renovate Snider Plaza, the open-air mall in University Park near SMU. Apparently the plaza "is about 157 spots shy of the more than 1,100 spaces needed to meet demand during peak periods." At least they're considering a garage, but still, it sounds like they've got an Easter Sunday mindset.

If only he really would

2005-10-23T21:43:00.000-05:00

Noted Alaskan porkmonger Ted Stevens threw a fit in the Senate when Tom Coburn (R-OK) proposed to spend money on fixing a Louisiana bridge destroyed by hurricane Katrina instead of wasting it on the two Alaskan bridges to nowhere. (Previous Fraxinus bridge discussion here: 1, 2.) Apparently Stevens threatened to quit if his precious bridge funds were diverted. To which I can only say: oh no, Senator Stevens, please don't throw us in that briar patch. We sure would hate it if you were to leave the Senate.

Alas, Coburn's amendment failed.

And now back to crappy news.

2005-10-21T21:26:00.000-05:00

"The rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed twice as quickly as previously thought, with companies exploiting less easily detectable logging techniques, satellite images reveal."

what that column in Trafalgar Square is about

2005-10-21T21:23:00.000-05:00

Fine editorial in the Austin American-Statesman: a paean to Horatio Nelson, on the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Worthy in its own right, and more so as a break from all of the ongoing depressing hurricane/earthquake/Iraq/bird flu/Miers disasterfest.

Also: The Times has an article on the anniversary celebration.

how high gas prices help us

2005-10-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

As I've kvetched about ad nauseam before, Dallas sprawls a bit. Rather more than a bit, really.

For most people, living in a city laid out like this means driving a lot. Especially for those who commute a long way. Now rising gas prices are bringing some of the flaws in this approach into sharp relief, and (among all their other effects) may actually help bring about lasting and sorely needed changes. Dean Terry has a great op-ed on the subject in today's Dallas Morning News:

Will working downtown and living 50 or 75 miles away still make sense when gas prices are $4, $5 or $6 a gallon? Maybe Big D is a little too big.
. . .
The truth is that we're drunk on oil and intoxicated with scale. The imagined "bigness" we pride ourselves on here in Dallas is in actuality a weakness. The city marketing slogan, "Live Large, Think Big," is really an invitation to live precariously in a world that depends entirely on the exploitation of fossil fuels.

Here Terry is leading into the question James Howard Kunstler tackles in The Long Emergency: what happens to us when one of the premises of the physical structure of our civilization -- cheap gas -- goes away, forever? Experts disagree on the timing, but even Big Oil is starting to acknowledge that cheap oil won't be forever.

We've put ourselves in a very deep hole by building our world this way. (Subdivisions can't easily be compressed.) I suspect Kunstler is right, and the transition to the post-cheap-oil world will be painful indeed. But there is also much to be gained if we can reshape our cities to match reality better than they do now. Terry continues:

[E]ven if energy were inexpensive, readily available and clean, designing cities based on the idea that we should spend hours a day traveling alone in our cars from place to place is simply not good for society.

It's not good for individuals, who are isolated in cars in a hostile, dangerous environment far from their families. It's not good for communities, which are hobbled by the lack of walkable destinations and public spaces because the suburb is designed for cars and not people. And without strong communities, what is it exactly that forms the fundamental fibers of democracy?

And it's not so good for us physically, as pungently stated by Dave Roberts: "[m]odern-day American exurbians are living in a way that's making them obese, diabetic, asthmatic, and disconnected from communal support, not to mention dead from heart disease and auto accidents."

Note that Dallas is hardly unique: just about every other large American city has the same problem. But it doesn't have to be this way, as the late Donella Meadows wrote in the best short piece I've ever read on sprawl:

When I imagine the opposite of sprawl, I think of Oslo, Norway. Oslo rises halfway up the hills at the end of a fjord and then abruptly stops. What stops it is a huge public park, in which no private entity is allowed to build anything. The park is full of trails, lakes, playgrounds, picnic tables, and scattered huts where you can stop for a hot drink in winter or cold drink in summer. Tram lines radiate from the city to the park edges, so you can ride to the end of a line, ski or hike in a loop to the end of another line and ride home.

That is a no-nonsense urban growth boundary. It forces development inward. There are no derelict blocks in Oslo. Space no longer useful for one purpose is snapped up for another. Urban renewal goes on constantly everywhere. There are few cars, because there's hardly any place to park and anyway most streets in the shopping district are pedestrian zones. Trams are cheap and frequent and go everywhere. The city is quiet, clean, friendly, attractive and economically thriving.

Meadows didn't merely see problems; in the same essay she talked about how we might "make our cities more like Oslo and less like land-gulping, energy-intensive, half-empty St. Louis [or, of course, Dallas]." Read the original -- like I said, it's short -- but in general the answers come down to taking our foot off the "accelerator" of subsidies for sprawling development (like free infrastructure and tax abatements for new development), and putting on the "brakes" by affirmatively setting limits (like greenbelts).

As for Dallas in particular, Terry has some good suggestions:

Dallas, rather than taking up the rear, should join other major cities in enacting forward-looking energy, planning and environmental policies. [Yeah! Why don't we start with joining the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement? Hello? Mayor Miller, are you there?]

Instead of living large and thinking big, we should instead be living smart and thinking ahead. . . .

For the city, it means paying attention to the land-use recommendations being made by leading urban planner John Fregonese, who has done excellent work in Portland and was recently hired by Dallas. It means green, efficient building practices. It means designing the city around communities rather than freeways.

Terry winds up with the sobering point that "if we continue to assume that things should be big and far apart and that we will always have the cheap energy to keep it all running," then every city in the country will be as fragile as New Orleans.

Indeed.

and speaking of senseless hunting

2005-10-11T21:58:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago Montana decided to resume its bison hunt, authorizing the killing of up to 50 of the beasts unlucky enough to step outside the invisible boundary lines of Yellowstone National Park. Sayonara, guys.

Those of you comparing and contrasting my espisodes of hunting-related dudgeon, note that (in contrast to the whaling situation) I am not suggesting that the intelligence of bison makes them particularly deserving of protection. At least, I don't think it elevates them above cows or pigs or horses or dogs.

I'm against killing the Yellowstone bison for other reasons. First, ecological: the Yellowstone bison are the largest wild herd we have left, living in the largest intact U.S. ecosystem outside of Alaska. Next, sentimental: they're a reminder of what we lost in the reckless destruction of the "Great Barbecue" at the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, economic: it makes no sense to kill what's rare (wild bison) in order to protect what's common (domestic cows).

The Buffalo Field Campaign does good work on this issue.

what whale research means in Japan

2005-10-11T20:57:00.000-05:00

The Japanese Government says that it kills whales ("590 minke whales, 50 Bryde's whales, 50 Sei whales and 10 sperm whales" a year) but that "this activity is not commercial whaling (although some NGOs have stated differently). The research employs both lethal and non-lethal research methods and is carefully designed by scientists to study the whale populations and ecological roles of the species." Ah, how nice. Everybody loves research, right?

Especially when the schoolkids get to chow down on whale curry. Part of a campaign "to promote whale meat," you see. Because, presumably, if they don't get the kids to acquire a taste for the flesh of cetaceans, this disgusting relic of an industry might wither away altogether.

Ethnocentric? Nah -- I'm pissed at Iceland and Norway too.

Illogically focused on a particular group of animals? Nope. Whales and dolphins deserve special attention, of the non-killing kind, not only because of their size and role in ecosystems, but because of their intelligence. For the same reason, we shouldn't feed on apes (though we do, to our eternal shame).

Note: sperm whales and sei whales, which Japan acknowledges killing, are endangered species.

Also note: WWF thinks something stinks with Japan's "research whaling" claims too.

state parks

2005-10-09T21:47:00.000-05:00

Went for a hike yesterday in the Johnson Branch of Ray Roberts Lake State Park. Nice place, as far as North Texas parks go; scenic without being grand.

Pretty lake, shoreline mostly free of crappy development, good wildlife habitat. Hiked the western edge of the Johnson Branch unit, partly on some mountain bike trails that wind through the woods and partly on an old fire road going through fields and forests.

Of course, like every other state park in this part of Texas, the backcountry area is tiny. And since after all it is a reservoir in relatively flat country, much of the shoreline is a smelly, litter-strewn mudflat. Still, it's a pleasant spot, and especially valuable in being only an hour from Dallas.

But a $10 charge for two adults to spend a few hours in a park is ridiculous. I mean, ten bucks buys a family a week's admission to most national parks (twenty gets you into the marquee parks like Yosemite and Denali). And, Ray Roberts, you're a nice little park, but you're no Yosemite or Denali. If we look locally, you're in the same league as Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge (albeit with less wildlife). But entrance to Hagerman is free.

To be fair to TWPD and the Legislature, I think the Ray Roberts fee is higher than most of the other Texas state parks. It's hard to confirm that since there doesn't seem to be anything about fees for most parks on the TPWD site. So I must disagree with state Senator Jeff Wentworth, who says:

Fees and schedules for all state parks, historical sites, natural areas and wildlife management areas and other information may be obtained by calling toll-free (800) 792-1112 or clicking into the Texas Parks and Wildlife site at www.tpwd.state.tx.us/park. Because the Texas Legislature has kept park entrance and camping fees low, the state's recreation areas are within the budget of nearly all Texans.

First, there's precious little in the way of fee information on the TPWD site. Second, the Lege has not kept entrance and camping fees low -- it would cost a family of four (kids over 13) twenty bucks just to have a picnic at Ray Roberts. And even more to camp.

I don't object to paying entrance fees. I know that Texas state parks are sadly underfunded. (Sen. Wentworth correctly says that "Texas ranks 49th in per capita spending on state parks.") As a state we need to spend more -- lots more -- on acquiring new parks, expanding existing parks, and taking better care of what we have. But the user fees we charge should be consistent with the going rate for similar uses on other public lands. Exorbitant fees aren't just unfair and unseemly. They will also drive away people who might form a part of the constituency for building a park system we could actually be proud of.

Gasbags playing on Americans' insecurity

2005-10-07T16:51:00.000-05:00

The wretched (and stupidly named) Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005 (text here) passed the House today by two votes, 204-202. Reminiscent of their antics with the bank-breaking giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, the Republican leaders in Congress held the five-minute voting period open for 45 minutes while they twisted arms. Coverage on Reuters, NY Times (AP), and NPR. I like the audio on the latter: toward the end, as minority leader Nancy Pelosi charges that the process "brought dishonor to the house," one of the majority hacks shouts over her with the repeated and archaic-sounding demand that "the gentle lady" shut the hell up. Meanwhile, the opposition chants "shame." Ah, democracy.

So what does the bill do? All kinds of lousy stuff, for the benefit of an industry that's currently making record profits. From the Times:

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said the bill streamlines the maze of permitting requirements for expanding or building refineries and directs the president to single out federal land where a refinery may be built. The changes could lead to construction of a new U.S. refinery within a year, he predicted.

But opponents said the legislation fails to address the rising cost of natural gas -- which will cause heating costs to soar this winter -- or deal with high prices motorists are paying at the pump. Instead, they argued, it will allow the oil industry to avoid environmental rules and force states and communities to accept refineries they don't want.

Ah, yes, of course this stinker is the handiwork of Smokey Joe Barton. It's no surprise, therefore, that it includes a provision that would amend the Clean Air Act to allow EPA to extend clean air deadlines. Want to breathe more easily? Keep waiting.

Note that the opposition to this piece of dreck was bipartisan; its support was exclusively Republican.

Senator Cornyn hits a new low

2005-10-07T10:25:00.000-05:00

The craptacular junior senator from Texas, John Cornyn, was among the nine who voted against John McCain's anti-torture amendment two days ago.

Pretty good DMN editorial today about the McCain amendment.

D'oh!

2005-10-03T22:47:00.000-05:00

Apropos of Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), the man working to sell off national parks and gut the Endangered Species Act, today I saw a listserv reference to a 1999 article in the Environmental Forum by Michael Bean. Apparently, Bean thusly described a meeting with Newt Gingrich, science luminary Edward O. Wilson, and Pombo: "on the one hand [Wilson], the Homer of biodiversity; on the other hand [Pombo], the Homer Simpson of biodiversity."

High Country News has a long profile of this joker as well.

What I said, only better.

2005-10-03T17:56:00.000-05:00

Last week I wrote about the DMN editorial page's ugly about-face on the Trinity Project bridges, from saying that Congress should delay the bridge funding in order to pay for hurricane relief, to (one day later) saying that the bridges were just too damn important and Congress should find other pork to cut.

I should have known that Jim Schutze would nail this one. Writing of the DMN's first bridge editorial, he said:

I don't know if I can even express what an absolutely amazing gesture that was. The Dallas Morning News has campaigned for the Trinity River project, to rebuild the river through downtown, with fervid doggedness from the beginning. I believe one reason the News has pushed it with such single-mindedness is that the project directly impacts the real estate interests of the small group of families with controlling ownership of the newspaper.

I believe the Trinity project is pork of the rankest odor. . . .

. . .

Why should the federal government pay for Dallas to have suspension bridges across a mud flat? The argument, dear reader, is that these will be signature bridges. These bridges, to be designed by famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, will do for Dallas what the world's biggest ball of string and world's biggest waffle have done for other burgs. These bridges will make a statement.

. . .

What statement will be made by make-believe Spanish suspension bridges over a muddy ditch in downtown Dallas? I can tell you. The statement will be: Dallas is a very silly city, and somebody talked the idiot feds into paying for it.

Can any moral, fair-minded, decent citizen honestly argue that federal tax dollars should be spent for make-believe suspension bridges in Dallas, Texas, while a huge swath of the nation lies bloody, near death, gasping for recovery?

The Morning News editorial page said no. . . .

[But] the very next day they stepped in it. The lead editorial in the News on September 21 was an abject, quaking, voice-shaking apology. . . .

They took it back. They said all the other pork should be cut but not the Trinity project.

I asked [DMN editorial page editor Keven] Willey why. She said: "This was largely a miscommunication. The publisher was out of town, frankly, and had not been aware of our thinking or our intent on this. When the publisher saw the editorial, he wasn't particularly happy with it, shall we say."

. . .

So what does all of this show? It shows why the transportation act will not be reopened, and the pork will not be cut in order to pay for Katrina or Rita or Grandma's Medicare.

I'm afraid he's right. Go read the whole thing.

This week's Onion has been preempted by a reality too ridiculous for parody.

2005-09-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

"House Resources chairman Richard Pombo [R-CA] is circulating a draft of a bill that would sell 15 national parks and require the National Park Service to raise millions of dollars by selling the naming rights to visitors' centers and trails." But it's not that bad -- Pombo's spokesman says he's only making this obscene threat in order to get others in Congress to support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oh, cool.

"Millions of acres of government-owned land in the West should be sold to pay the bill for Hurricane Katrina recovery, Rep. Tom Tancredo said." Specifically, he wants to sell fifteen percent of the federal public lands.

Meanwhile, Rep> Henry Waxman (D-CA) is trying to raise hell about draft legislation being circulated at EPA "that would allow the agency to waive any provision of the Clean Air Act, nationwide – including limits on toxic emissions and the health-based air quality standards – without any notice or public comment whenever the Administrator chooses to declare an emergency."

Sigh. For a sane, thoughtful response to the hurricanes, check out the Center for Progressive Reform's report, An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

What I didn't say at my high school reunion

2005-09-26T22:52:00.000-05:00

Hi R -- good to see you. Listen, even though almost everyone in our class is Christian to the point of listing one or more Apostles as "Fantasy Dinner Guests," it ain't right for you to open our reunion dinner with a Christian prayer. It's a public school, dude. It's only common decency to realize that at least a few of your classmates don't share your beliefs: they aren't deacons, don't pray, and would rather sip bourbon with Mark Twain than break bread with St. Paul. Do you see anything wrong at all in forcing a captive audience to participate in your religious ceremony? Do you realize that anyone might be offended by this?

Of course you do; that's why you said "And for those who do not believe in You and Your Son, let them not be offended by this blessing." Nice variation on the "I'm sorry if anyone was offended by my remarks" routine so beloved of politicians and football coaches. Thanks for the thought, but I think the polite thing to do would have been to speak to us directly.

Your assigned text for the next reunion is Matthew 6:5:

And when you pray, do not imitate the hypocrites: they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at the street corners for people to see them.

Don't get me wrong -- I'd still find prayer at public events offensive, even if the Bible said it was hunky-dory. But shouldn't you pay more attention to these particular words of Jesus?

And speaking of Schutze

2005-09-21T22:37:00.000-05:00

In last week's Observer, the best journalist in Dallas noted that, by ignoring a 1993 federal report on flood control, we're setting ourselves up for a New Orleans-style disaster. In particular, with the Trinity Project, "[w]e are doing every single thing the report warned America not to do -- jamming massive new freeway construction down cheek-by-jowl with the river, raising levees, encouraging lots of fancy new development in what would otherwise be cheap flood plain."

What a difference a day makes

2005-09-21T21:02:00.000-05:00

A day plus, I suspect, an angry call from the publisher. Here's the story.

Dallas Morning News, lead editorial, September 20:

Katrina doesn't have to sink us in debt

. . . The best place to start is to reopen the transportation bill Congress passed this summer. This page supported that legislation, but that was before Hurricane Katrina.

GOP Sen. Jon Kyl proposes lopping 25 percent off the $286 billion, five-year measure. While it's not likely that Congress will go that far, cutting or delaying 10 percent of the projects seems reasonable. Several that are dear to Dallas' heart, such as funds for signature bridges across the Trinity River, should be included. This would be one more way Dallas can extend the right hand of fellowship to its neighbors.

Well said, DMN. A little timid, yes, but offering to cut or delay the delivery of federal funds for our fancy new ornamental bridges is just the decent thing to do.

But wait -- there's more (italicized material mine).

Dallas Morning News, lead editorial, September 21:

Katrina's Costs: Trinity River project is vital to North Texas

One of the points in an editorial on this page yesterday has been widely misunderstood. For that we accept responsibility and set about here to clarify our message. How Presidential of us.

Our editorial supported President Bush's call for communities around the nation to identify nonessential spending that could be cut or postponed to help cover the $200 billion cost of Katrina recovery without raising taxes. We cited projects in the transportation bill approved by Congress last summer (like the stupid Alaskan bridges) as a good place to start, and thought we would lead by example in suggesting that funding be delayed for a year or two for the second and third Calatrava bridges in our beloved Trinity River project (AKA "Our Precious.")

It is now apparent to us (now that the publisher and his buddies have read the Riot Act to the ed board, that is) that this was a poor example to cite. (Do not touch Our Precious.) They and the Trinity Project will be a huge economic engine for the revitalization of downtown, which supplies the oxygen for much of the rest of North Texas. (Downtown supplies our oxygen?) They are critical to resolving this area's transportation challenges (Um, no, they're not. As Jim Schutze has reported, the existing, non-fancy bridges are in good shape and work just fine for transportation.) and to enhancing our most important waterway. (As much as I like White Rock Creek, I guess I have to admit that the Trinity beats it out, narrowly, in the race to be the most important Dallas-area waterway.) There are other ways Congress can find the money to pay for the catastrophe wrought by Katrina without deepening the federal debt or raising taxes. (Or taking Our Precious from us.)

Enough of my feeble attempts at sarcastic annotation. Two points emerge from this ugly spectacle:

(1) It is the official position of the Dallas Morning News that getting the taxpayers of the rest of the U.S. to fund the construction of two fancy designer bridges over the Trinity River is too important to be delayed by even one year for such a frivolous purpose as funding hurricane relief.

(2) Given the transparent, appalling, parochial selfishness of point #1, I conclude that the editors of the DMN, who have in general struck me as people with at least a modicum of integrity, were force-fed a huge lemon last night. Ugly.

The first time I have linked to the Heritage Foundation

2005-09-16T17:10:00.000-05:00

And with utter approval, no less. The creepy conservative think tank has at least one thing right: to fund relief programs for Hurricane Katrina, Congress should rescind its authorization of at least the more obscene of the pork projects making up the recent transportation bill. Don Young's stupid bridges to nowhere are taking a major hit. I especially like this letter, and this letter, from right-thinking Ketchikanians.

know your place

2005-09-15T23:27:00.000-05:00

The always-interesting Kevin Kelly has posted a list of questions on his blog, Cool Tools. He calls it The Big Here Quiz -- it's an expanded version, he says, of a list that began 30-odd years ago. (I remember seeing a proto-version in Sierra maybe 10 years back.) Reading through the list and trying, inwardly, to fumble through an answer to a simple question like "Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available" or "Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap" was a humbling exercise.

The Roberts record

2005-09-12T21:09:00.000-05:00

University of Michigan Law Library has compiled what looks to be a comprehensive online collection of John Roberts's writings.

more on Katrina and climate change

2005-09-11T22:17:00.000-05:00

Light posting lately. Until I have time to generate something more substantial on my own, consider these two pieces. I'm quoting at length, but do read the originals. First, from Grist's Chip Miller and Dave Roberts:

If we could travel back in time 10 years, even 20, and work to prevent last week's misery and loss, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would be far down the list of pragmatic preventative strategies.

. . .

And yet: Once the storm's victims are safe, the toxic lake in New Orleans has been drained, public officials have been held accountable for their failures and our immediate concern and fury have run their course, climate change will still be there. It looms over all our decisions now.
While scientists can't connect global warming to Katrina, or any individual weather-related disaster, they say the larger trend is crystal clear: We are entering an age of climate instability. In coming years, we can expect rising sea levels, more-intense hurricanes and monsoons and longer, drier droughts. Katrina is expected to drain the federal government of more than $150 billion.

How many more $150 billion hits can we take? . . .

We urgently need to prepare on the ground for weather-driven upheaval, to restore our natural coastal buffer zones, push development inland and revitalize the agencies tasked with emergency response.

But along with that preparation -- no, as part of that preparation -- we need to get serious about doing what we can to stabilize the climate.
. . .
In an age of climate disruption, we are all New Orleanians.

And Bill McKibben says:

A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places -- coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on -- and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees", forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.

Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on earth, and then increase it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate it to the poorest nations on earth.

. . . No single hurricane is "the result" of global warming, but a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emanuel published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms were now lasting half again as long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few decades before. The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico. . . .

. . . [S]cientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise 5 degrees before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far.

. . . Take New Orleans as an example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that the city will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many times will we rebuild it? Even in America there's not that kind of money -- especially if you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria, and so on ad infinitum. Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to run on something less suicidal than fossil fuels, a task that becomes more expensive with every year that passes.

Cheery stuff, what?

Where anti-government zealotry takes you

2005-09-07T19:35:00.000-05:00

From Tom Friedman:

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

Follow it up with Harold Meyerson:

Even now, with bedraggled rescuers pulling decomposed bodies from the muck of New Orleans, Bill Frist, the moral cretin who runs the U.S. Senate, wanted its first order of business this week to be the permanent repeal of the estate tax, until the public outcry persuaded him to change course. The Republicans profess belief in trickle-down, but what they've given us is the Flood.

The world looks on in stunned amazement, unable to understand how a once great nation has grown so indifferent not just to its poor and its blacks but even to the most rudimentary self-preservation. Some of it is institutional racism, but the primary culprit is the economic libertarianism that the president still espouses whenever he sells his Social Security snake oil.

Katrina

2005-09-06T20:59:00.000-05:00

I'm overwhelmed; all I can come up with is a miscellany.

The obvious.

Give. Lots of options; the Morning News has a Dallas-based list; KERA has another. Nationally: many options, including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the Humane Society.

Two semi-obscure bright spots.

A web designer named Katrina converted her eponymous personal site into a Hurricane clearinghouse, turning down offers of huge pots o' cash from various people who, it seems likely, did not have hurricane relief in mind but instead were looking for a guaranteed bunch of hits.

New Orleans has two law schools, neither of which will have a fall semester in the city now. Since the semester was about to start, hundreds of students who had paid their tuition, bought books, etc., have scattered across the country. In response, law school professors and deans from around the country have moved almost instantly to open their schools to these students, waive tuition, inveigle textbook publishers into providing free replacement books, and the like. Law school info here. (I assume that there are similar efforts under way in every field; I've just happened to hear about the law schools.) (Related: poignant note about the impact of Katrina on the legal system and profession in Louisiana.)

Some observations:

Bush's "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees" is eerie in its parallelism to Condoleezza Rice's claim that no one could have anticipated the use of planes to slam into buildings. And even falser. (See, for example, this great New Orleans Times-Picayune story from 2002.) Likewise, his use of firefighters as walking photo-op background material is reminiscent of his Flight Suit Moment on the Lincoln. But more revolting.

One of the incredibly annoying things about bureaucracy is the inevitable tendency of bureaucrats to make excuses and to pat each other on the back, purely to show how good they are at patting each other on the back. One of the other incredibly annoying things about bureacracy is how necessary it is. Just because it's been underfunded and led by knuckleheads does not make FEMA disposable. Just because the Corps of Engineers wastes tons of money on ridiculous and unnecessary water projects doesn't mean it should be abolished, or that its New Orleans flood control budget should have been slashed.

Hedonism and genial acceptance of corruption and incompetence tends not to promote good government. New Orleans should have planned better. But so should we all have -- the management of the entire Mississippi watershed has contributed to the coastal wetland loss that has made the city steadily more vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. American Radio Works did a great (and prescient) story on the problem.

Speaking of which, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) should now be properly ashamed of his efforts to make it easier to log cypress forests in Louisiana wetlands. Of course, it won't make him too proud to seek aid from the rest of the country in restoring the wetlands he's helping to destroy.

There seems to be a lot of controversy over the extent of the mayhem in the mostly-abandoned city. I don't know the answer. I did hear enough reports that seemed to be from people with firsthand information to conclude that a substantial amount of looting and violence went on. It occurs to me that at times even the most gun-hating of us might want to have a weapon. On the other hand, the most fervent of Second Amendment purists ought to recognize that there are social costs attendant on keeping large stocks of weapons in every pawn shop, discount store, and sporting-goods outfit.

The physical damage is immense, and the site never made much sense, but we should not quickly write off such an interesting city. If nothing else, rebuilding may be economically necessary to maintain the port at the mouth of the Mississippi. And there is the rather important matter of the desires of the people who have lived there. But any rebuilding effort has to recognize the potential for another hurricane just like Katrina, years or weeks from now. And the likelihood that by 2060 or so, with the coastal wetlands fully eroded away, New Orleans will exist on a sort of peninsula projecting out into the Gulf. At that point, a weaker hurricane than Katrina could cause worse damage. How can the city be rebuilt so as to avoid that? I don't know, but I know we need to figure it out.

The same goes, with some variations, for the other coastal communities hit hard by the hurricane.

I also know that we need to do something about the generational poverty that left so many people trapped on the Gulf coast when the hurricane hit.

On the whole the response to Katrina leaves me worried. Astoundingly generous and heroic efforts by front-line responders and private citizens, but a government seemingly ill-prepared to take on any kind of emergency. I mean, the least I would have expected from an authoritarian bully-boy like Bush would have been that he could crack a few heads and maintain basic civil order where doing so was clearly necessary to save thousands of lives. Instead we got anarchy, and the senselessness of medical relief crews being being fired on. Away from the crisis zone, we have constant caterwauling about gas prices. I can't help wondering if this is in some ways a foretaste of the "long emergency" that James Howard Kunstler has predicted. (His take: here.) Either way, we have a lot more work to do before the next one.

Some good or interesting stuff I've seen:

Krugman.

Tomdispatch, via Dave Roberts at Gristmill.

RealClimate discusses hurricanes and global warming.

techno-limbo

2005-08-31T23:50:00.000-05:00

Computer woes the last week or so. Back soon with more of the usual bilious ranting.

All the Roberts you could ask for

2005-08-25T21:53:00.000-05:00

Thorough-looking collection of the words of John Glover Roberts, put together by the University of Michigan Law Library.

Interesting Roberts fact: at the same time he was deciding the Hamdi "enemy combatants" case in favor of the Administration, he was interviewing with that Administration for a Supreme Court spot.

So much weirdness in one little story.

2005-08-23T21:38:00.000-05:00

But I think we can all agree: anyone who stages a wedding between a golden retriever and a chihuahua deserves to be tackled by a crazy alter ego from out of the sea.

an antiwar conservative speaks

2005-08-22T18:23:00.000-05:00

Rod Dreher has a good post on the war over at the Dallas Morning News blog today (no permalink -- scroll down to 4:41 pm). Reviewing Bush's VFW speech in Salt Lake City -- " a passel of platitudes and shopworn rhetoric that is shockingly disconnected from the realities on the ground in Iraq" -- Dreher makes five quick, solid points. Example:

Mr. Bush extolled a constitutional process that upheld the "the values and traditions of the Iraqi people." Oh? Like sharia, which will oppress women and religious minorities? Is that what American soldiers have fought and died for? Why is this a good thing? Shouldn't Mr. Bush explain it to us?

Dreher winds up with: "Bottom line: our president is fighting the war he wishes he was fighting, not the war we're actually in."

Yep.

8/21 on White Rock Creek

2005-08-21T21:28:00.000-05:00

Canoed White Rock Creek today for the first time in a while. No camera this time; sorry. And the report will be much briefer. Water level: fairly low. Birds: green and great blue herons, both kinds of night herons, e. phoebe, e. kingbird, wood ducks, red-shouldered hawk, belted kingfisher, chickadees, great egrets, and -- this was cool -- a barred owl, which flew in its totally silent way across the channel and then sat with great big owl-eyes watching me watch it for several minutes. While I was still trying to find where it had landed, I saw a raccoon perched in a cottonwood about fifty feet above me, staring down with its masked eyes in what I must admit was an extremely cute way.

(A different raccoon:)

Also saw a few turtles, fish, and frogs. Disappointingly, no snakes. Couple of kayakers.

Trash level: pretty high. Consider my previous grumpiness repeated. I'm still happy that a place like this exists in the middle of Dallas, and sad that we trash it so.

the Alaskan disgrace

2005-08-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

In the grotesquely overstuffed sausage of a transportation bill that the President signed last week, Alaska's Don Young showed his remarkable ability to suck at the federal teat:

As chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Alaska's lone congressional representative for 32 years, the elder statesman wrangled $941 million for Alaska in the bill, making Alaska, the nation's third least populated state, the fourth-biggest recipient of transportation funds. The money for the bill is fed by a gas tax at the pump, but this slush fund isn't redistributed to all Americans equally: The bill spends $86 per person on a national average; it spends an estimated $1,500 on every Alaskan.

(Salon.) Yep, Young is truly a proud, independent, up-by-his-bootstraps Westerner, who lives by an ancient credo: "get out, and give us more money."^*Thanks, apparently, to Young, the nation's taxpayers ended up on the hook for $223 million for a bridge between Ketchikan and its 10-flight-a-day airport. But don't worry; it's really important:

Alaska officials defend the bridge as necessary to promote development in sparsely populated areas and provide a better link to the airport on Gravina Island, which can be reached only by a seven-minute ferry ride.

(Houston Chronicle.) Seven whole minutes? Oh, the humanity. Ah, but the bridge will help promote the holy grail of Development too. Now, of course we all want to help the builders and realtors in Ketchikan get by, but couldn't we just have sent them a few sackfuls of money directly?

And the Ketchikan bridge isn't all -- we're also paying $241 million for a bridge between Anchorage and the single-resident town (?!) of Port McKenzie. The transportation bill makes sure we know who's responsible:

SEC. 4411. DON YOUNG’S WAY.
(a) DESIGNATION.—The Knik Arm bridge in Alaska to be planned, designed, and constructed pursuant to section 117 of title 23, United States Code, as high priority project number 2465 under section 1702 of this Act, is designated as ‘‘Don Young’s Way’’.
(b) REFERENCES.—Any reference in law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to the bridge referred to in subsection (a) shall be deemed to be a reference to ‘‘Don Young’s Way’’.

Got that? Whatever you do, please remember to call the bridge by the right name. (I guess they decided "Don Young's Enormously Wasteful Monument to Ego" would be hard to fit on the signs.) Crusty old West Virginia pork whore Robert Byrd, perhaps the original Senator Highway-to-Nowhere, must be jealous.

This debacle has been been pretty well-covered in blogs and in the press, including the conservative press, so I won't say much more here. Except to note that too much of the routine coverage (as opposed to the outraged editorializing) has taken as axiomatic that legislators are doing their constituents a favor by paving over more of their districts. Which is, I would say, crazy talk. Note, for instance, that there is "strong local opposition" to the Ketchikan bridge. As refreshingly honest Sally Walsh of Ketchikan asks, "How is this bridge fair to the rest of the country?"

More fun with the transportation bill, including a look at how it hits us in the Dallas area, later. I'm afraid our hands aren't exactly clean in the boondoggle-bridge department.

________________________
^*Bernard Devoto (article at p. xix) .

a leftist sanctuary in the heart of Texas

2005-08-12T13:06:00.000-05:00

It's true. As noted on the DMN blog, a new report looking at voting patterns says that Dallas is the most liberal city in Texas, and the 32nd most liberal in the country. More liberal than Austin (93rd); way more liberal than Houston (177th). In fact, Dallas is apparently more liberal than Madison, Wisconsin. The reaction around the state can be summed up as: "WTF?"

But it's not so strange as all that. Dallas proper may have a healthy population of liberals, but we're also surrounded by right-wing suburbs: Plano (5th most conservative), Arlington (14th most conservative), Garland (29th most conservative), Carrollton (34th most conservative), Mesquite (52nd most conservative), and Irving (56th most conservative). (None of the Austin burbs make the list at all.) Mash it all together and the effect is enough to generate the miasma of pro-business conservatism we all know so well.

Mooney rules

2005-08-11T23:17:00.000-05:00

Every damn thing this guy writes is important and thoughtful. Sampling from the last few days:

- discussion of a Nature paper on global warming and increasing hurricane intensity

- review of the press coverage of President Bush's remarks suggesting intelligent design be taught in schools

- a thoughtful review of the impacts of the Daubert decision on expert testimony, from a scientific perspective

- a dismantling of NYT columnist John Tierney's no-problem-here take on global warming and polar bears

- a "rant about Hollywood's abuse of the Frankenstein myth in films ranging from Star Wars: Episode III to The Island"

Great stuff, all.

Texas Public Lands News

2005-08-09T23:10:00.000-05:00

Am thinking of a new blogging project.

more on the anti-NEPA hearings

2005-08-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

Grist has a pretty thorough report.

(Previous Fraxinus post here.)

The Ikea Dallas Ikea Morning Ikea News

2005-07-31T15:39:00.000-05:00

Hey, did you know there's a new Ikea store opening in Frisco, Texas? You must have missed this article. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And, especially, this full-throttle animated Ikeagasm.

Making the world safe for theocratic misogynist repression

2005-07-28T22:39:00.000-05:00

I know that good things have happened as a result of President Bush's colossal screwup in Iraq. Getting rid of dictator: good. Building electric and sanitation infrastructure: good. But installing a "democracy" consisting of Shiites who torture prisoners and make women cloak themselves on pain of death? Bad.

We're waiting for an apology, Mr. President. (What? I can dream, can't I?)

the NEPA kangaroo court

2005-07-25T22:40:00.000-05:00

House Resources Committee chair and noted knucklehead Richard Pombo has ginned up the grandly named Task Force on Improving the National Environmental Policy Act. And by "improving" you may be sure he means "eviscerating." The Task Force has convened a series of hearings around the country to solicity public input on NEPA. The hearings are not open to all comers, but to a picked group of invitees, among whom environmentalists are not numerous.

NEPA's the vitally important law requiring studies of the environmental impact of major federal actions. It's everything a law should be: high-minded, useful, brief, and comprehensible to anyone. Like the Wilderness Act, it's borderline poetic in spots, declaring a continuing federal policy "to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans," and assigning the entire federal government the responsibility to "fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations."

Okay, Yeats it isn't, but it's a damn sight more readable and inspiring than, say, the Clean Air Act. Alas, the executive branch has ignored most of the poetry, and the courts have said the law doesn't allow citizens to force the federal government to make environmentally responsible decisions.

But at least citizens can use NEPA to make sure that the feds make an informed decision, and that they let the public know what the consequences of that decision will be. (That's just too much good government, say Pombo and company.)

For local press on the East Texas show trial, see the Lufkin Daily News, before and after.

The LA Times has a decent story on the Task Force.

For views from the environmental community, check out Sierra Club and the American Lands Alliance.

And to let the Task Force know what you think, write to them at nepataskforce@mail.house.gov.

weather porn

2005-07-20T21:56:00.000-05:00

pretty cool Hurricane Emily photo at Sprol

Roberts clarification

2005-07-20T07:33:00.000-05:00

In the post below I was trying to examine the likely consequences of his confirmation rather than make a case for his rejection. Unless something really surprising turns up in his record, looks like Roberts will be confirmed pretty easily. Democrats and advocacy groups should scour his oral argument transcripts and written opinions, and ask all the questions they want, but so far it looks like if they go to war over this one they'll just waste money and look silly.

So: looks like a bad choice in the sense that Roberts is going to move the Court to the right, but that's what you get when you elect a right-wing President.

global warming: thoughtful Republicans vs. Joe Barton

2005-07-19T22:57:00.000-05:00

Sort of an old story, but now that other House Republicans are getting cheesed off at Joe Barton, the major papers have picked it up.

Judge Roberts on the environment

2005-07-19T20:28:00.000-05:00

As usual, environmental issues will get at best a sentence or two in the big news stories. Here, an effort at correcting that oversight. First, a note from the Alliance for Justice report on Roberts when he was nominated to the D.C. Circuit:

First, as Acting Solicitor General, Roberts was the government’s lead counsel before the Supreme Court in Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation [497 U.S. 871 (1990)], a case brought by citizens seeking to enforce environmental protections in response to the government’s decision to open 4,500 acres of public land to mining activity. Plaintiffs asserted that they would be injured by the government’s decision to open the land to mining, citing recreational activities in which they had engaged and planned to engage in the future in that area. Despite express statutory authorization for such suits, however, Roberts argued that plaintiffs, members of the National Wildlife Federation, had no right to file the claims, because they had not presented sufficient proof of the impact of the government’s actions on them to give them standing. He asserted that the D.C. Circuit, which had granted standing, had “presum[ed] facts that the parties did not -- and perhaps cannot -- allege on their own.” [Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, 1989 U.S. Briefs 640 at p.1, Reply Brief for Petitioners, April 6, 1990.] The Supreme Court agreed with Roberts, tightening standing requirements for federal cases in one of a line of cases making it harder for plaintiffs to challenge governmental actions detrimental to the environment.

Ugh. Lujan's a crappy case, all right. More, this time from a Legal Times piece:

Roberts also displayed what some viewed as insouciance toward arroyo toads in a 2003 case, Rancho Viejo v. Norton. Roberts wanted the full D.C. Circuit to reconsider a panel's decision that upheld a Fish and Wildlife Service regulation protecting the toads under the Endangered Species Act. Roberts said there could be no interstate commerce rationale for protecting the toad, which, he said, "for reasons of its own lives its entire life in California."

Sounds a lot like someone who thinks the Constitution doesn't permit the federal government any role in environmental protection if the resource in question is arguably contained within one state. (So long, wetlands!)

But he has shown himself willing to defer to agency judgments (which can be good or bad) in the right circumstances. From SCOTUSBlog:

Indep. Equip. Dealers Ass'n v. EPA, 372 F.3d 420 (2004): In an opinion joined by Judges Garland and Rogers, Judge Roberts dismissed an action brought by a trade association of independent dealers of heavy construction and industrial equipment. The association was seeking review of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) interpretation of emissions regulations for nonroad engines. Judge Roberts held that since the EPA advice letter at issue merely reiterated the longstanding prior interpretation of the regulations, the letter did not constitute an agency action subject to judicial review.

More later.

The expert speaks.

2005-07-14T22:54:00.000-05:00

When Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton (or any other Bush Administration bureaucrat) says things like this:

Importantly, this legislation would increase America's energy supply by authorizing environmentally responsible energy production in the 1002 Area of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
. . .
The Department of the Interior will ensure that energy production in the 1002 Area is environmentally responsible and does not result in any significant adverse effect on the wildlife or the environment on Alaska's North Slope.

Then think about this:

Thunder Horse stands tall, designed to dig deep for the domestic energy America needs. It was created to protect the blue waters that it stands in -- no matter how great the storm.

The largest oil platform in the world, Thunder Horse is also one of the toughest and one of the most environmentally benign. . . .
It shows the power of new technology to conquer extremes of nature in pursuit of energy. At the same time, it is extremely protective of the fragility of our natural world.
. . .
Thunder Horse will withstand the worst that winds and waves will throw against it.
. . .
Thunder Horse is the latest and greatest example of environmental performance.
. . .
This steely structure is far more than a business investment and technological marvel. Thunder Horse is an anchor of energy stability, lending America a more secure ride through international storms.

And then think about this.

I have to admit it.

2005-07-13T22:05:00.000-05:00

This bit of Teutonic engineering is kind of awe-inspring, in a monumental, crushing, planet-eating way.

Report on the Region C water hearing

2005-07-13T21:54:00.000-05:00

For follow-up on the big North Texas water boondoggle hearing this past Monday, see the articles in the Star-Telegram and the Morning News.

Something else I learned at the meeting: they're taking public comments on the water plan by email as well as the postal address I mentioned a few days ago. Send comments to regionc@freese.com by 5:00 pm on September 9, 2005.

call me parochial, but

2005-07-13T21:33:00.000-05:00

I find it hard to believe that there are half a dozen governors who are even less popular in their own states than Rick Perry is.

N. Texas water meeting Mon. July 11: tell them we don't need any more reservoirs

2005-07-10T16:40:00.000-05:00

The horrible Marvin Nichols project is still a glint in the beady eyes of North Texas water planners, along with three other wasteful and unnecessary reservoirs. I've written about this before, here and here. The short version is that if we adopt sensible conservation measures we won't need to build any more reservoirs, which would be a good outcome because the reservoirs would destroy farms, ranches, and wildlife habitat and would cost a staggering amount of money.

Tomorrow there is a public meeting to accept comments on the current water plan for "Region C," which includes Dallas, Tarrant, and 14 other counties in North Texas. It's at 1:00 at :

Bob Duncan Community Center
2800 South Center Street
Arlington TX 76014

The Region C planning council consists of 19 people, only two of whom represent environmental interests. Two more represent the public. (For the list, click here and go to page I.4.)

Here's the Dallas Group of the Sierra Club's brief write-up on tomorrow's meeting.

Here's the official public notice.

Note that even if you don't make the meeting, public comments are being accepted until 5:00 PM on September 9. Send them to:

James M. Parks
RCWPG Chairman/Administrator
c/o NTMWD
PO Box 2408
Wylie TX 75098-2408

And by "Environmental Protection," they mean "Energy Promotion."

2005-07-06T21:44:00.000-05:00

Steve Johnson, the newly-minted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, told the Western Governors' Association yesterday that the EPA should be "a catalyst for energy development while protecting the environment." He also said that EPA should be "supporting legislation over regulation," which would convert EPA from a watchdog agency into a collection of taxpayer-funded lobbyists.

The Denver Post editorial board was not amused:

He said he wants the EPA to be a "catalyst for energy development."

Huh? This fellow is confused. That's not the EPA's mission. The federal government already has an outfit (the Department of Energy) whose mission is to encourage development of energy resources. Yet another office (the Department of Interior) has become a cheerleader for oil and gas drilling.

Of course the nation should develop its energy resources, and some agencies of government have a legitimate guiding hand. But the EPA? It's got a job to do, and energy development isn't it.

The EPA's mission - as proposed by President Nixon in 1970, defined and updated by Congress many times over 35 years, and sharpened by three decades of court cases - is to ensure that such public values as clean air and clean water are considered, and honored.

microgeneration starts looking real

2005-07-05T22:06:00.000-05:00

Microgeneration means renewable energy production at or near the point of use. No power lines, no power plants -- just your solar panels or windmill or whatever. It's starting to look more feasible, as WorldChanging reports. Now who wouldn't want one of these?

Smokey Joe strikes again

2005-07-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

Dave Roberts at Gristmill summarizes the controversy around one of Rep. Joe Barton's latest misdeeds, a bullying letter to climate scientists demanding that they turn over data, supply their CVs, and swear fealty to the Republic of Petrolia. (I'm inferring that last part.) And Roberts's main source, Chris Mooney, has some good updates, including a link to his American Prospect column on the debacle.

Trudeau gets mean.

2005-07-05T20:35:00.000-05:00

Ouch.

Happy 4th

2005-07-04T07:53:00.000-05:00

Congratulations, NASA. Nice fireworks.

The party of Lincoln.

2005-07-03T20:21:00.000-05:00

Digby covers a little reality problem with the Administration's editing of the NPS video at the Lincoln Memorial.

DMN report

2005-07-03T18:03:00.000-05:00

Some good stuff in the Points section of the Dallas Morning News today. First, an excellent piece by David Kusnet about how Barack Obama's articulating "the best case for liberal politics in recent memory," as well as an excerpt from the commencement speech that inspired it.

Second, an excerpt from The Long Emergency, which is The Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler's book on peak oil and its consequences.

And speaking of great Americans

2005-07-03T16:32:00.000-05:00

Former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson has died. Nelson was a fine liberal who opposed the Vietnam War from the outset and was a co-founder of Earth Day. On which, see his Beyond Earth Day:

We will not succeed in forging an economically and environmentally sustainable society until all key social, political, economic, and religious groups are on board. If labor, business, or any other major group is opposed to doing what is necessary to achieve sustainability, it probably will not happen.

By the same token, we should not be blind to the fact that, for some companies, Earth Day is merely an occasion to put on their Sunday best one day a year. It is evolving, however. Whether a corporation wants to appear green for public recognition, or for perfectly honest reasons, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, we’re gaining. If they are deceiving the public, let them be exposed in the political marketplace. Keep them honest if you can. They can read the science as well as we, but an environmentalist can’t go out and tell businesspeople that they must mend their ways and expect them to listen.

No one is pure. We all make compromises in different aspects of our lives where the environment is concerned, and it is self-defeating to draw rigid lines of purity when trying to build a political consensus.

In short, the company that buys into Earth Day once a year but that fails to clean up its act plays the same game as the individual who picks up litter one day a year but fails to be a good steward of the planet every other day. Earth Day is not a day of penance for America. It was founded on a spirit of desire and a sense of duty— as a means to an end, not as an end. Let us keep that spirit alive and our goal clear.

100

2005-07-01T16:37:00.000-05:00

So I hear that the Discovery Channel has a list of the 100 greatest Americans, compiled through some sort of poll. In which, apparently, morons were over-represented, as the list features such towering figures as Tom Cruise, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. I can't say I think John Edwards, Michael Moore, Mel Gibson, or (yet) Barack Obama belong in the elite 100 either. The list also, in a highly questionable result even for people who think he was a great president (I don't), ranks Ronald Reagan as the #1 Greatest American of All Time (take that, Abe!) and the current Disaster-in-Chief as #6.

Below, in alphabetical order, is my own list, compiled haphazardly out of my own faulty memory and idiosyncratic preferences and before I looked at the full Discovery list. My list, of course, reveals all kinds of things about my own biases and preconceptions. Political figures are overrepresented; artists are underrepresented, as are various ethnic and cultural groups. Environmentalists are there in pretty healthy numbers. Some people of enormous achievement and significance in our history are missing simply because I hold a grudge against them -- e.g., Douglas Macarthur. (I can't abide his insubordination during Korea.) Or because I forgot about them. But this is not intended to be a complete list. My chief guiding principle was: make a list that Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson are not on. If I took more time, probably I'd decide to replace some of these cats. But for now, I'm through with it. If you think someone's missing, let me know.

1. Hank Aaron
2. Jane Addams
3. Susan B. Anthony
4. Louis Armstrong
5. Isaac Asimov
6. Louis Brandeis
7. William Brennan
8. David Brower
9. Rachel Carson
10. Jimmy Carter
11. Johnny Cash
12. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
13. Raymond Chandler
14. César Chávez
15. Julia Child
16. William Clark
17. Roberto Clemente
18. Aaron Copland
19. Clarence Darrow
20. Jared Diamond
21. William O. Douglas
22. Frederick Douglass
23. Freeman Dyson
24. Thomas Edison
25. Albert Einstein
26. Dwight D. Eisenhower
27. Duke Ellington
28. Ralph Waldo Emerson
29. William Faulkner
30. Enrico Fermi
31. Richard Feynman
32. Ben Franklin
33. Buckminster Fuller
34. Benny Goodman
35. Woody Guthrie
36. Julia Hill
37. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
38. Edward Hopper
39. Crazy Horse
40. Sam Houston
41. Langston Hughes
42. Thomas Jefferson
43. John Paul Jones
44. Chief Joseph
45. Helen Keller
46. John F. Kennedy
47. Martin Luther King, Jr.
48. Dorothea Lange
49. John Lewis
50. Meriwether Lewis
51. Roy Liechtenstein
52. Abraham Lincoln
53. Aldo Leopold
54. Archibald MacLeish
55. Bob Marshall
56. George Marshall
57. John Marshall
58. Thurgood Marshall
59. John McCain
60. Herman Melville
61. John Muir
62. Mardy Murie
63. Willie Nelson
64. Georgia O'Keefe
65. Robert Oppenheimer
66. Rosa Parks
67. Roger Tory Peterson
68. Gifford Pinchot
69. Edgar Allan Poe
70. Robert Redford
71. Jackie Robinson
72. Fred Rogers
73. Will Rogers
74. Eleanor Roosevelt
75. Franklin D. Roosevelt
76. Theodore Roosevelt
77. Carl Sagan
78. Jonas Salk
79. Carl Sandburg
80. Upton Sinclair
81. Benjamin Spock
82. Bruce Springsteen
83. John Steinbeck
84. Nikola Tesla
85. Henry David Thoreau
86. Harry S. Truman
87. Tecumseh
88. Harriet Tubman
89. Sojourner Truth
90. Mark Twain
91. Morris Udall
92. Earl Warren
93. George Washington
94. Daniel Webster
95. Orson Welles
96. Walt Whitman
97. Roger Williams
98. Ted Williams
99. E.O. Wilson
100. Chuck Yeager

O'Connor's out

2005-07-01T09:43:00.000-05:00

She'll be missed. Not my favorite Justice by any means, but if you take Sandra Day O'Connor out of the Court and replace her with even a Rehnquist clone -- to say nothing of a Scalia- or Thomas-type judge -- how many 5-4 decisions would go the other way? One, for instance, would be the Kentucky Ten Commandments case, a blatant abuse of the Establishment clause. O'Connor was in the 5-4 majority that found the display unconstitutional.

Update: for an early take on the potential environmental impact of nO'Connor, see the Bush Greenwatch site.

different kind of shark story

2005-06-30T22:45:00.000-05:00

Just ran across this news item:

A federal judge ordered a Hong Kong company to pay for 29 metric tons of shark fins found aboard one of the company's contract vessels in open seas off Guatemala.

Holy mackerel. (Ha.) 29 metric tons of fins? Just to get an idea of what'the magnitude of the numbers involved, let's say one shark produces 20 pounds of fins. (I feel like that's probably an overstatement.) In that case the boat -- this single boat -- had done in 3,190 sharks. For their fins. For soup.

I'm not a professional ecologist or anything, but I don't think you can keep up that sort of take for long.

We could learn a thing or two from the Chinese.

2005-06-30T22:41:00.000-05:00

So Three Gorges Dam is a monumental disaster in the making, and they're kicking bikes out of Beijing, and there's still a bit of an overpopulation problem.

Nonetheless, the Chinese seem to know a lot more than we do about how to tax cars.

chicken?

2005-06-29T23:27:00.000-05:00

I know they're busy, but I'm still going to point out that neither John Cornyn nor Laura Miller has replied to me yet.

What I said there

2005-06-29T23:10:00.000-05:00

At Gristmill, Andy Brett wrote a misleading entry about the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program, and a recent decision by the D.C. Circuit. I offered a response. Nothing back from Andy yet.

(For background on the Bush New Source Review "reforms," try this excellent NYT Magazine article by Bruce Barcott.)

Peak Oil talk

2005-06-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

In lieu of an actual home-grown response to the happy-talk op-ed in the Morning News today by Scott W. Tinker, "state geologist of Texas," let me post a few links. If you've spent any time here, you can probably guess where I stand on this, but mainly I want to say that it's past time to learn about this stuff. It's not just the usual gang of lunatics shouting about the coming downward slope of the oil-production bell curve.

From EnergyBulletin.net, a solid Peak Oil Primer with lots of links.

Kevin Drum's series on peak oil.

James Howard Kunstler's blog.

Documentary The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream.

Does John Cornyn somehow not have a problem with lynching?

2005-06-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

A disturbing number of national Republican "leaders" seem to feel the lingering ties of old-school Southern racism, the racism that had a big part in handing the South to the Republicans whem Democrats started to oppose it. Yeah, I'm talking about the lynching apology resolution. Granted, it's a symbolic gesture. But is it such a hard symbolic gesture to make? Apparently it was for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and for 7 other Republicans (Alexander of Tennessee; Cochran and Lott of Mississippi; Enzi and Thomas of Wyoming; and Gregg and Sununu of New Hampshire). Way to make us proud, Sen. Cornyn.

Not surprising that Cornyn's the nation's least popular senator among his own constituents, is it?

Kelo

2005-06-26T21:13:00.000-05:00

Tons of interesting stuff written on the Kelo v. City of New London decision. SCOTUSblog is a good place to start.

My take? First, I'm mildly surprised by the vehemence of the reaction. Among the outraged commentators are many who, I suspect, either (a) haven't read the decision, or (b) don't care about the reasoning supporting the decision because they don't believe in government in the first place. For the first group, I'll note that the decision's impact is going to be limited by the reality that kicking people out of their homes is a potentially costly thing for politicians to support. Also, Justice Kennedy's concurrence suggests that the floodgates are not completely open. On the other hand, the dissenters argue with some merit that the people who are subject to eminent domain proceedings for economic development projects are disproportionately likely to be poor and powerless. I don't much like the outcome in this case either.

But I think the decision's right. In her dissent, Justice O'Connor gyrates rather wildly to avoid the pretty clear precedents provided by several Supreme Court decisions on eminent domain and public use. Given the other takings cases where she's had no problem siding with the government, I can't help thinking that here she's approaching it from a Western property-rights activist perspective, precedent be damned. At least Thomas, in his solo dissent, has the honesty to acknowledge that to get to the result he wants the Court would have to overturn decades of settled law. (In other situations, many conservatives would call that "judicial activism.")

For opponents, Thomas's is the best response to the heart of Stevens's majority opinion:

Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government. There is, moreover, no principled way of distinguishing economic development from the other public purposes that we have recognized.

See, governments have already used eminent domain to take private property to boild roads, dams, and bridges; to help private parties build, operate, and profit from railroads and stadiums; and even to help private parties build urban renewal projects. Given what came before, the majority opinion's not a stretch. If you're against the result here, you can either argue as Thomas does that we should tear up the old decisions and start over. (This would be the "baby with the bathwater" approach.) Or, you can press for your local and state governments to adopt restrictions on the use of eminent domain. (Me, I'd be happy to see it sharply curtailed by the legislatures or city councils. Governments are too free to throw everything they have behind any kind of big concrete-pouring boondoggle, be it shopping mall, ballpark, dam, or road.)

temporary new look

2005-06-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

Decided to slap a new template up so as to at least get the archives visible. May work with this one, maybe not.

Return of the tech woes

2005-06-25T12:46:00.000-05:00

Sidebars temporarily disabled while I figure out what I did to mess them up. Or, more likely, start over with a new template and proceed to fool with it until I mess it up and have to start over.

Am also considering a name change for this thing. Stay tuned.

Open Letter to the Kansas Board of Ed

2005-06-23T21:30:00.000-05:00

I wish I'd written this. (Thanks, Adam.)

big D(irty)

2005-06-20T23:26:00.000-05:00

I can't believe this study, which ranked Dallas 30th in cleanliness among 50 big cities nationwide, didn't even consider our little litter problem. Throw that in and I'd say we'd drop into the 40s.

(I first read it on FrontBurner.)