Here’s your tax cuts, America!

America’s sewers are showing their age. Deteriorating pipes, overwhelmed by volumes of water they were never designed to carry, release billions of gallons of raw sewage into rivers and streams each year. The spills make people sick, threaten local drinking water and kill aquatic animals and plants.
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Hundreds of municipal sewer authorities have been fined for spills since 2003, according to a Gannett News Service analysis of EPA data. And dozens of local governments have agreed to spend billions modernizing failing wastewater systems over the next 10 to 20 years. Many of those projects will be financed by rate increases.

But the improvements can’t keep up with problems affecting the thousands of miles of sewer pipes snaking underground through each community. Foul-smelling waste gurgles from manholes and gushes down streams and rivers somewhere in the U.S. almost every day.

In March, between 700,000 and 1.3 million gallons of human feces and other waste spilled from a damaged pipe into Grand Lagoon at Panama City Beach, Fla. In January, about 20 million gallons of sewage flowed into Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River after a 42-inch pipe ruptured near Reading, Pa.

I’m hoping things get to the point where my boss allows us to work from home, because even my relatively short commute is becoming very expensive:

As prices near — or in some places top — $4 a gallon, most Americans say they are cutting back on other household spending, seriously considering buying more fuel-efficient cars and consolidating their daily errands to save fuel.

Americans worry that steep gas costs are here to stay: eight in 10 say they doubt today’s high prices are temporary, the poll finds. It’s the first time such a large majority sees pricey gas as a long-term problem.

The $4 mark, compounded by a sagging economy, could be a tipping point that spurs people to make permanent lifestyle changes to reduce dependence on foreign oil and help the environment, says Steve Reich, a program director at the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida.

“This is a more significant shift in behavior than I’ve seen through other fluctuations in gasoline prices,” he says. “People are starting to understand that this resource … is not something to be taken for granted or wasted.”

Thanks to great political leadership from both sides of the aisle, of course!

I honestly don’t understand why we haven’t reinstituted the 55 mph standard that Jimmy Carter put in place. Whether people liked it or not, it saves gas - and it’s difficult to do when everyone else on the same road is driving at 65 or higher.

And of course this will probably be used as yet another compelling reason why we have to attack Iran:

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Hezbollah gunmen seized control of several Beirut neighborhoods from Sunni foes loyal to the U.S.-backed government on Friday as sectarian clashes reminiscent of Lebanon’s bloody 15-year civil war raged in the capital.

At least 11 people have been killed and more than 20 wounded in three days of street battles and gunfights, security officials said.

About 100 Shiite Hezbollah militants wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles marched down Hamra Street, a normally vibrant commercial strip in a mainly Sunni area of Beirut. They took up positions in corners and sidewalks and stopped the few cars braving the empty streets to search their trunks.

On nearby streets, dozens of fighters from another Hezbollah-allied party appeared, some wearing masks and carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

In another sign that the Hezbollah-led opposition was gaining steam, the satellite TV station affiliated with the party of Lebanon’s top Sunni lawmaker, Saad Hariri, was forced off the air Friday. Gunmen also set the offices of the party’s newspaper, Al-Mustaqbal, on fire in the coastal neighborhood of Ramlet el-Bayda.

Lebanon’s army, which has stayed out of the sectarian political squabbling that has paralyzed the country for more than a year, only intervened after the building was set ablaze. Troops provided cover for firefighters, who eventually extinguished the flames.

I’d love to have some of whatever Matt Stoller is drinking. Go read the whole thing, it’s a comprehensive look at how Obama is consolidating money/power:

All I’ll add is that it’s time to think through the consequences of a party where there is a new chief with massive amounts of power. I’ve been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven’t, and they know what it’s like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he’s not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi’s just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force. When you disagree with Obama, you are saying to these people ‘your favorite band sucks’.

Like many of us, I endorsed Obama, gave him money, and I intend to work to get him elected. He is attempting to completely rewrite the rules of politics, and we should try to figure out what that means for where we take our meager work. Obama is now the party leader. And he has ensured and we have given him the mandate that when he speaks, he speaks for all of us. I hope he’s a vibrant progressive when he gets into office, and we should begin figuring out how to put ourselves in a position to help him take the country in a progressive direction.

The only reason anyone has paid attention to the blogosphere is because of our fundraising, period. Obama’s now vacuumed up the majority of the grassroots donors, is discouraging his donors from giving to anyone else, and there’s no point whatsoever to placating the netroots.
I can’t believe Stoller doesn’t get that. They don’t need us, and we will have no influence whatsoever in an Obama administration. Those of you who dream of a new progressive netroots Utopia will have a rather rude awakening, I think. (Not that this makes some huge difference in my own life - I’ve never thought bloggers were anywhere near as influential as they like to think.)

I can believe that Obama, or Daschle, or whoever designed his movement, has relatively benign intent - for now. But the nature of unchecked power is such that the power inevitably becomes an end in itself - and, of course, corrupts.

Oh well.

So a man with a major subprime lender as his campaign finance chair is being hailed as the new progressive hero who will lead Democrats to the Promised Land.

It’s especially funny to me because so many of the Philadelphia activists who so fervently support Obama relentlessly attacked the candidate I worked for, because the bank he owned made payday loans - for 18 months. (Even though, you know, he was the one who actually made the city poor a priority in his campaign. But what the hell, he had dyed hair, bad caps on his teeth and was a terrible orator. He just didn’t make the activist base feel chills, although old people liked him.)

Even funnier, those same activists had all hailed a different black man as their new progressive hero - even though, like Obama, he was pretty much a DLC Democrat, a former municipal bond dealer with strong ties (a little too strong, for my taste) to the local business community. (At one panel, he said the biggest priority for his administration was expanding the local convention center.)

But we never could break through that illusion people had of who he was. See, there was this assumption (and you know what they say about “assume”) that because he was black, he was automatically a progressive - because he supported what I consider non-partisan basics like efficiency and transparency.

Anyway, he won. And as mayor, he came out strongly to support Hillary Clinton - which was making some of those activist heads explode. “He probably did it just because he thought back then that she’d win,” they said. Even though the man himself rejected that idea, saying he just thought she was the better candidate.

And I just laughed, because life really is funny sometimes.

Bob Somerby explains the rules by which some people get to talk about race - and some people don’t. (Oh, and don’t forget the mindreading!)

I read today that Obama plans to declare himself the nominee on May 20th.

Why doesn’t he declare himself the King of Spain, while he’s at it?

Link:

Jay Butler, who teaches real estate at Arizona State University, said of the builders, “They really weren’t building homes. They were building mortgages that they could put into mortgage-backed securities in order to sell them to investors in China and France.“

Q: My comment has been deleted or wasn’t instantly approved. Does this mean that this site is part a grand conspiracy to silence me and my millionaire candidate?

A: No.

Q: Nobody has responded to my intense and thought provoking comment. Does this mean that everybody who reads this site is too stupid to comprehend the product of my brilliant, sparkling mind?

A: No.

Q: The calendar tells me it’s 2008 and even three year olds have their own email account these days. Is it reasonable that I’ve somehow failed to grasp the basics of spam filtering?

A: No.

Q: My comment really was deleted. Is there something I could refer to in order to find out why.

A: There is.

Q: Now that we’ve established that my comment will be deleted if I behave like an asshole towards my hostess, or other commenters, is there anybody around here I can treat like an asshole?

A: You can treat Chris like an asshole. He doesn’t feel at home if he’s not being berated.

Q: Will he respond by treating me like an asshole?

A: Probably.

Ruth points us to the news that a grocery chain in North Texas is giving out free prenatal vitamins to expectant mothers. Great!

As rumored for years, yes, cheerful war criminal Donald Rumsfeld was pushing Bush for “regime change” in Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon:

Rumsfeld’s proposal called explicitly for postponing indefinitely U.S. airstrikes and the use of ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to catch bin Laden. Instead the Rumsfeld paper argued that the U.S. should target states which had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It urged that the United States “[c]apitalize on our strong suit, which is not finding a few hundred terrorists in caves in Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our military and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen the opposition forces in terrorist-supporting states.”

And look how well that worked out in Iraq!

When Matt Taibbi’s bad, he’s bad. And when he’s good, he’s good:

But if we recognize that, we must also recognize what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things. She took an opponent who was relentless in his attempts to remain genial, positive and unifying, and managed to turn him into a divisive villain, a symbol representing every oversexed winner who ever had it too easy at the pimply kid’s expense.

It’s brilliant strategy, and it’s working so well that Hillary now has her crowds hurling catcalls at the mere mention of anything Obama. Moreover, she’s inspired such profound loyalty that her supporters no longer give a shit at all how they win, as long as they do. Like O.J. apologists who became overnight skeptics of DNA evidence, Clinton backers don’t see anything wrong with winning the nomination through a brokered convention, despite being behind in the popular vote and the delegate count. “Why not?” says Don Dileo, a union organizer who worked for Hillary in Pennsylvania. “That’s the system of government we have, right?”

Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of Obama crazies, either — only on that side, the fanaticism is more of the throw-your-panties-onstage craze for the cool cool thing last seen swirling around the Beatles or Elvis or Shaun Cassidy. Just as the majority of the Hillary supporters I’ve talked to lately don’t give a damn about her policy positions, so too do many Obama fans hide behind vague terms like “I like his integrity” or “He changes the paradigm.” It’s the same mindless devotion as the Hillary camp’s “I won’t back down!” Only it seems painfully personal in one case, intellectually earnest (almost comically so) in the other.

And here’s the thing. Whereas the Clinton rallies seem to embrace the combative nature of this contest, in the Obama camp one frequently finds people who are deeply troubled by it. “He’s been a complete gentleman,” says Amala Lane, an Obama volunteer from New York who came down to Pennsylvania for the primary. “This is exactly what Obama is trying to get us beyond: this blue-state/red-state thing.”

Listening to Lane — a soft-spoken, white, college-educated intellectual who worked as a teacher overseas — you can see exactly where Obama has gone wrong. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Obama polled well among people exactly like this: liberals and college graduates. In the Full Metal Jacket paradigm, faggots and sailors. Earlier in the campaign, the Obama camp was so busy stewing over Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s and worrying about being painted as a “black candidate” that they forgot to worry about being painted as something even worse, in American political terms: the candidate of liberal intellectuals.

With all his verbose deflections of Hillary’s attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to “obliterate” Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who’ll crawl through the mud for “Madam President” while marching to classic rock tunes like the “Horst Wessel Song.” Clinton’s genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road.

The result has been an epic clash, a war of cultural types that has nothing whatsoever to do with issues and everything to do with self-image. It’s become a pitched fight between the fucked-over suburban little guy and the vilified intellectual, two groups that for years have felt put upon and dispossessed, for different reasons. The fact that their respective champions are identical superstar U.S. senators/multimillionaires makes the bitter hatred this schism is inspiring absurd, but it doesn’t make it any less real. Or likely to end anytime soon.

The late Mildred Loving (of Loving v. Virginia) thought of herself as an Indian.

If not your own town:

A major Wall Street firm agreed to return $37 million to 17 cities and towns in the state, as well as to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, after it allegedly misled them into buying investments they thought were as safe as cash.

UBS Financial Services Inc. reached an agreement with Attorney General Martha Coakley after she found that the brokerage had not fully disclosed the risks of the investments, known as auction-rate securities. Cities were unable to get their hands on their money when the market for these investments evaporated almost overnight.

Winchester, which had invested more than any other town, will receive $6.8 million in the settlement. The turnpike will receive $4.4 million, and the city of Holyoke and its retirement system will get $3.2 million.

“There have been a lot of new financial products,” Coakley said. “There’s been a heavy push by brokers to sell them, and a rush by cities and towns to take advantage of what appeared to be a burgeoning market.”

The settlement was the first admission by UBS or any US brokerage that something may have been amiss in the sales of municipal debt securities. The market for these securities relied on weekly and monthly auctions run by brokerage firms. But starting in February the auctions attracted only sellers and no buyers, so the market failed.

Some Palestinians are working for a one-state solution within Israel.

Keeping in mind that this lying piece of shit serves as “informal adviser” to John McCain, Rove handicaps the state of the Democratic primary campaign. I’m sure there’s some truth in here someplace, but we just don’t know where.

Whose shameless spinning is this? Scroll to next page for answer:

However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

[…] Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

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Big bottom, big bottom
Talk about bum cakes, my girl’s got ‘em
Big bottom drive me out of my mind
How could I leave this behind?
- “Big Bottom,” Spinal Tap

Apparently there’s an upside to Blogger Butt!

Riverdaughter with her thoughts on yesterday’s results:

I think what we’re seeing here is a real racial divide. It was engineered, deliberately, by Obama’s campaign in order to separate African Americans from the Clintons. It has worked spectacularly well. Obama consistently wins urban and southern AA voters, by lopsided margins. It didn’t have to be this way. There was no reason for the African-American community to spurn Clinton. But in this America, in 2008, color is everything. It seems like the civil rights movement of the 60’s was just a dream. As long as you are the right color, you’re golden. Color masks a multitude of deficiencies- experience, knowledge base, earned coalitions, even interest. Obama has not reached out to the working class, to women, to the elderly, the loyal base of the Democratic party. But he has managed to exacerbate the fault line in the party when it comes to race. There’s no doubt about that now.

Winning NC does not make me like him more nor do I have an elevated desire to vote for him. Let me dispel the notion that he and his supporters have about me voting for him in the fall: unless Florida and Michigan are seated and have an impact on the nomination, I will not consider the nomination legitimate. That doesn’t mean I’ll vote for John McCain. It just means that I don’t know what I’ll do when I stand in front of that button. And don’t hang this on Hillary. If it comes to that, I’m sure she would do her best to GOTV. It has nothing to do with her. It has to do with how deeply offended I am by how Obama has split my party on racial lines and pitted race against their regular party members, as if there was a real split there to begin with. As if I were the enemy. He has pitted Dem against Dem. I am insulted that Howard Dean and Donna Brazile have put their thumbs on the scales for Obama instead of encouraging him to agree to revotes in FL and MI. The thought of voting for him under these circumstances fills me with revulsion. And there’s no amount of cheerleading that Hillary can do to make me change my mind. It’s not her. It’s him.

I know an awful lot of people who feel this way. I feel this way myself (about Axlerod pursuing a strategy of racial division, not everything else she says), although I’ll still vote for whoever wins the nomination. But will I give money? Will I fundraise for Obama? Will I volunteer? Nope.

I’ve been marginalized, and so I’ll stay right out here on the margins, watching the circus.

Lambert noted something this morning he remembers from an economics game: That people presented with an unfair choice will simply stop playing the game, even when it is to their clear economic advantage to keep playing.

John Baer tells us how to pick the nominee.

I have a history with squirrels. I don’t like ‘em. Nope. They’re not cute, I don’t want them anywhere near me.

Now they’re in my walls. They seem to follow me wherever I go, and now they’re in the walls of my new abode. They make loud, skittering noises, and I hurt my hands from pounding on the walls to make them stop.

I hate them.

When even Republican evangelicals get it, why don’t our politicians?

This especially resonates with me today because I have to go to battle with my insurance company. I need an MRI on my ankle, which most likely has a protruding bone chip from when I sprained it in September. (It’s gotten to the point where I walk with a limp.) The doctor’s office left a message yesterday that the MRI had been denied “because you haven’t tried physical therapy first” - this, despite the four months of three-times-a-week PT I’ve already done because, you know, that was billed through my car insurance, and not my health insurance.

Not to mention that my new doctor apparently wasn’t listening when I told him all this, or that he simply didn’t bother to check my file.

Think how much simpler - and cheaper - this could all be.

And now I’m going to have to show my testicular fortitude to get it resolved.

Paul Begala vs. Donna Brazile, via the always great nycweboy.

New Hillary rap video: