Thursday, June 23, 2005

Congress restored $100 million in PBS funding, thanks to all your cards, letters and emails.

We're still spending less on non-commercial TV programming than we do on military marching bands. Promoting culture gets you good value for money, I think. Since we're currently in a cultural war with militant Islam, a little more Sesame Street is not a bad way to spend some of our money.

In other news, the Supreme Court decided that corporations can destroy your house if they can convince a town council that their mall will pay more taxes than you do. Actually, they don't need a reason.

8:53 PM

3 Comments:

For the first and only time in my life, I'm siding with the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. ED has traditionally been the bane of African American neighborhoods, with freeways and highways often cutting them into two or three different parts. So I can't see how the liberal/moderate wing actually allowed corporations to have that much influence and trump individual property rights. This is dangerous, and I need to read more about it to see if I'm missing something.

By  Lawrence, at 11:14 PM  

And Thomas said just that, for once surprising us all by actually taking the side of poor blacks against rich whites.

The minority were the extreme right wingers, plus moderate Reagan appointee O'Connor.

I gotta side with the extreme right wingers on this one. The city shouldn't be allowed to take your house unless there's a compelling public reason for it. And "Donald Trump wanted it" is not a compelling public reason.

By  Alex Epstein, at 11:38 PM  

To be on the same side as Thomas gives me the heebie jeebies. What's funny is that my friend is a city planner, and we were talking about the redevelopment of South Central. I have quite a few college friends who are buying property in the area, and are developing infill res/bus property. Don't be surprised if you see large housing corporations going into poor, but geographically desirable inner city areas, and buying up ten/twenty/thirty blocks of houses and constructing development that is either higher than the existing housing, or development that isn't necessarily appropriate for the space. Utter madness.

By  Lawrence, at 4:36 AM  

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