Say goodbye, it’s Independence Day

Cedar Rapids, Iowa July 4 2008

Time Check neighborhood

Members of Castle Rock Community Church of New Orleans at work in Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The house had about 5 feet of water in its first floor.

Pastor John Gerhardt of Castle Rock Community hauls a load of debris from Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The church sent 10 people to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City for three days of demolition and recovery work. Gerhardt’s wife Wendy Gerhardt, nee Rhatigan, was born and raised in Cedar Rapids. Castle Rock’s trip north came after a church group from Cedar Rapids cancelled its planned trip to New Orleans for relief work.

John Gerhardt: “We can look at people with all sincerity and say, ‘We can get through this.’ It causes some stress, but you can get through it.”

Gerhardt’s neighborhood had about 6feet of floodwater, about the same as Kuzela’s area of Time Check. He said about half the residents have sinced returned.

“There’s a sprint at the beginning, to get all your stuff out of your house. But then it becomes a marathon.”

Lisa Kuzela snaps a photo of the church crew at work.

Little Bohema neighborhood

If you’re fortunate enough to have been there, you know why the Little Bohemia was one of America’s great corner taverns. If you’re not, you may be too late.

There was substantial debate over the question: Did the neighborhood get its name from the Little Bo, or vice versa? It was a reputed hangout of Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, which sounds reasonable because Cone actually painted it.

High water plus 18

 Some (ok, a few) people have asked what the town looks like three weeks after the Cedar River crested, so here’s a few quick shots from downtown on my lunch hour. At crest, the river stopped just about midway along the block between the railroad tracks and 5th Street SE- that’s five blocks away and nearly 30 feet in elevation from where it’s supposed to be.

Nearly every downtown building has stuff like this parked out front. The silver machine is an industrial-strength dehumidifier (there are plenty bigger than this one), powered by the trailer-mounted portable diesel generator at left.

Much heavy debris removal – furnishing, carpet, wallboard, plaster, etc., appears finished, but you have to lower the humidity before rebuilding to prevent mold formation. I don’t know about this particular building, but the county Public Health teams are measuring humidity levels over 50 percent in flood-damaged homes. That has to be brought under 20 percent to prevent mold. Businesses (or their insurance companies) are bringing in these. Homeowners are just letting them sit to dry out – plus, most of those lucky enough to get back in their homes are still in the tear-out phase.

The humidifiers breathe through these tubes, pulling out damp air and leaching out the moisture.

If you’re a railroad expecting a flood, what you do is, you park a bunch of freight cars loaded with stone on your bridge. Sometimes this works. Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (CRANDIC) Railway bridge downstream from the Eighth Avenue bridge.

Will shoot & post photos from other neighborhoods as soon as I can.

 

 

 

Mission Accomplished

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.

 

Those were no-bid contracts, btw. Of course, it wasn’t about oil.

Note to political media: You are not the story

A bit of good news: ABC won’t get the chance to screw up another presidential debate:

The campaigns want to get the media off the stage. Journalists are not the collective third candidate in this election, although at times it’s obvious they consider themselves to be just as important as political leaders. That runaway narcissism has severely damaged the craft, and the campaigns have wisely decided to give the press a time-out.

Come on, rise up

Masters of war

So, Scottie McClellan’s memoir gets all the attention for telling us all something we already knew (ie, the president is a weak, morally degenerate sociopath) and this, which examines just how they lie to us, sinks like a stone:

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

…this is from that Senate Intelligence Committee report released this week. These are the “people” his Maverickness wants to leave in charge of our strategic future.

Something for the first big travel weekend of the summer…

…as they say on the radio news as you’re tooling down the Interstate in the Family Truckster:

“The prices that we’re paying at the pump today are, I think, going to be ‘the good old days,’ because others who watch this very closely forecast that we’re going to be hitting $12 and $15 a gallon, and then, after that, when world oil production goes into decline, we’re going to talk about rationing,” Robert Hirsch, Management Information Services Senior Energy Advisor, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “In other words, not only are we going to be paying high prices and have considerable economic problems, but in addition to that, we’re not going to be able to get the fuel when we want it.”

Whether Hirsch is precisely accurate or not, the way we live is about to change. Given some sane political leadership and a populace accepting of reality, I don’t think it’s anything we can’t cope with and adjust to. But will we get those givens?

Your tax dollars at…something

Imagine the mess we’d be in if we hadn’t had those run-government-like-a-business types in charge…it’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the invasion and occupation was nothing more or less than a big bidness opportunity for somebody:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

(snip)

The disclosure that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets.

Read, as they say, the whole thing, especially the parts about

Something to think about the next time you buy gas, pt. II

From Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch:

Gasoline at $7 a gallon by 2012?
That’s the prediction of analysts at CIBC. They also believe crude will surpass $200 a barrel in the next four years.

Got to ride it like you find it

Amtrak’s feasibility study of a proposed Chicago-Iowa City passenger rail service is Iowa’s most realistic chance for additional rail service since the national passenger rail corporation was created by Congress in 1971.

The study released Friday lays out an estimate of $32.5 million for start-up capital costs, mostly for improvements to the Iowa Interstate Railroad’s track between Davenport and Iowa City. But Amtrak estimates the annual operating susbsidy at just $100,000 to $300,000, depending on which route is chosen for the Chicago-Quad Cities leg.

In state budget terms, that’s virtually a rounding error. Assuming the state and the Iowa Interstate can reach a deal on start-up costs, and the states of Illinois and Iowa can agree on their share of responsibility for the Chicago-Quad Cities leg, there may finally be cause for optimism for an alternative to a dreary I-80 trek.

Amtrak’s report includes proposed schedules for several alternative routings and levels of investment (and resulting higher operating speeds). My favorite has Iowa City departures at 7:30 a.m. and 5:35 p.m. and Chicago departures at 9:22 a.m. and 6:35 p.m., with running times of about six hours. It offers a tantalizing future of easy weekend trips to Cubs games, the Art Institute, or the blues fest - not to mention Union Station connections to the east.

It would also be back to the future. The Iowa Interstate operates over what was until its 1980 demise the Rock Island route. In the pre-Amtrak heyday when the railroads bragged about their passenger trains, the Rock Island dubbed its top trains the Fleet of the Rockets. In 1961, Iowa City had three daily trains each way on the Rock Island, including the Chicago-Denver Rocky Mountain Rocket and the Des Moines-Chicago Corn Belt Rocket, with about a five-hour travel time to and from Chicago. According to the 1961 timetable, in addition to coaches both Rockets carried sleeping cars (”Chicago to Des Moines, 6 sections, 6 roomettes, 4 double bedrooms. Available for occupancy at Chicago 9:30 p.m. May be occupied until 8 a.m.”) The eastbound Corn Belt Rocket had a parlor car, and the Rocky Mountain Rocket promised a Buffet Lounge Parlor Car, Dining Car, and a Club Lounge Car.

Amtrak doesn’t have parlor cars, and the proposed new service wouldn’t be long enough to justify a diner or a sleeper. But food service would be offered, according to the Amtrak study.

And wouldn’t it be cool if Amtrak, which often adopts historic names for its services, revived the Corn Belt Rocket?