flynn050

I wrote the below article for this blog in June 2012, four years ago in the last presidential election cycle.  Back then the Maryland Governor was Martin O'Malley who would run briefly for President in this year's Primaries. In 2014 O'Malley's Lieutenant Governor, an insider, was anointed to become his successor but lost the bid in an upset by a Republican outsider. A stunning result in a blue state like Maryland.  In 2015 Baltimore experienced a widespread disturbance that rattled the city. The Governor called it a riot and sent the National Guard. The Black Lives Matter movement called it an uprising. The Governor rode into town a few times since decrying the conditions in this city and promising decisive action. But he cancelled the city's largest project in decades, a $3 billion rail project slated to connect the rich and the poor parts of the city. The recognition that anger was also bottled up inside the big city did nothing to reduce the anger in the rural pa...

No doubt, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization which can't be partisan and shouldn't disrespect a who a constitutionally elected president. A pragmatic approach suggests cooperation.  But then there is dignity and a broader sense of what is right. The AIA faces the same dilemma as so many others face this week. Pragmatism is too gentle a term for AIA's public statement not even half a day after the result of the general election became clear and only minutes after the losing candidate's concession speech. Its fawning opportunism exuded the pungent flavor of sucking up to the winner in a thinly veiled attempt of gaining business. “The AIA and its 89,000 members are committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues our country faces, particularly strengthening the nation’s aging infrastructure. During the campaign, President-elect Trump called for committing at least $500 billion to infrastructure spending over fiv...

When a people's basic consensus on aspirations, decency and on how to organize their country is trashed, those who believed in that now obsolete common ground will find it impossible to see a safe space in which to recoil, let alone thrive. Half of US citizens feel this morning as guests in their own country. The popular vote stands at about 59, 200 people for each candidate with a very small lead for the losing candidate. Donald Trump early this morning in his conciliatory victory speech History has many examples where countries and peoples have departed from a people's established compact. Sometimes through revolutions that seemed to free a country or its people from shackles that kept them down. Sometimes the disruption is reactionary denouncing a consensus in an attempt of reestablishing privileges in a futile fight against the tides of progress, liberty and égalité. The populist movements in many western countries and the fundamentalism in some eastern ones is of the latte...

There is a strong suggestion in this campaign season that the country has seen much better times. When steelworkers, autoworkers, and miners never wanted for jobs and America's factory were humming and China was still thought of as a destitute country with hungry kids of which a mother might remind a child if they didn't eat their packed lunch or finish their dinner plate.  I suppose that would have been sometimes in the fifties and sixties.   Fifties kitchen and female role model Polls have asked Americans whether they prefer the past to the present. In March,  Pew asked people  whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.( NYT ) Thinking of my American hometown of Baltimore, the mid-fifties was when Baltimore had 950,000 residents, Bethlehem Steel had over 30,000 employees, General Motors had a plant here an...

Sometimes environmentalists fight renewable energy. Green arguments against green energy come into play wherever wind-farms spoil mountaintops or shore views and the problems are not simply aesthetics but extend to deforestation, coverage of highly productive agricultural soils or disturbance of wildlife. Cleverly, wind and solar industries have adopted the term farm to distract from the fact that their renewable energy production is often industrial and its only connection to farms is that farmland gets covered up for energy production.  Amazon Solar Farm Accomack, Virginia Local jurisdictions usually control land use, and often they are at a loss how to classify those wind and solar "farms" since the ag zoning category clearly offers little help. If big enough, power generation sometimes becomes a matter of the state and its utility controlling Public Service Commission. The Baltimore County Council just deferred an application for a solar "farm" until it had a ch...

Most think of transit as a bus or train running on a fixed route on a fixed schedule. Service that goes where the request is made and deploys when its made (or a certain time thereafter) is associated with taxis or lately with Uber and Lyft. Mini buses that provide a hybrid service, half bus half taxi, are popular in South America or Turkey ("dolmus") but in the US most know such service only from hotel shuttles or the airport service Super Shuttle. Few know that almost all US transit agencies provide such a hybrid demand responsive service every day and on a pretty big scale, although many may have wondered about the growing number of vans and sedans with the transit agencies logo on it. The reason that most don't know about it is that only a few qualify for the service. Para-transit. as this service is called, is mandated by law. It has the noble purpose of providing transit to the mobility impaired. But transit agencies had no practice in providing demand based service...