If you look into what that case was about, it was about a small group of land owners who over time ended up being on prime waterfront property. Rather than leaving these fortunate souls alone, the government targeted their little patch of waterfront property for a re-development. Took their property and kicked them on the street.

The original idea behind immenent domain was so that if a highway needed to be built that it could be built. Here in New Orleans portions of people’s property is being taken by immenent domain to improve the levee system. These things are done because the property in question is unique in the world and the only way to improve that levee or build that highway is to take a person’s property.

In the case of Kelo there was no necessity of taking those particular individuals property. There was a desire among powerful people in government to re-develop a particular neighborhood into something else. Most likely they wanted to increase the tax base or their friends wanted the contract for re-development. The point is that there was nothing particlar to that property that made them need it. They wanted those people’s property they did not need it.

That is a huge world of difference in my book. That court case is part of what really convinced me that the last election was about the supreme court. The Kelo decision proves that the court does not really consider the ramifications of its actions. To me the ramification of Kelo is that no property owner, and particularly not one of little means or power is safe from his or her land being taken. This is particularly true if the property is deemed valuable. Also remember that the government only gives you present value for the land. What if after the improvements they make it would be worth ten times as much? Tough.

In NOLA we are fighting over the old Charity and whether to build a new hospital complex. Curiously there is a two block area smack dab in the middle of the new complex that they are not proposing to take. Why do you think that is? Who owns that property? Probably the state. That land will be worth 10 times the value of today after the medical complex is built. Rather than build it on land they already have, they are proposing to bulldoze neighborhoods where people live that they plan on taking by immenent domain.

Lesson: vague statutes and vague supreme court cases make for really crummy lives for the people that have to live with the results.

So yes, I admire the sharp cut off of city and country in Europe. It is quite beautiful. But it comes from a historical legacy that we don’t have. We own land and that ownership is built into our character. And that character bridals at the thought of trying to let some monarch tell them what they can and cannot do.

On top of that land development and civic infrastructure projects are claimed to be our largest economic driving force, not cars, not crops and not bombs. We build cities and then we hollow them out and build them again in a ring around the middle. It’s where the money is. That is the thesis of “The Geometry of Nowhere,” which helps explain how we’ve ended up with such a reprehensible built environment.

A beautiful book that those interested in land development and history should pick up is “Measuring America.” Beside explaining that an acre was originally the size of a plot that a man could plow with an ox in a day goes on to say because the United States land is measured in a surveyor’s chain 66 feet long, we will never adopt the metric system. The author is from Scotland. And the beautiful thing is that an acre has a rational base. It is 10 square chains, (66 x 660 ft) which is more understandable than 43,560 sq ft.

The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were a pair of tribunes in 2nd century BC who attempted to pass land reform legislation in Ancient Rome that would redistribute the major patrician landholdings among the plebeians. For this legislation and their membership in the Populares party they are deemed the founding fathers of both socialism and populism (other populists prefer Spartacus or the latter Populares as Julius Caesar as their predecessors by members of both ideologies trying to find immemorial roots to their movements). Both were assassinated for their efforts. The brothers were born to a progressive patrician family – their mother being Cornelia Africana, the daughter of Scipio Africanus.

It’s really about the common woman and man being as self-assertive about protecting their rights as the common company, isn’t it? It’s also about recognizing that others have those same rights – something companies claim they are constitutionally prohibited from doing, which is an artifact of the legislature-made law and judicial decisions that interpret it.

Well, when constitutions fail to instigate a just government for the governed, we should change them.

One suggestion is that public schools teach citizenship as involving more than about being orderly and obeying orders. The side benefit is that that would send Lynn Cheney into a tizzy from which her equanimity would never recover.

“How are you going to pay for this?” asked the pleasant, large woman behind the desk.

My friend reached in her bag, pulled out a card from inside her wallet, said: “I’m Swedish.” and handed over the card.

The nice desk lady had never seen such, and there was a bit of confusion behind the desk because, after all, no one walks into an American hospital without money worries. A call “upstairs” and … that was that. Treatment and resolution, and no bill.

I was in the Jeu de Pomme just before it closed to move. I recall a painting, I think Monet, that I had never seen before. He had painted a veil on a hat that basically was black dots all across the woman’s face. I thought it was a really brilliant painting, very edgy for the time.

Art, not bombs. Health care, not bombs.

The one lesson that you learn in France is that the food is fresh….so fresh that it was in the ground or the sea yesterday and cooked today. Elmore fought eating peas while growing up….. I witnessed him eating them twice in France …… those tiny french peas….. Never in the 14 days we were there did we find a “bad” meal, even buying picnic food at the rest stops on the autoroute. Fresh baguette, wonderful cheeses, salami and fresh fruit that was actually fresh with chin dribble peaches….

Couple that will preventive care since birth…. no wonder the French are not battling chronic disease at the levels of Americans. Americans pay over twice in health care than the French. They are number 1 in all the outcomes….

My question to the repugs is …..Are you willing to settle for #37th in infant mortality ? How about life expectancy dropping a year, yearly.