The hurricane which became tropical storm Irene ended up doing more damage with its precipitation than it did with its winds. In parts of the East Coast, August was already the rainiest month on record prior to the storm. So the waterways were swelled and more prone to flooding. Apparently Vermont got some of the worst of it, with much of the state flooded. And the storm knocked out power to millions of residents as well. The death toll is at least at 24, and that could rise.

With unemployment still extremely high and the cost for the federal government to borrow so low it is practically free, I would like to offer up my own jobs plan. It is called the “taking care of our shit initiative,” or as Wolf Blitzer might describe it, the “good jobs for sewer infrastructure” program. The objective of the program would be to put people to work upgrading the systems that take care of our human waste problems.

The infrastructure bank will be just another tax haven for the rich. They don’t pay taxes, and you pay them interest on the money they should be paying in taxes. Win-Win, except for you.

Let’s replace democracy with rule by a team selected by elected officials. I know I’ll feel better if Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get to decide which bridges to repair.

Here in this age of austerity, it’s fashionable to point out that the world just doesn’t work the way it did when John Maynard Keynes was the talk of the town. You just can’t find any shovel-ready projects, so weighted are they by environmental impact reports and the other red tape of 21st century life. But this neglects an entire area where construction work is needed: maintenance. I know from living in Los Angeles that there are enough potholes to keep a small army of workers in business year-round.

Stop asking for infrastructure spending, can’t you see we’re building a bridge into the 18th Century

“Increasing building code enforcement in lower-income neighborhoods” and “fixing broken sidewalks and curbs” doesn’t sound nearly as fun as “installing 60 new security cameras and putting 100 more cops on the street to catch scumbags,” but it has an undeniable impact on the lives of those in those neighborhoods. And what do you know, it actually nets a cash-poor city some dough, too.

In 1804 and 1805, Lewis and Clark made history with their trip up the Missouri River, but it’s the waters coming down the Missouri that will make history in 2011. People along the Missouri are thinking less of Lewis and Clark and more about Noah these days. Water levels in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota are already at record levels, and all that water is pouring downriver. Dams can’t take any more water, and so the flow will only increase for cities and towns downstream.

It’s going to be a long, wet summer along the banks of the Missouri.

If we fixed things like levees and energy plants, we’d also be more resilient to things like earthquakes and climate change. Mind you, if Republicans found out about that, it’d be enough reason to defund it. So we’ll just keep that part a secret between us.

Sometime today, the US Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza Floodway in Louisiana for the second time in its history. The object is to divert some of the huge flow of water coming down the Mississippi away from the usual path that streams past Baton Rouge and New Orleans into the Mississippi delta, and into a largely agricultural region of Louisiana instead. It’s a Hobson’s choice, where agricultural fields and various small towns will be flooded in order to help save many the lives and livelihoods, and communities of millions of Louisiana residents nearer to the Mississippi’s regular pathways.

This is Katrina in reverse, with the water coming from the north rather than from the Gulf. Let’s hope the lessons learned from flooding in the past that led to the creation of the floodways will help, and that the post-disaster recovery efforts that failed so spectacularly with Katrina have been improved this time around.