Fresh Loaf

It’s amazing the things a governor will take the time to do and the things he’ll choose to ignore.

For example, Gov. Sonny Perdue recently wrote a letter to Texas Gov. Rick Perry about some “salty” words uttered by Mayor Bill White of Houston toward two female Georgia Forestry Commission employees helping out with Hurricane Ike clean up.

So reporteth the Houston Chronicle:

After receiving a complaint Friday from Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Gov. Rick Perry yesterday asked his staff to investigate comments White made to two Georgia Forestry Commission employees who came to Houston to help manage the distribution of federal and state supplies to area residents hit hard by Hurricane Ike. Perdue said in a letter to Perry that White had “verbally and profanely abused” the women.

A witness said White told the women, “You need to be getting these (expletive) trucks out of here.”

The mayor then began arguing with a Harris County sheriff’s deputy over whether trucks full of Federal Emergency Management Agency supplies had been delivered to a distribution site, the witness said. White told the deputy he had just been to the site and about 3,000 people were waiting for supplies.

White went on to say that if nothing was delivered soon, they were ”about to be in a (expletive) riot,” the witness said.

I’m all for the proper treatment for state employees. And these two workers deserve nothing less than the utmost respect. But it was also a stressful environment.

Let’s put all those arguments aside for a moment and just sit back and bask in the wisdom of crowds — aka the comments section on the Chronicle’s article — to get the final word on ExpletiveGate 2008.

(Photo by CowboyPoetry)

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The Brookings Institution, that lovable bunch of left-leaning think tankers up in Washington, D.C., released a report of the top 30 “walkable” cities in the United States, and our sprawling — or maybe not — hunk of paradise placed … wait for it … 14th.

While I can understand how we placed better than Detroit — did they take crime into account or something? — it’s pretty astonishing that we placed just behind New York City. The D.C. boys and gals decided to give top honors to the District. Tampa, home to one of our sister publications, placed last on this list.

How’d they come up with the list? From the article:

Christopher B. Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow at Brookings, set out to quantify the walkability trend by counting the number of “regional-serving walkable urban places” in each of the 30 biggest metropolitan areas in the country. “Regional-serving” means the place is not just a bedroom community, but has jobs, retail or cultural institutions that bring in people who don’t live there.

Leinberger, who also teaches urban planning at the University of Michigan, counted 157 such “walkable places” — including the Houston area’s Sugar Land Town Square, one of many built-from-scratch “lifestyle centers” to make the list.

And they also factored this in:

Leinberger counted only places where significant subsidies are no longer required to spur development. He predicted that many more — such as downtown Detroit and Crossroads in Kansas City, Mo. — would reach that point within the next decade.

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