Bush should have stayed true to form and replaced Rumsfeld with Condi, just like he replaced Powell with Rice. She looks like she could clean things up in Iraq!

But anyway, it's soggy and dreary here in Boston. I walked the 1.5 miles from the Radisson to the Convention Center this morning in the damp brisk dawn air, and spent the day listening to speakers on the subjects of Smart Growth and Brownfield Redevelopments. It was raining harder by the end of the day, so I took the T from South Station to Boylston, changing from the Red Line to the Green Line at Park, to get home (I sound so Bostonian, don't I?).

After a day of hearing the praises of Smart Growth and the New Urbanism, I was tickled to see Greensmile's comments about yesterday's post on The Big Dig, namely, "What pisses me off is that [1] they made it faster to get into a town with a car and didn't add one damn parking place and [2] with a small part of the cost overruns, they could have extened all the subways by a mile or added 5 miles to the bus routes...thus eliminating the need for all of the new road capacity except the new harbor tunnels."

Agreed, and it makes me grateful to be involved with Atlanta's Beltline development, the first major urban proposal in the South that doesn't include four lanes of new highway, that couldn't qualify for a NASCAR track if the commuters were to abandon it.

The forecast tomorrow is for continued crappy weather, with a shitty front moving in sometime tomorrow afternoon. I may have to break down and take a cab to the Convention Center.

Reporting live from Boston, I'm etc.