Early Spring Thoughts From a Louisiana Bayou

Tonight I'm blogging from a hotel room in Alexandria, Louisiana. This afternoon, I flew into Alexandria's surprisingly pleasant new airport, built on the now-decommissioned Englund Air Force Base, and after meeting up with a client and a corporate associate, we headed out to a cajun restaurant for etouffe and blackened snapper.

Last week, I was in Houston, Texas. If you laid out every American city on a scale of either smart urban planning or sustainability, Houston would be on one end of that scale and Portland would be on the other - every other city would be somewhere in between. Houston, with its lack of zoning ordinances and petro-fueled economy, is just one big freeway, a concrete eyesore in the flat pineywoods of east Texas. All I saw were exit ramps, strip malls, parking lots and high rises. "Free enterprise" is the civic mantra, and Houston is what you get when you let it run unchecked.

Portland’s growth controls draw residents into close-in, urban neighborhoods, encouraging strong market fundamentals and tamping down overbuilding. Houston's unchecked urban sprawl allows developers to build ever more distant subdivisions and shopping malls, requiring the city to try to keep up with a clogged and increasingly dysfunctional highway system.

Atlanta is closer to Houston than to Portland on those scales, and Houston should be viewed as a warning to Atlanta as to what runaway overdevelopment and no growth controls will create.

Speaking of Portland, I see that my former Presidential pick, former candidate Gov. Bill Richardson, chose PDX to announce his endorsement of Barack Obama for President. Smart decision, Bill, and note to Sen. Obama: Bill would make an excellent choice for VP. As an acting Governor, a former Secretary of Energy and distinguished diplomat, Richardson would be a perfect counter-argument to claims of a lack of experience on the Obama ticket.

And then there's John McCain. Writing in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg notes, "He plumped for lobbying reform but has lobbyists running his campaign. He opposed enacting Bush's tax cuts for the rich but supports extending them indefinitely. He supported a 'patients bill of rights' but refuses to treat health care as itself a right. He voted against banning same-sex marriage in the Constitution but favors banning it state by state. He once disdained the likes of Jerry Falwell (who blamed AIDS on God's alleged hatred of a 'society that tolerates homosexuals') but now embraces the likes of Pastor John Hagee (who called the Roman Catholic Church 'the great whore'). He was for starting the Iraq war but was against the way it was being fought; now he's for the way it's being fought but against discussing whether it should have been started."

Six years after calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance," McCain went a spoke at Falwell's Liberty University, leading Jon Stewart to ask, "Has the Straight Talk Express been rerouted through Bullshit Town?"

He used to be against overturning Roe v. Wade and for allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship, but now he's for overturning Roe v. Wade and avoids talking about illegal immigrants earning citizenship.

Last year, McCain said, "When I voted to support this war, I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough, and those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of easy task, then I'm sorry they were mistaken." However, before the war started, he told Larry King that "success will be fairly easy."

He told Wolf Blitzer, "I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time."

He even said, "It's a safe assumption that Iraqis will be grateful to whoever is responsible for securing their freedom." Pat Buchanan once said of McCain, "He will make Cheney look like Ghandi."

As a toddler, if he didn't get his way he'd hold his breath until he fainted. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine," said Senator Thad Cochran.

And so on. Tomorrow, I head north out of Alexandria to the now-infamous Jena, Louisiana.