The cost of America’s inefficient sprawl

By William Fulton, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: William Fulton is vice president for policy and programs at Smart Growth America, and a former mayor of Ventura, California. The views expressed are his own.

July 31st, 2012

Earlier this month, Global Public Square addressed a critical issue at this moment in American history, as towns and cities nationwide look to bounce back from the recession.

ALEC feels the heat from anti-corporate campaigns

Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”

They are only half right.

The Military Solution
The Lessons Washington Can't Draw From the Failure of the Military Option
By Tom Engelhardt  http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175564/

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.

Magic and the Machine
Living in an American Age of Techno-Wonder and Unreason 

[A longer version of this essay appears in "Magic Shows," the Summer 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

Lewis H. Lapham - As between the natural and the supernatural, I’ve never been much good at drawing firm distinctions. I know myself to be orbiting the sun at the speed of 65,000 miles per hour, but I can’t shake free of the impression shared by Pope Urban VIII, who in 1633 informed Galileo that the earth doesn’t move. So also the desk over which I bend to write, seemingly a solid mass of wood but in point of fact a restless flux of atoms bubbling in a cauldron equivalent to the one attended by the witches in Macbeth.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175561/

Getting Rolled in Wisconsin Why Electoral Politics Sold Out the Popular Uprising in the Badger State -- and Why It’s Not All Over

Andy Kroll - The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175556/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll%2C_how_the_wisconsin_uprising_got_hijacked/

How ro Forget on Memorial Day Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

Tom Engelhardt - It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

 http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175546/