Alabama

If the governor and legislative leaders don't agree on a revenue forecast by Thursday, the new state comptroller - who was elected by the legislature - will decide the amount.

Hillary Clinton disclosed more information about the family charity she and her husband have run since 2001.

Hillary will be about 300 feet away from Barack Obama when they deliver speeches in Alabama on Sunday. On a campaign flyer, Rudy Giuliani misstated the official death toll at the World Trade Center.

Eliot Spitzer will announce a new review process for groups bidding on the state's horse racing franchise.

Democrats in the state Senate almost boycotted the session yesterday because of a seating dispute.

Councilman-elect Mathieu Eugene said he's been living in the district for about a month, thereby meeting residency requirements to hold office.

"It will be very obvious very quickly if [Blair] Horner is allowed to operate as freely as he and [Andrew] Cuomo say he will be," says the editorial board of the Times Herald-Record.

And the Post editorial board thinks Spitzer "has it right" on health care spending.

-- Azi Paybarah

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Gerald Johnson, a man with a Ph.D., an accurate eye and unstoppable hope, polls t  read more »

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Gerald Johnson, a man with a Ph.D., an accurate eye and unstoppable hope, pol  read more »

I'm just back from New Orleans, and stunned and shocked. Nothing on television or in the papers conveys the scale of Katrina, six months on. You turn onto a boulevard and suddenly there's a mountain of dead trees, gargantuan and muddy and scraped clean of branches and leaves by crews that left months ago. That's about all the evidence of federal activity, though. The great ongoing scandal of this disaster is the degree to which private citizens are being expected to clean up after themselves. Plywood signs are nailed up in trees or on the sides of houses with spraypainted phone numbers for GUTTING or TREE REMOVAL. Yes—private citizens are offering these services, six months into the alleged relief effort.

Where's the government? This isn't a question of Big government, this is a question of No government. A disaster blights one of our greatest cities, halving its population, and six months on nobody's home and the most basic recovery services are being marketed by private vendors. It's a national shame (and where's the outrage?).

We treat dogs better. No doubt about that, the evidence is before your eyes. Everywhere you go there are still signs spray painted on houses and fences: Two Tan Dogs Here. 4 Dogs Here. 0 Cats Here. The animal lovers of America, and I'm one, mobilized bigtime around the hurricane. They canvassed the city for animals. And though too many dogs died atop air conditioners (that's where they landed when they were swimming helplessly around in the floodwaters) a great number were saved. We can't do the same for people. Something chokes the generous impulse when it's poor blacks, or poor whites, or people who lack the wherewithal to do for themselves.

OK I'm a bleeding heart. But even the hardhearted should be ashamed of the fact that six months on there are still 20,000 to 30,000 abandoned vehicles on the streets of New Orleans, jammed under overpasses, and the city is floundering to get them cleared away. Or mountains of garbage and wreckage down every other street. This is America? Where's the pride and can-do spirit? What do we pay taxes for? The only motion of grace or spirit in the Lower 9th ward are the college kids on spring break zipping up haz-mat suits to do a little volunteer cleanup. There should be some massive federal undertaking here, to clean up this gem, this great and strangled source of culture. But there's nothing. (The bulldozers are in Iraq.)

(P.S. The dull murmur here, the conspiratorial whisper, louder when Mayor Nagin says it, is that New Orleans is being remade as a boutique city, a Charleston on the bayou, with red beans and rice for $17.95, the shotgun houses all neatly painted, and the poor blacks and their problems exported to Houston. "It's never been safer here," a guy from Fairhope, Ala., says at my hotel. The place has been, er, cleansed. That's another story, of racism and urban planning and gentrification. Again, the federal government could rewrite the narrative here, could dedicate itself to restoring New Orleans's former scale. But again, we see a vacuum of vision or even understanding...)

Riverhead, Long Island is looking to expand—shopping centers, businesses and esplanades—and is considering three proposals from private investors for apparently public use. Currently however, the land belongs to someone. And the town is taking careful steps to avoid using eminent domain to claim it.

Yesterday, The Real Estate pointed at a New York Daily News editorial that discussed the modern uses of eminent domain for the construction of offices and factories, rather than roads and schools, stretching the justification of “public use.”

Now, Wisconsin is looking to reinforce the rights of property owners in light of the Supreme Court’s decision this past summer in the eminent domain case of Kelo vs. City of New London. The state bill on the table prohibits the condemnation of property that isn’t blighted if the land will just be handed off to another private party. The Kelo case determined that local governments could seize private homes and businesses for other private economic development projects—perhaps ones that would be more lucrative.

Wisconsin's governor is expected to sign the bill. Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama has already enacted a similar law and Tenessee is talking too.

While others tip-toe around the term, in New York, eminent domain is used to justify proposals like Atlantic Yards and Columbia University’s expansion into Manhattanville, according to the Daily News, vis-à-vis the Empire State Development Corporation—an unelected body that isn’t really accountable to the public as much as it is to its government employers. Steve Anderson, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, told the Times Union that New York is “one of the biggest abusers" of the claim.

The Daily News writer points to City Council for an answer, while others suggest a public referendum. Perhaps Riverhead’s developers can get away without calling on eminent domain because the majority of the land is held by a single owner, but as New York continues to grow, will anyone address the Kelo question?

Inman News New York Daily News The New York Times Times Union - Riva Froymovich

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