DL Open Thread: Thursday, December 29, 2022

There’s Always A Delaware Connection. The Rethugs know that they had a disastrous 2022 national election. Who better to analyze what went wrong, and how to fix it, than someone with a sparkling record of winning statewide races in Delaware?:

The R.N.C. has undertaken what it says is a serious analysis of the 2022 results, led by Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the nephew of the state’s former governor, Haley Barbour, and a co-author of the so-called autopsy that the party ordered up after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That report counseled a more inclusive attitude toward voters of color and moderate swing voters, and a more open stand on overhauling immigration laws — the opposite tack taken by the party during the Trump era.

The 2022 review committee includes Jane Brady, a former attorney general of Delaware, and Kim Borchers, a committee member from Kansas, but it is also being co-chaired by Ms. Dhillon, who, at least for now, has spent the past weeks rallying the hard right, not courting the center.

‘To Save Paradise, They Tore Down The Parking Lot’.  50-some years after ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, the times they are a’changin’:

They are gray, rectangular and if you lumped their population of up to 2 billion together they would cover roughly the same area as Connecticut, about 5,500 square miles. Car parking spaces have a monotonous ubiquity in US life, but a growing band of cities and states are now refusing to force more upon people, arguing they harm communities and inflame the climate crisis.

These measures, along with expansive highways that cut through largely minority neighborhoods and endless suburban sprawl, have cemented cars as the default option for transportation for most Americans.

From January, though, California will become the first state to enact a ban on parking minimums, halting their use in areas with public transport in a move that Gov. Gavin Newsom called a “win-win” for reducing planet-heating emissions from cars, as well as helping alleviate the lack of affordable housing in a state that has lagged in building new dwellings.

Several cities across the country are now rushing doing the same, with Anchorage, Alaska, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nashville, Tennessee, all recently loosening or scrapping requirements for developers to build new parking lots. “These parking minimums have helped kill cities,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who accused political leaders of making downtowns “look like bombs hit them” by filling them with parking lots.

How Warehouses Took Over SoCal–With Predictable Results:

Over the past decade, warehouses for online retailers as well as logistics and distribution companies such as Amazon, UPS and FedEx have reshaped southern California’s landscape. To satiate a growing hunger for one-click, doorstep delivery, colossal structures to store and sort our online orders have risen across the region.

About 1,100 warehouses have been constructed since 2010, encompassing more than 12,500 acres, according to a data tool developed by researchers at the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College and Radical Research. The data, shared exclusively with the Guardian, for the first time maps this sprawl of warehouses across the region and estimates their impact on the local environment.

It reveals that:

• Overall, there are about 9,500 warehouses in the region with a footprint above one acre.
• Each day, more than 1m truck trips out of these warehouses cloud the air with 1,450lbs of toxic diesel particulate pollution and 164,000lbs of nitrogen oxide pollution, which are linked to health problems including respiratory conditions.
• The trucks also emit just under 100m lbs of carbon dioxide each day.
• Across the region, about 340 school campuses are located within 1,000ft of a warehouse property line.

Burn Notice.  Torching documents was a regular occurrence in the Trump White House, with Mark Meadows the Arsonist-In-Chief:

On several occasions, Hutchinson said, she was in Meadows’ office when he threw documents into the fireplace after a meeting. At least twice, the burning came after meetings with GOP Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, who has been linked to the efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election. The New York Times and Politico have previously reported on Meadows’ alleged document-burning practices.

Delaware Call Unveils The Secrecy Behind UD’s ‘Investments’.  Great reporting, disgraceful practices by the University.  Did I mention that both John Carney and Claire DeMatteis are on the Board Of Trustees? As is a rogue’s gallery of corporate insiders.  Almost all of whom know how to hide money b/c they’ve done it.

What do you want to talk about?