I want to clarify the last post. The hurricane brought a lot of damage throughout the region. I meant only that it was underwhelming relative to what we readied ourselves for. Nine people died in New Jersey. About 188,000 buildings remain without power. The storm bought a tremendous flood. Here's a review:
The hurricane turned out to be not nearly as painful as we expected. It caused several deaths, which is sad, and significant property damage, but Hurricane Irene ended up being only slightly stronger than an average mid-Atlantic storm. Days before it looked as though it was going to make a direct hit and inundate Cape May County with its storm surge and rains, the storm passed with a lot of rain but little structural damage. Most flooding was along inland rivers, such as the Rahway and Passaic. It was a lot like Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999.
Hurricane Irene is moving through New Jersey, according to the latest projections moving just along the coast, brushing the Island Beach State Park area. Heavy rains here in Jersey City at 1 a.m. National Hurricane Center predicting secondary landfall near the Rockaways. History after the jump:
Hurricane Irene is crossing over the Carolina coast, on course for the Delmarva peninsula, New Jersey and New York City. Cape May County is likely to take a direct hit from the storm. I love Cape May. This was the first summer in years I didn't visit there. New York and New Jersey mass transit will be suspended after noon Saturday. Storm surge map of Jersey City after the jump.
Hurricane Irene is heading north along the Atlantic Coast, forecasts show the storm going straight up the shore to New York. Above is the National Hurricane Center's flooding map for a category two hurricane. Currently Irene is a category three storm. According to the map for a category three storm, my neighborhood would be under more than ten feet of water.
In case you aren't noticing, the most insane inversion in U.S. political history is occurring. The "Party of Business," the Grand Old Party, the vehicle of the northeastern titans—to this day the civil embodiment of "good-for-business" Babbitry, the Republican Party, in control of the House of Representatives, is about to ensure a totally unnecessary default on U.S. government obligations. It's a radical party that has highjacked the government and its credit.
I couldn't allow it to go The Way of All Blogs. I've sunk too much work into HD. So, it will return. Mostly the same, for now. It might change as we go along. As some of my readers know, the hiatus did not indicate my absence from Hudson democracy—the opposite, in fact. I'll be more specific shortly, but HD was always a vehicle for learning, and I know a lot more now than when I left off in April.
I checked out a copy of Josh Margolin and Ted Sherman's The Jersey Sting from the Jersey City Public Library yesterday. It's really a great book—I was wary it would be another cut-and-paste job from the newspaper archives, like Bob Ingle's The Soprano State, but it is not that at all. Margolin and Sherman fill out the unimaginable story of the black-hole-sociopath-turned-rat Solomon Dwek with exactly the sort of patient, shoe-leather reporting that makes for classic journalism.
Just a short programming note: posting is going to be light this week and part of next week. Things are slow right now, but we're going to have a lot to talk about soon as the city and state budget negotiations get started in earnest. We also have Board of Education commissioner elections coming up on April 27. Check Twitter for links and quick updates.
The Jersey City Board of Education is set to vote tonight on whether to accept a grant of a thousand dollars from Houston-based energy conglomerate Spectra Energy, the company bidding to extend a wholesale natural gas pipeline sixteen miles through Bayonne and Jersey City. This resolution appears on the board's agenda for its regular meeting:
Two Star-Ledger reporters write in a new book that Harold "Bud" Demellier, campaign manager for Mayor Healy's 2009 re-election bid, took $20,000 cash from "David Esenbach"—the infamous Solomon Dwek—as payment for "consulting". The revelation comes a year and a half after deputy mayor Leona Beldini, a close personal friend of Healy and the mayor's 2009 campaign treasurer, was arrested with more than forty others in a sting that had Dwek handing out envelopes of cash in every Hudson berg.
This just about says it all: trading low-income housing programs for tax-deductions for vacation-home mortgages and community health centers for all-important tax loopholes for multi-millionaire hedge fund managers. This—this—is what the Republican party is about. Not "small government", not "free enterprise", not "real America"—the GOP is a paid agent of the wealthy, and is loyal to no agenda higher than pillaging the fiscal commons on their behalf. Their rhetoric of morality is a cheap costume.
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