FEMA pours money into flooded parts of Illinois

FEMA announced yesterday that $75 million in aid has been distributed to Northern Illinois flood victims, just two weeks after the Obama administration declared seven Illinois counties a federal disaster area. The AP reports that more than 45,000 flood victims have applied for aid and that the average aid reward is about $3,000. Most of these applicants are from Cook County, which includes Chicago and western suburbs like Oak Park and River Forest that were hit hardest by the floods.

Until the announcement yesterday, the biggest local media story about federal flood assistance concerned a Tribune article that FEMA inspectors wrongfully denied a household in Hinsdale flood compensation. (more…)

Illinois ditches abstinence-only sex ed money

Adam Doster of Progress Illinois reports that Illinois has declined Dept. of Health and Human Services money for abstinence-only sex education. (more…)

You too can get sick for just pennies a day

The trade off between safer eggs and the risk of a deadly salmonella outbreak is just pennies a dozen, according to a in-depth look at the industry by P.J. Huffstutter in the Los Angeles Times.

Slightly stricter guidelines in California have helped egg producers avoid bacterial contamination in recent years, but in an industry where the bottom line reigns supreme, tighter rules have caught on in only nine of the 50 states. (more…)

SF and Silicon Valley look to opt out of immigration checks

Local officials in California are going head to head with federal authorities over a program requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s attempts to deport undocumented immigrants. (more…)

Does DHS impact the illegal immigrant population?

The Chicago Tribune’s Dahleen Glanton reports that Illinois has “bucked a national trend” with an increase in its 2009 illegal immigrant population. A Pew Hispanic Center study finds that they were 525,000 illegal immigrants in Illinois last year compared to 475,000 in 2008. Nationally, the number of illegal immigrants continues to gradually drop — from 12 million in 2007 to 11 million in 2009.

What is interesting about these numbers is how little they have to do with deportation policy under the Bush and Obama administrations. (more…)

Don’t worry about Lincoln Park

Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood has low levels of air pollution now — and will have even lower levels when a nearby steel mill moves to the poorer part of town. (more…)

Treasury keeps bank on life support

Steve Daniels of Crain’s Chicago Business reports that Aurora, Illinois-based Old Second Bancorp Inc. will stop paying dividends to the Treasury Dept. under the TARP program. The arrangement highlights how non-Wall Street firms are still reliant on TARP and also the continued — questionable– generosity shown to even medium-sized banks. Old Second Bancorp was burned by real estate loans, and in January 2009, the Treasury Dept. propped up the bank with the purchase of $73 million in preferred shares. The bank continued to take a nose dive, losing $60.6 million in the first half of 2009. (more…)

Broadband access: American public not so broad minded

Some people who don’t use broadband think they’re not missing much. But for those whose homes, libraries, public safety networks and healthcare facilities will have broadband access because of the $1.8 billion the government awarded last week, it will make a huge difference.

One of the larger of the 94 broadband projects funded last week – $28.8 million to Peoples Telephone Cooperative (PTC) in eastern Texas – will connect as many as 190 community institutions to broadband, benefitting as many as 241,000 people and 10,300 businesses, and creating an estimated 100 jobs.

The grants and loans announced last week are only a portion of the $7 billion (more…)

Charles Peters asks, “While we’re at it, how much of a salary cut would work for you?”

I have frequently expressed concern that the White House has been as deficient as the media in its lack of curiosity about what’s going in the bureaucracies that it oversees. Further confirmation of my fear comes from a recent headline in the Washington Post: “White House Orders Agencies to Identify Trimmable Programs.” It seems to me that the White House should know by now what these programs are—or at least have acquired enough sophistication about the ways of Washington to know that the agencies themselves are the least likely to concede that any of their functions is less than absolutely essential.

(Reprinted by permission from The Washington Monthly)

Post-salmonella, FDA starts inspecting egg factories

Disturbing fact unearthed by William Neuman of the New York Times:  the miserable, filthy conditions at the Iowa egg farms that were the source of salmonella bacteria were investigated for the first time after the salmonella was discovered.  New rules for inspecting egg farms were written “well before the current outbreak, but went into effect only last month.”  It appears that the FDA only got around to inspecting these plants after they were already too far gone.

End-of-summer reading: the Big Green Buy

You might have missed this one over the summer, but it’s worth a look:  The Nation‘s Christian Parenti looks at one way government can quickly and easily move the economy greenward.  He calls it the Big Green Buy, and the idea is simple:  Instead of looking for breakthrough environmental technologies (which are up against massive obstacles we often ignore), the federal government should use its purchasing power to support green technologies that already exist and start saving energy and money. (more…)

Idea: Have government regulate oil industry

Who knew?  Turns out there’s an oil company called BP that is responsible for releasing petrochemicals into the environment without telling people.  James C. McKinley, Jr. reports in the New York Times on BP’s latest travesty in Texas (they’re good at creating disasters over in Louisiana, but in Texas they’ve outdone themselves — it’s all about being consistent).  (more…)

Immigration enforcement: problems and problematic solutions

Is there a difference between an illegal immigrant and an illegal immigrant who has filed papers for residency status?  Immigration raids across the country have rounded up both categories of undocumented workers, and, as Julia Preston reports in the New York Times, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division has decided there is a difference.  Prosecuting a smaller number of illegal immigrants may help ease a backlog of court cases besetting another Homeland Security department — Citizen and Immigration Services.  But it’s also inciting an ideological debate and tension in the ranks at ICE. (more…)

Minerals Management Service: the Novel

Set aside some time to read Juliet Eilperin and Scott Higham’s insightful (and long) look in the Washington Post at the culture of permissiveness that developed over many years at the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency (now disbanded) that was responsible for overseeing mining and drilling of natural resources on federally owned lands.  MMS’s “consensus-based” approach to oil regulation, beginning in the 1990s, led to a decision to end royalty payments for certain deepwater drilling leases that required larger investments by oil companies. The Deepwater Horizon was built on one of those leases.

Preventive Journalism update: Gardiner Harris on FDA and medical tubes

A simple solution to a lethal problem could come with the stroke of a pen — and save lives.  It remains out of reach because the Food and Drug Administration’s unwieldy review process.  Gardiner Harris of the New York Times investigates something  basic and alarming — the misconnection of plastic tubes that are used to deliver medicine, anaesthetic, and other vital substances to patients in America’s hospitals.  The tubes are often very similar, and can easily be fitted into many different devices.  The result can be painful and sudden death when medical workers make errors and connect the wrong tubes — liquid food can be inserted into a vein, and air bubbles can end up in people’s blood streams. (more…)