Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Hope And Change Diary: Making Things Better For Black People (Section 8 ranks swell to record sizes)


Thirty thousand people showed up to receive Section 8 housing applications in East Point Wednesday, suffering through hours in the hot sun, angry flare-ups in the crowd and lots of frustration and confusion for a chance to receive a government-subsidized apartment.

The massive event sometimes descended into a chaotic mob scene filled with anger and impatience. Some 62 people needed medical attention and 20 of them were transported to a hospital, authorities said. A baby went into a seizure in the heat and was stabilized at a hospital.

People were removed on stretchers and when a throng of people who had been waiting hours in a line were told to move to another line, people started pushing, shoving and cursing, witnesses said.

Still, officials of East Point declared the day a success. Nobody was arrested and nobody was seriously injured, they said. It was an assessment roundly challenged by many of the people who had to go through it.



The massive event sometimes descended into a chaotic mob scene filled with anger and impatience. Some 62 people needed medical attention and 20 of them were transported to a hospital, authorities said. A baby went into a seizure in the heat and was stabilized at a hospital.

People were removed on stretchers and when a throng of people who had been waiting hours in a line were told to move to another line, people started pushing, shoving and cursing, witnesses said.

Still, officials of East Point declared the day a success. Nobody was arrested and nobody was seriously injured, they said. It was an assessment roundly challenged by many of the people who had to go through it.


Kim Lemish, executive director of the East Point Housing Authority, said the event marked the first time the city has offered Section 8 housing applications since 2002. The waiting list that lasted eight years had depleted, she said, and the agency was beginning a new one. So people braved all the physical difficulties just to get on a waiting list that could keep them waiting for years.

Lemish said the agency had expected about 10,000 people but three times as many showed up. Many were just accompanying those looking for an application. Some 13,000 applications were handed out.

Concern is rising that a similar scene could occur Thursday when the housing authority of this small city begins accepting the completed applications. Wednesday's event was only to hand out the paperwork. The housing authority will begin accepting applications at 9 a.m.

Some of the crowd waited for two days at the Tri-Cities Plaza shopping center. As the temperature rose Wednesday, people fell ill.

Sgt. Cliff Chandler, spokesman for the East Point Police Department, said a toddler was treated earlier in the morning for "some type of seizure," Chandler said.

"A lot of it was heat and some was health-related issues" such people not taking their medications, Chandler said.


By the time everyone had left around 2 p.m., the temperature had climbed into the low 90s.

East Point police, some wearing riot helmets, were patrolling the area. Firefighters and EMTs were attending to people who were overheating in the sun. Police from College Park, Hapeville, Fulton County and MARTA assisted in crowd control.

Chandler said there were no arrests.

Felecia McGhee told the AJC she arrived around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. She said the major problem began when people started breaking into the line and then officials handing out applications started moving those areas and those line breakers. She said she saw at least two small children trampled when the crowd rushed the building where the applications were to be handed out.

"It's a real mess out here," she said.

Channel 2 Action News reporter Mike Petchenik said fights were breaking out and police had to stop people who were storming the door.

Channel 2 reporter Tom Jones said, “There are thousands, I mean, thousands of people here. I’ve seen people fall out from the heat.”

By late morning the crowd had thinned considerably and people were walking up and getting their applications without delay. But just before the 1 p.m. deadline, a line of about 200 people had formed. Shortly after 1 p.m., several people ran across the parking lot to get in line but were told by police that the line was closed.

Emergency personnel brought in a pickup truck full of bottled water and were handing it out to the crowd.

A sign on the door of the office explained that only applications were being handed out.

"The housing authority will be issuing applications Wednesday, August 11, starting at 9 a.m. Everyone in line by 1 p.m. on the 11th will receive an application. ... No Section 8 vouchers are available at this time. There are no public housing units available at this time. You're applying for the waiting list only."

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, called Section 8, subsidized the rents of low-income families living in apartments and houses that are privately owned. The federal program makes up the difference in rent that the poor can afford and the fair market value for each area.

The federal government has specific standards for its subsidized properties but at the same time landlords are assured an income.

Only families with incomes no more than half the median income for the area qualify. The median income for the East Point area is less than $32,000, according to Census data. It is up to the renter to find a place that meets HUD standards, which includes being 90 percent to 110 percent of the “local fair market rent.” [source]

Monday, August 9, 2010

Barry As President: Color Your Hair Gray To Appear Experienced While Complaining About The President From 2 Years Ago


President Barack Obama attacked the economic policies of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush in Bush's home state on Monday as evidence of the way Republicans would operate if given power in Nov. 2 U.S. congressional elections.

At a fund-raising event for Democrats in Dallas, where Bush now lives, Obama said the former president's "disastrous" policies had driven the U.S. economy into the ground and turned budget surpluses into deficits.

Obama defended his repeated references to Bush's policies, saying they were necessary to remind Americans of the weak economy he inherited from Bush in January 2009.

"The policies that crashed the economy, that undercut the middle class, that mortgaged our future, do we really want to go back to that, or do we keep moving our country forward?" Obama said at another fund-raising event in Austin, referring to Bush's eight years as president.

In reminding voters about the policies of the unpopular Bush, Obama is trying to protect his fellow Democrats' majorities in Congress and limit anticipated Republican gains.

On Nov. 2, voters will choose all 435 members of the House of Representatives and 37 members of the 100-seat Senate.

Republicans say they doubt Obama's effort to cite Bush as a reason to vote against them in November will work because Americans are more concerned about getting or keeping a job.

"When we talk about this 'going back' thing, I notice that some Republicans say, 'Well, he just wants to bash the previous administration, he's looking backwards.' ... No, no, no. The reason we're focused on it is because the other side isn't offering anything new," Obama said in Austin.

He said later in Dallas that Republicans were simply offering "retreads" of economic policies that "got us into this mess in the first place" and had no new ideas to offer voters.

One part of Bush's legacy remains a subject of intense debate in Washington -- the tax cuts for all Americans he steered through Congress in 2001 and 2003.

These expire at the end of this year, and a pitched battle has begun over whether to extend all or part of them.

Obama and the Democrats say tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year should be ended to help close the U.S. budget deficit. Republicans argue that no taxes should rise in a time of economic peril.

Obama, grappling with the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, 9.5 percent unemployment, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, soaring budget deficits and an impatient electorate, said all that Republicans have done is try to obstruct him at every turn.

'LACK OF SERIOUSNESS'

He said he has made tough decisions such as bailouts for the U.S. auto industry because he was not elected "to do what was politically expedient at the moment."

"There's been a fundamental lack of seriousness on the other side," Obama said.

Between political events, Obama gave a speech about the need to improve the U.S. education system.

The White House shrugged off a decision by Bill White, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, not to attend Obama's events on Monday in Texas, a heavily Republican state.

"He definitely does not take that as an insult," White House spokesman Bill Burton said, referring to Obama.

The state's current governor, Rick Perry, a Republican running for re-election and said to be pondering a 2012 presidential run, made his presence known shortly after Air Force One landed in Austin.

Perry handed Obama aide Valerie Jarrett a letter from him asking for more federal assistance to tighten up security along the U.S.-Mexican border.

"Drug cartels and related forces are waging war in Northern Mexico, their tactics including death threats, torture, car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and beheadings," Perry wrote.

Last week, the U.S. Senate approved a bill adding $600 million to border security efforts, a measure that the House of Representatives might also pass this week. [source]

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Only The Brainwashed Say Global Warming Is Settled Science or How Obama Forced Cap And Trade On A Beleagured Nation



Republican lawmakers, coming off a loss Friday in their attempt to block passage of a massive climate bill, have seized on a global warming memo they say was suppressed by the Obama administration.

The memo, drafted by two environmental economists, is highly critical of the science behind an Environmental Protection Agency memo that found carbon dioxide to be a greenhouse gas.

Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, said the memo shows that the EPA did not have accurate information when it completed its finding.

"Over the last few days, however, we have learned that a senior EPA official suppressed a detailed, rigorous account of the most up-to-date science of climate change," Mr. Inhofe and Mr. Barrasso wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Tuesday. "This account, written by two agency employees, raises serious questions about the process behind, and the substance of, the Agency's proposed finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare."

An EPA spokeswoman noted that the memo's author, Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist, and denied the claims of suppression.

"Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false," EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy said Tuesday.

"The document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding," Ms. Andy said.

The EPA found in its so-called "endangerment finding" determined that carbon dioxide is one of six gases that contribute to global warming. The move, spurred by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, was lauded by liberals and chastened broadly by conservative groups.

Mr. Carlin, according to his Web site, has worked for close to four decades as an economist at the EPA.

Mr. Carlin's boss, Al McGartland, director of the National Center for Environmental Economics, wrote in a series of e-mails between March 12 and March 17 that he would not forward the critique to the EPA office in charge of writing the final endangerment finding.

"I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate," Mr. McGartland wrote in a May 17 e-mail.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank, pushed the memo and the e-mails this week and, on Tuesday, sent the EPA a formal request that it release the report.

"EPA sits on this report for over three months, and then only allows it to be made public on the author's personal Web site," CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman said. "The fact that we have to formally re-file it with the agency indicates how unreal this situation is."

Global warming skeptics publicizing the memo this week have said the Obama administration is guilty the same thing that it had accused the Bush White House of: placing ideology ahead of science.

But liberal watchdog groups have said the memo repeats false claims made by global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels and have noted that much of the report was drawn from blogs and reports that had not been peer-reviewed.

House lawmakers narrowly passed a contentious climate change bill Friday, after heavy lobbying from the Obama White House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat. The bill, which supporters say will help curb global warming, now moves to the Senate. [source]