Chupacabra Report

-Ben Bernanke spoke to the Austin Chamber of Commerce yesterday and Governor 39% Big Hair Perry was there grandstanding against Washington bailouts, an issue he thinks will help him against potential rival Senator Kay Bailey. A story about this in Sunday’s Chronicle rightly pointed out that Perry himself had ladled out $35 million in taxpayer money to two of the big players in the meltdown, Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual.

-The trampling death of Jimbo Damour at the Black Friday opening of a Nassau County New York WalMart is a potent allegory for our consumer culture and it’s inherent violence. We stomp around the world to feed our manufactured appetite for cheap stuff and lots of it, and somehow fail to notice the bloodstains. Is this a great country or what?

-A Neal Peirce column last week about budget shortfalls in local governments nationwide has a story about Maricopa County Arizona Manager David Smith, who oversees a corrections system that spent $800 million last year.

“So Smith has launched a major prisoner re-entry program in South Phoenix, a 10-block area with 300 ex-felons and people still on parole. "We call it the $50 million ZIP code," he says, because of the costs the criminal justice system incurs there. Smith has co-located 15 services for homeless people in the area, partnering with churches and nonprofits. The program: help released prisoners get identification, find needed services, put some money in their pockets if they stay out of trouble and find jobs.”

This tracks a story line from the third season of “The Wire” where Police Major Bunny Colvin tries to get his law-abiding citizens some relief from the drug war happening in their neighborhoods by re-locating the hoppers dropping the bodies and the fiends shooting the dope to a burned out and vacant section of town that soon became known as “Hamsterdam.”

I don’t know if this is another example of reality aping fiction, or if this is something that author George Pelecanos saw happen in Baltimore or Anacostia. Go figure.