If it is no diet day does that mean we should fast? It is Ramadan after all.

Lots to do today. Gonna mow the roadsides. The fields are in full bloom so they grow wild for another few weeks to set seed for next year. Then I've got to rework my road. After 2.5" of rain Saturday it is gullied up. And I still am plugging along on my wellhouse project...so a busy day...and week.

I often wonder how I ever had time to hold a job.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0Uhlrope0]

Thanks for the OT and music!

Good morning, how is everyone's housing situation? Good things can happen, good stuff.

Ben Carson Wants To Kick Undocumented Workers Out Of Public Housing

The Trump administration has introduced a devastating new policy to prevent undocumented family members of U.S. citizens and documented immigrants from living with them in public housing. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is apparently leading the effort.

“Thanks to @realDonaldTrump's leadership, we are putting America's most vulnerable first,” tweeted Carson on Thursday (April 18). “Our nation faces affordable housing challenges and hundreds of thousands of citizens are waiting for many years on waitlists to get housing assistance.”

UniParty investors come first. Dividends make a good economy, or something like that. trickle trickle

Yet as Carson highlighted, this is not a front-loaded program.

“Only investors who commit capital for five, seven, and ten years,” he explained, “receive the tax law’s formidable financial benefits. That means new growth becomes consistent growth, and new jobs become steady jobs.”

In the vernacular, this is “good stuff.” It shows that conservatives can marinate great ideas for combating poverty, and that when liberals such as Booker (or, decades ago, earlier New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley) are willing to join forces, good things can happen.

Opportunity, enterprise, and empowerment are favorite themes among the strain of conservatism that runs from Reagan through Kemp and Paul Ryan to Tim Scott. They are themes, though, that should know no ideological boundaries. Here’s hoping policymakers keep finding ways to make them reality.

BOHICA Around here Cloverdale is building housing and planning for more. None of it is affordable without subsidy. The house across the street is for sale now, and so is the lot next door again. Empty apartments exist, none of them affordable to low income eaters.

My downstairs neighbors are moving to Sacramento, she works for the Department of Education and drives all over hell anyway. Her mom lives in Fresno. stairway to heaven highway to hell Middle class world burners doing fine.

Sonoma County to reform low-income housing voucher system after critical federal review

County officials who announced the plan Thursday acknowledged the current system was overburdened and incapable of serving the thousands of low-income families and individuals who applied for housing vouchers over the years. Only about 300 of the 3,000 county vouchers are made available annually to applicants on the waiting list. That roll now numbers over 26,000, and the application window hasn’t been closed since its opening in 1999, officials said.

“We’ve been frozen in time for 20 years,” said Margaret Van Vliet, executive director of the county’s Community Development Commission, which oversees the Sonoma County Housing Authority.
...
County officials propose replacing the current waiting list with a new queue of 500 people selected through a lottery. The smaller list would then be closed until all 500 applicants have been processed. The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on the new system in June.

Tempus did not fugit for two decades. Did you read the article where I quoted Carson wants to evict undocumented immigrants? bipartisan cooperation

Nonwhites at disadvantage

Janelle Wetzstein, spokeswoman for the Community Development Commission, said county officials informally decided to limit the scope of the consultant review, citing the October 2017 fires that stretched staff thin and the additional expertise that came with hiring Ross, who previously worked for HUD, in February 2018.

The county’s residency preference, coupled with its open waiting list, disadvantaged a wider swath of nonwhite applicants beyond Santa Rosa, federal officials said.

HUD found that while 31% of all applicants on the county’s waiting list were black — including many people living in neighboring counties — only 4% of Sonoma County’s Section 8 vouchers were held by black people, according to the agency’s letter.

Citing this data, HUD concluded that the county’s local preference effectively denied housing opportunities to low- income minorities throughout the Bay Area.

I could have been on that list of 26,000 for 15 years, now they are going to purge it and start over with a lottery. Why bother. A nearly useless Section 8 voucher is what they are waiting for, a voucher that most landlords already refuse but I guess the new fix is in. Meet the new fix... SNAFU.
And now Trump's Opportunity Zones are pumping up real estate investors, keeping landlords fat and happy. Non-subsidized renters get the shaft, no progress. D-Kabuki

Cold fried chicken on the House floor. Happy No Diet Day

Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life

Scientists reveal one million species at risk of extinction in damning UN report

Then again, I'm someone who realized that ice cream is, for me, merely a delivery system for whipped cream and chocolate sauce. So, on occasion, I just fix myself a dish of chocolate sauce and whipped cream and consider myself wisely saving calories.

Unlike the writer of the song, Crazy, I can't remember when I lost my mind. So, like Lady Gaga, I've concluded that I was born this way. Crazy, however, reminds me of the funniest key holder I've ever seen. It is a chain attached to the longest piece of clear plastic, on which is etched the sentence, "Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."

As Colbert's former character observed often in different contexts, "It's funny 'cause it's true."