'Eisenhower, The White House Years'

By Jim Newton, Doubleday, 2011

How the Republican Party has changed. In this past week, a century-old speech by a Republican president received a revival when President Barack Obama traveled to Kansas and sounded the populist themes of Theodore Roosevelt.

Another Republican president is getting some deserved attention, too, thanks to a highly readable and insightful book titled, "Eisenhower, The White House Years," by Jim Newton, editor-at-large and columnist at the Los Angeles Times.

Dwight Eisenhower was, in Newton's estimation, "profoundly conservative," but he resisted the Republican right's demand for tax cuts and challenged the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

He used the federal government to preside over the creation of the interstate highway system and St. Lawrence Seaway, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and called on the Soviet Union to join in a total war "upon the brute forces of poverty and need."

Importantly, Eisenhower sought to govern from the "broad middle way toward prosperity without war for ourselves and our children." Those are hardly sound bites that a Republican would utter today.

The 34th president got a rap for spending too much time perfecting his golf game. He enjoyed his down time. But for decades, presidents fostered a sense of crisis to accomplish their goals. Eisenhower sought to portray calm, "to wean the nation from its addiction to crisis."

Newton also documents what went on behind the scenes, some of it less than flattering, including the president's use of covert action to overthrow the regimes in Iran and Guatemala.

No history of Eisenhower would be complete without a focus on his farewell address. He spoke for 16 minutes, stumbled over a word here and there, and urged public vigilance to be warned of the "military-industrial complex."

Less well-known was a second warning: "Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower is a Republican worth studying, though not one who will be emulated any time soon by any prospective Republican president.

– Dan Morain

'Why your water bill must go up'

By David Lepeska, www.theAtlanticCities.com, Nov. 28

It's not just Sacramento homeowners and businesses who are about to get socked with years of rate hikes to fix decrepit water and sewer systems.

The bill is coming due in cities across the nation as pipes built mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and neglected for decades are falling apart, literally.

The situation is not just environmentally unsound, it's dangerous to public health, David Lepeska writes for The Atlantic magazine's website on city issues.

He cites a study by UCLA and Stanford researchers who estimated that more than 1.5 million people in Southern California get sick each year because of bacteria in polluted water from broken pipes. He points out that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nationwide, 700 water mains break every day.

Lepeska and the experts he quotes say the federal government should help out more, as it once did. But they acknowledge that is highly unlikely and that cities will have to pay most of the tab – estimated at $750 billion or more over the next couple of decades.

"An impossible expense," Lepeska calls it, noting that a $3 billion sewer debt caused the nation's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy – in Jefferson County, Ala., last month. "In many places – including Los Angeles, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., Sacramento and now Chicago – residents have pushed back against proposed rate increases," he adds.

In Sacramento, officials want to accelerate replacing and repairing water and sewer pipes. They plan to spend $700 million over 30 years just on the sewer system.

To pay for all the work, they're talking about increasing water rates by 10 percent ($3.44 a month for the average single-family customer) and wastewater rates by 16 percent ($2.36 a month) starting next July. There would be similar increases the next two fiscal years, as well.

A ballot measure to roll back and cap Sacramento's utility rates was soundly defeated in November 2010. But if these rate hikes move forward, you can bet there will be plenty of squawking.

Replacing old sewer lines may be unavoidable. That doesn't mean we have to like paying for it.

– Foon Rhee

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