Council district survey results are in, and Bob Caesar remains abjectly clueless about street and road issues.

Who gets quoted the most? The one who comprehends the least. Welcome to governance, New Gahanian Style.

DESIGN DESIGN DESIGN, you blithering idiot.

He hasn't learned a single damn thing, has he?

New Albany City Council compiles list of top public priorities, by John Boyle (Hanson's Journal of Misplaced Priorities)

 ... With the growth of the population along with work being done on roads in different sections of the city, overall traffic has increased. Caesar pointed out two types of traffic — commuter and consumer.

Commuter traffic consists of drivers coming to and from work, while consumer traffic is due to people running assorted errands. The latter is affected by and, perhaps, affects the traffic situation the most, Caesar said.

Unlike commutes, trips out on the town can't always be planned out well.

"When you run around picking up different things, you don’t know how long it's going to take," Caesar said. "A lot of times, people don’t want to have to wait at stop lights, and sometimes you can kind of get yourself in a rush.”

In order to trim time off of their trips, Caesar said drivers will cut through residential neighborhoods that wouldn't otherwise see thru traffic, often doing so at dangerous speeds. Solving the situation will be tough, he said.

Speed limits have been lowered in many neighborhoods, but other things like increased police presence, signage, speed bumps and prominent lines marking stop signs could help.

"It’s a sticky wicket to really discourage people from taking all of these cut-throughs around town," Caesar said. "It’s something we need to convince people to not do. Most of the time, you’re not really cutting down time, even though you think you are.”

Nationally, not locally: "The Democrats are also in a profound struggle over their future."

In Floyd County, the long-term trend shows no signs of abating.

In response to Republican Full, the Undemocratic Chairman Dickey offers Republican Light.

Increasingly, local voters taste the choices and opt for the more flavorful of the options, rather than the one that just tastes like water.

Maybe this will change, though given the good-old-boy inclinations of the local party's intellectually vacant standard-bearers, holding one's breath might not be a good plan.

---

Civil war has broken out inside the Democratic party. Does the future belong to the populist left or the centrists? (The Guardian)

Last week’s defeat in a high-profile congressional contest sparked a tough fight over the heart of the Democratic party. Heather Cox Richardson, Jean Hannah Edelstein and Michael Cohen look at what the future might hold

 ... Unlike the Republicans, though, who will have to reinvent themselves if they are ever to recover from the damage of the Trump era, the Democrats have the opportunity to heal their differences for an easier transition to a new political era. Establishment Democrats are not wrong to put faith in experience: Clinton, after all, lost the electoral college, but won the popular vote by more than two points. The upstart Democrats who rallied to Sanders are, though, demanding a focus on economic fairness, one that echoes the Democratic leadership of the 1930s. “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” FDR said in 1944. “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College

---

We must learn from Jeremy Corbyn’s success and speak to younger voters
One might have thought that the November election would have drawn a clear line under Democratic centrism. But the defeat of Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th congressional district may have been its true death wheeze. Even with six times as much funding as his opponent and a crazed and incompetent Republican president, Ossoff could not get enough of the district’s wealthy and well-educated Republicans to vote for him to flip the district.

When Bernie Sanders remarked that he wasn’t sure that Ossoff was a true progressive, it wasn’t a kind thing to say, but it also wasn’t inaccurate. The future of the Democratic party is not men like Ossoff. We must learn from the comeback of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK election and start putting our might and money behind candidates who are truly on the left.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a writer based in New York

---

Liberals should be wary of policies that will scare away the middle classes
It has been a rough couple of months for the Democratic party. As Republicans have sought to roll back the key legislative accomplishments of President Obama, it has been one disaster after another. Even with President Trump’s approval ratings at historically low levels, Democrats continue to lose special elections around the country.

But in spite of these losses, there is a clear glimmer of hope – one that could presage a significant Democratic victory in congressional elections next year. Democrats are losing, but they are losing by much smaller margins than they have in the past.

Michael Cohen is the author of American Maelstrom: the 1968 Election and the Politics of Division