Now, if the project were in Sadr City . . . or done by 'guest workers,' this idea might have a chance

In case you hadn't heard (and if this is the case, thank GOD you awoke from that vegetative state . . . IT'S A MIRACLE, I tells ya!), the federal government has been quite diligent about throwing good money after bad on a calamitous expeditionary war in Iraq and pork-barrel "earmarked" projects.

It has not been diligent at all about rebuilding the devastated Gulf Coast, including the New Orleans area, which was drowned by the Army Corps of Engineers' breakaway levee system. Nor has it been diligent about chipping away at pernicious poverty and social breakdown, even after Katrina laid bare the festering sores on America's body politic.

The government, and America's business leaders, instead found the economy can be kept limping along upon the backs of illegal Mexican immigrants, who demand little in the way of living wages, benefits or compliance with Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. (All they ask is no one call la Migra.)

IN FACT, it seems to me that the federal government's official jobs policy goes something like: If illegal aliens can't do the job here, the Chinese can. In China.

In other words, screw America's poor, screw America's working class, and screw America's middle class.

And, still, the Gulf Coast molders.

As a certified neo-New Deal Democrat, your Mighty Favog has, from Day One, thought that the displaced and jobless of the Gulf Coast region ought to be put to work rebuilding their cities and towns in a full-fledged Works Progress Administration-style jobs program. In the process, the ill-educated could be educated, and the dysfunctional could be counseled.

But every able-bodied participant would know the dignity of honest and meaningful work.

FINALLY, BY GOD, someone -- a San Jose State professor -- has come up with just such a proposal. And someone in Congress has called for such a thing, too.

Amazing.

It probably doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell. This is the New America, after all.

Still, if you're like me and can't resist tilting at windmills, you can go here and tell your congressman and senators in Washington to DO THE RIGHT THING.

It would cost a hell of a lot less than our Perpetual Meat Grinder in Iraq.