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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (96464)	12/8/2010 7:33:55 AM
From: TideGlider	7 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224750

That makes me recall the "fainting" nonsense in his campaign. Is he passing water out to the left wing now to revive them? You guys made such a big deal of this inexperienced small time politician that you had no place soft to fall. I don't blame Obama, although his policies are horrible and his agenda is destructive. I blame the press and nonthinking people like you who wanted to "make" a star. The old saying is you can't make a silk purse of a sows ear. You all would have been better of electing Hillary Clinton and the better the country as well.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (96464)	12/8/2010 8:21:25 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224750

Stuck In The Sticks In California Posted 06:31 PM ET High-Speed Rail: The first leg of the Golden State's bullet train will run from nowhere to nowhere. What keeps us from laughing is the cost — more than $4 billion — before cars, locomotives or electric power. Not to insult the roughly 25,000 residents of Corcoran and Borden, but these towns in California's San Joaquin Valley don't really fit anyone's idea of a major destination. OK, Corcoran (much the larger of the two) has a state prison, with Charles Manson as an inmate. So people do head there from time to time, though fewer leave anytime soon. Enough with the jokes. Nothing wrong with small towns, or the people in them. But there's something out of whack about last week's decision, by the California High Speed Rail Authority, to start building the state's bullet-train system where it's least likely to be used. The 65-mile line would pass through one bona fide city, Fresno, but it wouldn't take Fresno's half-million or so residents anywhere they'd likely want to go. About $3 billion of its $4.15 billion price tag would come out of federal funds. And all this is before the cost of locomotives, cars, heavy maintenance facilities or the electric power supply. The obvious question is, "Why?" The answer is politics. The new route makes no economic sense, but it does fit the conditions placed on federal stimulus funds. The Obama administration wanted the first leg to be done in a relatively short time and to be usable in the existing Amtrak system if the high-speed project had to be abandoned. The Borden-Corcoran route scores well by these standards. Land there is cheap in comparison to the urban coastal areas, the region is hungry for jobs and local resistance seems nil. Quite a contrast to the Bay Area, where suburban towns are already fighting to block the line that would run from San Jose to San Francisco. And, should funding for the bullet train dry up, the new starter line would meet the federal requirement of "independent utility" — meaning it wouldn't just sit there unused. The pokey trains of Amtrak's San Joaquin service could use the new track and maybe go a little faster than they do now. All for $4 billion-plus. Bullet-train boosters say such a worst-case scenario is highly unlikely. But the math of this project suggests otherwise. The cost of linking San Francisco to the L.A. area is now estimated at about $43 billion. State bond funds would cover less than a quarter of that, and potential ridership and revenues are too iffy to attract private investment. So the project's only hope is to get a lot more federal money. But the Republicans have stormed back into Washington pledging to cut exactly the kind of boondoggle spending represented by this project. Also, tough measures to cut the federal deficit — a whole lot tougher than deleting bullet-train funds — have drawn surprising bipartisan support. The new Congress should be able to see this wasteful spending for what it is, especially when it is so clear on the map.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (96464)	12/8/2010 8:22:10 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224750

lefties lost last election and again in 2012