High-Speed Rail to Nowhere

This morning's San Francisco Examiner reports that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is submitting a bid for $4.5 billion in federal porkulus funds to get California's high-speed rail project moving forward. Although voters had already approved the sale of $10 billion in bonds for that purpose, the state's terrible credit rating and drowning debt have made it impossible to sell the bonds, and the rail project is languishing. Apparently there just aren't many folks dumb enough to bet on California's government straightening itself out any time soon.

So now the governor is begging Washington for the down payment on a system that is projected (by the California High-Speed Rail Authority) to cost up to $35 billion when all is said and done. Unfortunately, there are two major problems with even this official state forecast. First, the ultimate cost is likely to mushroom as all public project costs do when bureaucrats' rosy predictions run into reality. And second, today's estimates assume the project will actually ever get done. As in, completed. Operational. Functional.

The Bay Area suffered a catastrophic earthquake in 1989 in which sections of the Bay Bridge's eastern span between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island collapsed. Twenty years later, a replacement span still is not complete. Even worse, state engineers actually knew 30 years before the '89 quake that the Bridge's eastern span was vulnerable in the event of a major temblor. In other words, it's been 50 years -- half a CENTURY -- since California first identified a critical, life or death issue with a massive economic impact on the state, and yet the project to replace the troubled span still is not complete.

And back to the cost overrun issue, the Bay Bridge project is a cautionary tale. In less than a year in 2005, the project costs skyrocketed from the state's $300 million estimate to about $6.5 billion.

What chance does the state have of actually finishing a high-speed rail system across the entire state, and doing it for its current cost estimate of $35 billion?

No chance.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/01/EDGN1C0UD41.DTL&type=printable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%E2%80%93_Oakland_Bay_Bridge

Afghan Endgame?

George Will certainly stirred up a lot of anger among my fellow righties with his column yesterday saying that the U.S. ought to withdraw the bulk of troops from Afghanistan and transition to a more remote engagement relying on drones, special forces strikes, and such rather than pursuing the troop-intensive strategy of counter-insurgency General Stan McChrystal has laid out.

Counter-insurgency is necessarily nation-building, as it relies on establishing not only security, but also civil relations and functioning institutions. Will has been consistent, unlike many on the right, in opposing such endeavors on traditionally conservative, politically realistic grounds. He made similar arguments about our involvement in Iraq.

As a neocon, I must disagree with Will and that near-isolationist impulse, as well as with pure political realism generally. Having little engagement and even less influence in places like Afghanistan is what created such a headache for the United States in the first place. Make no mistake, there always have been and always will be those who want to kill on a mass scale. The U.S. is not to blame for its suffering the 9/11 attacks because of our inattention to that region. But there can be little doubt that our inattention did at least allow Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies to increase their operational capability, enhance their training and grow bolder and more confident in their agenda.

As so many of us said after 9/11, never again.

Americans cannot allow the festering sores on the other side of the globe to become wounds in our own national body. We cannot rely on technology, no matter how impressive, to keep us safe from cells of enemies who hide in caves and blend in with civilian populations. Drones and satellites and cruise missiles cannot help us weed out the bad guys from the innocent civilians across Afghanistan. And if we do not continue to root out and kill those bad guys, they will grow more powerful once again.

We cannot allow that.

George Will is a brilliant, thoughtful conservative. But he's wrong on this issue. America must not only remain in Afghanistan, we must win our counter-insurgency and embrace the nation-building so many of us on the right still bemoan. Like it or not, we live in a world of intervention now. Either we intervene on our own security behalf, or the terrorists will intervene in our lives in the most horrific of ways.

Media Spreads Untruisms about GM

One of the dumbest things I've heard or read from reporters talking about GM over the past several months is that, at some point, the company just started making cars no one wanted to buy.

Ridiculous. Until last year, GM sold more cars worldwide each year than any other manufacturer. Then Toyota passed them by. Now exactly who on Earth was buying all those GM cars year after year, even during the 1980s and 90s when the company was supposedly completely ignoring consumers? How can any company sell more of something than every other company on Earth when “no one” wants their products?

Obviously, plenty of consumers did want what GM was selling. More, in fact, than for any other auto maker, including Toyota and all the supposedly more consumer-oriented companies.

What did GM in was not that no one wanted their cars, but rather that their cost structure and distribution network could not support merely being No. 1. They were based, rather, upon the shortsighted assumption that GM would continue to utterly dominate the auto market. UAW workers and retirees enjoyed pay and benefits that made them not merely middle class, but outright affluent.

My grandfather retired from GM after 30 years with a 90 percent pension and generous lifetime benefits I can only dream of. Now my high school dropout grandpa stays home every day and collects more than I do working full-time in a professional position, having graduated from one of the finest universities in the world. I'm glad he's comfortable. But even he complained for years about how the union was strangling the company, how lazy workers were untouchable, and were paid just as much as truly dedicated employees.

Well, the chickens have come home to roost.

I admit that I've been rather uninspired by most of GM's designs over the past couple decades. But then, Honda, Subaru and Mazda haven't done much to pique my interest either. Most auto makers, it seems, started churning out dull, lifeless, cars over the past 20 years intended to be acceptable to the widest possible market segment rather than actually turning anyone on. Of that, GM was as guilty as anyone. But it's absurd to say no one wanted their cars when more people were buying them than were buying any other make.

This reminds me of the the famous quote from media film critic Pauline Kael in 1972 about Nixon's election: “I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him.”

Lefty elitists in the media today are just as oblivious talking about lowly American auto makers. Since no one they know would deign to buy an American product, they think no one would.

Neocons Were Right

The people of Iran are demonstrating to the world that America's neocons were right all along -- by planting democracy in the heart of the Middle East, we have emboldened the people of the region to fight their despotic rulers. First in Lebanon, and now in Iran, the people increasingly look at Iraq, and recall the images of purple fingers raised proudly to show they have voted, and these people are saying to themselves, "Why not here? Why not us?"

Freedom is a universal human desire. Even in the face of bloodshed.

Hope for Iran

Who isn't moved by the images trickling out of Iran, and filled with hope that this may finally be the end of that country's vile regime? If the people of Iran can topple the theocracy, it would encourage peace in the region. If the uprising fails, the regime may be encouraged to clamp down even more, and to become more belligerent in its international dealings, seeking to use hatred of (or even war against) Israel to unify its people and distract them from domestic affairs.

Say a prayer for the people of Iran.

Sotomayor Just Another Latin Bigot

Like many Americans, I'm deeply offended by the assertion of Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, that race and gender are central to the quality of one's jurisprudence. And as an American of Mexican ancestry, I am embarrassed that yet another member of "La Raza" has demonstrated such narrow-minded ethnic chauvinism. Of course, this most cynical of administrations will downplay Sotomayor's bigotry as empathy and compassion for underrepresented, historically oppressed people. Nonsense.

I'm sad to say that a lot of leading Hispanics seem to be stuck in some bygone era when it comes to issues of race and gender. Their mestizo race gives some Hispanics an inflated sense of pride and uniqueness, and encourages a powerful feeling of "us" versus all the various "thems" of this multi-ethnic society. Predictably, ethnic demagogues exploit this sentiment to devastating effect, undermining assimilation, subverting effective education, and encouraging caustic identity politics.

As a centrist Democrat in college, I constantly had to defend myself against attacks from other members of Hermanos Unidos when I'd stand up for America's right to defend itself against terrorism, or took exception to another member's hate-filled celebration of the death of Ronald Reagan. Rejecting arguments that the U.S. was responsible for the perpetual dysfunction of Latin American governments, I was accused of "white washing." At every turn, my fellow Hispanics took me to task for defending "gringos" and showing too little respect for La Raza.

Hermanos Unidos quickly lost its initial appeal.

Ethnic identity is a tricky thing. On the one hand, it gives us so much to savor, and provides a space for us to exist as members of a whole instead of as atomized individuals in an impersonal society. On the other hand, too much emphasis on identity leads to exactly the kind of intolerance and arrogance Sotomayor has demonstrated -- a dismissive insolence that belittles or even writes off other people altogether. Hardly commendable examples of the empathy and compassion Obama claims to expect from his nominee.

Court Upholds Marriage Definition Amendment

The California Supreme Court today upheld the right of Californians to amend our constitution, affirming Prop. 8, which changed the constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman.

The anti-8 folks have long mischaracterized the issue as being one of civil rights, with gays somehow being unfairly singled out for persecution and prevented from getting married. This has been an intellectually incorrect (and sometimes intentionally dishonest) assertion.

All Californians already have an equal right to marry anyone they choose of the opposite sex. Heterosexuals do not have any additional right that gays are denied. Heteros, too, are denied the right to marry members of the same sex. The difference is not one of rights, but of feelings about those rights. Heterosexuals don't want to marry members of the same sex, while some gays do.

This is no different from our society's restriction on the right to marry multiple people. Proponents of polygamy may say that society has unfairly denied them the right to marry whomever they love (and they may be correct), but the rest of us can honestly reply that their right to marry multiple partners is no more restricted than it is for the rest of us. We also cannot marry multiple people. As with the issue of gay marriage, the difference is in how we feel about this limitation that is applied equally to all of us. The rights themselves, or lack thereof, are exactly the same.

Union Killing Jobs

The San Francisco Examiner carried an article this morning about the budget problems for two of the Bay Area's largest mass transit agencies, BART and Muni. Not surprisingly, the agencies are burdened with bloated union contracts that make their unskilled workers very highly paid even while shielding those workers from too much actual work.

Two union rules are especially dumb. One restricts the number of BART's track maintenance workers who can be brought in on weekends to no more than 50 percent. Because the lines are so busy during the week, though, and trains run from 4 a.m. until 1 a.m., that leaves only three hours each weekday for actual track maintenance and many hours of idle time. The weekends, with less traffic and shorter operating hours, are a more suitable time to perform maintenance, so BART pays dearly to hire additional workers at overtime rates to come in and do it.

The other really dumb union rule involves forced regression from paperless pay stubs to old fashioned paper ones. The union actually filed a grievance when BART tried to implement a paperless system that would have saved two cents per employee pay stub, not to mention reducing paper and ink waste and preserving carbon-dioxide ingesting trees. The union's stubborn pig-headedness in this case isn't costing the agency much money -- just $64 per pay period based on BART's 3,200-employee workforce. But it is adding a silly cost, and it's out of step with contemporary technology and environmental mores in the Bay Area.

But that's what unions do these days -- add costs without adding value and subvert innovation and efficiency. In this time of local budget cuts, job losses and global recession, it's hard to feel much sympathy for unionized workers who seem intent on killing the goose laying all the golden eggs.

Doing Less With Less

You've got to admire Contra Costa County District Attorney Robert Kochly for his courage to speak truth to foolish politicians on the county's board of supervisors. Reacting to a $1.9 million cut to his department's budget, the DA naturally ordered that police departments stop sending minor cases to his office for prosecution. The budget cut has forced the DA to lay off prosecutors from a department that was already understaffed. Tough times for everyone, I guess.

For Kochly, it was a matter of simple math. There simply is no way to prosecute every petty crime, drug transaction and traffic violation with a reduced staff. At least not without seriously compromising the DA's ability to properly prosecute serious felons such as murderers and rapists.

Some supes, though, appear never to have considered what a budget cut would entail. Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Susan Bonilla complained that, "Our expectation was that our elected district attorney would step up in his role, rather than say, 'Don't submit these crimes.' " As if Kochly and his remaining prosecutors could somehow make up the 25 percent staffing shortfall if only they'd get more creative, or work harder. Unfortunately, there is no creative way around the harsh realities of the 24-hour day and human prosecutors' need for daily sleep.

As I mentioned here before, in this time of budget shortfalls, it is time to expect less from our government.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/28/MN4O179N8L.DTL&tsp=1