Mitch makes the first move

From Market Watch:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. set up the two showdown votes for Thursday, a day before some 800,000 federal workers are due to miss a second paycheck. One vote will be on his own measure, which reflects Trump’s offer to trade border wall funding for temporary protections for some immigrants. It was quickly rejected by Democrats. 

The second vote is set for a bill approved by the Democratic-controlled House reopening government through Feb. 8, with no wall money, to give bargainers time to talk.

Both measures are expected fall short of the 60 votes need to pass, leaving little hope they represent the clear path out of the mess. But the plan represents the first test of Senate Republicans’ resolve behind Trump’s insistence that agencies remain closed until Congress approves $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

For Democrats, the votes will show whether there are any cracks in the so-far unified rejection of Trump’s demand...

Rob's comment:

No, the real story is that McConnell is allowing a vote on the Democrats' measure to reopen the government. Why would he allow a vote on something that the Senate passed on a voice vote last month to keep the government open? Because Republican senators are getting restive about the damage the shutdown is doing. It's about a lack of "resolve" on the Republican side, not among Democrats.

McConnell is ready to confront Trump if/when enough Republicans defect and vote to end the shutdown, even if the vote to reopen the government falls a few votes short. Then he would tell Trump: "If I allow another vote, the Senate will join the House and vote to end the shutdown. You can tell your base that you tried, but it was just impossible to do in this political situation. The votes aren't there for the wall. Let's blame it on the Democrats and move on."

Does anyone think Trump has the backbone---all bullies are weaklings---to defy McConnell?

Later: Looks like something like the above happened to end the shutdown.

The "transit oriented development" lie

Dick Spotswood in the Marin Independent Journal:

...Let’s see if transit-centered housing works as promised in Marin. Presume our typical commuter lives at Corte Madera’s Tam Ridge Apartments, aka WinCup. The four-story 180-unit high-density complex is exactly the housing envisioned in SB 50. When approved, WinCup was touted as transit-centered housing next to a Highway 101 trunk line bus stop.

Photo: Frankie Frost

The time selected for this exercise is the 8 a.m. morning weekday commute. The destinations are six Bay Area employment centers. It’s a fair time for a test, because traffic is heavy and transit frequencies (public transportation such as bus, train or ferry) at their maximum. 

Travel time from WinCup to each destination by auto and transit is estimated using the smartphone Google map app.

From WinCup to:

• Montgomery and Market streets: auto, 33 minutes; transit, 55 minutes.

• UC Mission Bay Medical Center: auto, 42 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 18 minutes.

• UC Berkeley: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 40 minutes, via San Francisco.

• Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square: auto, 41 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 43 minutes.

• San Francisco State University: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 13 minutes.

• Oakland’s Alameda County Courthouse: auto, 27 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 17 minutes.

...To promise that a high proportion of high-density transit-centered housing residents will regularly use transit without first providing a comprehensive transit network is intentionally misleading.

For many destinations, you simply can’t conveniently get from here to there by transit, and MTC planners know it.

They push the bogus concept because there’s no other plausible rationale for constructing high-density units far from job centers.

Big city politicians, big business honchos, developers and tech titans---the folks who pull the regional agencies’ strings---need more housing for their expanding workforce.

Whether the transit-centered housing theory works in practice is irrelevant to them. They’ll be enjoying big profits while average Bay Area citizens pay the price with increased traffic congestion, higher taxes and crowded schools (Planners keep pushing the bogus concept of transit-centered housing).

See also Whose fault was the WinCup disaster?

Estimating the UFO situation

Salem, Mass., 1952

From the NY Times:

...A new project, code-named “Sign,” based at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, was given the mandate to collect U.F.O. reports and assess whether the phenomenon was a threat to national security. With Russia ruled out as the source, the staff wrote a top secret “Estimate of the Situation,” concluding that, based on the evidence, U.F.O.s most likely had an interplanetary origin.

According to government officials at the time, the estimate was rejected by General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff. From then on, the proponents of the off-planet hypothesis lost ground, with Vandenberg and others insisting that conventional explanations be found.

Project Sign eventually evolved into Project Blue Book, with the aim of convincing the public that flying saucers could be explained.

Yet behind the scenes, authorities grappled with something sobering: well-documented U.F.O. encounters involved multiple trained observers, radar data, photographs, marks on the ground and physical effects on airplanes.

In 1952, the office of Maj. Gen. John Samford, the Air Force director of intelligence, briefed the F.B.I., saying it was “not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars,” according to government documents. Air Intelligence had largely ruled out an earthly source, the F.B.I. memo reported...

...in 1967, a glowing red oval-shaped object hovered over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and all 10 of the facility’s underground nuclear missiles became disabled almost simultaneously while the U.F.O. was present, according to interviews with witnesses and official government reports. Technicians could find no conventional explanation...

...Clearly, government agencies continued to have some level of involvement in U.F.O. investigations in the decades following — and to the present. Despite government statements to the contrary, once-secret official documents include detailed reports of dramatic U.F.O. events abroad. Many cases at home were not investigated, including a 2006 event in which a disc-shaped object hovered over O’Hare Airport for more than five minutes and shot straight up through the clouds at an incredible speed...

See also On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program and Breaking a "juvenile taboo" on UFOs.