Monday, March 18, 2024

No surprise

Daily Kos

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Saturday, March 16, 2024

$100 billion more for high-speed rail? Scrap it!

in the SF Chronicle:

California’s high-speed rail needs $100 billion to finish — scrapping the project is a possibility
March 16, 2024

California’s high-speed rail project has teased residents with recent renderings of how its futuristic trains and massive stations would look. But, despite recent progress and the excitement those renderings have produced, the project remains about $7 billion short of the cost to complete the initial segment from Merced to Bakersfield.

The rail project also needs about $100 billion to make the original vision of linking San Francisco and Los Angeles via bullet trains a reality. And some of the project’s watchdogs say state leaders need to decide soon whether to commit to the entire project — or abandon it....

Authority officials say they’re trying to secure $4.7 billion in federal funds to pay for the bulk of the Central Valley segment’s remaining estimated cost....

State leaders agreed to prioritize finishing construction in the Central Valley first, and the rail project’s supporters hope that the launch of interim service there will galvanize public support to finance the rest of the project....

the state’s high-speed rail project, got a combined $6 billion windfall from the Biden administration’s 2022 infrastructure law, and rail authority CEO Brian Kelly told legislators the Brightline West project “will probably affect our ongoing analysis of where we go next.”

...It’s unclear how, when and if the high-speed rail project will acquire the funding required to complete the Bay-to-L.A. system initially sold to California voters in 2008. 

Kelly, who in January announced plans to retire, told lawmakers it would likely take funding “not just from the federal and state (governments), but probably local and regional partners, as well,” to complete the envisioned system.

California’s bullet train project, though, faces other immediate questions.

The project has been mired by rising cost estimates, delays and litigation — “Phase 1” between San Francisco to L.A. is estimated to cost three times the initial cost projection....

Louis Thompson, chairman of the project’s Peer Review Group, said the costs face “considerable risk” in rising further, “because most of the project remains at an early design stage or less, and there is no experience to date with major elements of the project.”

Exacerbating the problem, Kelly and Thompson both said, is the fact that the project continues to face financial uncertainty. Its sole source of ongoing funds, from the state’s cap-and-trade program, expires in 2030. Authority officials want to extend that authorization to 2050.

Even with an extension, that funding alone won’t be enough to finance the complete project, and Thompson said lawmakers should decide soon whether to commit to building the entire project or cut bait....


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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Dorothy Kilgallen and the JFK Assassination


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Monday, March 11, 2024

Trump insider recounts failed hunt for 2020 fraud


The December 2020 claim of voter fraud was explosive, if true: More than 700,000 people had voted twice in Wisconsin, the tip alleged.

But when a highly paid expert for Donald Trump’s campaign began to study the claim at the behest of a Trump lawyer, he quickly realized that not only was it false, but it had also traveled a surprisingly twisted path before landing in his inbox.

The expert, Ken Block, learned it had first appeared in a post on a website called TheDonald.win, where it was spotted by the owner of an IT company, who brought it to the attention of the general manager of Trump’s golf course in the Bronx.

The golf executive forwarded the tip to the president’s son Eric, who passed it along to the lawyer. At last, the lawyer, Alex Cannon, directed the wild Wisconsin claim to Block, a software engineer and former politician from Rhode Island who was hired by the campaign shortly after the 2020 election.

“I think there is a fundamental flaw with the analysis,” Block told Cannon a few hours later, in a Dec. 4, 2020, email reviewed by The Washington Post. The hundreds of thousands of supposedly double-counted votes were “nothing of the sort.”

“They have incomplete data, did not recognize that, and inferred that the only logical explanation is fraud rather than incomplete data,” he wrote in the email.

Block describes the moment in a new book, “Disproven,” which will be released Tuesday. In the book, Block reveals how, again and again in the months after the November 2020 election, he was tasked by Trump’s campaign with batting down implausible and inaccurate allegations that Joe Biden had won the election through fraud.

Block’s book provides an insider’s account of the desperate measures Trump’s campaign took to pursue allegations of voter fraud and of how quickly the campaign concluded internally that each one was invalid, even as the president continued to rile up his supporters by claiming the election was stolen....

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Saturday, March 09, 2024

Chesa Boudin: How San Francisco fails the homeless

Chesa Boudin in the San Francisco Standard March 2:

For the last eight years, politicians in San Francisco and California have used Donald Trump as a foil. “Standing up to Trump” has been a rallying cry meant to motivate voters and showcase democratic bona fides. It’s, therefore, all the more offensive that some of those same politicians are looking to Trump-appointed judges to excuse their own failures on homelessness.

By turning to the Trump-packed U.S. Supreme Court for relief, these politicians are admitting, once again, that they prefer sound-bite policies—policies that have repeatedly failed in the past and will actually harm our ability to address other crucial needs in our community.

It didn’t have to be this way.

In 2018, despite the opposition of Mayor London Breed, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition C, which levied a tax on big business to fund solutions to homelessness. Thus, San Francisco’s homelessness budget for 2021-2022 was nearly $700 million, fully half that of New York City, which serves a population 10 times our size. 

Given these substantial resources, San Francisco had a unique opportunity to make progress on homelessness by creating more shelters, transitional housing and expanding essential services.

Unfortunately, whether because of corruption, indifference, incompetence or bad policies, San Francisco’s approach is failing. Numerous news stories have detailed how: Slow referrals and poor conditions have left available single-room occupancy units empty; those who did get placements were too often kicked out for minor rule violations; hundreds of positions needed to address the crisis remain vacant; poor community outreach hamstrung opportunities to create new treatment or living centers.

Instead of grappling with that failure, San Francisco’s leadership has chosen to double down on another sound-bite strategy—criminalizing poverty and homelessness.

Other Western cities have tried handcuffs rather than homes in response to housing crises. In 2022, in a case out of Grants Pass, Oregon, the Ninth Circuit prohibited prosecution of people setting up tents on public property when no alternative shelter was available, deeming it cruel and unusual punishment. Despite the dissent of a Trump-appointed judge, that decision was binding on most of the American West.

In light of that and similar rulings, San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness asked a federal court to enjoin the city from a police response to tents. A federal judge agreed and ordered the city to stop punishing sleeping in public unless there were available shelter beds. This decision should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention—the lower court was following established precedent, and San Francisco was clearly violating its own regulations. But what happened next is shocking.

In behavior reminiscent of Trump’s attacks on a judge whose ruling he disagreed with, San Francisco’s elected political elite protested outside the federal courthouse while Gov. Gavin Newsom mused about doxing the federal judge who had issued the ruling. It is totally understandable that government officials want more power to address real problems. 

But it is becoming dangerously common for members of the political branches to blame the judiciary for long-standing policy failures. And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what happened here. The court ruled that people cannot be prosecuted for setting up tents if there is no alternative shelter. The inability to create that shelter is a failure of San Francisco, not the courts.

San Francisco leaders lean on Trump judges

That reality, however, didn’t stop San Francisco from rushing to Trump justices to escape its responsibility. San Francisco has joined with some of the most conservative voices in the country in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse the Grants Pass decision. The Court promptly agreed to review the case (leading to the pending case against San Francisco being paused). 

In a brief last Friday, San Francisco tried to take a middle-of-the-road position, conceding that a “total prohibition on sleeping outside”—precisely what the ordinance they ask the court to reinstate does—“would effectively criminalize unhoused,” but still urges the court to reverse. Indeed, Trump appointees are expected to reverse and rule that, even if there is no other available shelter for the unhoused, local governments may freely arrest and prosecute people for sheltering on public property.

To be sure, many taxpaying residents are sick of seeing tents and associate visible poverty with other real public safety challenges. But the power San Francisco’s politicians seek from the Supreme Court will be no solution at all. California law enforcement agencies are spending more but solving fewer crimes than ever before. The San Francisco Police Department is solving just 20% of reported robberies and even lower percentages of rapes, burglaries and car break-ins. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of cases the police did solve are now being dismissed because of the DA’s failure to prepare and limited courtrooms. It’s hard to see how clearance or conviction rates will improve if we divert limited resources to the impossible task of policing and prosecuting poverty.

In a few months, when the Supreme Court overturns Grants Pass, San Francisco will double down on its refusal to invest in housing or even short-term shelter in favor of handcuffs and prosecutions. The city will surely succeed in making life for the unhoused more “uncomfortable” and undermining our collective humanity while giving Trump, his tactics, his pundits and his judges the last laugh. 

The city’s actions in this moment will not only affect the lives of all those who call San Francisco home but also will define our legacy as a beacon of progress or a cautionary tale of lost values.

And when, inevitably, these same politicians tout how they “stand up to Trump,” just remember they were more than happy to seek refuge in his justices to cover their own failures.

Chesa Boudin is the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law School and the former district attorney of San Francisco.

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Thursday, March 07, 2024

Pseudo-socialism in China

Emperor Xi Jinping

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Sunday, March 03, 2024

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (2024)

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Friday, March 01, 2024

Regulating Social Media

Letter to the editor in yesterday's NY Times:

To the Editor:


Conservative politicians need to get their story straight regarding the regulation of social media platforms. At the end of January Republicans, such as Senator Josh Hawley, were demanding that Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, apologize to parents for failing to protect children from harmful content.

However, this week conservatives from Texas and Florida argued that social media platforms should not be able to choose what content goes onto their platforms; the states believe that social media should have to publish all messages, regardless of the content.

Luckily, the justices of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of the two states’ laws, which would open the floodgates of misinformation, hate speech and unimaginably harmful speech that could lead to suicide, eating disorders and even terrorist attacks.

If we want a society in which people are protected from harmful information and government censorship, we have to allow (and even demand) that private social media companies continue to develop strict guidelines that determine what is proper or improper to put on their websites.

Of course those guidelines should not censor views based on politics, but on whether the information is truthful and whether its potential harm outweighs its benefits. These decisions are not always easy, but newspapers such as this one do it every day.

Adam Michels
San Francisco

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Thursday, February 22, 2024

The Repugnant Party and the Russians


What did Republicans know and when did they know it?

We now know that:

Alexander Smirnov lied to prosecutors about Burisma paying $5 million bribes to Hunter and Joe Biden.

These lies started in June 2020.

Smirnov began an extensive series of meetings with Russian intelligence officials in 2019.

Republicans made Smirnov's accusations a centerpiece of their corruption charges against the Biden family....

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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

We're number three!

 CA Has 3 Of The 10 Healthiest Counties In The U.S.

  • No. 1: Marin County (100.0)
  • No. 3: San Francisco County (98.6)
  • No. 8: San Mateo County (95.5)

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Why Putin killed Navalny

Even behind bars, Navalny was a threat to the corrupt Russian dictator.

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Trump and Putin sitting in a tree....

What are Republicans doing in bed with Putin?


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Monday, February 19, 2024

Taxes

Thanks to Kevin Drum

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Sunday, February 18, 2024

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Thursday, February 08, 2024

Zombie high-speed rail project shuffles on

The LA Times reports that California's Central Valley residents are excited that they'll soon have access to high speed rail. For example, here's Domaris Cid, a student at Fresno City College:
“It kind of sucks how I would have to move out of the valley to....have an education that I want,” said Cid, 18. The high-speed rail, she said, could give her access to UC Merced or UC Berkeley to continue her political science studies. “I wouldn’t have to leave a place I really do like.”
This is nuts. It's less than 60 miles from Fresno to Merced on Highway 99. It's an hour by car or train. HSR will cut that down to....45 minutes, and it won't get you anywhere near Berkeley.

The entire stretch of HSR from Bakersfield to Merced will cut a 3-hour trip to 90 minutes. Add in commuting time to and from the stations plus waiting time and it's barely better than driving.

This whole plan is nuts. HSR all the way from LA to San Francisco is a bad idea that's never likely to happen, but at least it's defensible with a few heroic assumptions. But the Central Valley leg all by itself? There's no credible justification for it at all. It's just a pointless money pit....

Rob's comment:
It's discouraging. I've posted against this project maybe as long as Kevin Drum, but we were just pissing against the wind. It's a zombie project that will never die, which is what its original supporters correctly figured: once it really got started way back in 2008, it coudn't be stopped. 

State politicians like Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown understood that and kept feeding the project money. (The Democratic Party is mostly responsible for this fiasco, though Republicans have been mostly silent.

And national politicos like Joe Biden did the same. Biden, aka Amtrak Joe, used to take Amtrak from Maryland to Washington D.C., which made him a train true beliver.

And the labor unions loved the project, since it provides a lot of construction jobs, an argument that was surely used by Egyptian pharaohs and the men who built the pyramids in Egypt. 

Moral of the story: Even dumb projects create jobs. The big losers here: federal and state taxpayers in both the short run---the cost to build the project---and the long run, since the project will have to be subsidized to operate forever after it's built.

Randal O'Toole summed it up best: 
All you have to do is mention the words 'public transit' and progressives will fall over themselves to support you no matter how expensive and ridiculous your plans.

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Monday, February 05, 2024

We're number six!

The 2023 Foot Traffic Survey 
by Smart Growth America

Most walkable cities

1. New York
2. Boston
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Seattle
5. Portland
6. San Francisco
7. Chicago
8. Los Angeles
9. Pittsburgh
10. Philadelphia

You can walk here, but you probably can't afford to live here.

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Monte Wolverton

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Thursday, February 01, 2024

Getting to your job


....On average, over 50 urban areas and for trips of 10 to 60 minutes, auto users were able to reach 48 percent more jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Solid lines show 2021 and dotted lines show 2019.

These numbers are the average of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, but for some the increased access caused by less traffic was much greater. 

In a 20-minute auto drive, residents of Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington could reach more than twice as many jobs in 2021 than in 2019....


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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

MAGA, Taylor Swift, and the Super Bowl

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Monday, January 29, 2024

Trump dances with the Talking Heads

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Friday, January 26, 2024

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Wednesday, January 24, 2024

JFK assassination

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