Sunday Train: Is State Sen. Simitian aiming to kill High Speed Rail in California?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This coming week is supposed to contain an important symbolic Independence Day: the day when the California State Senate votes whether or not to proceed with one strategic element of Energy Independent Transport for the State of California, or whether to gamble the state's future on petroleum.

It is, of course, a very sure thing as a gamble ~ on the losing side. They aren't making more, and the butane from natural gas liquids and energy inefficient production of ethanol from corn starch that has been used to juke the states on US "liquid fuel production" doesn't change the fact that we still depend on petroleum imports for over half of our petroleum consumption. We deplete more and more low production cost petroleum every year, shifting our consumption to higher cost petroleum.

And even if we had the petroleum that Pollyannas would like to wish into existence, we can't afford to burn it all at an accelerating rate, due to the CO2 emissions that will result.

State Senator Simitian does not seem to see it that way, as he appears set to vote kill the effort to allow the California High Speed Rail project to break ground next year.

Now, in an wonderful display of political pretzel logic, State Senator Simitian threatens to kill the HSR project will declaring his strong support of it: it will all be someone else's fault if he votes to refuse to break ground next year.

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Romney Wants An Economy He Refuses to Make Possible

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Romney indulged in soaring rhetoric^{1} when he declared victory^{2} in the fight to become the Republican Nominee and launched his General Campaign pitch:

I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. Because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hard-working, educated and skilled employees is intense, and so wages and salaries rise.

One problem: he refuses to make it possible.

The success of new business enterprise requires customers with the means and willingness to buy, and productive workers, equipment and natural resources. Romney's policies are:

• To take even more of the means from those with the willingness to buy to those who place a higher priority on accumulating wealth
• Offer his hypothetical entrepreneurs workers that are under-skilled and under-educated
• Saddle prospective entrepreneurs that attended college with a burden of debt
• Reduce the freedom of those workers with health benefits to take a job with that entrepreneur
• And insist on leaving all of those entrepreneurs exposed to the risk of the next oil price shock recession throwing them into bankruptcy

He expresses a desire for a wonderfully desirable economy, but his policies promise that his administration will be too damn lazy to lift a finger to it possible.

Heck, that could be a bumper sticker: "Vote Romney for a Lazy, Do-Nothing Government."

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 Notes

^{1} Really, I read the transcript. That part of it is soaring rhetoric. If you had a different impression, you may have watched it as it was delivered ~ but I never said it was a soaring delivery.

^{2} He had of course declared victory before, but when running a scorched earth campaign, sometimes you have some hold outs in the hills that you have to chase down before its really won.