Just one more edit.
public misinformation about Iran’s nuclear project remains exceedingly high: in a 2010 poll, 7 in 10 Americans said they believe Iran already has the weapons. (In the Iraq War’s early days, 81 percent of Americans said they believed the country likely possessed WMD’s, an understandable conclusion given Bush administration statements and the media’s coverage).
Since department protocol limits the use of the AIS to cases where the victim is killed or is deemed likely to die, and local patrol officers are not trained to perform in-depth crash investigations, cases that involve injuries that are not considered life-threatening receive only cursory attention. When asked by Vallone how it could be that a cyclist or pedestrian could have both legs broken with no possibility of charges against the driver, Cassidy replied, “I don’t set policy.”
Fail.
When continuously bombarded with authoritative voices uncritically warning them of the Grave Threat posed by the New Hitlers, and with powerful images of menacing missiles and unhinged leaders accompanying those warnings, even rational populations will become sufficiently scared into succumbing to the next act of aggression.
Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the war drums against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant.
My overall comment is this: Europeans understand they exist in a high cost environment so they squeeze out the inefficiency to be competitive. They focus on value-added design and on efficiency in planning and scheduling. We don’t.
Yet this type of accountability just brought to Pakistan’s intelligence service is simply inconceivable in the United States. It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. Anyone who doubts that can simply review the past decade of full-scale immunity bestowed by the Justice Department and subservient American federal courts on all executive agencies in the War on Terror. We should think about that the next time some American pundit, politician, or media figure righteously holds forth on how undemocratic and oppressive is Pakistan as opposed to the U.S.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar yesterday patiently explained that drone strikes — which Americans widely support, including American liberals — are “completely illegal and unlawful” and “counterproductive” because they “fuel terrorism,” since people tend to become quite angry at the foreign power which slaughters their children…
So let me get this straight. A few years after some terrorists used our airliners as bombs in attacks on otherwise unreachable American targets—and that plot was unrepeatable thanks to subsequent passenger awareness—we become pioneers in the business of cheap, remote controlled flying bombers that can go anywhere. We create a thriving market for their components and accelerate the development of these objectively evil machines by many years. And just in case anybody had qualms about using drones against American civilians, we accidentally kill hundreds of civilians with drones over several years, in countries where we are not at war.
If you craved a near-term future of asymmetrical drone warfare encircling the globe and inevitably reaching within our borders, you would do exactly what the old men in charge of our war machine are doing.
All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.”
WTF.
Thus the House transportation bill is bad not only because it’s bad for transit, but also because it’s bad government. It’s not even selective worrying about cost-effectiveness, a charge often thrown by political transit supporters. It makes no attempt to decouple any funding from gas taxes, a decoupling that it necessary for the purpose of making it possible to tax pollution without demands from both APTA and the AASHTO that the revenues raised be plugged back into transportation. It makes no attempt to let go of projects that cost too much while maintaining those whose cost is adequate. It’s purely an exercise in muscle-flexing, a continuation of the US practice of not having a transportation policy that’s separate from the usual political and lobby bickering.
Alon is right that this ugly attack must be opposed its targets—us—but I can only do so halfheartedly, for the reasons he lists. I can not feign passion for a system of “dedicated funding” that I think is stupid to begin with.
Oh, the horror of having to establish once a year that a government entity needs a few billions from the mean old general fund! What is next, will the public want to know how it all worked out each year, whether the expenditures yielded the expected benefits? Will we… gasp … expect an accounting of lives saved, commerce increased, and pollution averted?
Where I work they decided to do performance reviews twice a year, because too much stuff happens in a year. And it’s true, tons of things happen in a year if you actually do work. No one likes doing the reviews so often, for various obvious reasons, but we do them and it makes a difference.
I understand the appeal of dedicated funding. Everyone would like to have a guaranteed allowance in to spend as they please, but guys: you can’t run a railroad that way. Or actually you could, and it would be called Amtrak.
The gas tax is just a thing we should use to wean ourselves off oil, so that we aren’t dragged into resource wars and then economically ruined when production peaks. But it may be too late to do anything about that now.
Part of the reason we failed to act is we wrapped a simple tax in layers of politics, bureaucracy, and ideology. It became a multiplier for motorist entitlement, even as it failed to cover the one category of roads it was supposed to cover. The piddling American gas tax and the frantic politics surrounding it are one of the most pathetic spectacles of our era.
And money remains, stubbornly, money. It’s just an abstraction whose purpose is to allow humans to shift resources. The idea that governments can and should treat money from one source as being bound to particular categories of spending makes no logical sense. People don’t do that unless they have some gambling, shopping, or drug addiction. It’s a weird political gimmick that was supposed to do all kinds of things that it has utterly failed to do. America’s transit system, with its special dedicated funding, is the envy of no one in the first world.
There are simple, honest, and good arguments for taxing gas at European levels, and separately, for subsidizing public transit. There are no such arguments for automatically assigning some random percentage of gas taxes to transit agencies, and to send the rest to disastrous mega-highways. Instead we just hear procedural excuses, mixed with the same overwrought liberal pleading that has been un-winning the hearts and minds of Americans for the past 30 years.
It’s time to try something else.
In order to prevent smart scope changes from leaving the cost-ineffective parts out, the planners take the cost-effective lines hostage in order to make sure that they are built.
