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If the House GOP really cared about local control of transportation funds, they could draft a bill that distributes federal funding to cities and towns. The problem for John Boehner and the oil companies who back this bill is that cities and towns spend transportation dollars on things like transit, biking, and walking.

Please work this angle, not the one that sounds like us asking for charity from motorists. That wonderful system of diverting a piddling of gas taxes to transit was set up by Reagan (as we are now reminded by transit advocates trying to perform some Republican Voodoo) to make metropolitan regions look like beggars. Never mind that we pay far more federal taxes overall than we get back in any form, this clever shell game successfully convinces the sprawlists that budgetary up is down.

Battles to receive any federal funding are going to be uphill for the foreseeable future. We can do best in this environment by beating back boondoggles like the Tappan Zee and its cousins around the country. As federal highway spending is reduced, local responsibility necessarily fills the void. New Yorkers will not tolerate silly preferences (such as Cuomo’s) for sprawl over subways when it becomes a question of noticeable differences in our state income tax.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices.

The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!

When gas was cheap, grasshoppers like Gingrich were singing about how stupid we urban ants were to live in relatively small spaces—to be “packed” into our apartments as they put it, with rote derision. And the subway? It has never been considered a great luxury or comfort, not by those who ride it or those who don’t. The subway is a great efficiency.

Now that the eternal winter of our fossil fuels is palpably at hand, the grasshoppers are starting to change their tune. The wiser ones will “pack” themselves into some kind of urban community. The followers of Gingrich will keep loudly enjoying their luxuries while blaming everyone else for rising costs, until one day they find they can’t afford to live—anywhere.

This bill, which attempts to make up for the country’s stagnant gas tax by squeezing revenue from domestic oil drilling, takes the concept of sustainability (environmental, fiscal and otherwise) and strives to achieve the opposite. Not only would it eliminate bike and pedestrian funding, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has said he plans to saddle the bill with a measure permitting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, recently quashed by the president.

This evil plan too dumb to take seriously.

When Republicans propose a tax on domestic oil depletion as the thing to keep overbuilt roadways from naturally contracting, I say call their bluff.

Today more than 12 percent of trips are made by foot or bike, yet less than 2 percent of our nation’s transportation funding goes towards biking and pedestrian infrastructure. According to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, bike commuting increased 57 percent between 2000 and 2009. Instead of increasing investment in transportation options that Americans want, the House bill appears to funnel more dollars towards roads…

I don’t know what these Senators know that we don’t know, but I find it hard to believe that they’d put their names to this if they thought that Keystone was really dead. It’s possible they are just being good partisans and are using their oily credibility to get the payroll tax cut extension. But it would be highly unusual. There’s something odd going on there.

Ya think? I can’t believe Digby would take Obama and his State Department at their word that the shortened review period was a guaranteed rejection for Keystone XL. There is no threat that this president will not back down from. Everything is a feint.

Republicans figured this out a long time ago; you can tell by the way they call every single one of his bluffs. But in this case they may have overplayed their hand, as no one can see the Senate reconvening at this point. Chaos is a more powerful force than the manifest depravity of “both sides”.

Let it be an interesting January.

Also fortunate for the savvy news consumer, the AP apparently has a better grasp of what America’s intelligence agencies do and do not know than Newt Gingrich, a man who used to be third in line for the presidency and has received countless classified intelligence briefings.

Remember, kids: political insiders like Gingrich are in possession of Top Secret Government Conjectures of the 1990s!

You, as mere citizen or reporter, can not intelligently evaluate anything they say or do, because you have not had countless “intelligence briefings”. Your role in voting or reporting is simply to accept what the so-empowered declare and apply your rubber stamp where instructed.

Orlando’s police department originally requested two drones to use for security at next year’s GOP convention, only to change their minds for budgetary reasons.

Naturally the only thing to balance the horrible death robot future/present our weird illegitimate government has chosen for us is the fact that they are flat broke.