A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
Congratulations to Ohio State, First NCAA Football Playoff National Champions!
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"Rick Santorum calls Rand Paul and Ted Cruz “bomb throwers”.I don't think Rick quite gets the concept of a money bomb.http://t.co/ERiucToF4t
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) January 13, 2015
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New Nominee for Bad Elephant of the Year
From Rare:
New Distribution Channel for Comics“Do we really want someone with this little experience? And the only experience they have basically — not Rubio, but Cruz and Paul because I don’t think Rubio is going to go — is bomb throwing? Do we really want somebody who’s a bomb thrower, with no track record of any accomplishments?" - Rick Santorum
Facebook Corner
(Sen. Mike Lee). What do you think about reducing Washington's role in transportation spending and giving as much of this power back to the states?
Nice implementation of the principle of Subsidiarity... And ultimately we need to transition from an obsolete, regressive fuel tax system to mileage-based/toll systems, not to mention privatizing operations at the state/local level.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. $787 billion dollars total, but only $48 billion of that was set aside for transportation projects. Of that $27.5 billion was for freeway/highway projects. In driving around the country over the past years, I've seen signs up at construction projects that state it was from the ARRA. So the money went out and did good. Sizeable portions of it went to just buying new and updated equipment for transportation departments as a lot of it was old and wearing out. A bunch went to new air traffic control centers as many of ours are 50+ years old. A bunch went to upgrading shipyards as well as they haven't been touched in decades either. New mass transit rail systems were also built using it or upgraded.
If you read the yearly report card that the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the US infrastructure (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/), you quickly realize how horrifically out of date and in bad repair the entire infrastructure of this country is. Estimates to repair it all go into the trillions. And this is from engineers, not politicians. There truly are literally thousands of projects that need to get done. Unfortunately they all get mired down in political gamesmanship and earmarks and riders and amendments and either nothing gets done at all when a bill gets killed over pork, or it is mired in so much politics that it costs 5 times what it needs to.
And yes, doing these projects would employ tens of thousands of people around the country, putting money into local economies. Could have been a decent stimulus, but the final version of the bill had so little available for these types of things that it really didn't amount to much. Again, thank Congress for that, they write the bills, not the President.
What a big surprise: special-interest groups that would profit from government "investments" in infrastructure would report out that our current infrastructure sucks...
What's pathetic is this has been debunked by Cato Institute and others for years. In fact, US investment as a percentage of GDP is quite favorable in terms of the OECD. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of bad bridges and rough paved roads has declined by 20-50%
(Reason). The collapse of marijuana prohibition is pitting Republicans' anti-pot prejudices against their avowed devotion to federalism.
Republicans dont really give a s#!t about federalism. They give lip service while funneling wealth to their banker buddies.
What part of "At the end of last month, seven Republican members of Oklahoma's legislature, including five of the most conservative, publicly criticized that state's Republican attorney general, Scott Pruitt, for trying to reverse marijuana legalization in Colorado" did your pygmy mind fail to grasp? They didn't say DEMs criticized the GOP attorney general.
(Rand Paul 2016). Here's another example of why Rick Santorum is a complete joke.
Poor Rick Santorum.... He doesn't quite get the concept of a money bomb, or short-duration political fundraiser
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via Townhall |
Céline Dion, "Love Can Move Mountains"
