Bridge collapse update

The place to go if you want to track the media responses to our Twin Cities bridge disaster is Minnesota Monitor. There are regular updates as new information comes in.

If you’re looking to know where the responsibility is going to fall, Nick Coleman has the answers.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

After citing that ghastly quote from Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half … to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (especially after Katrina, that quote deserves to be Norquist’s epitaph), Phoenixwoman seconds that suggestion:

It’s possible that delayed maintenance — delayed because of budget cuts, as the Republican Pawlenty would rather chop off his own genitals than undo his tax cuts for the rich — may have been a factor.

I think we can safely say that the Republican party platform has been a catastrophic and costly failure. Let’s hope one positive result from these recent disasters is that people realize that taxes ought to be used for investments in infrastructure rather than propping up the obscenely wealthy and funding wasteful foreign military adventures.

Spot makes an interesting observation: he reminds us that the Republican convention is in Minneapolis next summer. This disaster is not going to be corrected by then. Can we all remember to rub their noses in the debris when they come around?

Now we just need an opportunity to tell the Democrats that they’d better set their priorities appropriately, too.

Also read BldgBlog: Infrastructure is patriotic.

It’s interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration’s annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I’m on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That’s $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.

To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.

I dread airports, not flying

Tomorrow, I’m flying off to San Jose, California to hang out with a bunch of weirdos on Google’s dime, and naturally I’m anticipating being pissed off at the experience of going through the airports again. I despise TSA, an organization of typical Bushpublican incompetence that will not accomplish their goals of suppressing terrorism, but is supremely efficient at being a nuisance to legitimate travelers. Actually, the one good thing about them is that they’ve replaced fear of flying with annoyance at bureaucratic idiots as the primary emotional vibe in modern American airports.

So naturally I’ve been enjoying Bruce Schneier’s interview with Kip Hawley, head of the TSA. Well, enjoying Scheier’s side of the discussion, anyway: Hawley is an obtuse timeserving fan of petty hoop-jumping. Read about the fluids foolishness, the shoe scam, and the no-fly list nonsense. Hawley can only provide shoddy excuses, and as Schneier says, it’s only cover-your-ass security, nothing useful. If you don’t want to read it all, Timothy Burke has a good summary.

But tomorrow I’m still going to have to take my shoes off and play games with toothpaste and deodorant and shuffle through that familiar line of bored, officious goons who will make you suffer if you don’t pretend they are the beloved guardians of your safety.

America’s alcohol problem

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the ethanol boondoggle.

Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.

And that’s just the beginning … it starts getting savage after this point.

How do we get HPV infections, anyway?

One of the weirdest issues to drive the religious right into frothing madness was the discovery of a vaccine against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which would effectively reduce rates of cervical cancer … and it was opposed because it blocked infection with a sexually transmitted disease, and thus would encourage licentiousness. Weird, I know. Their brains don’t work right.

Anyway, here’s a new twist: investigators have found other non-genital reservoirs of the virus: HPV strains that could cause severe forms of cancer have been found under people’s fingernails. Ooooh, yuck, you filthy humans, crawling with viruses and microorganisms and various creepy crawlies … it gives one a little sympathy for obsessive germophobes.

It has to be emphasized, though, that finding the virus in one place does not mean it is transmitted via that place — this may be a completely negligible finding. If transmission is documented, then this could be an important discovery for public health policy, since we could at least tell them we’re inoculating their kids against a virus they might get from their priest patting them on the head, rather than just in case their child grows up to be a nasty dirty slut who actually has sex. It’s too early to do that, though, and right now this is mainly an opportunity to justify more research into mechanisms of infection with HPV.

Different strokes

OK, I don’t know quite what to make of this: it’s a site called The Atheist Conservative. I know there’s no obstacle to being both godless and conservative, but this one is ’round-the-bend freaky far-right Bush-lovin’ conservative. I don’t know how an atheist could write a review of Ann Coulter’s Godless that contains gooey dollops of praise for Coulter — that book was one flaming bonfire of stupid. But hey, if there are conservative atheists out there with tears running down your cheeks because you’re reading this pro-atheist site by a crazed liberal, maybe you’ll be happier over there.

Oh, and they’ve got their own symbol for atheism: it’s the square root of 2. Oy. Everyone’s gotta be different.

(via The Friendly Atheist)

Lowe’s or Home Depot?

If you’re considering purchasing some supplies for home repair from one of the mega-chains, you might want to consider their advertising policies. Archy makes a good case that you should shop at Lowe’s—they don’t support barking mad reactionary freaks.

Of course, it’s a bit irrelevant to me, since I don’t have either one near me. Instead, we’ve got four or five small locally owned hardware stores. Their owners might be sympathetic to Bill O’Reilly, but they don’t have enough money to buy air time on his show.

The A-bomb

Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it’s great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there’s a sly tactic being carried out here. Someone dropped the A-bomb in the discussion already: they’ve asked “Is Steve Novick an atheist?“

That quickly developed into a major topic of discussion at BlueOregon. One of the major points is that while Oregon is one of the least godly states in the country, it still has a large Christian majority, and the assumption is that tagging him with areligiosity will hurt Novick’s chances.

What this kind of tactic actually does, though, is tarnish the reputation of Christians, so I’m saddened but unsurprised that more believers aren’t distressed by it. Imagine if a black candidate were running, and someone tried to argue that he was going to be beat because a large percentage of the voters were white. That’s not a commentary on the candidate, although there always is a tendency to hold the victim accountable: it’s an acknowledgment that the majority of voters are superficial bigots, an appeal to the prejudices of the lowest of the mob.

At least nowadays people wouldn’t try to publicly defend their bigotry against blacks, although I suspect many still practice it in the privacy of the voting booth (it’s also still a useful dirty campaign issue, as was used against McCain). We’ll still see people argue that atheism is a legitimate reason to vote against someone though, because he doesn’t share their “values”. That’s an admission, I think, that they want a Christian candidate who will inject religion into the secular task of running the country.