Boondoggle beat: Cali’s Dream Train Goes Solar
“Fifteen years, and numerous setbacks later, not a single mile of monitor has been laid” for California’s bullet practice, scoffs Jack Elbaum on the Washington Examiner, and its “estimated prices have risen to $128 billion.”
There’s “no cash left” to construct it — but the “California High-Speed Rail Authority now plans for the complete mission to be powered by photo voltaic power.” “Because . . . why not?”
“The preliminary plan was handed in 2008,” it’s now 2023, and there may be “nothing to point out” for it.
“Adding one other, much more, sophisticated component” is “a recipe for much more failure.” “This is strictly how scams work: enormous guarantees, no outcomes, after which extra enormous guarantees to cowl up” failures.
Foreign desk: Congress Must Block Iran Deal
The textual content of a secret US-Iran nuke settlement is reportedly close to “prepared,” warns Eric Mandel at The Hill, and a few concern there might quickly be a “deal with no deal” — i.e., with “no signing, no ceremony, and no congressional oversight.”
Iran would promise to restrict its uranium enrichment to 90% and free three US hostages; we’d give $20 billion in sanctions reduction.
Yet it could be a “self-inflicted American tragedy” to strike a deal that “accepts Iranian ballistic missile growth” and terror funding and doesn’t reverse Iran’s nuke program (at the same time as Tehran aids Russia and aligns with China) and could spark a conflict with Israel.
Congress ought to “get forward” of this and clarify that Team Biden’s bid to “end-run” lawmakers, as President Barack Obama did, “robs Congress of its constitutional accountability.”
Media watch: The Press’ Trans Delusions
Polling exhibits a transparent public shift in opposition to the thought “that athletes must be allowed to compete in opposition to those that share their gender identification”; within the final two years even “Democrats have moved a staggering 15 factors away from the place advocated by most get together officers” — but, fumes Isaac Schorr at Mediaite, “efforts to implement the bulk opinion are characterised not as frequent sense measures . . . however excessive and even hateful.”
Media relentlessly forged the bulk view “as ignorant and merciless” — ignoring even “plain-to-see anthropological proof.”
“Despite being small in quantity, transgender athletes have risen to the highest in ladies’s swimming, weightlifting, and monitor and discipline.”
Americans “rightly” take the media’s “unfair framing” as “an admission of their weak point.”
Ukraine War: A Key Opportunity for the West
The Ukraine conflict poses some key “strategic questions” for the West, argues Hal Brands at Bloomberg.
For starters: “Would the democratic world use the conflict correctly, to prepare for the even better risks forward?”
The United States gave “Ukraine the assist it wanted to avoid wasting itself and devastate [Vladimir] Putin’s military,” and “international locations throughout Europe pledged to considerably hike army spending.” But urgency “has light, paradoxically, as Ukraine has held its personal.”
“During the Cold War, a scorching conflict in Korea” moved the West to “forge the army protect” that will examine the Soviets.”
“Ukraine’s tragedy was the free world’s warning” — “an opportunity” for democracies “to get forward of impending challenges” from each Russia and China. “They could not get one other.”
Libertarian: Rail Safety Gaslighting
“After a few years of working within the coverage world, I’ve concluded that politics is at most 10 % about making the world higher and safer,” grumbles Reason’s Veronique De Rugy.
The relaxation is “45 % theater and 45 % catering to particular curiosity teams.”
Or typically worse: The Rail Safety Act, sponsored by Ohio Sens. J.D. Vance and Sherrod Brown — supposedly a response to the freight-train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — has “little connection to the derailment, or to another derailments for that matter.”
Instead, it “seems to push pet tasks” and has “an terrible lot in it for unions to love.”
Rather than getting insurance policies that enhance rail security, “the American public is being railroaded by 50 % pandering and 50 % favoritism to unions.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
