Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, February 26, 2010 12:19:35 PM
Here's a wild one: since the world basically went on a tear after 9/11, and passengers started jumping AT airborne miscreants instead of hiding from them, the airline industry is obviously not the primary target for terrorism worldwide.
What is? Trains. Easy to board, little or no security, lots of people crammed in, captive audience. Just what a good Jihadist needs. Ask the folks in the London subways. Or Madrid.
So we are forking over stimulus money to create or improve high speed train facilities in a few key areas of the country. Amtrak loses money in almost every division, and we subsidize it. So what? The Japanese bullet trains are still subsidized by the government, too.
But what gets cut off at the knees? The entire magilla for the Aries project at NASA. There are four more Shuttle missions scheduled, and there was going to be a few years where we had to hitch rides into orbit- probably from the Soviets, at $50 mil per man, per ride.
Now, it is open ended. We will hitch rides until somebody goes to D.C., grabs Obama by one ear and pulls him out of the Oval Office.
Don't kid yourself, folks. When he loses the election in 2012, the following January, he will not be doing a smooth transition thing. He and his Chicago Mafia will have to go to rehab to get the power trip out of their systems. It will not be pretty.