Train Ride to Hollywood

I'm not talking about Bloodstone's 1975 pop movie.

Brightline Holdings, a company known for building passenger rail lines, is constructing a new high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.  Well, not exactly all the way to LA.  It would terminate at Rancho Cucamonga, California, where it would like to commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles.  Most of the 218-mile track would be laid in the median of Interstate 15 to relieve weekend traffic between the two cities.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is quite bullish on the project.  He made that clear at an event celebrating the project at the site of a terminal to be built outside the Las Vegas Strip.  "People have been dreaming of high-speed rail in America for decades," he said.  "It’s really happening this time."

Whatever.

If I sound blasé about this project, that's because I am.  High-speed rail works best when it connects transit-friendly cities, and Los Angeles and Las Vegas are probably the most autocentric cities in America, or at least the most autocentric cities in America west of Houston. Woody Allen once joked that Los Angeles' idea of a cultural advantage is a right turn on a red light, while Las Vegas, apart from the Bellagio's art collection, doesn't have a culture.  It does, though, have a lot of casino-hotels so far apart for each other that the idea of taking an Uber from one of them to the railway terminal would be a trek in and of itself.

Also, both Los Angeles and Las Vegas are major metropolises that were built in the desert.  LA is too big for its location along a semi-arid stretch of the Pacific coast, and Las Vegas has even less reason to be in such a remote, hot corner of Nevada.  Ironically, it was founded as a "tank town" - a town meant to service the railroad line between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City because it was roughly equidistant from both cities.  Why would you want to build any transport project to encourage more growth in cities stretched way beyond their limits? 

And - and you knew this was coming - why doesn't Brightline build a high-speed rail line connecting ur heavily populated megalopolises in the Northeast or the Midwest?  Better yet, why doesn't Amtrak do that?  In the Northeast, Acela remains a joke, and in the Midwest, Republican governors and legislatures have successfully resisted efforts to upgrade Amtrak service to high-speed rail.  These places need bullet trains the most.  And if Buttigieg really wants to help high-speed rail in California, he'll get the Biden administration to get that Los Angeles-San Francisco line finished.  That line is way over budget and way behind schedule.  As for Brightline's track record (no pun intended), it operates a train in Florida from Orlando to Miami that only runs 125 mph - a slowpoke by European standards.   

As for me, I'm not pushing for bullet trains anymore.  It's become obvious that real high-speed rail, at least where I live (full disclosure: I live in the Northeast), is a pipe dream.  If I ever do ride on a bullet train, it will be in Europe - assuming, of course, Trump isn't returned to power and doesn't close the nation's borders to people wanting to leave.    

Rolling Craps?

The bruising bloodbath that was the 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas this past Wednesday night may have helped Donald Trump more than any of the Democratic candidates, though, thanks to a few bright moments here and there - none of which involved Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - I'm not quite ready to build my Kon-Tiki raft and set sail for Europe just yet.

The biggest winner of the debate was probably Bernie Sanders, who won by not losing.  He basically held his own and didn't make any poll-changing mistakes.  But among Democrats - Bernie Sanders is an independent - I would have to say that Joe Biden was the big winner, if only because he was poised, confident, and articulate - three qualities he hasn't been known for in this election cycle.  Also, he gave a shout-out to passenger rail.  What other candidate does that? 

And Elizabeth Warren?  Warren is believed to have won the night for a fiery performance fueled by righteous indignation against Michael Bloomberg, but the quality that always made her so endearing was missing.  Even at her most assertive in previous debates, Warren always came across as the favorite aunt who always bakes chocolate cake for family gatherings because she knows you like it; this past Wednesday night, she was more like the nasty aunt who says that your model train set is a piece of junk and then says she was only kidding.  Except that Aunt Liz wasn't kidding; she really laid into Bloomberg for his "stop and frisk" policy as mayor of New York City and went after him hard over reports of misogynistic practices at his company.  She wanted to prove how she could go hard against Trump, and she turned Bloomberg into a Trump stand-in.

Which brings me to the biggest loser of the night, Michael Bloomberg.  Being the target of withering attacks doesn't make you a martyr, especially when you come to a political debate expecting a policy discussion and find yourself at a shouting match.  And Bloomberg's record has demonstrated that he has a lot of baggage to shout about.  The millions of dollars he spent in carefully crafting an image of a benevolent CEO in his TV ads went down the drain, and he went from being a messiah to being a pariah as he demonstrated his inability to defend himself verbally when the moment isn't scripted.  He knew as soon as Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez changed the rules for qualifying for the debates, which was awhile ago, that he might qualify for this one.  He had ample time to prepare for the debate and knew what to expect; this was the best performance he could come up with?

To be fair, it was Bloomberg's first political debate in over a decade, and there's always next time, right?  Getting it right the second time may not be as good as the first time, but at least Bloomberg knows what not to do should he participate in the next debate on February 25.

But, the Democrat who made out the best wasn't on the stage.  He isn't even running for President.  He's practicing law in Baltimore and promoting a book on online media.

As far as I'm concerned, Martin O'Malley is the big winner because Democrats are left thinking about what could have been, if only they'd listened to those of us who were ready to rally for O'Malley.

All derogatory comments about the former Maryland governor will be deleted.

The Greatest Mass Shooting In American History

Bullets rained down on a country music festival from a hotel in Las Vegas.  At least 58 dead, maybe more.  More than four hundred injured.  The shooter was a 64-year-old man from a retirement community outside the city.  No indication that it was a political act of terrorism, no motive, no context to put it in.

For those thinking that America has hit rock bottom, I have news for you - life in the United States is never to bad that it can't get any worse.  

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Vegas

As a stamp collector, I appreciate the wonderful printing errors and design mistakes that have appeared on some of our stamps and made many of them collector's items. Examples of printing errors include the 1918 "Inverted Jenny" 24-cent air mail stamp that depicted an inverted image of a Curtiss JN "Jenny" biplane, the pane of which was sold at a Washington post office to one William T. Robey for a mere $24 - the most valuable property bought for that sum since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians. How far back do you want to go for upside-down images? The 1869 pictorial stamps had inverted images of the paintings of Columbus landing in the Bahamas and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, as well as upside-down flags.

While such printings are honest mistakes of feeding the paper in the printing press the wrong way, design errors are less excusable because the artists hadn't done their homework. Two separate U.S. stamps, issued in 1928 and in 1977, showed Washington praying at Valley Forge; there's no evidence that he did so. A 1944 stamp honoring the completion of the transcontinental railroad shows the golden spike ceremony in Utah with a flag flying in one direction and the smoke from a locomotive blowing in the other.

But these design errors are nothing compared to the latest doozy. A definitive first-class stamp depicting the Statue of Liberty that was just issued shows not the actual statue in New York but . . . the replica at the New York New York Casino-Hotel in Las Vegas.

This seems all too appropriate for the United States, where history and tradition are routinely fictionalized and reduced to theme park values. We are unable to tell what's real and what's false anymore. So, just as many Republicans accept the idea that President Obama may have been born in Kenya, just as Jon Kyl can make a charge against Planned Parenthood with phony statistics on their abortion business (it's three percent of their entire business, not the ninety percent Kyl said it is) and declare through a spokesman that his statement wasn't intended to be factual, just as housing developments include fake storefronts to approximate the look of a real small town, so a stamp with a fake version of a real landmark gets issued and no one even notices . . . until it's too late.

Don't go out and buy this stamp expecting it to be replaced and become a rarity. USPS spokesman Roy Betts defended it, saying, "We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." Betts did tell the New York Times that the Postal Service is "re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future."

Yeah, right.

I only hope that when Independence Hall is included on a stamp again, the Postal Service depicts the real one in Philadelphia, not the fake one anchoring the "Independence Mall" shopping center outside Wilmington, Delaware.

This is the fake Independence Hall, for the record. Were you fooled?

And how are we going to solve our most pressing problems when we're bombarded by distortions of reality on a regular basis?

Admittedly, one could argue that the fake Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas is no less kitschy than the real one, an oversized, multiple-scale statue with a torch that lights up - which has also inspired very bad mime artists in Battery Park - but that's another post.