Trump World

Donald Trump, after only a few days in the Presidency, is living down to expectations.  After a belligerent and incendiary inaugural address laying out his reactionary vision for America, he moved to start the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, deny federal funds for family-planning groups that suggest abortion as a recourse, and cancel mortgage premium cuts.  All by executive order.  Wait until Congress gets in the act!

Meanwhile, the women of the world (and their male counterparts) held a whole bunch of marches across the country and across the planet  to protest Trump.  Now the women of America have the daunting task of stopping Trump's agenda despite Republican control of all of Washington.  The Democrats remain ineffective as an opposition party; they can't even seem to decide on on a party chairman.

One heartening fact is that the marches in America brought out so many people and so much energy that the anti-Trump contingent has a lot of energy to tap and is eager to do so.  It seems to me that they will likely concentrate on the state and local races, if only because the 2018 congressional midterms are stacked against the Democrats in both houses, thanks to a lopsidedly Democratic Senate class up for re-election and a gerrymandered Republican House.  The only trouble is, a lot of state legislative districts are skewed in favor of the GOP as well.           

And the Trump White House actually disregards not only the estimated number of people at marches but the estimated number of the people at the inaugural?  Sean Spicer started off his tenure as White House spokesman on the wrong foot, insisting that the Trump inauguration was one of the most attended inaugurations in history, of not the most attended inauguration, when the facts show otherwise.  Trump aide Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer had offered up "alternative facts" to counteract such reports.  An alternative to a fact is not a fact, it's a lie.  But who cares, when all of this talk about alternative facts, started by the Trump White House, was really a diversion from the fact that Trump wants to privatize public broadcasting, eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and block-grant Medicare and Medicaid money (ensuring that it won't be distributed generously and fairly)?

We're all about to get dumber, sicker, and more culturally impoverished.    

Derailed AGAIN!

I knew it was too good to last.

Do you remember those rail projects I talked about on Wednesday? Well, it seems that now you can forget them. House Republicans are not only interested in killing the $53 billion, six-year plan from the Obama administration to bring bullet trains to Amtrak, they're proposing to slash funding for the existing national passenger railroad. That means the proposed tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River is also in jeopardy. U.S. Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, insists that the ridership on Amtrak is too small to justify more subsidies at taxpayers' expense. (The media report that the Republicans are prepared to "fight" President Obama's Amtrak plans.) In New Jersey, where a new tunnel under the Hudson River is desperately needed, not only is Governor Christie not showing any interest in standing up to Rogers, but Republican U.S. Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and whose district (in which I live) includes commuter rail service to New York City, has been mum on the issue too.

I wish more Republicans would come clean and admit that they don't want to support any transportation project that cuts into the profits of car sales. That's why they supported President Obama's call to spend more money on highways. Oops! Correction: John Boehner called that wasteful government spending. Still, it makes sense that the Republicans would support a profit-oriented transportation network, given their enthusiastic support for the GM and Chrysler loans. Oh, wait a minute - they didn't support those either!

So what is the Republican idea for a transportation system that moves more people and creates more jobs? Apparently, it involves people selling Japanese and Korean cars made by workers in foreign-owned factories located in right-to-work states - preferably SUVs rugged enough to handle decrepit highways and go over grade crossings of abandoned railroad tracks.

Oh yeah, there are many more budget cut proposals aimed at the sort of amenities that make a country worth living in. I'll get to that later.