Wednesday August 31, 2005

As was pointed out several times tonight: It is quite surreal to hear the word “refugee” associated with a disaster here in the United States.

It’s time for some mind-boggling perspective here: by the time the casualties are added up from both New Orleans and the Mississippi coastline, Hurricane Katrina may have killed more people than the terrorists did on 9/11 and become the deadliest storm since the Texas town of Galveston was swept away back at the turn of the last century. The mayor of the Crescent City fears that thousands upon thousands have died in his town alone, not to mention those in surrounding towns and others in Biloxi and Gulfport.

Read about the events in New Orleans from the blog of the Times-Picayune here. There have been some amazing stories told by the reporters of that paper. Perhaps more horrifying are the tales on the paper’s online forum: people trying to get word about whether their relatives are still alive, whether their homes are on dry ground or underwater, and the like. Another page simply lists names and addresses of the missing with contact numbers.

You can give money to the Hurricane 2005 Relief Fund of the American Red Cross here. I know most of y’all are poor students, but surely you have a little spare money that you can send along. Those providing aid need all the help they can get just to keep those who survived the storm alive. It seems impossible that New Orleans will ever fully recover from their own regional apocalypse.

UPDATE (6pm): Fox News just showed a station in Atlanta selling gasoline for $5.88 per gallon. It’s expected that the stations may be unable to receive new deliveries from refineries (20% of our country’s oil drilling and refining capacity is out of commission) and will increase prices dramatically in an attempt to prevent people from buying their gas, preserving supplies for those who absolutely need it.

Monday August 1, 2005

[ADDED (2:40 pm) -- An economist tells you why your flights are always delayed: the airlines do it on purpose.]

President Bush has signed the $286.5 billion boondoggle that is the new transportation appropriations bill, dramatically trumping the last six-year spending package of $218 billion. (Incidentally, Bush said he would veto anything bigger than $284 billion, but hey. I’m thinking he doesn’t know that he *has* a veto, since he’s never used it.) The bill passed by ridiculous margins in both houses of Congress: 412-8 in the House and 91-4 in the Senate. This legislation determines how the Feds will dole out money for roads and transit for the rest of the decade.

$24 billion of the total is “earmarks,” i.e. porkbarrel spending. Generally speaking, these are things that should be paid for at the state or local level, but someone is connected enough to personally know / pay off / give sexual favors to a member of Congress. They will then make ludicrous proposals, like $100,000 in Federal funding to install a stoplight in Canoga Park, California. Since everyone wants their stuff passed, no one really asks questions and taxpayers get stuck with the bill.

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) happens to be the chairperson of the House Transporation Committee. This gives him the chance to basically do whatever the hell he wants. If he wanted money for a personal harem in this bill, he could have pulled it off. (The last chairman, Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania, got his own interstate freeway built, numbered it himself, named it after himself, and gave big construction contracts to his family and friends. Clearly, Altoona needed a world-class expressway.) For starters, Young named the bill after his wife. He then managed to gobble up nearly <Dr. Evil>one billion dollars</Dr. Evil> for the state of Alaska in earmarks, fourth in the country behind New York, California, and Illinois. That’s not fourth per capita, mind you, but fourth total — $1500 for every single person in that state, compared with a national average of $86.

What the hell are they spending all that money on? Well, more than a third of it is going to Anchorage. $229 million goes to the completely coincidentally-named Don Young’s Way, a bridge over the bay near downtown. There’s another $5 million for a parking garage and $2 million for handicapped access ramps, among other little things. The most mind-blowing number, though, is the $220 million for another bridge in Alaska, one that connects the city of Ketchikan with Gravina Island — an island that has FIFTY PEOPLE ON IT.

So in short … the next time you hear your so-called representatives say that they have your best interests at heart, consider whether Congress should be able to swipe about $1000 from every man, woman, and child in America to pay for traffic lights and mile-long bridges to icy nowheres. The two major parties are equally vile here. Neither party cares about you. Both parties want a massive government that has complete control over almost every aspect of your life. The debates between them are sideshows to distract you from the fact that your liberty is withering on the vine.

Politicians: you can’t live with them … and you can’t kill them. Vote Libertarian.