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The Joe Biden Presidency Thread


swordfish

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https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/biden-mentions-good-side-of-florida-condo-collapse-during-visit/

President Biden struck an odd tone near the site of the Florida building collapse Thursday as he talked about finding a “good” side to the disaster that left at least 18 dead and nearly 150 missing.

“You know what’s good about this?” Biden said at a briefing with local leaders. “It lets the nation know we can cooperate and when it’s really important.”

Biden added, “I just got back from 12 days in Europe. You wonder whether we can do this. And you’re doing it. I mean, just the simple act of everybody doing whatever needs to be done.”

Eighteen bodies have been recovered from the rubble and 145 people remain missing and are feared dead after the collapse of the beachfront building in Surfside, north of Miami.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, sitting to Biden’s right at a table in Surfside, thanked the president for federal support in the eight-day rescue operation, which was paused Thursday due to safety concerns.

“This is your show. We just want to make sure [you have] whatever you need,” Biden told DeSantis.

DeSantis applauded the federal response, saying, “You guys have not only been supportive at the federal level, but we’ve had no bureaucracy. When we’re dealing with FEMA, we’re literally getting requests routed from local to state to federal in no time and the approval is happening.”

The Republican governor added, “What we just need now is we need a little bit of luck and a little bit of prayers, and we would like to be able to see some miracles happen.”

Biden is expected to meet privately with the family members of victims Thursday afternoon before returning to the White House.

During a brief pep talk to local police and other emergency response workers around noon, Biden said, “I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” before veering off topic.

“As you all know, it’s not only what you’re dealing with now, but your brothers and sisters across this country are having more pressure put on them because of the drought, because when you have 121 degrees heats up in Vancouver you really got a problem,” Biden said.

“I was on the Zoom call yesterday with all the Western governors and you know what they’re asking for? They need more firefighters… because, you know, last year the fire season didn’t start this early. And enough places burned down, enough territory burned to the ground  — more than, bigger than the size of Rhode Island. And already it’s started early.”

Biden also told the emergency personnel about how his first wife and daughter were killed in a 1972 car accident, with the “jaws of life” being used to free his two young sons.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One that Biden’s goal for the trip is to “offer up comfort and show unity” in response to the disaster.

“The White House and FEMA have been in close contact with the governor’s team to coordinate federal assistance throughout the entire process,” Jean-Pierre said.

DeSantis is widely regarded as a leading potential 2024 presidential candidate. Former President Donald Trump also said that if he chooses to run again, he would consider DeSantis as a running mate.

"You know what's good about this?"  Said President Biden.....

During a brief pep talk to local police and other emergency response workers around noon, Biden said, “I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” before veering off topic.

"Before veering off topic"  - They're not even trying to hide it anymore......

I mean - He really needed to be there - this is a tragedy his presence could help, but someone needs to reign him in a little.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Joe Biden Talks Down Democracy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/joe-biden-talks-down-democracy/

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"We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War.” The president of the United States, a man long known for hyperbole, doth protest too much. Biden’s speech Tuesday at the National Constitution Center yet again invoked the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but his theme was that new voting and election laws passed by Republican state legislatures are a “21st century Jim Crow assault” on voting rights. This is irresponsible and dishonest; worse, it is dangerous.

As we have noted on many occasions in recent years, it is not “voter suppression,” racist, or a return of Jim Crow to implement popular, common-sense rules for the fair, orderly, and honest conduct of American elections, and the Democrats’ addiction to apocalyptic rhetoric on the topic is detached from reality and threatens to make Americans unduly mistrustful of their democratic system. It is entirely reasonable to establish and maintain updated lists of registered voters and require some form of identification to confirm that voters are the people registered. It is entirely reasonable to require voters to submit their ballots on time and to the correct location. It is entirely reasonable to secure the secret ballot and maintain space around the casting of votes to protect voters from electioneering and intimidation. And it is entirely reasonable for governments to periodically adjust the locations and methods of voting to balance voter convenience with public expense and security.

We do not agree with every proposal that Republicans have made in every state. As the president himself noted, however, there have been over 400 of these in 2021 alone and a great many have not been enacted into law. Most of those that made it into legislation have reflected reasonable choices, and if they impose some modest inconvenience on voters, that is the nature of any system that has rules. Lacking legitimate grievances, Biden has to invent them.

One of the few specifics offered in his speech was the claim that, “in Texas . . . [the] Republican-led state legislature wants to allow partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and imperil impartial poll workers.” The Texas law does no such thing; indeed, the current draft of the bill requires poll watchers to take an oath “that I will not disrupt the voting process or harass voters in the discharge of my duties.”

Comparisons of these bills to the brutality of Jim Crow are embarrassing coming from Democrats too young to remember that era. They are obscene coming from Joe Biden, who not only remembers the Jim Crow-era South, but sat in the Senate with many of its Democratic leaders, considered them friends, pandered to their supporters, gave encomia at their retirements and eulogies at their funerals, and speaks with warmth of them to this day.

Biden is not so effusive about democracy when it means honoring the will of the people.

Democratic legislators in Texas have fled the state — a juvenile stunt that has been too commonly used by state legislators of both parties — rather than allow the duly elected legislature to function. They have done so on the basis of the usual overwrought claims about the Texas election bill. Biden has publicly supported these legislators, and Kamala Harris has met with them, indicating for the umpteenth time that anti-majoritarian tools (such as, until recent months, the filibuster) are fine with Democrats when Democrats are the ones who get to use them.

Most worryingly, Biden’s speech appears to be laying the groundwork to undermine public confidence in the 2022 and 2024 elections in the event that they do not turn out as well for Democrats as did the 2020 election. “We’re going to face another test in 2022,” warned Biden, “a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion.” Which we will doubtless hear repeated a lot if voters once again give Republicans control of one or both houses of Congress. Biden is offering cover for more Democrats to take the Stacey Abrams route and reject the legitimacy of election losses. This is bad for the health of a democracy.

The real shame of Democrats’ monomaniacal opposition to reasonable voting and election laws is that there ought to be room for bipartisan agreement on the other threat that Biden claims to be worried about: state legislatures, state elections officials, Congress, and/or angry mobs taking steps to overrule the vote counts. We were consistently critical of Donald Trump’s efforts on this front in 2020, and we cheered the many Republican officials who refused to play along. It would be prudent to strengthen the nation’s defenses against a repeat by either party in 2022, 2024, or beyond. But doing so would require lowering the rhetorical temperature, focusing on forward-looking reforms rather than waving the bloody shirt of January 6 for partisan gain, and decoupling the issue from Democrats’ wish list on voting procedures. Biden’s speech landed him foursquare against any of those steps in an address impressive only for its demagoguery and dishonesty. We can only conclude that he prefers reliving past controversies to avoiding future ones.

 

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I believe this - The Democrat party stole the 2020 election by using the loopholes in the voting system to place unchecked and unverified votes from people on the voter roles who actually didn't even show up to vote.  Pretty hard to prove anything was illegal without physically going to each voter to verify.  These loopholes in the system are being closed with common sense laws meant to ensure that anyone who can LEGALLY cast a vote can actually do it securely and those that don't want to won't have to worry about it.

Case in point, my father passed away in 1988.  When I showed up to vote in the 2020 election, his name had a signature beside indicating he had already voted.  I raised a fuss, and his name was removed from the voter roles the next election, but the election agent working the poll said she has had that happen many times before, but most people don't say anything.

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On 7/15/2021 at 12:06 PM, Muda69 said:

Comparisons of these bills to the brutality of Jim Crow are embarrassing coming from Democrats too young to remember that era. They are obscene coming from Joe Biden, who not only remembers the Jim Crow-era South, but sat in the Senate with many of its Democratic leaders, considered them friends, pandered to their supporters, gave encomia at their retirements and eulogies at their funerals, and speaks with warmth of them to this day.

And those Jim Crow Democrats became Republicans- just like Strom Thurmond. 

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On 7/17/2021 at 11:29 AM, DanteEstonia said:

Don't you live in Indiana? Isn't Indiana a Republican State?

1)  What does it matter?  Fraud is fraud.  

2)  I felt it had more to do with the local politics back then.  Either way, my father was in his grave for almost 2 years, yet was still able to vote?

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2 hours ago, swordfish said:

1)  What does it matter?  Fraud is fraud. 

Voter rolls are controlled by State governments, ultimately. 

Your allegation borders on libel, but I'm presuming you are ignorant of how voter registration works. 

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3 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Voter rolls are controlled by State governments, ultimately. 

Your allegation borders on libel, but I'm presuming you are ignorant of how voter registration works. 

At my age, I kinda already know voter registration is local.  I still believe (and will probably not be persuaded otherwise) that the Democrat party (in each of the states still currently under audit) was implicit in figuring a way to steal the election and was successful in their execution. 

BTW - is sharing a personally held opinion bordering on libel?  We all better just close the OOB then........and never speak to anyone - ever again......Come on DE.....

Come On Reaction GIF by GIPHY News

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1 hour ago, swordfish said:

At my age, I kinda already know voter registration is local. 

Ok, you are at least with it, a little bit. 

 

1 hour ago, swordfish said:

I still believe (and will probably not be persuaded otherwise) that the Democrat party (in each of the states still currently under audit) was implicit in figuring a way to steal the election and was successful in their execution. 

... and you also live in a fantasy world. 

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7 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Voter rolls are controlled by State governments, ultimately. 

Your allegation borders on libel, but I'm presuming you are ignorant of how voter registration works. 

Please elaborate.

 

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Federalizing Elections Doesn't Make Much Sense and Won't Save Democracy

https://reason.com/2021/06/23/federalizing-elections-wont-save-democracy/

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Arctic Village, Alaska, is about as remote a spot as you'll find in the United States. Tucked into a sweeping bend in the east fork of the Chandalar River, Arctic Village and its roughly 150 full-time residents live more than 100 miles from the nearest "metropolis"—that would be Fort Yukon, Alaska. Population: 582.

And yet, under the terms of a sweeping federal elections bill that hit a wall in the Senate on Tuesday evening, Arctic Village would have been required to keep its polling place open for 10 hours every day for at least 15 days prior to every future federal election.

"The whole town could practically vote in an hour," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska), pointed out Tuesday during a speech on the Senate floor that deconstructed some of the practical issues with the sprawling For The People Act. "When you nationalize something—when you have federal overall oversight—it ends up being a one-size-fits-all mandate coming out of Washington, D.C., that in many cases doesn't work in a place like Alaska."

Federalizing control over elections is a major goal of the bill, which would give federal officials a much-expanded role in regulating things that states have always been left to decide, like when polling places are open and how much early voting occurs. But in a country as diverse as America, one set of rules doesn't make sense everywhere. A possible solution to long lines at polling places in Atlanta creates a ridiculous and expensive mandate in places like Arctic Village.

"The bill that we have in front of us is not so much about voting rights as it is a federal takeover of the election system, and a partisan federal takeover of the election system," Murkowski said Tuesday. A few hours later, she joined the 49 other Republican members of the Senate in voting against a procedural maneuver that would have allowed the bill to come to the floor for debate—a vote that effectively kills the For The People Act's chance of passing into law anytime soon. (It cleared the House in March.)

The bill is a response to what Democrats see—with good reason, in some cases—as Republican-led attempts to undermine voting rights in some states. Efforts to disenfranchise voters should be steadfastly opposed at the state level, but senators like Murkowski are rightly hesitant to use the hammer of federal law to accomplish that goal.

That's not only because of the silly mandates it would impose on places like Arctic Village. There are also serious legal and constitutional issues with other parts of the bill, which would regulate political speech and mandate state-level behavior in ways the federal government has never before attempted. Even if you don't care about the First Amendment issues in the bill, they would guarantee years of litigation over its provisions.

Instead of creating more certainty about election rules, dozens of lawsuits and conflicting court rulings could create "messy litigation that leaves the state of election law uncertain for years to come," Murkowski said Tuesday. Imagine, for instance, if you had to understand the latest legal battles over Obamacare before being allowed to see a doctor.

What's more, federalizing elections to make them more secure might actually make them more vulnerable. Think back to the Republican-led efforts to disrupt the election last year. They were thwarted by state-level officials (including fellow Republicans) who applied the law correctly even when under intense political pressure from President Donald Trump and his top allies. If Trump had to exert pressure on a few federal officials rather than a diffuse network of state-level elections boards, most of which were staffed by people who owed him nothing and had little incentive to cave to his threats, would the outcome have been different?

These practical and legal concerns have been largely glossed over by the bill's advocates, who have framed the measure as the last stand for democracy. But the fate of America's democracy has never hinged on just one bill or one vote because most of our election systems are decentralized.

That said, there are many good ideas included in the For The People Act. Expanded early voting, automatic voter registration, and restoring voting rights to people who have served time in prison are worthy policies for increasing voter participation. Redistricting commissions, which the bill would mandate all states use for redrawing congressional district lines, are a decent solution to a messy problem. Banning states from using voting machines that don't provide paper trails for all votes would make elections more trustworthy.

But, as Murkowski argued Tuesday, those provisions could be considered separately from the "sprawling" proposal Democrats have been pushing. Though it is also fair to point out that Republicans were none too interested in a narrower proposal offered as a potential compromise last week by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.).

Certainly, there is an element of partisanship to Murkowski's stance—particularly since she's facing the prospect of a Trump-backed primary challenger next year when her seat is up for re-election. But it would be wrong to dismiss her for that reason alone. For three consecutive congressional sessions, Murkowski has been the lead Senate Republican sponsor of the Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bipartisan bill that would update the 1965 Voting Rights Act to require that states get federal permission before making changes to their voting laws in advance of an election. That's an actual, practical way to stop some of the shenanigans that states might pull in the future. Murkowski also voted to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 riot—hence why she faces a Trump-backed primary challenger next year.

In short, some Senate Republicans have no qualms about supporting attempts to undermine elections, but Murkowski is clearly not one of them.

"It will make administrating elections more difficult, more expensive, subject to federal micromanagement," she said. "My fear is that this measure does not lead us further down the path" to fairer elections.

Agreed.  Federal micromanagement is bad, an anathema to the federalism on which this great country was founded.

 

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SF kinda thinks DE just learned "libel" and "defamation" and was looking for a chance to use those words......

rock n roll facepalm GIF by FilmStruck

BTW - I kinda think the old gal I talked to in 1990 (I mistakenly typed 2020 in that post, btw - the next election after my father's passing was 1990) is probably passed on now 31 years later.

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13 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

@swordfish and @Muda69 I recommend watching this starting at 19mins.

A 52 minute long Youtube vid is not on my list of "gotta do that" today.  Especially if the topic is "Racist History of Austerity Politics".  Everyone knows there were mistakes made getting the US to the place it is today.  

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Goodbye, America

We no longer have a Constitution.

https://spectator.org/goodbye-america-and-free-speech/

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Saturday July 2021. A month that will live in infamy. If there is such a thing as “history” in the Biden–Orwell–Soros omni-dictatorship, July 2021 will mark the month that the Constitution, the “greatest work ever thrown off by the hand and mind of man,” as Gladstone put it, was thrown into the Ministry of Truth Memory Hole.

It was put into the “History Erase” well. A bottomless pit.

In this month, actually starting with the month before, that the superpowers of the tech world, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo, admitted to working with the Biden/NKVD administration to suppress free speech.

For months now, we had known that the tech powers were watching us and suppressing any dissident speech against the current administration. I have seen it up close and personal. But what was argued was that the First Amendment to the Constitution protected us only against Congress and the executive branch suppressing free speech. It did not protect us from private enterprises, even very large private enterprises like Amazon or Google or Facebook, keeping tabs on citizens and shutting them out of the internet-sphere if they expressed views contradicting the views and policies of the Biden–Harris–Big Tech Party.

True, there was one big case involving a large steel company suppressing free speech by its workers, and the Supreme Court ruled that such a big company suppressing free speech on its company properties was indeed a violation of the First Amendment. But that was rare indeed.

Now, in the year 2021, the iron curtain has come down hard. With Big Internet Tech and the White House now admittedly colluding to identify and suppress dissidents, even completely nonviolent dissidents, we no longer have a Constitution.

There is just one big corporate–government–IngSoc superstate running everything. Goodbye, America. The GOP, with 50 senators, does nothing. The state legislatures, by far a majority GOP, and the spineless Supreme Court do nothing. And so goodbye to the greatest experiment in the history of the world.

When the Constitutional Congress ended in the late 18th century, as Ben Franklin was walking out, an onlooker said, “What do we have, sir? A republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin answered, “A republic. If you can keep it.”

God help us.

<insert deity here> help us indeed.

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/07/28/surprise-surprise-the-migrants-bidens-letting-in-arent-reporting-to-the-feds/

Team Biden has released 50,000 illegal immigrants into the country without even giving them a court date. And — surprise, surprise — just 13 percent have reported as required to Immigration and Customs Enforcement on reaching their destinations.

Yet the administration continues its catch-and-release policy, with 7,300 migrants in the Rio Grande Valley alone let go without notices to appear in the past week.

President Joe Biden restored the old “catch and release” policy of releasing many illegal immigrants while telling them to later check in with the feds — simply hoping they’ll comply to seek permission to work.

Oops: Only 6,700 of the 50,000 who arrived between mid-March and mid-July did so, Axios reports, citing Homeland Security data. About 27,000 migrants are still within their 60-day window to report. But 16,000 have let the deadline lapse without contacting ICE.

These are people who entered the United States illegally, after all. Why think they’ll start honoring the law once they’ve made it in?

Total southern-border apprehensions for the year have already reached 1 million — a number not seen since December 2006 — and show no signs of slowing. It was more than 188,000 for last month alone, the worst June in over two decades.

And while Biden’s CDC moves to re-mask America, his administration is releasing tens of thousands of unvaccinated migrants across the country: ICE says 30 percent of illegals in its custody have refused the jab.

DHS spokeswoman Meira Bernstein told Axios, “Those who do not report, like anyone who is in our country without legal status, are subject to removal by ICE.”

That’s laughable. On his first day in the White House, Biden put a moratorium on deportations, and he just reiterated his push to give all illegal immigrants in the country a pathway to citizenship.

 

SURPRISE?  SF thinks the Biden administration's immigration policy is working just as he intended it to.........

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https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/remember-biden-said-migrant-surge-would-drop-by-july-didnt-happen/

At a news conference in March, President Joe Biden pooh-poohed surging illegal migration at the southern border as an ordinary, seasonal problem. “It happens every single, solitary year,” he said, and to some extent he was right: Usually, illegal border-crossing rises through the spring and drops off in June and July, as temperatures rise and the trek gets more dangerous.

But that isn’t what’s happening this year.

Apprehensions at the border have risen every month since April, with a huge spike after Biden took office in January and an even bigger one in February. In May, federal authorities made more than 180,000 arrests at the border, and in June, when we would have typically seen the numbers begin to drop off, arrests topped 188,000.

The July total is likely to exceed 210,000, according to a Biden administration federal court filing this week. Federal agents haven’t encountered that many people on the border in a single month in 21 years. So far this fiscal year, more than 1 million people have been arrested at the border, and we’re on pace to break the all-time record, set in 2000.

So this isn’t the typical seasonal influx. Will the media so much as remind Biden of his March hand-waving?

More important, what’s actually happening? Why are record numbers of people risking a dangerous border crossing in the sweltering heat? The answer is simple: They know Team Biden will let them stay.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki can lie all she wants about how the administration is still enforcing Title 42, the public-health order former President Donald Trump authorized at the outset of the pandemic that allows most migrants to be quickly expelled to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

But the truth is, the Biden administration has been quietly gutting Title 42, allowing greater numbers of families and single adults into the country and then releasing them, in some cases without court dates, but simply a notice to contact an immigration court and schedule a hearing at their convenience.

Word travels fast from the border, and the more migrants who are released, the more it convinces those in source countries that if you can just get across the Rio Grande, you’ll be released.

At this point, it isn’t just impoverished people from Mexico and Central America who are coming, but families and adults from all over the world. Migrants from South America, Asia and Africa are showing up in record numbers up and down the frontier.

In the small, South Texas town of Del Rio, middle-class Venezuelans are showing up with passports and cash to pay their own way north. Brazilians are disproportionately crossing in Yuma, Ariz. Border officials have never seen these patterns before, and it suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic hardship it has caused worldwide, are driving an historic wave of illegal immigration.

On the border itself, that means large numbers of migrants who have COVID are crossing into the US — and being released. In McAllen, Texas, the epicenter of the crisis, a record 7,000 COVID-positive migrants have been released downtown since February, including more than 1,500 last week. 

The city’s nonprofit shelter for migrants is overwhelmed, with nearly 2,000 migrants arriving there every day so far in August at a facility that can only house 1,200 people. McAllen’s mayor declared a state of disaster this week and erected tent facilities to house COVID-positive migrants. 

According to the city, some 87,000 migrants have passed through McAllen so far this year. That’s more than half the entire population of the city.

In smaller border towns, COVID-positive migrants are being released without the knowledge of local authorities and sheltered in hotels. Migrants who test positive are supposed to quarantine for two weeks, but there is no mechanism or authority to ensure that they do so once released from federal custody.

All of this amounts to a national emergency. Given the draconian measures Biden and other Democrats are contemplating for fighting the Delta variant, you would think the administration would also secure the border. You would think wrong.

SF thinks the President's "Meh" moment in March has already been forgotten by the media.......and the level of DOCUMENTED Covid positive migrants being released is amazing considering the "increase in cases" that is being thrown at us every day while the DECREASE IN DEATHS are being ignored......

 

 

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Highways and Bridges Are Not Crumbling

https://reason.com/2021/08/05/highways-and-bridges-are-not-crumbling/

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Politicians and interest groups claim America's highways and bridges are falling apart— "crumbling," we're sometimes told. My efforts to assess the situation suggest they are not. Others—including researchers from the Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research—have drawn similar conclusions. Yet the new "bipartisan infrastructure bill" plows ahead with the same old sound bites and spending plans.

Even if it all passes, in five years, again, expect to hear cries for more spending to solve our phantom highway and bridge crisis. It is long past time to shift more of the responsibility for highways and bridges to the states, where the costs and benefits to users can be better evaluated.

Using an objective and standard engineering measure of highway surface conditions provided by the Department of Transportation, I calculated, conservatively, the percentage of highways and roads in poor condition in each state in 2014 and 2018 (the most recent data available). In contrast to broad general statements about crumbling infrastructure, the data show only modest changes during this period.

 

Rural and urban interstates showed small improvements. In 2018, less than 2 percent of rural and 4.5 percent of urban interstates were in poor condition. About 3.5 percent of rural freeways (which are not interstates) and less than 6 percent of rural "main roads" were in poor condition. Main roads in urban areas remain the biggest problem, with about 23 percent in poor condition, but even this shows a small improvement from 2014.

Still, large differences between states remain. For example, in 2018, New Hampshire and Arizona had less than 1 and 2 percent of urban interstates in poor condition, respectively. Hawaii and California had nearly 20 and 8 percent in poor condition. We can observe similar state differences in other highways and roads, in both urban and rural areas.

Furthermore, using Department of Transportation data based on annual inspections of bridges, I was able to compare bridge conditions in 2019 (the most recent data available) to 2014. The percent rated to be in poor shape declined from a little over 7 percent in 2014 to about 6 percent in 2019. Overall, bridges in the United States have improved, but as with roads, differences across states remain. In 2019, only 1 percent of Nevada's bridges were in poor condition, while Illinois had more than 12 percent in poor condition.

Given the formula-based allocation of federal dollars—each state receives at least 95 percent of federal fuel taxes collected within its borders—federal funding will do little to reduce these state differences. Politicians in states where highways and bridges are in good condition will not be willing to give up federal funds to help other states. They will argue for their "fair" share of federal fuel and general tax revenues.

While it is easy to find examples of infrastructure in need of work in a nation as large as ours, the data simply do not show that highway and road surfaces are deteriorating quickly. The share of bridges in poor shape has declined. In fact, this is true going back to 2005. These figures do not paint a picture of crumbling highways and bridges.

Congress should ditch the highway portion of the plan and instead shift all regional and local highway and bridge maintenance (and construction) responsibilities back to the states and cities. The federal government would continue to maintain national highways and the interstate highway system.

Each state can set a fuel tax sufficient to fund its own highway and bridge work. The federal fuel tax should be set at a level to fund the continued maintenance, and as needed, the expansion of interstate and national highways in growing areas of the country. The federal fuel tax could thus be lowered to fund the smaller federal transportation responsibilities.

Washington politicians prefer to paint a dark picture of America's infrastructure. This way, not only can they take credit for sending federal funds to support projects in their states, but they can run for reelection as someone working to solve the country's phantom highway and bridge crisis.

Bingo.  This 'infrastructure' bill is yet another super-sized serving of pork to the states, and reelection fodder for the uni-party politicians who support it.

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/08/06/biden-mistakenly-says-350m-americans-are-vaccinated/

WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday said that 350 million Americans — more than the entire population of the US — have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a slip that was quickly seized upon as he departed for his 17th trip to Delaware since taking office.

Biden, wearing a tan suit, spoke about the need to continue vaccinating Americans after a surprisingly strong report showed the US economy created 943,000 jobs in July, exceeding expectations and dropping the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent.

“You know, we have roughly 350 million people vaccinated in the United States and billions around the world. And virtually no one has died because of that vaccinations [sic],” he said in the White House East Room.

“Today, about 400 people will die because of the Delta variant in this country — a tragedy because virtually all of these deaths are preventable if people had gotten vaccinated. But 10 months ago today almost 4,000 people died on that very day from COVID-19 — 4,000 versus 400. That shows how much our vaccination progress has done to protect us from the worst of the new Delta COVID-19 wave.”

Biden almost certainly meant to say that about 350 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered, as is indicated by CDC data. But those doses were administered to about 193 million people. More than 70 percent of US adults have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot.

Oh Joe......

The reality of the day is that over 70% of the US adult population has been vaccinated.  OVER 70% !!  Which was kinda the high-water mark that was being shot at to bring "normalcy" back.....remember.......Well we got there, but nope "we can't get no satisfaction" - keep the masks on now 18 months into "2 weeks to flatten the curve" because that less than 30% of the population out there is causing us all this grief.

 

 

 

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On 8/7/2021 at 11:35 AM, DanteEstonia said:

 

Why yes Dante. One bridge is worth trillions of taxpayers dollars.  And since this a federal interstate bridge then it should fall under the responsibility of the federal government to fix, where the vast majority of other roads, bridges, etc. should be the responsibility of the states.

 

  • Kill me now 1
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