The Virginia GOP's Coming Civil War

The infighting in the Republican Party will not be limited to the national level.  Here in Virginia the lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party base has been emboldened by the defeat of Eric Cantor by a Tea Party extremists and all indications are that an effort will be made to drag the Virginia GOP even further into looney bin territory.  While the national debate on immigration should hopefully make it clear to minorities of every stripe that they are not welcomed in the GOP, the fight in Virginia will also likely have insane far right religious overtones as the theocrats at The Family Foundation pressure the Republican members of the Virginia General Assembly to enact "turn away the gays" bills to grant special rights to Christofascists to discriminate at will under the smoke screen of "religious liberty."  An article in the Washington Post looks at the coming fray.  Here are highlights:

Virginia’s fractured GOP will be drawn into yet another skirmish between the conservative grass roots and party establishment next year, when its top Republican will face a primary challenge from the right.

Just five months after the stunning defeat of former House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Virginia House Speaker William J. Howell finds himself fending off a similar threat.

Virginia has gained national attention as a swing state where, after a string of losses, Republicans are working furiously to position themselves to compete in the 2016 presidential election. One of their challenges is to unite a state GOP deeply divided between moderates and a coalition of activists and tea party faithful who want the party to stand stronger on such rallying issues as reducing government spending and opposing abortion and immigration reform.

[T]he right wing continues to control many of the state GOP’s leadership posts and retains the power to guide candidate nominations. The lesson many Republicans are taking from Cantor’s defeat, and from Howell’s impending primary fight, is that anything goes in the topsy-turvy world of Virginia politics — and no one should assume he or she is safe.

Not everyone thinks Howell is any more at risk this election cycle than in the past — and Stimpson has her own set of detractors, some of them Howell loyalists who resent her for turning against her patron.

“Howell will beat Stimpson like a rented mule,” said Ray Allen, a Republican consultant and Cantor loyalist who has tangled with the conservative coalition.

Stimpson is part a chorus of conservatives who believe that Howell orchestrated a compromise that ensured passage of a sweeping transportation bill last year — and secretly cleared the path for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Howell led Republican opposition to Medicaid expansion and denied any secret effort to let it pass. But Stimpson and others objected to the creation of a 10-member commission that they feared would bolster the case for expansion.
[Howell] called the transportation bill vital for residents’ safety as well as economic development.  “That’s important, particularly in the part of the commonwealth where I live and where Susan lives,” he said. “People are desperate for transportation improvements. Conservatives don’t like to raise taxes, but they also don’t like to borrow money or not fund things.”

For those not living in Virginia, the state's Interstates were crumbling in many areas  and but for the money raised in the transportation bill would now be down right dangerous.  The lunatics of the GOP base care nothing about safety or sustaining the economy.  They are motivated solely by greed and hatred of others.

The Tea Party and the Collapse of America's Infrastructure

In the magical alternate universe of the Tea Party/Christofascists highways, bridges and other elements of the nation's infrastructure somehow maintain themselves without spending and without taxes to construct improvements and/or replacement structures.  And since the beginning of the George W. Bush presidency, infrastructure spending has plummeted even as the Chimperator took America into two unfunded wars based on lies.  The result is inadequate highway systems - a phenomenon well know in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia - collapsing bridges and other dangerous conditions.  Think Progress has a piece that looks at this dangerous trend.  Here are highlights:

The austerity fervor that’s seized Washington ever since the 2010 elections has lead to a sudden, steep drop in spending on building things. The collapse in infrastructure spending is illustrated in this chart [above]from investment research firm BCA Research.

After hovering around $300 billion per year from the middle of President George W. Bush’s tenure through 2010, government spending on building things not related to defense fell by about $60 billion in just a few years. The drop is a result of Republicans blocking President Obama’s efforts to invest in infrastructure that the country needs.

As the Financial Times’ Cardiff Garcia notes, the policy choices represented in the chart above aren’t compatible with a responsible effort to cut the country’s debt. Indeed, they’ll make things worse: “It’s also likely that much of the investment that has been forgone in the name of fiscal consolidation will have to be made eventually anyways — only it will be made when rates are higher, exacerbating the long-term fiscal outlook rather than improving it,” Garcia writes. In order to bring America’s infrastructure up to a reasonable level by 2020, Congress needs to be spending about $450 billion per year, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Infrastructure spending levels are tied fairly directly to economic performance. Continued underfunding in this arena over the coming years will cost businesses a trillion dollars in lost sales and cost the economy 3.5 million jobs. Infrastructure spending enjoys overwhelming support from voters. Democrats want to create a national infrastructure bank, something that would require just a $10 billion up-front investment but would provide an ongoing, sustainable funding stream for infrastructure projects.

Thousands of US Bridges Could Be On Verge of Collapse

 

We hear over and over again from Republicans that they seek to starve and shrink government and relentlessly lower taxes.   The result, of course, is that many critical needs and services go without proper funding.  In addition to throwing the poor and needy to the curb, this policy of spending less is taking a severe tool on the nation's infrastructure some of which could be a minor collision away from collapse.  American bridges are among the ticking time bombs that this failed GOP policy has set in motion.  George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney and their GOP accomplices in Congress cause the USA to squander billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Meanwhile our infrastructure at home is crumbling.  Talk about misplaced priorities.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at some of the dangers that could have deadly consequences with little or no notice.  Here are excerpts:

Thousands of bridges around the U.S. may be one freak accident or mistake away from collapse, even if the spans are deemed structurally sound.

The crossings are kept standing by engineering design, not supported with brute strength or redundant protections like their more modern counterparts. Bridge regulators call the more risky spans "fracture critical," meaning that if a single, vital component of the bridge is compromised, it can crumple.

Those vulnerable crossing carry millions of drivers every day. In Boston, a six-lane highway 1A near Logan airport includes a "fracture critical" bridge over Bennington Street. In northern Chicago, an I-90 pass that goes over Ashland Avenue is in the same category. An I-880 bridge over 5th Avenue in Oakland, Calif., is also on the list.

Also in that category is the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River north of Seattle, which collapsed into the water days ago after officials say an oversized truck load clipped the steel truss.

Public officials have focused in recent years on the desperate need for money to repair thousands of bridges deemed structurally deficient, which typically means a major portion of the bridge is in poor condition or worse. But the bridge that collapsed Thursday is not in that deficient category, highlighting another major problem with the nation's infrastructure. . . .

The most famous failure of a fracture critical bridge was the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis during rush hour on Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring more than 100 others. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the cause of the collapse was an error by the bridge's designers - a gusset plate, a key component of the bridge, was too thin. The plate was only half of the required one-inch thickness.

Because the bridge's key structures lacked redundancy, where if one piece fails, there is another piece to prevent the bridge from falling, when the gusset plate broke, much of the bridge collapsed.

Fracture critical bridges, like the I-5 span in Washington, are the result of Congress trying to cut corners to save money rather than a lack of engineering know-how, said Barry B. LePatner, a New York real estate attorney and author of "Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward."

About 18,000 fracture critical bridges were built from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s in an effort to complete the nation's interstate highway system, which was launched under President Dwight Eisenhower, LePatner said in an interview. The fracture critical bridge designs were cheaper than bridges designed with redundancy, he said.

Thousands of those bridges remain in use, according to an AP analysis.   "They have been left hanging with little maintenance for four decades now," he said. "There is little political will and less political leadership to commit the tens of billions of dollars needed" to fix them.

There are 66,749 structurally deficient bridges and 84,748 functionally obsolete bridges in the U.S., including Puerto Rico, according to the Federal Highway Administration. That's about a quarter of the 607,000 total bridges nationally. States and cities have been whittling down that backlog, but slowly. In 2002, about 30 percent of bridges fell into one of those two categories.

There is wide recognition at all levels of government that the failure to address aging infrastructure will likely undermine safety and hinder economic growth. But there is no consensus on how to pay for improvements. The federal Highway Trust Fund, which provides construction aid to states, is forecast to go broke next year. The fund gets its revenue primarily from federal gas and diesel taxes. But revenues aren't keeping up because people are driving less and there are more fuel-efficient cars on the road.

The GOP's "starve government"policy - triggered by Tea Party and the 1% greed -  is creating life threatening dangers yet morons in the GOP base just keep eating up the anti-tax demagoguery. 

The GOP War Against the Nation's Infrastructure

In order to give tax breaks to the wealthy, today's Republicans are willing to slash programs for the poor and needy even as billions of dollars continue to be squandered in the fool's errand wars launched by Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  But there is another victim of the Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda: the nation's crumbling infrastructure.  Here in Virginia the highway system is becoming increasingly inadequate and in Hampton Roads the transportation is so stressed at rush hour that the situation is harming economic growth.  But will the Virginia GOP vote to increase the gasoline tax which hasn't been raise in a quarter of a century?  Of course not.  They would rather abdicate responsibility and enter into "public-private" arrangements where private interest will rape Virginians with tolls and fees with little accountability to taxpayers.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this nationwide problem of our crumbling infrastructure.  Just imagine what could have been accomplished if billions and billions of dollars had not been squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Here are column excerpts:

Across the coasts of New York and New Jersey, hundreds of millions of gallons of raw and partially treated sewage are spilling into waterways and the ocean. The immediate cause is equipment damage from Hurricane Sandy, but as Michael Schwirtz recently reported in The Times, aging plants like one in Nassau County on Long Island were leaking long before the storm, flooding neighborhood streets with sewage during downpours.

There are thousands of faltering sewage plants like these across the country, staffed by operators who dread rainy days. Civil engineers in every state are monitoring ominous cracks in roads and bridges that carry freight and school buses. And millions of transit commuters are awaiting new equipment and long-deferred maintenance on systems that are reliable only when the sun is shining. 

The need for investment in public works, never more urgent, has become a casualty of Washington’s ideological wars. Republicans were once reliable partners in this kind of necessary spending. But since President Obama spent about 12 percent of the 2009 stimulus on transportation, energy and other infrastructure programs, Republicans have made it a policy to demonize these kinds of investments. 

When the president asked recently for a modest $50 billion for transportation improvements in the “fiscal cliff” talks, Republicans literally laughed out loud. There will be no stimulus in any deal, said Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, the incoming chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Big government construction projects put people to work, and those new jobs have enormous ripple effects — $1.44 in benefits for every government dollar spent on public works. An infrastructure bank for energy and water projects, started with $10 billion in government seed money, could leverage hundreds of billions in private investments. 

But the biggest reason to spend money on these projects is that they are desperately needed in every city and state. Around the country, there are 70,000 structurally deficient bridges; one of them, in southern New Jersey, collapsed under a train last week, sending tank cars full of flammable gas into a creek. There are 4,000 dams in need of repair, and the electrical grid in this supposedly advanced country ranks 32nd in the world in reliability, behind Slovenia’s. Those Republicans who deride this investment as worthless stimulus might want to explain to freezing homeowners why it is too expensive to bury fragile power lines.

Most estimates put the cost of basic repairs at more than $2 trillion, and that does not even include long-range upgrades to the electrical grid, storm protection and mass transit.  Around the country, ridership on transit has grown significantly since the 1990s, but federal investments have fallen far short. The Transportation Department says that if $18 billion were spent every year — 40 percent more than is being spent now — transit systems might get to a state of good repair by 2028.

The NextGen satellite program desperately needed to replace the nation’s clogged air traffic control system will cost at least $30 billion, but much of that money is likely to be cut by the automatic sequester of spending put in place by Republicans last year. This investment will ultimately save the airline industry vast amounts now lost to delays and excess fuel consumption, but like so many other important projects, it is being eroded in the blind ideological rush to cut everything. As bridges fall, subway riders are stranded and flight delays pile up, the cost of this shortsightedness will continue to mount.