Archive for February 13th, 2007

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

True Irony: House Global Warming hearing canceled due to ice storm

http://drudgereport.com/flash8.htm

HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER ICE STORM
HEARING NOTICE
Tue Feb 13 2007 19:31:25 ET

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled “Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?”

The hearing will be rescheduled to a date and time to be announced later.

DC WEATHER REPORT:

Wednesday: Freezing rain in the morning. Total ice accumulation between one half to three quarters of an inch. Brisk with highs in the mid 30s. North winds 10 to 15 mph…increasing to northwest 20 to 25 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation near 100 percent.

Wednesday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows around 18. Northwest winds around 20 mph.

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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Bank of America - Now Bank of Mexico

Sweet!  The organization formerly known as Bank of America is offering credit cards to people with no Social Security numbers (typically illegal aliens), according to a Wall Street Journal article picked up by Reuters and found in abbreviated form here.

The new Bank of America card is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft, the Journal said.

Don't know about you, but my name's Jose Sanchez for the next three or five months…however long it takes them to figure out that I'm not going to pay any of the charges I rack up on the card.

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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Metro: We Do Too Have A Plan!

It just doesn't really much involve roads.  We need more bicycle lanes and choo-choos.  Transport of goods and services really isn't all that big a deal.  We need to "encourage" people to live closer to where they work.  We do this by building multimillion-dollar condos and pricing people out of the local housing market by employing artificial constraints on land availability, and then we guilt-trip them by claiming that the problems thus created are all the fault of selfish individuals.

This is the Metro version of "planning".  It doesn't work; it has never worked, and it will never work.

Metro has a 35-year-long history of failure after abject failure, yet they take pride in the fact that they are a "model" for the rest of the country.  They are the only elected regional governmental layer in the country, and they don't quite seem able to grasp just why it is that nobody else has followed their "lead". 

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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Get ready to see a million dollars wasted

And get ready to see the City of Seattle and Greg Nickels throw a childish temper tantrum in court. They aren’t going to like this at all, and they’ve already promised they’d be childish about this.

The legislature’s response to the DOT letter that concluded that the four-lane tunnel would be unsafe was very swift. You’d almost think they saw it coming. From the Seattle Times:

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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

A six year-long public safety emergency mired in personal politics

Are Greg Nickel’s dreams of a tunnel doomed to fail? Or will the State Department of Transportation’s findings be ignored? Will the results of the advisory vote on the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement mean anything? Or are Greg Nickels and the Seattle City Council so set on a tunnel that they’ll give us “Big Dig Lite”? From the Seattle Times:

Seattle’s proposal for a reduced, four-lane Alaskan Way tunnel should be dropped from further consideration, because of “serious operational and safety problems found during our technical review,” the State Department of Transportation said in a letter released this morning.

…

Next week, advisory ballots will be mailed to Seattle voters, who are being asked to choose a four-lane tunnel, or a six-lane elevated structure. Final decisions rest with the state, where some officials have called the advisory measure flawed, or even meaningless.

The existing Alaskan Way Viaduct, built in 1953, was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake.

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