John and Ken

Lord Jerry Brown Looks To His Serfs To Work on High Speed Rail

Published by Papa Giorgio

An amazing statement (above) from Jerry brown. He views us as serfs, is he our lord?

  • Serfs lived in small communities called manors that were ruled by a local lord or vassal. Most peasants were serfs. They were bound to the manor and could not leave it or marry without the manor lord’s permission. Serfs did all the work on the manor farm: they worked the fields, cared for the livestock, built and maintained the buildings, made the clothing, and cut firewood. Men, women, and children worked side by side. Serfs had small plots of land they could work for themselves; sometimes a serf saved enough money to buy his freedom and became a freeman.

Cost Side:

(WSJ – May 18, 2012) California’s budget deficit has grown by $7 billion in the last four months. Uh oh. The good news in this debacle is that the state’s fiscal woes will make it nearly impossible to complete Governor Jerry Brown’s runaway high-speed rail train. The bad news is that the Governor is going to try anyway.

Transportation experts warn that the 500-mile bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles could cost more than $100 billion, though the Governor pegs the price at a mere $68 billion. The state has $12.3 billion in pocket, $9 billion from the state and $3.3 billion from…

HotAir continues:

This weekend the Wall Street Journal reports that our earlier estimation was in error. The financing isn’t “risky” at all… it’s an unmitigated disaster.

The good news in this debacle is that the state’s fiscal woes will make it nearly impossible to complete Governor Jerry Brown’s runaway high-speed rail train. The bad news is that the Governor is going to try anyway.

Transportation experts warn that the 500-mile bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles could cost more than $100 billion, though the Governor pegs the price at a mere $68 billion. The state has $12.3 billion in pocket, $9 billion from the state and $3.3 billion from the feds, but Mr. Brown hasn’t a clue where he’ll get the rest. Maybe he’s hoping Facebook will buy the train, though he’ll have a hard time convincing Mark Zuckerberg that it’s worth 100 Instagrams.

As the WSJ article goes on to point out, voters were originally sold on putting up $9B in bonds to fund the project on the promise that it would “only” cost $33B in total and that a combination of federal dollars and private investments would make up the rest. But Washington is facing something of a cash crunch itself, in case you hadn’t heard, and no investment firms want to pony up any money without some assurance of revenue down the road. It’s simply not happening.

…read more…

As HotAir admits:

  • ….I remain a fan of rail travel, partly because I hate flying and partly from a sense of nostalgia I suppose. And I’m still hopeful that projects like this may yet come to fruition in places where they make sense. The Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, DC still looks like it could support a high speed rail project if it were implemented intelligently. But California has neither the money nor the culture to support it….

Paul Koretz Likened Arizona Law To NAZI’s

Published by Papa Giorgio

FREEDOMMINUTE’S, Jay Beeber, was interviewed on KFI’s The John & Ken Show. Here is that interview after a short commentary from the blog at Freedomminute:

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to boycott the State of Arizona in protest of their recently passed immigration law, SB 1070, which targets illegal immigrants. Regardless of what one might think of the law, I was particularly troubled by the public statements of Council Members Janice Hahn and Paul Koretz in which they equated Arizona with Nazi Germany. Perhaps I’m a bit sensitive on this subject since some members of my family were victims of the Nazi regime and died in the concentration camps.

My objection to the use of this type of hyperbole is that when public officials (and private citizens) begin equating everything they might object to with the atrocities of the Holocaust, it minimizes the slaughter of 12 million people. Paul Koretz, who also lost family members in the Holocaust, should be particularly conscious of the dangers of this type of grandstanding.  However, during last week’s council meeting, this is what he said in regard to Arizona’s new laws (including two measures relating to public education):

“If this was being proposed at the Federal level, I would think we were absolutely at the beginning of what went on in Nazi Germany.  It’s not much different.  Fortunately it’s a State, but this State needs to be stung in every possible way until they stop this behavior.  We can’t let this advance any further, this is absolutely dangerous.”

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