Free Republic

Since the beginning of last year, seven people have thrown themselves in front of trains on the Blue Line, which traverses some of the county’s poorest areas on its 22-mile route between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach. Before the recent increase, suicides had averaged one per year since the line opened in 1990, according to Metro spokesman Marc Littman

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A woman who embezzled $320,000 from a California state agency was later hired by the state's High-Speed Rail Authority — and she says nobody asked about her background. The Sacramento Bee (http://bit.ly/141r1Z6 ) says Carey Moore spent two years in prison after pleading no contest to grand theft in 2007. Prosecutors say she embezzled from the Department of Child Support Services. In 2011, Moore was hired by the High-Speed Rail Authority. Her job included making travel plans for officials. Her state job application didn't ask whether she'd been convicted of a crime and Moore says nobody...

A new political dynasty might soon be joining the Kennedys, Clintons and Bushes: Duck Dynasty, that is. Some key Republican operatives are eager to woo one of the hit show's stars--Willie Robertson--to run for the seat given up by retiring Republican Rep. Rodney Alexander. Alexander, expressing frustration with divided government, is going to work in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's cabinet. He will leave at the end of September and a special election will be held to fill the open seat. He represents the 5th District, including Monroe, La., home to the group headed by Robertson, the game call and hunting...

A passenger train derailed in Spain yesterday, killing at least 77 people trapped inside the crushed cars and injuring 143. There were Americans among the dead, according to television reports. The tragic high-speed derailment, along a curving stretch of track in the northwestern part of the country, was Spain’s worst rail accident in decades, officials said. Bodies were covered by blankets along the tracks as rescuers used pickaxes to pry open the cars and free people inside the train cars.

A deadly crude oil train disaster in Canada has brought renewed scrutiny to the growing use of rail to carry oil – including hundreds of thousands of barrels in Texas – and prompted worries that the higher volume will mean more accidents. Though rail proponents say moving crude by train is safe, federal regulators and others say that pipelines are safer, a stance that has played a role in the debate over the planned Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. And regardless of the relative safety of the two transportation modes, the mere fact that more crude...

American greenies imagine they can save the planet by stopping construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, but in the real world they will expose Mother Gaia (and human beings) to greater harm by forcing more oil to be transported by rail. Pipelines are far safer than rail transportation, as we are reminded by the horror that engulfed much of the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec in flames. Thirteen people are known dead, but as many as 50 are missing, while charred bodies still are being pulled from the ruins. This reality should haunt the nightmares of greenies, people generally given to...

Funny... for the kids not being star-struck, they finally think we're cool after meeting Willie at the NRA speech...

Whether a high-speed rail system ever gets built in the United States is still up in the air, but if it is, artist and activist Alfred Twu has figured out exactly where those speedy rail lines should go. Twu started working on this map in 2009, when President Obama's plan to build high-speed rail was unveiled. "There were many such maps being made by various designers," says Twu, but since then he's updated the map with labels and put it on Facebook, and it struck a chord. It's gone viral. "With the huge response it's generated, I created a petition...

there was no grand celebration this month as Silicon Valley marked 25 years of light rail... The near-empty trolleys that often shuttle by at barely faster than jogging speeds serve as a constant reminder that the car is still king in Silicon Valley -- and that the Valley Transportation Authority's trains are among the least successful in the nation by any metric.

"This weld is our own version of the golden spike for the transcontinental railroad as it connects the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis," Fuhrmann said. "By connecting Central Corridor Green Line with the Hiawatha Blue Line, we will expand environmentally friendly, affordable transit options for residents of St. Paul, Minneapolis and the region."

Bill Clinton, after steering clear of the flap over Mitt Romney using him in an ad in which he accused President Obama of trying to "gut" the 1996 welfare reform act, responds tonight with a statement rapping the Republican:  "Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.  "The act emerged after years of experiments at the state level, including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980.  When I became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states...

Organizers of a national transit advocacy conference have chosen the Twin Cities as the host site for their fall 2014 event, which is expected to draw roughly 1,000 rail enthusiasts and transit planners from across the country. The "Rail-Volution" board of directors approved a joint proposal from the Counties Transit Improvement Board, the Metropolitan Council and the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Organizers say their next step is to find a Twin Cities conference site. The timing is no coincidence. In 2014, the Green Line -- currently more commonly known as the Central Corridor light-rail transit line -- will begin taking...

A host of newspapers up and down the state have run an extremely long article that we guess is supposed to make a case for California’s boondoggle express, AKA high-speed rail. Did it occur to anyone what the bottom line is? It was 1,413 words into this epic, written by a Fresno Bee reporter and published in our paper, when the reader is given what we find to be the most pertinent of information: “There is no question whether (Spain’s system) can cover its costs. It cannot,” ...

E.R. Companion, of Eagan, writing to the editor in Sunday's Pioneer Press, wondered why our elected officials would commit to spending billions of dollars for a so-called high-speed rail line from the Twin Cities to Chicago. (Well, because they're nuts.) Companion was referring to a story that appeared Jan. 12 featuring the idea that the Minnesota Department of Transportation has begun studying environmental impacts along the 400-mile route, which would take passengers to Chicago, through Milwaukee, in an advertised five hours and 30 minutes. Companion wondered what was high-speed about that, and I could not agree more with his sentiment....

Former president Bill Clinton will appear as guest on The O’Reilly Factor for the first time. Fox News announced that Clinton will make his first official appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s program since Factor launched 15 years ago.

I missed this during my travel to BlogCon 2011 in Denver, which I reached by airline travel — an economical and safe choice on a route served by multiple carriers and requiring little government subsidy to use. The competition for this route falls short of that for the Los Angeles-San Francisco route, though, where more than a half-dozen carriers offer flights between California’s two largest metropolises, complete with choices of departure and arrival airports on either end. Despite the lack of need for fast and reliable transportation between the two cities, Governor Jerry Brown told the LA Times editorial board...

Voters approved the project in 2003, to replace a freeway damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Back then, the cost was $647 million. Today, the price tag is $1.6 billion, with the lion's share of the funding still to come from the federal government. In July, San Francisco's Civil Grand Jury concluded the project was poorly designed, won't meet projected ridership levels, and, as the scathing title of its report says, costs "too much money for too little benefit." At about $1 billion per mile, the Central Subway has become a driving force in Tuesday's mayoral election.

With the Golden State nearly broke, it now plans to secure funding largely by borrowing more, the Associated Press reported, though specifics were unclear. About 20 percent would come from the private sector. Until now, the state had been relying on more than $15 billion from the federal government, $10 billion from private investors and $5 billion from local governments. But the state hadn't gotten any closer to raising the money in the three years since voters approved the plan. The bullet train project, which would link San Francisco and Los Angeles with the nation's first high-speed rail line, has...

Dead. Kaput. Through. Finished. Washed up. Gone-zo. That, I think, is a fair description of the Obama administration’s attempt to build high-speed-rail lines across America. It hasn’t failed because of a lack of willingness to pony up money. The Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package included $8 billion for high-speed-rail projects. The Democratic Congress appropriated another $2.5 billion. But Congress is turning off the spigot. The Republican-controlled House has appropriated zero dollars for high-speed rail. The Democratic-majority Senate Appropriations Committee has appropriated $100 million in its budget recommendation. That’s effectively “a vote of ‘no confidence’ to President Obama’s infrastructure initiative,”...

Hear Us Now is pleased to host Randal O’Toole of the CATO Institute on October 11th. His topic will be, “The Best Laid Plans”: […]how government attempts to do long-range, comprehensive planning inevitably do more harm than good by choking American cities with congestion, making housing markets more unaffordable, and sending the cost of government infrastructure skyrocketing.