Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Facebook Won’t Save Metro

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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, ‘Metro’) has a bright idea for its future: a Facebook page.

Long hovering, like so many other groups, in the nether-region between government agency and for-profit business, Metro’s insanity never ceases to amaze me. They charge higher fares than any other rail transit system in the United States, but MetroRail’s reliability still gives Microsoft operating systems and Chevy automobiles a run for their money. When the Washington Nationals baseball team came to town, Metro thought that Major League Baseball needed to pay them millions of dollars to cover the costs of increased ridership . . . even though common sense would indicate that increased ridership already means increased FARES.

I stopped riding Metro five years ago now. Riding five days a week, it was uncommon that my commute would go as-planned more than 50 percent of the time. Drastic delays—sometimes delivering me to work or home a full hour later than expected—slowly went from being an occasional annoyance in 2001 to a twice-a-week nightmare by 2004. Local media make fairly regular investigative reports, which invariably discover patent mismanagement, millions of wasted dollars, and general ineptitude throughout the management structure of the organization. Best of all, if you’re a resident of Virginia, Maryland, or Washington, DC, your taxes likely contribute to the [mis]management of this agency whether you ride or not.

Here are some ideas for Metro:

  1. Go back in time to 1985 and extend your rail service to Dulles Airport, Tysons Corner, Columbia, Fort Belvoir, and (duh) Georgetown. It’s way, way, way too late now.
  2. After accomplishing step 1, now you can start talking about the rail extensions you should be making today . . . to Manassas, Gainesville, Leesburg, Purcellville, Quantico, Annapolis, and other places in the greater DC metro area.
  3. Stop complaining about money . . . or, as an alternative, lower your fares to be price competitive with every other mass transit system in the country and then complain about money.
  4. Stop assuming everybody lives in the suburbs and works in the city. This isn’t reality anymore, and hasn’t been for fifteen years. Build up methods to commute from suburbs to other suburbs, instead of your vintage 1970s structure where all the rail lines intersect downtown. My commute from Herndon to Alexandria shouldn’t be a two-hour odyssey of driving to a park-and-ride lot, taking a bus to an Orange Line station, transferring to a Blue Line train, and finally hopping a shuttle bus to the office.

Final conclusion: If I can get to work faster and cheaper by driving, even in the DC area’s horrible traffic mess with sky-high gas prices, then Metro really, really, really sucks. Starting a Facebook site won’t fix that.

Big, Dangly Cat Feet

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vincent-bigfeetVincent, our kitten, is weird. I came home today, and this is where I found him: sitting on top of our kitchen cabinets with his front legs dangling down, showing off his mutant, five-toed feet.

And, to top it off, he gives me the ‘dummy’ look. Vincent is very good at the ‘dummy’ look. Pretty regularly, a vacant stare comes across his face as he tries to compute whatever is happening around him. In this case, he was trying to figure out why I was laughing and pointing a cell phone camera at him.

Mei Mei, our older cat, is a bit smarter. When I point the camera at her, she usually stops doing whatever she was doing. She does this to spite us. Vincent hasn’t figured this out yet, and I doubt that he ever will!

A Proposal for President Obama

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President Obama:

I can save the American automotive industry, and it will only cost the taxpayers 10 billion dollars (which is less than half of what GM and Chrysler are requesting). Please make the check payable to “Scott Bradford”. I will be happy to pick it up at the White House, or we can make arrangements for a direct deposit if that’s easier. This payment is a one-time, non-refundable investment in the creation of a new privately-held company: American Motors, LLC.

I will need two things from you (in addition to the 10 billion dollars). First, I will need legal authority to terminate union contracts that were signed by the current U.S. auto manufacturers under duress (the threat of a United Auto Workers [UAW] strike), which should be legally invalid anyway. Second, I will need your support and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approval for American Motors, LLC to purchase all three of the ‘big three’ auto manufacturers. I figure if you can get Congress to approve an 800 billion dollars ‘stimulus’ in two weeks, you should be able to get these things approved in that time or less.

Read more . . .

Back to the Trough for $21.6 Billion

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Back in December, General Motors (GM) and Chrysler were unilaterally and unconstitutionally issued a $13.4 billion ‘loan’ by the George W. Bush (R) administration out of the 700 billion dollars that had been intended by Congress for a bailout of the banking and finance industry. This unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into private industry—executed by a Republican president who wanted to top-off an unconstitutional bailout by unconstitutionally ignoring what Congress told him to do with it—came with a requirement that the recipients develop and deliver detailed plans for their future viability.

GM and Chrysler delivered those plans today with an unsurprising revelation that the $13.4 billion they just got wasn’t enough, and they would need at least $21.6 billion more of your and my money in new ‘loans’ to save themselves from their own mismanagement. Let me write the next part of the story for our legislators and our new president: in six months, they’ll have burned through the $21.6 billion and they’ll come back to you asking for $43.2 billion. Six months after that, they’ll come back desperately needing $25.4 billion. Shall I go on?

Enough already. The government can—and should—call in the $13.4 loans for immediate repayment and refuse to provide any more support for an industry that cannot sustain itself. GM and Chrysler can bring themselves back to viability most efficiently by entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which will allow them to renegotiate (or, better yet, eliminate) the United Auto Workers (UAW) contracts that are sucking them dry. This is their best chance for success, not another mindless federal handout.

I would tell you to write your congressmen and President Barack Obama (D) asking them to oppose this idiocy, but widespread public opposition to the $700b bailout last year, the auto bailout last year, and the new $800b ‘stimulus’ bailout Obama signed into law today didn’t stop any of those things from happening.

I weep for the republic.

The Greatest President

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Happy Presidents’ Day!

The Federal Holiday celebrated today is technically, under federal law, the celebration of Washington’s Birthday although it has more recently (with most states eliminating the Lincoln’s Birthday holiday) become an all-inclusive day. 43 individuals have held the office of President of the United States. Barack Obama (D) is the 44th president, the numerical discrepancy because of Grover Cleveland’s (D) non-consecutive terms as 22nd and 24th president. All 43, good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, are deserving of our attention today as people who held the highest office in the land.

One of the big Presidents’ Day stories making the media rounds today is the C-SPAN survey of 65 historians ranking the 42 Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush (R). Perhaps un-surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln (R) ranks as the ‘best’ president for leading us through the Civil War and preserving the union, while his immediate predecessor, James Buchanan (D) ranks as the ‘worst’ for standing by and letting the Civil War happen.

While the 65 historians have generally hit the nail on the head, or at least fairly close to it, I respectfully disagree with some of their conclusions. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) deserves a much lower ranking than his #3 position, as his well-intentioned but misguided efforts merely prolonged one of the darkest economic times in our history. George W. Bush (R) also gets low-balled at #36, the seventh worst, when he probably deserves something in the twenties for his post-9/11 leadership (and would have deserved better had he not spent his last couple of months in office trying to re-create FDR’s walk to Socialism). His rankings will improve with time.

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.