Through a spokesman, Federal Railroad Administration chief Joseph Szabo rejected the premise of questions that I sent to him a few years back that federal rules were window-dressing for an Obama administration determined to get a CA bullet-train project well under way to create a “too big to scrap now” public works scenario.

But for all Szabo's insistence that things are being done on the up and up, it's tough not to wonder if there is a link between what happened Aug. 16 in Sacramento and what happened last week in Washington.

Feds lose state fig leaf

On Aug. 16, Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny ruled that the state of California's bullet train plan violated state law because it intended to begin construction on the first 300-mile section without having all funding ($31 billion) in hand for the entire section and because it hadn't completed environmental reviews for the entire first secton. Both were requirements established by Proposition 1A, the 2008 state ballot measure that gave $9.95 billion in bond-seed money to the state bullet train project.

Attorneys for Kings County and other plaintiffs that won Kenny's ruling are downright cocky about prevailing in the next phase of their lawsuit as well. That will address whether the state bullet train is illegal on another front: because it won't come clossing to getting from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco in 160 minutes or less, as Prop. 1A requires.

It's tough to argue that the state of California is a worthy recipient of federal bullet-train dollars if a state judge says it doesn't have a legal business plan and that it's not even a bullet train.

So what happened Sept. 17? Szabo issued revised federal rules that no longer govern federal support for state high-speed rail but for “higher performing rail systems.” This appears to set a considerably lower threshold for legal use of federal rail funds than had been established before.

Obama's 'high speed rail cheerleader' moves on

Ken Orski of Innovation NewsBriefs pointed out this hilarious change. His speculation on what it might mean:

“Could this welcome change in the official rhetoric be linked to the departure of former [Transportation Secretary] Ray LaHood, the Administration's chief 'high speed rail' cheerleader?

“And will the California high-speed rail project be henceforth renamed the “Higher-performing rail project”, now that the blended approach has made a two-hour 40 minute LA-to-SF trip a physical impossibility?”

It's hard to believe it doesn't have some significance. Maybe, just maybe, it means five years after its bizarre origin as a suggestion from Rahm Emmanuel's oncologist brother, the federal bullet-train initiative is dying.

Here's hoping the same fate awaits California's high-speed folly.

As I wrote at the time …

“The Transportation Department, parent to the FAA, has a $73 billion annual budget. Of course Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood could find another way to make his department’s share of budget cuts required by the March 1 sequestration of funds.

“Another word for this is ridiculous. The same Transportation Department has sent $3.5 billion to California for our bullet-train boondoggle.”

Soon after, Congress figured this out and ordered transportation officials to prioritize.

Uncritical regurgitation of Obama talking points

Now along comes a California example of the Obama administration’s attempt to make the sequester as bad as possible — and it finds an accomplice in Ventura County Star columnist Timm Herdt, who in a 700 words doesn’t even raise the possibility that the White House may be to blame for failing to prioritize federal spending or demand smarter decision-making from Army engineers:

“If there is any place in America where one can take a photograph of the obtuse federal process known as sequestration, it is in a small coastal community in Southern California.

“In the city of Port Hueneme, a beach that is typically as wide as a football field has disappeared. The Pacific Ocean is encroaching. It has already wiped out an outdoor shower used by beachgoers and undermined a sidewalk. It is threatening to breach a city street called Surfside Drive. Beyond that are homes, condominiums and public facilities. …

“‘We’re not a beach-resort community,’ says Mayor Ellis Green. ‘We are a humble town.’

“The winter is approaching, which will bring with it storms and higher tides. The seawater is creeping toward what Green calls a ‘catastrophe’ that could cause tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

“If this happens, it will not be a natural disaster. It will be a super storm brought about by federal budget paralysis.”

Later on, Herdt more specifically blames “leadership in the House” for refusing to ride to the rescue of the Army Corps of Engineers and fund needed work.

Never mentioned: Army Corps’ budget has gone up

Does he mention that the Army Corps of Engineers multibillion-dollar civil works’ budget is higher this year than last year, which certainly suggests what we’re seeing in Port Hueneme is sequester theater?

No.

Does Herdt mention that the sequester was the White House’s idea?

No.

Does Herdt mention the reports that lots of agencies that feared doom and gloom quietly prioritized spending and felt few effects from sequestration, as the Washington Post, Reason and many other publications have repeatedly reported?

No. Hey, Timm, even the Canadians  have figured out sequestration isn’t what it was billed. And note that an L.A. Times report insinuates this is all theater as well.

But in California, if you’re an opinion columnist, your default position is usually to find a way to blame everything on evil conservatives.

And so you conclude that the federal government — which had a $3.5 trillion budget last year and a $3.5 trillion budget this year — can’t handle its customary Port Hueneme protection responsibilities because of House Republicans.

Feel free to groan. And groan. And groan some more.

By Chris Reed

The immense perception gap between East Coast and West Coast journalists when it comes to reporting on the Golden State was never in sharper relief than in 2003. If you were in California, the recall of Gov. Gray Davis felt like a political earthquake, a sign of vast public discontent and — at least if you liked the recall — an affirmation of the value of direct democracy.

To lazy East Coasters, it was an opportunity to paint Californians as flakes. When I whined to Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory about his extroardinarily superficial column on the recall, he replied with a condescending, contemptuous email.

This disconnnect may be emerging on California’s bullet train. On this coast, the Los Angeles Times editorial page may be gung ho, and some other editorial pages are still all aboard. But it’s difficult to remember the last in-depth piece of any kind in the news pages of any California newspaper that didn’t carry the implication the California High-Speed Rail Authority was poorly run and unrealistic and that the project was on track for boondoggle status. Journalists are pretty liberal in general, but they’re also front-runners, in a sense. The non-pundits don’t want to seem to back losers, so coverage has turned negative as the insanity of the project has become clear.

Mr. ‘Wonkblog’ gives his blessing

But on the East Coast, the extent of Cali’s bullet train folly hasn’t really sunk in. The New York Times’s editorial page, whose writers show zero sign of having followed what’s actually happened in the Golden State, is in the tank. But so is the rising young media star Ezra Klein, who writes the heavily read Wonkblog column for the Washington Post and is a Bloomberg News columnist and MSNBC commentator. There has arguably never been an American pundit who in his 20s already has enjoyed more success and access to a bigger audience than Klein. Here’s what he had to say in a recent lengthy Post blog about President Obama’s accomplishments to date:

“A partial accounting of Obama’s first term reveals more accomplishments than most presidents secure in two. The health-care law, of course, is almost certainly the most significant piece of social policy passed since the Great Society. The rescues of the financial and auto sectors, though begun under President George W. Bush, were mostly carried out and completed under Obama. The Dodd-Frank financial reforms included the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The stimulus financed long-term investments in everything from weatherization to electronic medical records and high-speed rail.“

The bolding is mine. I acknowledge that all the other things that Klein lists can be touted by liberals as achievements, even if conservatives disagree. People value different things. But Klein’s inclusion of high-speed rail as an Obama triumph — a funding category where by far the most federal money has gone to California — amounts to an indictment of his credibility. As I noted earlier, the newsrooms of California newspapers have turned on the bullet train because they worry about their reputations. Klein should worry about his, too, if he touts this fiasco.

Post editorial page vs. Post blogger

As it turns out, the editorial page of a major East Coast newspaper also sees its credibility at risk if it cheers for high-speed rail. And it turns out to be the newspaper that has Ezra Klein as a full-time employee — The Washington Post. This is from a Post editorial in November 2011:

“Things just went from bad to worse for high-speed passenger rail in California. After the Golden State’s voters approved a $9 billion bullet-train bond issue in 2008, officials said they could build an 800-mile system by 2020, for $35.7 billion. The cost projection now, as issued by the state Nov. 1: $98.5 billion, with a completion date of 2033.

“Time to pull the plug, right? Not according to Gov. Jerry Brown (D). The new ‘business plan is solid and lays the foundation for a 21st-century transportation system,’ he said. Equally upbeat, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood offered Mr. Brown his congratulations on ‘a sound, step-by-step strategy for building a world-class high-speed rail network.’

“This is unreal. Apart from the bond issue and $3.6 billion in federal funds already in hand, the cash-strapped state hasn’t credibly identified a source of funds for the system. The new report basically repeats previous assertions that, if California builds, federal and private-sector dollars will come. This is wishful thinking in an era of massive federal deficits, and if the opportunities for the private sector were really so great, where are the companies clamoring to invest?”

Yes, since then Jerry Brown has come up with a plan that purportedly shaves $30 billion off the cost of the project. But the complaints the Post went on to make about the stupidity of building the first segment in the Central Valley hold up as well as ever:

“U.S. and California officials tout this lonely corridor as the “spine” of a system that will connect big cities later on. After all, they argue, the interstate highway system started in Kansas. But that project had a dedicated funding source from the get-go: the federal highway trust fund, supported by fuel taxes.

“More realistically, Sacramento’s Legislative Analysis Office calls the Central Valley starting point a ‘big gamble.’ In the all-too-likely event that funding for the rest of the system never materializes, the report adds, ‘the state will be left with a rail segment unconnected to major urban areas that has little if any chance of generating the ridership to operate without a significant state subsidy.’ It would be a train to nowhere, but at least it would go nowhere fast.

“As questionable as this project is, we would have less business objecting if the only money at risk was California’s. But the Obama and Brown administrations are talking about devoting the nation’s funds to what looks more and more like a boondoggle. If the president and governor won’t slam on the brakes, then Congress or the California legislature must find a way to prevent the spending. Somebody, please, stop this train.”

So how could Washington wunderkind Ezra Klein not grasp the basic points his employer makes?  If you have a reputation as a very shrewd public policy analyst, that’s vastly difficult to square with being a bullet-train enthusiast.

The final twist: Klein was born in Irvine and went to UCLA. It didn’t take long for him to adopt the default East Coast media disdain for actually studying how the Golden State works before pretending to understand its twists and turns.

By Chris Reed

A little more than a year ago, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood surprised the inside-the-Beltway set by telling a Chicago reporter who asked if he would come back for a second Obama term that it was unlikely. I sure didn’t hear about it at the time from the California media, but in November, whom did the National Journal speculate might succeed LaHood, an Illinois Republican who is the only GOPer in the Cabinet?

Fellow “moderate Republican” Arnold! The key initial enabler of the California bullet-train boondoggle replacing the key overseer of the White House attempt to prop up the California bullet-train with promises of vast future federal funding! How cosmically tidy.

I don’t think it’s going to happen. Schwarzenegger’s renewed film career is doing fine. He’s got two action movies coming out in the next few months, one of which, “Ten,” is with a rising-star director (the guy who wrote “Training Day” and the original “Fast and Furious” and wrote/directed the recent, riveting “End of Watch”). And I just don’t think Arnold wants to spend 250 days a year in Washington D.C. That he flew home almost every night from Sacramento says a lot about his devotion to his Brentwood compound.

But it could have been the mostly deeply enjoyable spectacle a bullet-train hater could envision. The federal government is not going to keep funding our folly. House Republicans are less likely to vote to borrow tens of billions to keep California’s fiasco alive than they are to vote to make “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” the new national anthem.

For the federal government to pull the plug on California’s debacle while Schwarzenegger was secretary of transportation? Wow. I’d have watched Arnold’s pleading with House GOPers on C-SPAN with a glee approaching rapture.

By Chris Reed

A House committee hearing Thursday at which Republicans vowed to use their majority to block new federal funding for California’s bullet-train train wreck produced this astounding passage in The Washington Post:

“We’re not giving up on high-speed rail,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testified before a congressional committee. “The president will include funding in his budget. I think we’ll get there with public money, but in the absence of that we’ll get there with private money.”

Oh, yeah, private investors are salivating at the chance to be part of California’s grand experiment. That’s why they’ve been lining up to help Sacramento for four years.

Not!

What is it about trains that so deludes people on the left?

They talk themselves into thinking inflexible, costly light-rail is what poor people want, not flexible, cheap buses.

They talk themselves into believing a bullet train that by necessity has to have few stops (or it won’t be a bullet train) can be akin to a mass-transit subway in its level of use.

And now they think that private investors will look at their fantasies and see vast substance to them.

George Will is right. LaHood “should take a high-speed train into retirement.”

By Chris Reed

SAN DIEGO — The smug, insufferably superior politics of the faculty lounge have gone mainstream on the Left in the past decade to the point where many “progressive” pundits and Democratic lawmakers openly act as if it is a given that their side always knows best and that those who disagree are dimwits, rednecks or charlatans.

This was on full display in a recent post by Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, which carried the headline, “The War Between Data and Storytelling”:

“Krugman the liberal is all about the data: he hauls out charts, models, ‘signatures,’ and international comparisons. Brooks, by contrast, barely admits that data even bears on this question. He’s all about telling a plausible story: the chickens of globalization, failing education, high federal debt, and political sclerosis have finally come home to roost, so what do you expect? Of course the economy is in tatters.

“You see this play out on TV too. Conservatives tell a story, and Krugman then explains impatiently that the data simply doesn’t back up what they’re saying. Every week it plays out the same way. It’s like a kabuki show.”

I laughed so hard when I read this that I was at risk of breaking a rib. Why? Because I came upon Drum’s onanistic ode to the smarts of his side just hours after reading two amazingly damning passages in “The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery,” Noam Scheiber’s new book about economics policy-making in the Obama administration.

The first part involves the sophisticated way Obama’s aides decided where to spend tens of billions in the stimulus package they would soon present to Congress. This is from Page 102:

“In December [2008], the economic team dutifully prepared a list of drab but high-bang-for-your-buck outlays to [Rahm] Emanuel. The list included … $20 billion to repair existing roads and bridges, $5 billion to repair public housing units and another $5 billion to upgrade sewage treatment facilities. …

“Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel, a doctor who was joining the administration as a health care adviser, happened to be staying with the future chief of staff when the list arrived via fax. “There’s nothing that really gets my heart racing,” the brother later complained. “What would get your heart racing?” Rahm Emanuel asked glumly. “I don’t know. How about high-speed rail — getting from New York to D.C. in 90 minutes?” Within days, some $20 billion in high-speed rail investments had immaculately materialized on the list.”

Are you kidding me? The Obama administration’s obsession with high-speed rail began as a way to get Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s heart racing? This is at the root of the president’s determination to trick/bully California and other states into building immense boondoggles by providing them initial billions until the projects became too big to fail?

Bullet train

Just last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood came to Sacramento to warn the Legislature it better launch construction of the California’s bullet train soon or it risked losing the $3.3 billion in federal funds that had come its way because of Doc Zeke. The fact that California has less than 20 percent of the funds in hand that it needs for the $68 billion project and no prospects for outside investment went unmentioned by LaHood. Instead, he exhorted the broke state government to make the bullet train a priority — and, incredibly, Gov. Jerry Brown appears to agree.

Yo, Kevin Drum. Yo, Paul Krugman. This is not the triumph of “facts” over “storytelling.”

But what’s incredible is that, on the very next page of Scheiber’s book, there’s an even more depressing/appalling/insane anecdote. President Obama has spent three-plus years talking about how green jobs will rescue the economy. All along, he’s known it was a lie. The book reads:

“Energy was a particular obsession of the president-elect’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [economics adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investment in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged. The U.S. clean energy industry was so microscopically small that even doubling or tripling the size of it, a major accomplishment that could take years, would produce an insignificant number of jobs relative to the size of the country’s workforce.”

So Obama has understood this since before he took office, thanks to the honest counsel of the UC Berkeley professor who would become chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Yet he hasn’t changed course, constantly hyping the “green jobs” narrative and continuing to throw billions at Solyndra and similar projects while being hostile to the thriving conventional energy industry and indifferent to the larger private-sector economy.

Yo, Kevin Drum. Yo, Paul Krugman. Who’s using data? Who’s engaging in storytelling?

Green jobs

This is all particularly galling in California. The green jobs cult is so powerful in both Sacramento and the media that one routinely hears the absurd narrative that a 2006 state law forcing a gradual unilateral switch to cleaner but much costlier forms of energy will help the state’s economy, not create a huge competitive disadvantage. The much more likely result is that we’ll look back at the present 11 percent unemployment rate as the good old days.

We’re also home to the only remaining state-federal bullet train project. Other states having figured out that high-speed rail is incredibly costly, requires perpetual operational subsidies, and doesn’t carry nearly enough passengers to substantially reduce congestion and pollution.

But we have a Democrat-dominated Sacramento, our state leaders are advised by lots of sharp Krugman acolytes, and we’ve got Kevin Drum dispensing wisdom from his home in Orange County, so it’s just a matter of time before data triumphs, storytelling recedes and prosperity blooms.

If anyone out there actually believes this, please be in touch. I’ve got a subdivision in Riverside County I’d like to sell you.

Reed is an editorial writer for the U-T San Diego newspaper (formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune) and runs the Calwhine.com politics blog.

Spain also has wasted money on a high-speed rail boondoggle, one they actually built. The Bee ran an article on it that tried to make the Iberian choo-choo sound better than it is. But the facts still were there.

The Bee: “U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood voiced admiration for the Spanish network when he visited Spain last summer, calling it a ‘state-of-the-art system.’

“President Barack Obama touted it as a model for American high-speed rail plans when he announced billions of dollars in federal investments in April 2009.”

So, Spain’s train clearly is a model for California’s.

Lessons? “Top among them is how hard it is to be self-sufficient, even when conditions seem ideal, as they have in Spain.” That is, it doesn’t make money, but chews up tax money. Just like California’s California High-Speed Rail Authority.

The Bee: “Despite popular and political support from the very start, the AVE rail system faces a tougher future due to Europe’s financial crisis.

“Service between some smaller cities has been cut because too few people ride the trains. Some wonder if it is anything more than a luxury commuter service.”

Basically, tax money is short because of the financial crisis gripping the PIIGS countries: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. Although Spain’s debt crisis isn’t as bad as that in Greece or Italy, it’s still plenty bad, like California’s budget crisis.

Bad Priorities

The Bee: “‘They haven’t prioritized which lines are most important, so a lot of money has been spent on lines that aren’t as important,’ said Jacinto Calvillo, a passenger waiting to board an AVE train in Valencia.”

The CHSRA is trying to jump-start construction with a slow-speed rail running from Fresno to Bakerfield, one of the least populated areas in the proposed network.

The Bee: “Even the enthusiastic Spanish officials are curious about the logic of starting in the sparsely populated middle of California. The environmental benefits won’t be realized, they said, if the cities along the first line don’t have enough people to generate ridership.”

“‘You need to have either Los Angeles or San Francisco,’ said Pedro Pérez del Campo, environmental policy director for ADIF, Spain’s Administrator for Railway Infrastructures. ‘They should build it where it will have an impact so that people will support it’.”

The Bee: “Since the late 1980s, Spain has spent about $60 billion to build and equip its high-speed network.”

The latest estimates for the CHSRA are $99 billion and counting. But let’s look at the demographics. Spain’s population density is 231 people per square mile. California’s is 242 per square mile. So they’re about the same. In both cases, there just aren’t enough people to justify such a project.

The population growth rate in California is about 1 percent per year. In Spain, about 0.57 percent. So that won’t change much over the coming decades.

The Bee: “Spain’s system, however, was launched in different conditions than California is experiencing today. Political unity, a thriving economy and the spotlight of international events — a world exposition in Seville and the Olympic Games in Barcelona — provided impetus for Spain to embark on its high-speed journey….

“It has rapidly expanded to become Europe’s most extensive high-speed network — third only to China and Japan’s systems worldwide — while facing remarkably little of the NIMBYism, farmer opposition or politics fermenting throughout California.

“The project has been supported by both conservative- and Socialist-led governments.”

Spains “conservatives” sound like California’s Republicans during the Schwarzenegger Era.

Money Drain

However: “But with Spain and the rest of Europe mired in a lingering economic crisis, public attitudes may slowly be changing.

“Despite assurances from the Spanish government that the long-distance AVE trains operate without a public subsidy, academics and analysts don’t believe that even the busiest high-speed route — between Madrid and Barcelona — musters enough riders to cover its operating costs, much less the billions of euros spent on infrastructure over the past 20 years….

“Total high-speed ridership on the long-distance and regional trains peaked at nearly 17 million in 2009. Ridership has since tapered off as Spain, like the rest of Europe and much of the world, copes with economic troubles.”

The article also details how the system never has made any money. It’s always been a drain on the Spanish treasury.

The same with California’s High-Speed Rail boondoggle.

What I’d like to know is how much the money borrowed for Spain’s bullet train contributed to the country’s massive debt problem. Somebody should study that.