NTSB: I-5 Bridge Collapse is Wake-up Call for Entire Country

NTSB says Washington state bridge collapse is wake-up call for entire country

The collapse of an Interstate highway bridge in northern Washington state is a wake-up call for the entire nation, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board says. Investigators need to find out what happened at the I-5 span 60 miles north of Seattle and if it could be repeated at similar bridges around the country, Debbie Hersman said Saturday.

"This is a really significant event and we need to learn from it, not just in Washington but around the country," Hersman said after taking a boat ride on the Skagit River below the dramatic scene where a truck bumped against the steel framework, collapsing the bridge and sending two vehicles and three people falling into the chilly water. "At the end of the day it's about preventing an accident like this," she said.

As Yogi Berra once said, "It's Déjà vu all over again!". Doesn't this seem familiar somehow? Return with me to 2011. President Barack Hussein Obama:

"According to the Republican budget that was passed, for example, we would have to eliminate transportation funding by a third. We’d have to cut transporting funding by a third. You remember when that bridge in Minnesota collapsed with all those people on it? And there was a big hue and cry: How can this happen in America? Well, the National Society of Engineers, they’ve looked around and they give us a 'D' when it comes to infrastructure. Our roads, our bridges, our sewer systems are all deteriorating."

"We don’t even have a serious high-speed rail infrastructure in this country," Obama continued. "Our broadband lines are slower than places like South Korea. Well, so what, we cut transportation by another third, and what’s going to happen to America? We’re just going to have potholes everywhere? We’re just going to have bridges collapsing everywhere?"

And, of course, this was after the trillion dollars added to the budget in 2009 to shore up our infrastructure with those "shovel ready jobs" he admitted later weren't quite so "shovel ready", and an additional trillion dollars a year in the baseline budget for 2010 and 2011.

So, let's get the timeline straight:

*2007: A bridge collapses in Minnesota, which Obama blames on lack of federal spending. (Had he bothered to read the NTSB's report, he might have informed himself better.)

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the inadequate load capacity, due to a design error,” the NTSB states in its 2008 report on the incident.

In fact, the NTSB reported that on the day of the collapse, the bridge was in the process of being refurbished, further contradicting Obama’s claim that the collapse was evidence of a lack of infrastructure spending. “On the day of the collapse, roadway work was underway on the I35W bridge, and four of the eight travel lanes (two outside lanes northbound and two inside lanes southbound) were closed to traffic,” reads the NTSB report.

* 2008: Candidate Barack Obama, Toledo OH:

"We'll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools and bridges."

(Raise your hand if you remember Obama creating 2 million jobs.)

*2009: A trillion dollar stimulus is implemented, presumably to rebuild crumbling roads, schools and bridges.

*2010: Because of Baseline budgeting, the trillion dollars spent as "stimulus" in 2009 now becomes a part of the federal budget baseline. That means in every year that Obama has been in office, he has had an addition trillion dollars a yar to spend along with the trillions in debt he's racked up.

*2011: Another additional trillion dollars. Obama says we have to spend more to prevent crumbling bridges.


*2012: Another additional trillion dollars


*2013: Another additional trillion dollars

Five trillion additional dollars above what the Bush administration had to spend, plus trillions more in deficit spending, and now, Sacré Bleu! We need to wake up to the fact that our bridges are in need of repair! Where has this administration been for the last five years?

May I make a modest suggestion? We hire George Hussein Onyango Obama, the fellow who's living in a hut for less than twenty dollars a year, to inspect and repair all our bridges. We could maybe double his salary and throw in Obamacare. He could go around the country with a big wrench and tighten all the loose bolts he finds.

Some might say that he isn't competent to do the job. Well, that hasn't stopped his brother!

Cross posted at LCR.

Nancy Pelosi: "It is Almost a False Argument to Say We Have a Spending Problem"

Is Nancy Pelosi the dimmest bulb to ever serve in Congress? The most dishonest?? Or both??? In less than fifteen minutes on Fox News Sunday, former Speaker of the House Pelosi said almost more stupid and dishonest things than Joe Biden has hair plugs. But, to preface Ms. Pelosi's lies, prevarications and outright whoppers, we have the dishonest statement from the White House that (federal) budget cuts will result in the "damaging layoffs" of teachers, law enforcement officers and food inspectors.

Really? How many teachers in your public schools are employees of the federal government as opposed to being funded by the cities and communities that their schools are in? And why, you might ask yourself, out of the hundred of thousands of government bureaucracies, departments, employees and expenditures, why it is that every time the public demands a little more financial responsibility from their city, state and federal politicians, that the first thing that happens in return, is a threat to cut police, schools and safety, such as fire, or in this case, food inspection? Let's see a show of hands of all you who think that unnecessary expenditures and waste have been eliminated at every level of government and the only places left to cut are those which affect you most personally? Anyone?? Anyone at all???

The US Department of Education, for example, "currently administers a budget of $68.1 billion in discretionary appropriations" alone. This is in addition to the mandatory budget, which in 2006 was $56 Billion. And to think that for hundreds of years, we educated our kids without sending a single dime to Washington to educate them or expecting Washington to send back a single for it either.

Since Jimmy Carter created the cabinet level Department of Education in 1980, have the nation's test scores improved or continued to slide? Thirty three years of ineffective bureaucratic spending, regulations and pork, with nothing to show for it, except more government intrusion, hundreds of billions of dollars later, and the federal government cannot find any place to cut the budget except food inspectors and the military?

And still, the gems of wisdom have not even begun to fall from Ms. Pelosi's lips! Put on your hip waders, folks, and let us begin!

The first thing I want to point out is the same phony claim that Obama made during the last campaign, that he and the Democrats had "cut $1.6 Trillion" from the budget. Ms. Pelosi repeats the talking point/lie:

"We've had plenty of spending cuts. $1.6 Trillion..."

There is one question that I have been dying to hear anyone in the MSM, or now Fox News, ask of Mr. Obama or Ms. Pelosi:

"You say you've cut the federal budget by $1.6 Trillion dollars. So, in real terms, how many fewer dollars will the federal government spend next year than it did this year?"

If these cuts were more substantive than Monopoly money, then cutting the budget by X amount of dollars should result in spending X amount less than the year before. Right? But all of Obama's budgets and projected budgets increase spending year after year after year. To paraphrase Ms. Pelosi, what she said is not the "gospel truth"*. And speaking of phony, Obama ran all through 2012 claiming we needed a "balanced" approach to the economy, with both spending cuts and tax increases. As soon as he was re-elected, he forgot all about "balance" and pushed for higher taxes, without even any lip service to specific cuts that could or should be made. Need I remind you that in 2008, candidate Obama promised to go through the budget "line by line"** to eliminate waste and unnecessary spending. San Fran Nan used the word "balance" over and over again (it must focus group nicely!), but shied away from actual spending cuts like Dracula from holy water.

Most of us who have or ever had a credit card or loan, know that the only way to decrease the amount of interest we pay is to reduce the balance. We certainly do not decrease interest by increasing spending. But, Ms. Pelosi doesn't think (you could just go with the bold part of this sentence) that we have a "spending problem". Her exact words:

"It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem"

This is despite Chris Wallace pointing out, that you could confiscate all the wealth of all the wealthy and still not cover our current rate of spending, which would at least imply, to most sane people, that when your spending exceeds your wildest expectations for income, that you have a "spending problem". Ms. Pelosi, despite all your phony budget "cuts", spending continues to increase, making this next statement you made (also without bursting into flames) that much more of a lie:

"We're sick and tired of paying interest on the national debt."

If you were truly sick of it, San Fran Nan, wouldn't you make genuine budget cuts that actually reduce the amount of federal spending, rather than increase it, so that we might some day have the money to pay off the principle, or at least not have to continue to borrow money every day to cover our current spending?

You pretend that all of the problems were inherited from Bush, despite the fact that the really profligate spending started when you became Speaker of the House, which grew exponentially during Obama's first term. You cite pretend jobs that were created by the stimulus spending, when the truth is the US has steadily lost more jobs than were "created" under Obama. And your only solution is to throw even more money at the same failed policies of the past and insanely hope for a different outcome this time? Or do you merely line the pockets of yourself, your family and your cronies, knowing that none of your "solutions" will work, but at least "you've got yours"?

Oh, and one more thing, Nanny Nancy: You claim that monies spent for education are "investments made for the future". We started making "investments" by the billions in 1980 for the Department of Education. We've been making billions of dollars of "investment" in the future for thirty three years. At what point in your personal portfolio do you stop wasting money on investments with no return? Any of them for 33 years? Why don't you accord middle class taxpayers the same courtesy?







*To be honest, I did not catch this the first time I heard the interview. When I did catch it the second time, I was quite frankly surprised that she did not immediately burst into flame.

**"Line by line": Code words for "Somewhere between the first tee and the eighteenth hole"

Cross posted at LCR. The video from the Fox interview posted at LCR, but not here.

Barack Obama: Bamboozler-in-Chief

Phony Greek columns, anyone?

Remember back to the 2008 campaign? Before Obama had had a chance to break any of his campaign promises (his largest accomplishment so far), he had a word he like to use in his stump speeches: "bamboozle". It's a perfectly good word, I've used it myself, but for those of you not familiar with the term, it means:

to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery, or the like; humbug; hoodwink (often followed by into ): They bamboozled us into joining the club. Synonyms: gyp, dupe, trick, cheat, swindle, defraud, flimflam, hoax, gull, rook; delude, mislead, fool.

If Abe Lincoln had known Obama, he might have said, "You can bamboozle all of the people some of the time, etc."

To take another point from Obama's "Let's Pretend I'm T.R." speech (Teddy Ruxpin?):

To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law...

Now, on the face of it, that might sound like the most responsible thing for a president to do in hard economic times. What about what some people might call "lies of omission"? Or what the late Paul Harvey might have called, "the rest of the story"...

The truth is, the president's imaginary "cuts" are scheduled to take place over the next ten years, so divide that "trillion dollars" by ten and the impact of the cuts become negligible. That is to say, they would be negligible if they were real cuts. They're not.

Obama's bold deficit reduction cuts are cuts in the rate of increase only. In other words, Obama is planning on spending more money next year than this year, but wants to, wait for it, bamboozle people into thinking otherwise.

I wish that just one member of the Washington Press Corps (BTW, not "corpse", Mr. Obama!), would have the balls to stand up and ask him,

Mr. Obama, you say you have signed a trillion dollars in spending cuts. Tell us, exactly how much smaller next year's Federal budget will be compared to this years?

Mr. President?? Beuller???

You and I both know that Obama would dance around the question, probably blame Bush and then make sure that reporter's invitations were revoked from any future campaign bus trips.

Shouldn't someone be bold enough to ask the question? Are there no heirs to Edward R. Murrow? Obama might like to play act that he is FDR or JFK, or Reagan or Truman or TR, or even pretend he is taking a responsible approach to the deficit. Someone needs to call him on it. The watchdog press has become Obama's lapdog. Or maybe one of those little purse dogs, like Paris Hilton carries. It's time for the fawning bootlickers of the MSM to grow a spine and a little self respect. They tossed partisan softballs to Obama in '08 and as a result, we got the worst, and least serious president in the history of the republic. The public needs an impartial look at all the candidates running for president before next November...including the incumbent.

Update : Instapundit has video of candidate Obama promising to cut unnecessary government programs (perhaps some enterprising young reporter could ask exactly which programs Obama has cut in the last three years?), stop living beyond our means (other than trillion dollar "stimulus" bills), cut profligate spending and promised a "Net Spending Cut" if he were president.

"We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget, line by line, page by page, (unless it interferes with my golf game), programs that don't work, we should cut."

- Barack Obama


Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.

"Deep Impact" - the Deficit

And here all this time you thought that "Deep Impact" was just a movie!



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