Boy, things just get stranger every day around here, in Washington. The Montgomery County government is threatening to curtail public transportation. This is a replay of what it tried to do last year, even with my commuter bus, the wonderous #37 Ride-On.  We arose to stop the stupidity back then, trying to explain to the county executives that eliminating efficient modes of transportation and forcing the substitution of more expensive ones would not save county government money in the longer run. This is obvious. We also tried to explain that their proper metric of accounting was not their own parochial budget but the good of the community people who elected them. This was a hard concept for them to grasp. 

Apparently, they are not alone. In the New York Times yesterday, there was a front page story, dateline St. Louis, about the paradox of there now being more riders on buses and trains and less of them to ride. It's not a paradox, but a sign of stupidity, and of the Federal system not meshing properly. You cut public transportation routes and you will increase unemployment in the class segments that can least afford it, people who have no other viable, affordable way to get to work. You create a cascade of disconnection. You harm the economy double: not only do you not create jobs, you destroy ones that exist. The stimulus package would be more efficient by far if it saved jobs that already existed than tried to create new ones. But that's not how the thing seems to be designed with respect to mass transit. 

The result? We will end up delivering new buses and train cars in three or four years time to transportation systems that have eliminated the routes on which those buses and train cars are supposed to go, and have mothballed all the vehicles they used to run. And later on, the people who are in charge now will say, Oh, well, we didn't realize. Horsefeathers. If I can see that now, and you can see that now, so can they.

Also amusing (yes, you have to have a graveyard sense of humor these days) is another New York Times item -- Maureen Dowd's columns. Maureen Dowd was savagely funny and insightful during the Bill Clinton watch. With George W. Bush, however, she lost her muse entirely. She was in an over-the-top competition where she had no real comparative advantage, for there was so very, very much for liberals to be over the top about. Now, she seems to be back in her element. In a way she's a kind of Benjamin Button columnist, a backwards critic who excels at skewering her own kind better than her ideological opposites. 

As always, there is plenty more to say, but I lack the octane right now to say it. So a brief blog today; forgive me, those who may be listening in.