Jerry Brown v. Some Other Guy.
There’s no suspense here, is there? Brown seems to have it in the bag. And he seems to deserve it, too.
Jerry Brown’s done a fantastic job. In a sensible world, he’d be a contender for President if that’s what he wants to do.
Concur. Jerry Brown the first was a bit of an inexperienced, idealistic dork, but the second edition was his father on super-soldier serum.
He took over a “nation” of idiots with about as much sense and future as Haiti, and got enough of them to take the hard step of marching towards the same goals, no matter how much it hurt.
California’s a long ways from being fixed, but it’s on one holy hell of a lot better road than when Ahnold left it.
Isn’t he a bit old for it?
If he can run a state the size of France, he can run the United States government.
Unlike in other parts of the country, the Tea Party candidates generally lost to mainstream Republicans. I voted for Tim Donnelly, the Teabagger, just to help Brown in the fall, like he needed my help.
Yeah, the mere suggestion that Gov. Brown doesn’t have this race locked up is kind of laughable. I mean, he’s weighed down slightly by his bullet train push, but nobody cares enough about that to push Brown out of his office.
I’d vote for Brown over Kashkari. Not sure that means I’ll actually vote for Brown rather than some other loser, but Brown aint all bad. The bullet train is bullshit though.
What ever happened to that project, anyway?
The same thing that happens to every such Gernsbackian future proposal, especially those related to mass transit: they go back to the pages of PopSci.
Until some corporation, pol or group is in trouble, and then they haul them out and dust them off to prove how forward-thinking they are.
:dubious: Really?
California is about 60% the size of France by land area and 57% by population. But you’re probably right.
Yes. I don’t think they read Popular Science or Discover in Europe or Southeast Asia. You’ll note that a very large and wealthy country - some even call it a “superpower” - is conspicuously missing from that list.
Despite an untold number of promises, prototypes, test programs and hot air… often sounding as if read from breathless sortascience magazines.
The point is, HSR is more than some “Gernsbackian future proposal” if it’s up and running in other countries.
Well, yes and no. Not all of those installations are running to capacity or cost anything like their projected amounts. Not all of them have added value to transportation options. A lot are quite frankly prestige projects with little current value to the country’s infrastructure.
If the US, a vast and wealthy country with a large population that has reasons to get from one distant place to another quickly and at at reasonable cost, can’t find a place for high speed rail and hasn’t been able to for the fifty or so years of its existence, it should tell you something. One of the things it should be telling you is that public transportation needs to be a dense network, and throwing out one fancy link doesn’t accomplish much… not if the riders have to drive to Terminal A and then get other transportation (likely a rental car) to move around usefully from Terminal B. We need the Amtrak/Greyhound of the 1950s - covering nearly every town in the US and allowing easy transportation from anywhere to nearly anywhere, seamlessly - more than we need one or two elite HSR lines no one much will ride and which offer no local-area equivalent around their paltry few stations.
And no, spending billions on such narrowly-focused, problematic and largely useless links is NOT a “good start.” It’s much like putting an entire effort into putting one or two rickety craft on the Moon, with no infrastructure for anything else.
If Sacramento was smart (I know, I know) they would invest a billion in widening the rail link through the Cajon Pass. It’s a bottleneck that will strangle SoCal trade eventually. If they expanded the trackage for regular rail, it would then be an easy step to HSR from LA/Berdoo/Barstow/Las Vegas.
But back to the OP: Brown 2.0 I exactly what we needed after the Governator got done ruining the state. Another demonstration of what happens when Republicans get control of a state government.
In fact, the only reason he isn’t considered already elected is that California law mandates a runoff. Brown got 54% of the vote. (Since this is not a Presidential election year, all primary ballots in California are the same; there was one list of names for Governor, each voter got to vote for one, and the two with the most votes - Brown, and Neel Kashkari - will runoff in November. The primary for every state or federal office except for President will work this way.)
I don’t think those two sentences quite go together. Arnie tried damned hard to do what was needed, but with zero political experience or capital he just sort of broke everything he yanked on. The R’s in power let him. I think he gets 9/10 for effort, a whole lot less for accomplishment, and points off for the pointless breakage.
Brown 2.0 combines that original fiery idealism with decades of hard-won political ability… and it shows.
I can’t think of any other governor in my lifetime that has that depth of knowledge of California and it’s problems, the political capital and contacts to make things happen, and the balls to actually get dirty doing what needs to be done.
You would think that spending billions of dollars just to make it easier for Californians to spend money in another state would be the last thing a governor wants.
Do you honestly think there would be that much traffic on an LAX-LAS high speed rail link other than people going to Vegas on Friday afternoon and returning on Sunday morning? There’s a reason hotel prices in Vegas as much higher on weekends than they are on weekdays.