Veepstakes

I think this Wall Street Journal article hit the nail on the head with their short-list of VPs for both McCain and Obama.

For Obama: Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Tim Kaine, Jack Reed, Kathleen Sebelius.

For McCain: Charlie Crist, Carly Fiorina, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, John Thune.

I don't think Obama will choose Chris Dodd, Tim Kaine, or Kathleen Sebelius. Dodd because of his connections to the insurance and banking industries. Kaine because he just doesn't seem to offer that much to the ticket besides being from VA and another "outsider." He lacks foreign policy experience, national name recognition, etc. If Obama is inexperienced (of course he isn't, but...), Kaine is a baby. Sebelius because some former Clintonites might be offended that he would pick a woman who wasn't Hillary, and also for the same reasons Kaine is unlikely (no foreign policy experience). I think Bayh, Biden, Clinton, and Reed would all be excellent picks for different reasons, but Reed is still by far my favorite.

As for McCain, I think Crist, Fiorina, and Palin are unlikely. I don't have as many reasons for that. Just more of a hunch. My picks remain Portman, Romney, or Thune. Pawlenty has proven himself, at least in my opinion, to be really boring on the talk show circuit. Portman might also be boring, but he brings major economic street cred. Of course Romney Mittens Guy Smiley would be a dream come true. Thune would be a good pick, although being pretty far right wing, would have some major policy disagreements with McCain.

Guy Smiley on the stump.
How can people like this man? Seriously.

This Should Not Be Happening

You know, there was a time when people thought the roads of the 21st century would look like this--

--not this:

--

Can you imagine anything more profoundly terrifying than having an Interstate bridge collapse underneath you? It's an image from a nightmare.

--

After that steam-pipe exploded in Manhattan, there were a number of stories about how America's infrastructure is growing old and decrepit. Nothing came of it, but I was struck by the thought; isn't America supposed to be the country where things work? Wasn't America the country that engineered the rest of the world, that built incredible public structures as -- among other things -- momuments to human accomplishment? And what does it say that now they're falling apart?

TIME Magazine wrote this (emphasis mine):

A burst pipe in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday stirred the anxieties of New Yorkers who have experienced plenty of them since 9/11. But given the decrepit state of the country's urban infrastructure, the debacle could very well have been at a bridge in Boston or a sewer in Philadelphia. Indeed, the Manhattan steam-pipe geyser might be compared to the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 blackout of the Eastern Seaboard: accidents and catastrophes that might have been prevented with the right funding and political priorities.

Urban planning experts say America's older cities are modern-day Pompeiis - within range of volcanoes of infrastructure failures like New York's. On Wednesday, a pipe, laid in 1924, exploded near Grand Central station, killing one person and injuring 30. Maintaining a sewer system is hardly a sexy political issue, but years of funding neglect and a subsequent lack of maintenance nationwide have left many of the country's engineering systems unprepared to handle future stresses. "We have an aging infrastructure in this country, and we are not doing enough to maintain it and replace it," said Sarah Catz, director of the Center for Urban Infrastructure at University of California-Irvine. "What you saw happen in New York will happen in all types of infrastructures."

The issue is widespread, said Dan LeClair, who teaches city planning at Boston University. "It's not just pipes," he said. "It's bridges, it's roads, it's electrical systems, it's a variety of things that can happen in a man-made environment that can have a disastrous effect." A recent report by the Urban Land Institute determined that America's comparatively low investment in various transportation infrastructure - airports, public transit, railway systems, roads and bridges - has created an "emerging crisis." Of the 30 state transportation planning directors surveyed for the report, 25 said the nation's transportation infrastructure is incapable of meeting the nation's needs over the next decade.

It's too early to speculate on the cause of this particular disaster -- while Minnesota's Republican governor had been making enormous cuts to state services (as Republicans like to do while lowering taxes on the rich), there are conflicting reports on the bridge's structural integrity and whether inspections had been happening properly. Besides, our hearts are all with the people in Minnesota who lost loved ones today, and right now they need to trust their governor.

But at some point we need to confront this idea that America's infrastructure simply works on its own. It's not true. And this habit of cutting government funding for such things -- which has been around since Ronald Reagan and the "small government" mania of the 1980s -- has got to stop. Conservatives, it seems, fail to understand that when you don't fund your infrastructure it fucks up. And then people die.

Think about that.