California Today: In Final State of the State, Brown Touts Fast Train

I have personally collected signatures to repeal the gas tax. Readers will be happy to learn that members of the democrat party helped by filling the pages without hesitation.

Jerry Brown should shelve the bullet train and divert the money being squandered on it to repairing our roads and bridges. Republicans are right to fight the gas tax for whatever reasons they choose. We have been paying gas taxes for years that were supposed to fund road repairs. Where did that money go? Frivolous and at times foolish looking projects like the bullet train to nowhere have no place when the only way to fix infrastructure is by raising taxes. Sacramento needs to have its excess leftist needle shifted more toward the middle. In fact the entire country needs to become more centrist. We need more libertarians to balance out the extremes of the GOP and the Dems and yet here in California we have yet to elect a Libertarian.

And it’s not as if I can’t already take two different trains from LA to the Bay Area and Sacramento. One is very scenic along the coast but very slow because it stops at every beach town along the way. The other goes straight up through the Central Valley but the only problem with that route is to get to the Amtrak train, I have to take a bus from Union Station in LA to get to the station in Bakersfield where the train track ends going south. Nobody in all these years have figured out how to get a regular train over all the mountains and into LA, or they just never cared to. Yet somehow they expect to so with a super duper train that goes double over the budget per mile of track just on a flat empty pasture. I’ve lived in Pasadena all my life, a town renowned not only for its parade but also dead end stumps of ambitious but abandoned freeway projects that couldn’t hold a candle to the powerful and well heeled NIMBY’s that only live to stop any project that comes even remotely close in its tracks. Most communities down here take pride in the fact that they think they’re the only community on the planet that’s worth anything. Good luck Jerry tunneling through them.

The same small minded arguments that were raised by the people who called the Erie Canal project Clinton's folly, have resurfaced with Governor Browns bullet train. Governor Clinton then and Governor Brown now understood the value of their projects and persevered. It was the Erie Canal that opened the west by boat and made New York City become the great city it is today. Governor Brown has given California that same great leadership, a steady hand and a vision for the future. I hope he has a great last year in office and that we benefit from his visionary leadership long into the future.

A always kind of laugh when Jerry says that without that bullettrain, Califoriia’s Central Valley communities are essentially cut off from the rest of the world. Guess he failed to notice all the miles of Intersate highways, railroad tracks and airports that have served it for decades while he’s been governor all these years that his dad built. I can drive LA to San Francisco in six hours and have been able to for years. Guess it never sunk in that the nickname Moonbeam was not meant as a compliment.

Governor Brown has been the most important influence in shaping the California we have today: booming economy, preservation of our environment, far-sighted on social policies. In the 70s he led the fight against fossil fuel over dependence so successfully that now CA uses the same amount of fossil fuels as European nations do--while other states like TX use many times that amount, even with a similar range of climate areas. He is a deep thinker and reader and is far more interested in the art of governing than in turning governance into the politicking that most other leaders or our press does. He persuaded the public to a modest tax rise, which the people voted for (in democracies we tax ourselves) and ended the crippling debt burden on the state. Everyone but the few (possibly paid) naysayers here approve of him very highly. Nagourney's efforts in his profile to paint him as a 'conservative' versus the eager young turks who want to replace him doesn't really understand that his eye in on governing well and ensuring that he has thought through all the dimensions of a problem. California would benefit from a high speed train though auto / oil industries deride it, though I'm not terribly certain about the Delta tunnels. But he is leaving the state in excellent shape, and I hope that those who follow him don't take it for granted or just try to eat away at the good he has done.

This speech was just another example of why my Gov. should not be given a microphone and podium.

The Administration under Brown is criminal and should be prosecuted. Brown has done more to harm citizens than any other, he released prisoners that have taken the lives of police and civilian, continued a sanctuary policy that lead to the death of police and civilians, and he taxed us so much, it affected veryone in a house, with a car with nothing in return. His obstruction of federal law is what he should be charged with ASAP. The rest of his crew will pay in the coming years, many citizens are done with them

The high speed train money would be better spent on water projects: reservoirs, dams, aqueducts, and desalination plants. The train is a luxury boondoggle. We need water.

If Jerry Brown would like to portray himself as a climate-action hero, it’s at odds with years of shameless promotion on behalf of California’s fossil fuel industry. Brown has pressured regulators to speed up issuance of drilling permits; he’s replaced two carbon-free nuclear plants with burning gas, adding 18 million tons of CO2 emissions to California’s annual total; he’s outsourced 30% of our state’s electricity to hide its dirty provenance, and ignored calls to close a leaking methane storage facility on behalf of our state’s gas industry. Though he’s managed to put lipstick on his fossil-fuel pig by erecting some solar panels and wind turbines, Brown occasionally betrays his carefully-crafted green image. At a climate conference in Bonn last year, he responded to protestors calls to “leave it [fossil fuel] in the ground” by suggesting we “put you in the ground.”

Gov. Brown is the great success story in spite of his earlier ridicule by Republican detractors who labeled him as a lightweight. I wish he had been elected as president years ago. Compared to Florida's governor and legislature, he is a superstar.

But even an 80 year old lame duck governor cannot broach the subject of Proposition 13.