Infrastructure and Bishops

So President Biden announced a new bi-partisan bill had been agreed on this week and the shit hit the fan. I don’t know why it is tyat Democrats will never learn how to be politicians. Instead of nodding their heads in agreement and starting to fire up the engines to go after all the things they won’t get in the new bill, they all started to whine. Ocasio-Cortez and her coterie of cackling hens didn’t get this. Elizabeth Warren didn’t either. Bernie Sanders won’t get six trillion for ….. SIX TRILLION?

Hey, it’s only numbers. Look, it’s a negotiation. These people are supposed to be intelligent enough to understand that once it’s signed into law they can go after the next portion of the pie with the knowledge that they already have something in the bank.

Biden certainly misspoke when he talked about linking the bipartisan infrastructure bill which is about $1.3 trillion and Sanders bill, which will have to go to reconciliation at almost $6 trillion. But if a schmuck like Rob Portman can understand and support the infrastructure bill there’s no reason why even the most progressive Dems should have a problem passing it. Yes, they want more and even Moscow Mitch McConnel will not be able to stop them from getting more once they have this piece of the larger picture in the bank.

Biden has said over and over that he wants to work with Republicans. The GOP led by McConnell has demonstrated that they don’t want to work with him. So this little break, in which a few Republicans will come along, should be encouraged. The infrastructure bill should be passed with GOP and Progressive backing and then on to the stuff that will have to be passed by reconciliation.

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AOC was given her shot at defending her positions on a number of pieces of legislation this Sunday on Meet the Press and she killed it. I have not always been a big AOC fan, mostly because of her habit of going off half-cocked, but on the issues of infrastructure, human infrastructure, climate change and voting she was clear, concise and logical; making clear points and laying down platform material that was all but unassailable. If only her Progressive partners could be so reasonable and logical the much-needed Progressive POV would stand on a much stronger base and be better represented.

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I really like Malcom Gladwell. He’s smart as hell and just enough out of control to be interesting. He comes up with points of view that no one else ever thinks about. He was on with my favorite TV host, Fareed Zacharia, this weekend where he explained a fabulous theory about computer driven cars that I had never heard before and which I thoroughly embraced.

It seems that Gladwell perceives a whole new set of problems with automated cars simply because they will be so functional. The new automated cars will have every safety feature imaginable and in addition will be courteous to a fault. No road rage for these babies, which nice as it sounds will inevitably lead to chaos in a city overrun by jaywalkers.

But we have jaywalkers now, you say. Yes, but they are at least somewhat constrained by the fear of death. They know that if they step into the path of an oncoming vehicle there is at least an even chance that the driver is on her cell phone screaming at her ex for missing alimony payments which give the jaywalker only about a twenty percent chance of not getting knocked into next November.

Not so with automated cars, which will stop for the pedestrian whether he or she is right or wrong. Picture all those green lights with pedestrians ignoring them the way bicyclists do now with red ones. Picture all the automated cars stopping for those jaywalkers and understand that it will probably take four hours minimum to get across town.

Gladwell has a definite point. One for which I see no possible solution. Maybe we’ll just have to go back to trollies and make all cars park in The Bronx.

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Last week the Roman Catholic Bishops of America illustrated their stupidity and attempted to throw away every advantage that has been ceded to organized religion by the quasi-religious citizenry of this nation since its inception

This happened when a significant majority of the bishops voted to refuse communion to Joseph Biden, the President of he United States and an ardent Catholic. The reasoning or as it appears unreasoning, was based on the fact that Biden has supported legislation protecting the rights of pregnant women seeking abortion.

Abortion is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church. So is pedophilia but that doesn’t seem to have slowed down the moves of thousands of Catholic and Hasidic clergymen.

The stupidity of the bishop’s move looks even worse when considered in the light of all the concessions given to organized religion by political America just to keep the religions noise makers out of American politics.

We are a nation firmly based on the principal of separation of church and state. Our founding fathers, many of whom had come here fleeing religious persecution only to find it already established by the likes of Cotton Mather in the Protestant churches of New England, had gone far out of their way to give extensive concessions to those churches with the stipulation that they would not venture into politics.

Over the years most religions have first accepted those concessions and then raged against political positions from their pulpits. But that has almost always been by individuals, while the organized religious councils have kept their peace with politics. Of course what started out as a nation in which almost everyone had some kind of religion has developed into a nation in which almost 50% of the population has none. The fact that our latest Supreme Court Justice grew up under the influence of a religious cult made up of charismatic Catholics has many who normally ignore religion losing their minds.

The biggest concession made to religious groups has always been in the form of forgiveness of taxes, both income and property. With true believers no longer in the majority, government bodies might soon begin to eliminate those concessions. The numbers would be staggering. The Roman Catholic Church’s property taxes in New York City alone might come to billions of dollars a year. It would crush the organization financially. The same but maybe to a lessor extent would be true for all other religious organizations. This would be catastrophic on many levels because religious organizations do significant good. The Catholic School system, the second biggest in the country, would collapse along with many hospitals and other care organizations, And all this could happen because the Catholic Bishops couldn’t keep their end of a bargain and stay out of politics.