American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit.

Michael Anton’s controversial 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election” was compared to Tom Paine’s Common Sense as a tract that grabbed the public imagination. Michael is back now with a new book, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote That Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose. Steve Hayward talked with Michael Sunday …

But in a spirit of candor, Anton does not halt his explanation there. He admits that he declined to reveal his name because he feared losing friends, he feared being hated, and most of all he feared “ending a reasonably successful corporate career with no possibility of it ever being revived.”

//

I am sure I criticized the anonymous nature of the article as well at the time.

Now that I have seen the Turner administration go after a friend's employment based on twitter commentary, I am not so bothered by it.

That article has arguably changed the trajectory of Michael's life, and could well have put him in jeopardy of prolonged unemployment at the time. In retrospect, I have no beef with the anonymity or Charles Kesler's judgment in allowing it.

unless you're a complete idiot like stockman

We’re not crazy radicals here, we’re just going for net-zero emissions rather than zero emissions in ten yearsbecause we are part of the reality-based community.

Heh

Yup - and has been for a long time

ah, Angelo

Second: The Republican congressional leadership didn’t really care about the wall, and certainly wasn’t going to go to the mat for Trump on the issue when he wasn’t asking it to. [snip] (Alternatively–and better from my perspective–Republicans could have tried to redirect their supporters’ attention to better ways to enforce the immigration laws, like mandating that employers check the legal status of new hires.)

[snip]

Third: Throughout 2017 and 2018, Senate Democrats had the power to filibuster wall funding (and while Senate Republicans could have changed the rules to eliminate this power, they did not have 50 senators that wanted to take this step).

// The main problem: The GOP did not and still does not have 50 senators who want to address this issue.

The Stone indictment reads like an episode of The Three Stooges. Stone and two associates — conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerry Corsi, and left-wing-comedian-turned-radio-host Randy Credico, respectively denominated “Person 1” and “Person 2” — are on a quest to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton and when Assange is going to publicize it. But that does not suit Stone, who has cultivated an image of political dirty trickster and plugged-in soothsayer. In public, then, Stone pretends to know more than he knows and to have an insider’s view of Assange’s operation; behind the scenes, he scrounges around for clues about what Assange is up to, hoping some insider will tell him.

That is, it’s a clown show. A despicable one, at that. Assange is an inveterate anti-American who has done incalculable damage to U.S. intelligence operations. How interesting that Robert Mueller led the FBI during those debacles and has special incentive to dig into the WikiLeaks–Kremlin connection. And how interesting that Assange was a heroic figure to the Left, and the bane of the national-security Right, before his apparent distaste for Hillary flipped the script (at least for blind Trump and Clinton partisans).