Gah. What next.

Tibetan Buddhist monks wearing masks perform religious dances during the celebration of the Great Prayer Festival or the Monlam. [REUTERS]

I read a plaintive little article, somewhere or other, in the recent days… stating… for all the sturm and drang and money, couldn’t we please just have single payer health care and reform?  And mightn’t it alone do wonders for the country?

I am with that person.  That is my take.   Because in the past few days I also caught an interview with Uwe Rhinehart, the health policy guy at Princeton, that the average big city hospital has as many as 900 in back office staff, doing the insurance juggle.

Give it up.  It, that way, is failing on all fronts.  (I know they won’t.)

Instead we get governmental performance art.  And visible slippage.  Op Ed begs from the Commander in Chief.  Headlines to die or kill over.  Democrats surprised that R make repeated flanking motions.  Their front line warriors use poison tipped spears.

Well, they know the tender spots in the Democratic flanks.  They surely do.

It’s a snow storm.. but I did catch a couple of posts here and there on environmental (and transportation)  issues in the bill.  Frankly I had just grit my teeth and hoped that there were “shovel ready”, but lagging in the doing, plans that had environmental studies done and waiting.  And that they need not be done again.  As it is, I hear that most “shovel ready” (not that I know what I am talking about) is just overdue maintenance.  Well, we can use an awful lot of that, too.

However………

From Elana Schor at TPM-DC:

Vice President Biden, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) will be appearing at a suburban Maryland train station tomorrow morning to tout the congressional stimulus bill — or in the White House press office’s words, “the need to invest in transportation infrastructure in order to build a 21st century economy.” And few thinking Americans would challenge them on that point.

But as lawmakers and the mainstream press are coming to realize, and as we noted weeks ago, the stimulus plan dedicates stunningly few resources to creating the type of transportation infrastructure that can alleviate over-taxed public transit systems while weaning the nation from its obsession with environmentally unsustainable car travel.

What’s the trouble? Why aren’t we seeing liberal Democrats, at the very least, push for the kind of groundbreaking transit projects that not only create jobs, but fulfill the president’s promise for a massive investment in public works?

And this am, Biden did head on out to that train station to lie lie lie in fine Biden fashion.  I am reminded that Perrin, just yesterday, wondered how much bullscheisse the so called Liberals will swallow, then noted, hell they already swallowed Biden.  So they have sturdy gullets.  Tank class stomaches.

Vice President Joe Biden, joining in the hard sell for the economic stimulus plan, went today to a commuter rail station in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Laurel, Md., to highlight the infrastructure spending in the bill.

Biden said that President Obama’s plan would create 400,000 jobs in the next two years by investing at least $100 billion in mass transit systems, highways, bridges, ports — what the White House calls the largest increase in infrastructure spending since the creation of the national highway system in the 1950s.

But fellow Democrats in the Senate fell two votes short on Tuesday of adding $25 billion for highways, mass transit, and water projects to the package. Republicans blocked the move, insisiting that any additional infrastructure spending be offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the package.

Critics of the $819 billion version of the stimulus bill passed by the House last week say it falls far short on infrastructure spending — which many economists say is one of the quickest ways to create jobs — compared to the pledges the president has made. Analysts computed that only 5 percent of the House legislation would go to highway, mass transit, and rail projects.

Back to Elana:

[L]et’s take Boxer first. Green transit advocates are perplexed by her decision to sign on to a amendment sponsored by mass transit critic Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) that would strike a $5.5 billion surface-transportation grant program and instead use the money for general road-building.

What’s even more distressing is the possibility that Boxer could sign on to a proposal from her GOP counterpart on the environment panel, the notorious climate-change denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), to divert up to $50 billion in unspent stimulus money to road-building.

The Inhofe plan hasn’t materialized yet, and my inquiries to Boxer’s staff on the question haven’t yet been answered. But as Environmental Defense Fund transportation director Michael Reflogle told me, “this massive shift to the highways account would do nothing to enhance the system of public transportation and come with no assurances” that the money would be used first on repairing existing roads before building highways that may not be needed.

This is what’s known as a “fix-it-first” requirement — the second of my two story-lines — and it’s something that Congress has proved sadly unwilling to include in the stimulus bill. “Intense pressure has been put on senators” to pass the stimulus quickly, Reflogle explained. “We’re certainly hoping that what ultimately gets considered might look different than what was discussed initially, might reflect some of the concerns we raised.”  …

Worse, the post from Schor goes on to speculate that a possible run (I am unsure it would happen this way) between Boxer and Arnold may be influencing her.  Could be.  Dianne has her eye fixed on it, but we all know politics is what you make of it.  And people die…

But if a Democrat with Boxer’s cred isn’t pushing for a “fix-it-first” requirement in the stimulus bill, who will?

Kate McMahon, a transportation policy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, lamented the lack of a constituency for fix-it-first as “atrocious.”

…

When I wondered aloud about the political climate that would make such a seemingly practical provision out of reach, she observed: “The road-building lobby is pretty powerful. People just don’t want … to deal with it. At this point, [fix-it-first] would have to be something that gets voted on, and no one wants to offer an amendment that won’t pass. Right now they don’t even know if they can get the package passed entirely.”

And so we hang.

Then I read this over at Ambinder.  Which goes back to the environmental issues.

Full text:

The environmental lobby has many fires to put out and a few days worth of water left. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) opposes the stimulus package, but he wants to try and make it easier for federal agencies to build things more quickly. To do that, he’s proposed an amendment to exempt certain stimulus-related projects from the mandatory National Environmetal Protection Act review.

Sen. Barbara Boxer’s amendment would require every stimulus-related project to complete NEPA review.  Barrasso wants those projects whose reviews are taking longer than 270 days to be considered exempt or cleared; Boxer wants all projects being given stimulus money to get the benefit of a full environmental review.

NEPA can be time-consuming; critics say it is an example of liberal bureaucratic protectionism at its worst. But environmental advocates say that NEPA’s oversight is critical and ensures that programs are efficient, environmentally conscious, and don’t provide unnecessary risks to those who implement them.  The Chamber of Commerce supports Barrasso’s amendment.

The amendments are supposed to come to the floor this afternoon, and pro-NEPA forces worry that, with all the talk about money needing to be handed out quickly, attempts to slow down this down will be politically precarious.

I am told that Boxer is meeting with environmental advocates soon to plot last-minute strategy.

So… maybe a jobs bill for the re-election? Maybe.  I am not saying to ignore environmental studies (hell I am a coastal dweller, state of California too!).  But could we, maybe, survive this damned bill?

stolen from Ben Smith… all his caption said was it was taken at a “stimulus presser”.

In God We Trust.