Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

They’ve got to be kidding, right?
Tollbooths on Route 95? Hiking the gas tax a dime or more? Taxing people a penny for every two miles they drive their cars? A hundred bucks to register your car, hiked to $120 in a couple of years?

They can’t be serious.
The “they” to whom I refer is the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Transportation Funding. Its members are all good people and I do hope they are kidding, or at least that they are proposing all these onerous, unworkable and regressive solutions to prompt someone to realize they were given an impossible job.
Given the current economy and circumstances, states can not do their own repair, rehabilitation and rebuilding of the highways and bridges that are part of the Interstate Highway System. I did not say it is a difficult job, or a burdensome job. No it is an impossible job.
As Governor Carcieri reported last week after meeting with 45 of his counterparts from across the nation, 41 of them are leading states with significant budget deficits.
All the governor’s horses and all the governors blue ribbon panel members aren’t going to put the Pawtucket and Sakonnet river bridges back together again. Carcieri and all the other governors are going to have enough on their hands just keeping their states operating.
The way I see it, there is only one person in the entire world who can save America’s highways and bridges, boost the national economy and help pull the states out of the swamps of red ink into which almost all are swiftly sinking.
That person is Osama bin Laden. Yes, that Osama bin Laden.
The Interstate Highway System was conceived by the Eisenhower administration back in the 1950s as a way to move people and goods in case of an enemy attack. Back then the bogeyman was the Soviet Union and the “international communist conspiracy.” That was the rationale that allowed the commitment of billions of dollars (who knows what it would amount to in 2008 dollars) to create our interconnected network of highways that spans the country.
The result was nothing less than sensational. Really, name me one other thing the federal government has ever done that is as a good an idea or was as well-executed as the Interstate Highway System.
 But that was 50 years ago or more and the system is starting to show its age. So after a half century, it is time to do it again. Not a piecemeal “stimulus package,” not aid pigeonholed to go to the state where the congressmen and senators who have the most clout come from, but a full-blown overhaul of the entire Interstate Highway System, fully funded by the feds.
That would not only put people to work and strengthen the nation’s infrastructure, but it will take pressure off the states’ transportation budgets so they can fix surface roads and bridges and perhaps invest in public transportation.
But how to get Congress to commit to such a massive and stupendous project, one that doesn’t benefit a few rich bankers who contribute heavily to political campaigns?
For that you need a hated and feared enemy. For that you need a mysterious and elusive bogeyman. For that you need bin Laden.
We have to renew and rejuvenate the Interstate Highway System immediately because an attack with poison gas, a biological agent, a dirty bomb or an outright nuclear weapon will require that we are able to move huge numbers of people and all kinds of material from one part of the country to another quickly and efficiently.
If George Bush showed us anything in his eight years as president, he demonstrated that you can get Congress to throw half of the Constitution into the wastebasket or do pretty much anything else you want them to do simply by threatening to call them soft on terrorism or soft on bin Laden. How else could any reasonable person who values freedom explain the USA PATRIOT Act?
When Barack Obama becomes president, he can propose a stimulus package on steroids — overhaul the nation’s entire highway infrastructure like Ike did and build the nation out of an economic catastrophe like FDR did (Obama is big on bi-partisanship) by waving the bloody terrorism shirt, declaring a couple of phony baloney Orange Alerts like Bush did, and tagging any congressman or senator who votes against his plan as a bin Laden ally, vulnerable to being shipped down to Guantanamo as an enemy combatant before the place finally gets shut down.
Then we won’t have to worry about paying tolls on Route 95.

Coderre controversy
Former Pawtucket Sen. Tom Coderre emerged from obscurity last week and was immediately plunged into controversy.
It wasn’t really Coderre himself who was controversial, but the job to which he was appointed — chief of staff to incoming Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed — and more so the salary that job carries — 130,000 smackeroos a year.
That is a handsome paycheck, no doubt about it.
But once he officially comes on board, Coderre will not be alone among Statehouse bigwigs who are paid a high enough salary to qualify for the tax breaks for the rich the General Assembly has approved in recent years. Not even close.
The announcement drew fire from Republicans as well as Democrats fuming that people with insider connections (as Coderre undeniably has) are being handed six-figure salaries while the state is teetering on the abyss of an economic depression.
Governor Carcieri, a Republican, was quickly out with a press release branding the salary “absolutely irresponsible.”
“The State Senate is spending taxpayer money on high-price staff members when the state is on the brink of financial disaster,” the Carcieri statement continued.
That smacked of the gubernatorial pot calling the senatorial kettle black.
Carcieri himself has been criticized on numerous occasions for filling various six-figure jobs while the state was in deficit and he was demanding substantial givebacks from unionized state employees. I could easily paper at least one wall of my office with press releases from Democratic Party Chairman William Lynch slamming Carcieri for that very thing. I looked to see if there were any that used the words “absolutely irresponsible,” but I couldn’t find one.
But Coventry Sen. Leonidas Raptakis, a Democrat who has set himself up as the contrarian with the nerve to stand up to the new Senate leadership (maybe the Republicans could draft him to be minority leader) made a good point when he said that you could offer that job at $50,000 to $75,000 a year and get a slew of amply qualified applicants.
If the Republican caucus in the General Assembly weren’t so pitifully small, if there were enough lawmakers with the guts to stand up to the leadership in their respective chambers, the controversy over the Coderre hiring could be the jumping off point for a hard-eyed examination of every huge salary on the state payroll, in the executive branch as well as legislative.
But there aren’t, so it won’t be.
You voted them in, so pay your taxes and shut up about it, I guess.