Number’s game on MOM

NJ Transit released a new set of ridership figures that have supporters of the Monmouth Junction variant of the MOM Line crowing.

The figures show that the line running through Monmouth Junction would likely attract 27,450 riders per day, while the Matawan line would attract 24,050 riders and the Red Bank line would attract 16,800 riders. A study from 2005, which assumed a Newark terminus, projected that the Matawan route would have the most riders at 10,900 daily trips, followed by Monmouth Junction at 9,000 trips and Red Bank at 7,900 trips.

The change, according to NJ Transit, was based on two new assumptions: a change in destination from Newark to New York, thanks to a proposed new tunnel under the Hudson River; and new population estimates that go out an extra five years to 2030, which increases anticipated population in western Monmouth County.

I won’t dispute the numbers — NJ Transit didn’t provide a lot of background this week — but focusing solely on the ridership numbers, as Monmouth Junction supporters have been doing creates a misleading picture of the MOM debate. There also are the cost estimates, which peg the South Brunswick line as the most expensive to build and run. The Monmouth Junction alignment would cost $860 million to construct and $49 million to operate, compared to $600 million and $42 million for the Red Bank option and $730 million and $45 million for the Matawan option, according to a 2005 N.J. Transit study.

So consider this: The Monmouth Junction line would serve about 14 percent more riders, but cost about 18 percent more to build than the Matawan line.

In a time of tight budgets, the money should be an important factor — as should the concerns of the people in Middlesex County who would have to live along the route.

For southern Middlesex County, the Monmouth Junction alternative still makes no sense.

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Exactly who are the cynics, anyway?

Glenn Greenwald makes a pretty salient point today in discussing the Beltway tendency to dismiss “anyone who aggressively objects to the Bush administration’s extremism, and especially its lawbreaking,” as “either fringe, unSerious, overly earnest losers,” or “simply pretending to be bothered by such things in order to rouse the rabble and exploit them for cynical political gain.”

Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable — anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking — is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.

Greenwald’s issue is with the manner in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, though a staffer, attacked Connecticutt Sen. Chris Dodd, a fellow Democrat, because Dodd refused to go along with Reid’s — and most of the rest of the Democrats’ — support for granting telecom companies immunity for their involvement in the Bush eavesdropping scandal.

After all, it can’t possibly be the case that Dodd actually believes in what he’s doing and saying. He can’t really care if telecoms are protected from the consequences of their years of deliberate, highly profitable lawbreaking. Clearly, Dodd’s just doing all of this to prop up his flagging presidential campaign, just a cynical ploy for attention, not because he has any actual convictions that there is something wrong with granting such an extraordinary and corrupt gift to lawbreaking telecoms. No Serious person would ever actually get riled up about anything like that.

Greenwald connects the Reid attack on Dodd to similar dismissals of Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, last year.

Feingold was one of the few voices on the national political scene who actually objected meaningfully to the fact that the President was deliberately breaking our laws in how he spied on Americans ever since October, 2001. Feingold spent the year espousing what ought to have been the uncontroversial proposition that for Congress simply to look the other way and to ignore these revelations of illegality would be to reward lawbreaking and eviscerate the rule of law. But his motives were impugned by the Beltway establishment exactly as they are doing now to Dodd.

In March 2006, when Feingold introduced his Resolution to censure the President for breaking our laws, the super-sophisticated punditocracy, GOP Bush apologists, and the highly responsible Betlway Democratic establishment all jointly scoffed at Feingold, oh-so-knowingly dismissing his little outburst as nothing more than a cynical ploy to shore up the “leftist base” as he prepared to run for President. After all, nobody could really take seriously the idea that Bush shouldn’t be allowed to break our laws. The only possible motive for pretending to care is that Feingold wanted to scrounge up support for his presidential campaign.

Feingold announced in November, 2006 that he wasn’t running for President, yet he continued to pursue these matters with exactly the same tenacity and intensity as before. There he was this week, standing with Dodd against warrantless surveillance and telecom immunity, even though — as a Senator from a far-from-blue state — there is little political benefit and some risk in his doing so.

So perhaps Feingold was sincere all along, maybe he does genuinely believe that the President and the telecom industry shouldn’t be permitted to break our laws with impunity. But that thought is beyond the reach of our Establishment guardians. Because they believe in nothing other than their own petty Beltway rituals, they assume everyone else is similarly barren and empty, bereft of any actual convictions about anything.

The point here is that the entire political culture of Washington has become enamored of its own cynical games. The folks at the center of it — the politicians of both parties, the media (both print and broadcast) and the various paid consultants, lobbyists and assorted hangers-on — have lost sight of what matters. Everything is about advantage, money and power and those politicians who are willing to act on something more noble like Dodd and Feingold — and like Ron Paul and Chuck Hagel on the Republican side — are deemed to be rabble rousers of the worst sort and shunted to the outside of the process.

Dodd’s quixotic presidential bid — you have to know that he knows he’s tilting at windmills — offers him a platform on which to make his case about FISA in the same manner in which Bill Richardson is using his platform to agitate for withdrawal from Iraq and John Edwards is using his to draw attention to the nation’s economic disparities.

Might there be ego involved? Of course. I have never met a politician at any level that did not have some inflated sense of himself. But there has to be more to it than ego and cynicism. And if there is not, then we are waging an unwinnable war to save our democracy.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Runner’s diary, Thursday

Managed a three-mile run today, slow pace, despite this head cold that has kicked me in the butt. Did a little lifting afterward.

When the paper is done — and after our office get-together — it will be time for bed. I’m bushed.

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Bad electoral math

The Electoral College has outlived what little usefulness it has had.

Included in the U.S. Constitution as a way to ameliorate concerns from small states like Delaware that the presidency would be dominated by the larger states — and as a way to dilute the votes of actual citizens — the Electoral College offers little to American democracy.

The 2000 election, of course, proves the point, with a candidate taking the popular vote losing the election because he couldn’t cobble together the correct menu of states.

The 2004 vote, as well, plays into this. President George Bush won the popular and electoral votes, but the results in Ohio were close enough that there remains some doubt as to who won the state. Had John Kerry eeked out a win in Ohio, he would have bested President Bush and repeated the 2000 results — election of a president who lost the popular vote because he managed to win the right states.

So doing away with the Electoral College would seem a useful democratic reform. The trouble is that the changes on the table right now are flawed in various ways. In California, as John Dean points out, a politically motivated plan is being pushed by left-coast Republicans via the referendum process hoping to offset the incredible impact on the electoral vote that California’s backing of Democrats have.

In New Jersey, a plan to grant all of the state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote was tabled, while another plan — sponsored by state Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Monmouth) — would be similar to the California proposal and has the backing of The Asbury Park Press.

The California plan would apportion electoral votes based on Congressional districts — an absurd approach that would be no more representative than the current winner-take-all setup now in place. The winner in each Congressional district would get that electoral vote.

There are two basic flaws in this approach. First, Congressional districts are, after all, gerrymandered to create safe seats and have little to do at this point with representative government. States controlled by Democrats, for instance, can gerrymander districts to enhance their numbers — witness the Texas debacle a few years ago when the GOP attempted a mid-cycle redistricting.

Just as importantly, state-by-state reform that is not tied to national reform will do little more than dilute the importance of individual states. So long as Texas maintains a winner-take-all approach, California’s reforms will backfire. Texas will still give its large number of electoral votes to the GOP while California under the proposed reform would split its votes, in this case weakening the chances of the Democratic candidate. Flip the circumstances and the GOP would suffer.

As I said, none of the plans on the tables in the various states are perfect. The right way to do this would be to amend the U.S. Constitution and eliminate the Electoral College — not an easy task.

So something short of that should be done. The New Jersey plan tabled Monday appears to be the best of a bad lot — but only when enough states sign on to guarantee at least half of the nation’s electoral votes would be decided in this manner.

Otherwise, there is too great a chance that reforms will backfire.

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