December 28, 2022

Omnibus legislative package includes $21.2 billion for public transit and $16.6 billion for passenge

Omnibus legislative package includes $21.2 billion for public transit and $16.6 billion for passenger and freight rail


The bipartisan Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, includes $21.2 billion for public transit and $16.6 billion for passenger and freight rail, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) The bicameral agreement on Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 appropriations legislation includes the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2023 (THUD Appropriations bill). The THUD Appropriations bill appropriates the majority of public transit and passenger rail authorizations of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

“We are encouraged to see Congress honor the promise of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act by providing this funding for public transit and passenger rail for Fiscal Year 2023,” said Paul P. Skoutelas, APTA president and CEO. “This is a transformational investment in public transportation infrastructure our country so desperately needs. These historic and generational investments will enable communities to provide access to opportunities and create family-wage jobs, advance equity, tackle climate change and meet growing and evolving mobility demands.”

Specifically, the THUD Appropriations bill, together with the IIJA’s advance appropriations, provides a total of $21.2 billion for public transit in FY 2023, an increase of $704 million from the FY 2022 enacted level. In addition, the THUD Appropriations bill and IIJA provide $16.6 billion for passenger and freight rail in FY 2023, an increase of $69 million from the FY 2022 enacted level. ............(more)

https://www.masstransitmag.com/management/press-release/21291029/american-public-transportation-association-fy23-omnibus-legislative-package-includes-212-billion-for-public-transit-and-166-billion-for-passenger-and-freight-rail

December 28, 2022

9 Transportation Projects In The D.C. Region Set To Open In 2023

Every year, we take a look ahead at major transportation construction projects in the region scheduled to be completed sometime during the coming year.

Transportation construction boomed in 2022 with several generational projects completed: the Silver Line extension, Express Toll lanes on I-66, and D.C.’s first major bus lane project. In somewhat of a rare instance for big transportation projects, the new, expanded Harry Nice Bridge opened months earlier than planned. So the new bridge between Charles County, Maryland, and King George County, Virginia, missed our 2022 and 2023 lists! The East Potomac Park road redesign/new bike lanes took only a month to complete in December and also aren’t on either list.

Still, 2023 has quite the laundry list of new Metro stations, highway express lane expansions, and new bike lane projects.

We know construction schedules are notoriously finicky and projects are often delayed for a number of reasons. We tried to verify this list against project websites and reach out for confirmation, but schedules do change often. You can also find our lists from 2020, 2021, and 2022. ............(more)

https://dcist.com/story/22/12/26/transportation-project-metro-i395-dc-md-va/

December 28, 2022

George Santos is the Republican Party's future: A shameless con man

George Santos is the Republican Party's future: A shameless con man
Trump opened the door — and now every grifter and two-bit criminal sees job security in pandering to the GOP base

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 28, 2022 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) One thing was dead certain within moments of the New York Times publishing its exposé on the many lies of George Santos: There was zero chance that this brand new Republican congressman-elect from New York would be shamed into giving up his seat. Perhaps that didn't seem obvious to everyone at first, especially those with lingering memories of the pre-Trump era, when we all pretended to believe that Republican voters cared about hypocrisy, lying, overt racism, sexual abuse or any of the other personal or professional scandals that used to take politicians down routinely. But I never doubted for a moment that Santos would move onward toward being seated and that the incoming Republican House majority would allow it.

On Dec. 19, the Times published its first article making clear that little or nothing on Santos' résumé was true. He had never worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He did not run a pet charity. He hadn't graduated from Baruch College or, apparently, from any other college. His "business," the Devolder Organization, appears to be fraudulent. Nothing in that article convinced me that Santos wouldn't be sworn into Congress, and neither did the evidence that he is almost certainly not Jewish, as he had claimed to be, and that he had lied about his grandparents escaping the Holocaust. My faith that he will be seated on Jan. 3 remains unswerving, and has only been strengthened now that Democrats are calling on GOP leadership to expel Santos, which will only make Republicans dig in harder.

Now questions about Santos' possible criminality are beginning to emerge. According to the Times report, he pled guilty to check fraud in Brazil but apparently left the country without serving is sentence. Despite numerous signs that Santos' business career is mostly fictional, and evidence of significant personal debt in the recent past, he somehow lent his congressional campaign $700,000. Indeed, pretty much everything we know about his professional career (which isn't much) comes with a field of red flags.

Despite all this, the only way he doesn't join Congress as an esteemed member of the Republican caucus is if New York prosecutors can nail him for something first. I believe this in the way I believe that chocolate is delicious and cats are cute. After all, what is the modern GOP, if not a holding station for every two-bit criminal and grifter who wants the job security that can only come with exploiting the endlessly credulous Republican base? The party can no more start kicking out the fraudsters than it can stop trying to cut taxes for the rich. This is just who they are and what they do. George Santos is in no sense an anomaly. He is the Republican present and, even more to the point, the Republican future. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/28/george-santos-is-the-partys-future-a-shameless-con-man/

December 27, 2022

Unusual winter phenomenon happening now beneath U.P.'s Tahquamenon Falls

(Detroit Free Press) Amid the churning waters beneath Tahquamenon Falls — one of Michigan's most-visited, most-beloved waterfalls, in the Upper Peninsula burg of Paradise — stacks of pancakes are forming. Ice pancakes.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources recently shared a photo of the pancake ice on its Tahquamenon Falls State Park Facebook page.

"I just thought it was cool," DNR park interpreter Theresa Neal said.

Pancake ice forms a few different ways. In very turbulent waters — like at the bottom of Tahquamenon Falls — and in cold temperatures, ice granules form and clump together. Their collisions and the movement of the water rounds their shape over time, raising their edges as cold water and slush come on top. ..............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2022/12/27/ice-pancakes-tahquamenon-falls-michigan-upper-peninsula/69744163007/

December 27, 2022

Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a 'full-blown meltdown'

(NPR) A historic winter storm has tangled holiday travel and brought dangerous conditions to a big chunk of the United States, but no airline has struggled more to navigate the Christmas holiday rush than Southwest Airlines.

Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights Monday — at least 70% of its schedule for the day — and more than 2,500 flights Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET — at least 60% of its schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware. The disruptions add to chaos that has left people stranded at airports across the country, many of them with little idea of when they can get home or where their bags are.

The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights called off. Other airlines have also ordered large-scale cancellations in the past week.

....(snip)....

https://twitter.com/BrandonLRichard/status/1607250997818331136

Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline's disruptions are a result of the winter storm's lingering effects, adding that it hopes to "stabilize and improve its operation" with more favorable weather conditions.

Other issues that have exacerbated the airline's struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with "connecting flight crews to their schedules," Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments. ...................(more)

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/26/1145536902/southwest-flight-cancellations-winter-storm

December 27, 2022

The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting
The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injustice

Sam Levine
Tue 27 Dec 2022 02.00 EST


(Guardian UK) It was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.

All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.

Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.

But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.

Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote. ..............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/27/pamela-moses-voting-rights-mistake-jail

December 27, 2022

The Law Accepts Our Brains Aren't "Mature" at 18 or 21. We're Not Ready for What That Means.

Dangerous Minds
The legal world is slowly accepting that age 18—or 21—is not a magical moment of “adult” brain maturity. Are we ready for what that means?

BY JANE C. HU
DEC 27, 20225:45 AM


(Slate) In a car outside a convenience store in Flint, Michigan, in late 2016, Kemo Parks handed his cousin Dequavion Harris a gun. Things happened quickly after that: Witnesses saw Harris “with his arm up and extended” toward a red truck. Shots rang out. The wounded driver sped off but crashed into a tree. EMTs rushed him to the hospital. He was dead on arrival.

Two weeks later, Harris was arrested following a car chase. He and Parks were charged with the murder of Darnyreouckeonu Jones-Dickerson, known to his friends as Kee-Kee. At trial, a family friend testified that Jones-Dickerson and Harris had been feuding; Harris believed that Jones-Dickerson had been involved in the 2014 murder of his cousin Dominique Fuller. Parks and Harris were both convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Parks’ lawyers appealed the sentencing, arguing that it was unconstitutional. Parks was 18 at the time of his conviction, and his legal team asserted that it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” to put an 18-year-old away for life. They cited several landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases: 2005’s Roper v. Simmons, which abolished the death penalty for people under 18, and 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, which held that those 17 and younger could not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, sometimes referred to as LWOP. The lawyers argued that the age cutoffs established in those cases should be extended upward.

The case eventually made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, and in one filing, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists, and criminal justice scholars submitted an amicus brief in support. “Drawing the line at 18 for when mandatory LWOP cannot be constitutionally imposed is, from a scientific perspective, both arbitrary and underinclusive,” they wrote. “From a scientific perspective, a person’s 18th birthday is not a rational dividing line for justifying LWOP or similar sentences because the brain continues to develop and change rapidly across all the relevant metrics for several more years.”

....(snip)....

But when it comes to neuroscience and punishment, it’s getting worse: A growing body of research strongly suggests that brain development continues well into people’s 20s and beyond. There’s no hard cutoff at which most people have a “mature” brain, and there’s unlikely ever to be one even as scientists conduct more and more studies of how our minds work. There aren’t even clear indicators to test for that would signal that an individual’s brain is now grown and that it’s time to hold them accountable to a higher standard. One of the few things we can say for sure: To draw a hard line at 18 is to get it perilously wrong.

Our legal and social systems struggle with how to account for this uncertainty. Now we’re beginning to confront it head-on when young people make poor or even horrible decisions, and learning whether we can truly embrace an openness to change and fluidity—not only within the law but within ourselves. ...............(more)

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/teen-brains-neuroscience-justice-law-supreme-court.html

December 27, 2022

Democracy depends on whistleblowers like Cassidy Hutchinson -- flaws and all

Democracy depends on whistleblowers like Cassidy Hutchinson — flaws and all
Cassidy Hutchinson made an imperfect hero. But her kind of courage is crucial to protecting our fragile democracy

By CLAIRE SYLVIA - DENNIS AFTERGUT
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 27, 2022 5:30AM (EST)


(Salon) On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, the prominent Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel supposedly asked Benjamin Franklin whether the fledgling nation's new constitution would create a monarchy or a republic. He famously answered: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

In 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's final White House chief of staff, courageously played an outsized part in keeping it.

Franklin understood the fragility of democracy. Its survival requires the vigilance not only of an educated citizenry, but especially of those who serve in government. Yet the demands of loyalty and the lure of power are seductive countervailing forces. With any institution, whether a corporation or a presidency, rooting out corruption depends upon individuals who choose morality over loyalty.

In an all-too-familiar story, Hutchinson, like many whistleblowers, faced an agonizing dilemma: choosing between her moral convictions and allegiance to her former White House bosses. She understood the price that choosing morality entailed. As she told the House select committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection, "You know, I'd seen this world ruin people's lives…. I'd seen how vicious they can be…. And I was scared of that."

....(snip)....

Cassidy Hutchinson may not have been a perfect profile in courage. She was initially evasive with the committee. But whistleblowers are not required to be perfect people. In fact, they are "ordinary people under extraordinary pressure," to quote a line delivered by Al Pacino as "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman in the film "The Insider." Pacino continues: "What the hell do you expect — grace and consistency?" .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/27/democracy-depends-on-whistleblowers-like-cassidy-hutchinson--flaws-and-all/

December 27, 2022

Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a 'danger to the American people'

(Guardian UK) Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.

In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.

“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’.”

After Trump served one term and lost the Oval Office to Joe Biden in 2020, he pressured his vice-president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role as president of the session where both the Senate and House of Representatives met to certify the outcome of the race and interfere with the counting of the electoral college votes.

....(snip)....

“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the electoral college that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, adding that the institutions which prevented the Trump-fueled Capitol attack “just barely” did so. ................(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/26/jamie-raskin-electoral-college-danger-american-people

December 27, 2022

Are viruses alive? Why a seemingly simple biology question prompts heated debate among scientists

Are viruses alive? Why a seemingly simple biology question prompts heated debate among scientists
According to some criteria, viruses meet the basic definitions for "life"; according to others, they don't

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 26, 2022 2:00PM (EST)


(Salon) While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may make it difficult to perceive viruses as anything other than agents of destruction, the mundane truth is that viruses are barely even living things. In fact, some biologists — most, even — do not believe that they actually count as living things.

How can this be so? After all, viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, seem to have a horrifically efficient mechanism for reproducing themselves, suggesting they have a will to live. How could something with such a will to live not be — well — alive?

As it turns out, the question of whether a virus should be considered "alive" is one of the most fundamental in modern biology. Even today, scientists do not have a concrete answer — though they all have opinions.

"There is no single, consensus definition of life, and I doubt it is possible to develop a fully satisfactory one," Dr. Eugene V Koonin, the Evolutionary Genomics Group Leader and Distinguished Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, told Salon by email. Koonin said that while many scientists consider this question to be a "pointless, pseudo-philosophical exercise," Kooning does not personally perceive the question that way. Rather, it is "both interesting and useful for understanding the foundations of biology, and in a purely operational sense, to recognize life forms if and when candidates are discovered outside Earth," Kooning said.

....(snip)....

Dr. Jason Shepherd, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah Medical School, does not share Koonin's assessment about whether viruses qualify as alive.

"This is a classic question in biology, with the classic definition that something is alive if it reproduces, grows, and responds to external stimuli," Shepherd wrote to Salon. "The reason why people don't think viruses are alive is that they are parasites that need host cells to replicate." .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/26/are-alive-why-a-seemingly-simple-biology-question-prompts-heated-debate-among-scientists/