California's high-speed rail project was always a loser. People already have so many affordable ways to get from San Francisco to L.A. and vice versa. The "bullet" train was never going to reach the advertised speeds, and was going to cross the most sparsely populated part of the state, for much more than the cost, per passenger, of an airplane ticket. So when Gov. Gavin Newsom canceled the project upon taking office in 2019, it was a rare moment of sanity.
But then Trump did the unthinkable: he demanded that federal taxpayers be given back some of the billions of dollars they had spent on the boondoggle. After all, in the world of real estate development, if you cancel a contract to build something, you don't get to keep the money.
Now Biden is giving California nearly $1 billion back -- even though the state is flush with cash, including over $75 billion in budget surplus funds and nearly $30 billion in "COVID relief" from the federal government. The high-speed rail, even with that money, is no longer going to connect major cities, but rural communities.
Yet another reason Californians, and Americans, should miss Donald Trump.
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
Topics:
- The state of the economy
- The fight against crime
- The midterm election fight
- The struggle for peace between Russia and Ukraine
- The airstrike on the Venezuelan drug cartel
- The attempt to sink Kennedy
- The war in Gaza
- The case against Harvard
- The Trump presidency
Tune in: SiriusXM Patriot 125, 7-10 p.m. ET / 4-7 p.m. PT
Call: 866-957-2874
This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
