Tag Archives: Amtrak

This Is What Is Planned

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On Wednesday, Breitbart posted an article that included a question to President Biden from Zeke Miller of the Associated Press and President Biden’s response.

Here are the question and the response:

Miller: As you mentioned, you mentioned that Americans are frustrated. In fact, 75% of voters say the country is heading in the wrong direction, despite the results of last night. What, in the next two years, do you intend to do differently to change people’s opinion of the direction of the country, particularly as you contemplate a run for president in 2024.

Biden: Nothing. Because they’re just funding out what we’re doing. The more they know about what we’re doing, the more support there is. Do you know anybody who wants us to get rid of the change we made on prescription drug prices and raise prices again? Do you know anyone who wants us to walk away from building roads and bridges and the Internet and so on? I do not know — I think that the problem is, the major piece of legislation that we passed, some of it bipartisan, takes time to be recognized. For example, you’ve got over a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure money. Not that many spades have been put in the ground. It’s taking time — for example, I was on the phone congratulating a Californian recently, and then someone up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the congressman who got elected, he said, “Can you help us make sure that we are able to have high-speed rail service from Scranton to New York City?” I said, “Yeah, we can. We can.” First of all, it’ll make it a lot easier, take a lot of vehicles off the road, and we have more money in the pot now, already out there, that we voted for, than the entire money we spent on Amtrak to begin with. And it’s the same way — for example, I talked about during the campaign, that we’re going to limit the cost of insulin for seniors to $35 a month instead of $400 a month. Well, it doesn’t take effect until next year. So we there’s a lot of things that are just starting to kick in. And the same way with what we’ve done in terms of the environmental stuff. It takes time to get it moving. So I’m not going to change — matter of fact, you know, there are some things i want to change and add to. For example, we had passed the most bipartisan, we passed the most extensive gun legislation, you know, rational gun policy in 30 years, but we din’t ban assault weapons. I’m going to ban assault weapons. I’m going to try like the devil. So I’m not going to change the direction. I said I ran for three reasons. I’m going to continue to stay where I am now. I fully understand the legitimate concern that what I’m saying is wrong, okay?  One is, that I said we were going to restore the soul of the country, begin to treat each other with decency, honor and integrity. And it’s starting to happen. People are — the conversations are becoming more normal, becoming more — how can I say it? — decent. The second thing I said was I want to build the country from the from the middle out, the bottom up, and that way everybody does fine. I’m tired of trickle-down. Not a whole lot trickles down when you trickle down to hard-working folks. The third thing I know is still very hard, I’m going to do everything in my power to see to it that we unite the country. It is hard to sustain yourself as a leading democracy in the word if you can’t generate some unity. So I”m not going to change anything in any fundamental way.

Lord, help us.

Bowing To Public Pressure

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On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that even as an appeals court upheld vaccine mandates, private companies are dropping employee vaccine mandates.

The article reports:

More and more businesses in recent days have walked back previous rules mandating COVID-19 vaccine sas a condition for employment in a bid to keep workers.

Earlier this week, Amtrak—a quasi-public corporation—became the latest to rescind its vaccine requirement amid concerns about staff shortages and cut service in January. In a memo sent to staff that was obtained by The Epoch Times, Amtrak CEO William Flynn said the company would do away with the mandate that would have given employees until Jan. 4 to get fully vaccinated or go on unpaid leave.

About 500 out of more than 17,000 Amtrak workers remain unvaccinated, according to the memo. Still, the sudden loss of that many workers would have caused service disruptions, Flynn suggested, while noting that Amtrak was acting in accordance with recent court orders handed down against President Joe Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandates.

Several hospitals and healthcare systems have similarly rescinded vaccine mandates for employees and cited labor issues that were triggered by the new requirements. In early December, Florida’s AdventHealth announced the end of its vaccine requirement for some 83,000 workers, also citing the several recent court injunctions against federal mandates.

“Due to recent decisions by the federal courts to block the [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] vaccine mandate, we are suspending all vaccination requirements of our COVID-19 vaccination policy,” AdventHealth Chief Clinical Officer Neil Finkler said in a letter to staff. The move came after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services confirmed to The Epoch Times that the agency suspended enforcement following two court orders several weeks ago.

Public pressure works. Any medical procedure has risks. It is up to individuals to weigh risk and benefit. Somehow those in our government seem to have overlooked the risk part. They have also chosen to overlook natural immunity. It’s time Americans began retaking control of their lives.

Something Isn’t Quite Right

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Hot Air posted an article today about some rather mundane fact-checking done by the U.K. Daily Mail. What they fact-checked was somewhat insignificant, but maybe it wasn’t.

Hot Air reports:

This may not be the biggest breaking political news story of the year, but it’s certainly a strange tale that might give you pause when it comes to the question of precisely how well President Joe Biden’s memory is doing these days. The Daily Mail was among several outlets that decided to do some fact-checking of a speech that Uncle Joe gave in Philadelphia last Friday. They weren’t looking at any of his policy claims regarding the border crisis or the pandemic or anything else that’s been occupying our attention lately, however. Biden regaled the audience with one of his famous anecdotes from his long political career. As we all know, Biden prided himself on his regular train trips back and forth between Delaware and Washington, mixing in with the common folk and being a regular guy taking public transit. But in this story, Biden gave some specifics. He talked about a time during his fourth or fifth year as Vice President when a train conductor congratulated him on reaching 1.5 million miles on Amtrak while he was traveling to visit his sick mother. It’s one of those heartwarming stories of a regular American guy doing regular American things. But there were two problems with his story. First of all, the conductor he named had retired twenty years before that and his mother had passed away at least four years earlier.

The article concludes:

Just how well is Joe Biden holding it all together these days? He rarely holds any lengthy Q&A sessions with the press or publicly engages in unscripted exchanges on camera. He generally sticks to prepared speeches and has a lengthy set of notes on the lectern when making public addresses. How is he doing when he’s in private meetings or on phone calls with foreign leaders or the top ranks of our military?

I’m not saying this is some sort of end of the world scenario. After all, we made it through Ronald Reagan’s second term without even learning that he was fighting Alzheimer’s at the time. As long as Joe Biden has trusted staffers at his side at all times I suppose things will work out in the end. But these traits should really be taken into consideration before Joe Biden makes a decision about possibly running for a second term. We’ve still got more than three and a half years to go on this term and it could turn out to be a bumpy ride.

At this point, many of us are wondering who is actually running the country.

I Guess The Technology Had Already Been Funded

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US News & World Report reported yesterday that the section of the railway track where the Amtrak train crashed did have a computer system that allows speeding trains to be slowed remotely. Unfortunately, the system was not turned on at the time.

The article reports:

“The PTC was installed in the section of track where the Philadelphia accident occurred, but for whatever reason had not been turned on, the PTC in that section,” Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., tells U.S. News, referring to “positive train control.” 

His account was corroborated by Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md.

“The tracks had PTC, the train had PTC,” Harris says.

 Both congressmen are members of the House Appropriations Committee, which contacted Amtrak for more information about the crash.

“According to Amtrak, PTC was installed in the section of track where the Philly accident occurred,” a committee source writes in an email to U.S. News. “There have been delays in ‘turning it on’ associated with FCC dealings and getting the bandwidth to upgrade the radios from 900 MHz to something higher (for more reliability).”

Amtrak’s application for the bandwidth needed to use the positive train control system was approved in “early March,” an FCC official says.

Because speed has been cited as a major cause of this tragic crash, this is critical information. Somehow, this has not been widely mentioned in the discussion.

Ghouls On Parade

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The crash of an Amtrak train on Tuesday night was a tragedy. It was also an accident. Sometimes accidents can be avoided; sometimes they cannot. However, it is truly disgusting to see the death of American citizens innocently riding a train used for political purposes. While authorities were still rescuing the injured from the crash scene, Democrats in Washington went to work blaming the accident on Republican spending cuts. First of all, I would like to point out that President Obama has been in office since January 2009. If Amtrak spending were a priority for him, would the President have asked for more spending while the Democrat party had full control of the House and Senate? Would he have asked while the Democrat party had majorities in both the House and the Senate? To blame anyone before investigators have had a chance to begin their search for a cause is simply ghoulish political opportunism. Also, just for the record, where has spending been cut?

The Heritage Foundation posted the following graph of federal spending:

Federal Government Has a Spending, Not Revenue, Problem

There have been no serious budget cuts.

It also posted the chart below:

Where Does All the Money Go?

I don’t believe our problem is that we are not spending enough–our problem is that the politicians in Washington have used taxpayer money to buy so many votes that they don’t have very much left over. I would also like to know where in the U.S. Constitution it states that the taxpayers should be funding Amtrak.

It is a tragedy that people died in a train accident on Tuesday night. It is also really sad that some politicians sought to gain political points through the death of their fellow citizens.