Monthly Archives: October 2006

Here is a telling exchange as to how the Republican Reptiles are going to position ex-Congressman Mark Foley’s indiscretions.  From CNN’s American Morning between Soledad O’Brien and Chief Dubya Fartcatcher Tony Snow:

"O’BRIEN: I would assume everybody would want to know, including the president. I mean, we’re not talking about any old person. We’re talking about the leadership of the Republicans in Congress. Why would he not hear something that’s disturbing, or his office — over-friendly — when I see that word as a parent — and I think any parent would say, Whoa, over-friendly? Any communication between a 16-year-old and a congressman, why doesn’t that raise red flags — major, massive red flags?

SNOW: Yes, look, I hate to tell you, but it’s not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

Naughty e-mails?  To carry it further, in Tony Snow’s World, Lee Harvey Oswald merely cured JFK’s migraines and the Holocaust was a package tour that went bad? 

I know these people have no shame whatsoever, but this is over the top for a PR Fartcatcher.  Even the PR Fartcatcher for Dubya.  Even Ari Fleischer never went this far.

I like watching tight-assed, blue nosed, uber-conservative Republicans get their knickers in a twist when one of their own steps over the line.  Over the weekend, the Republican Reptiles have been spinning frantically as revelations come out that Congressman Mark Foley was trolling Congressional Pages online. 

For those not familiar with the general arc of the story, now ex-Congressman Foley was chatting up a Congressional page on a chat program.  Comments range from "What are you wearing?" to much more salacious.  Idiot that Foley was, he was doing it from his office, where his typing passed through a number of servers, most of which are probably tapped by the Department of Homeland Paranoia in the War on Terror.  Odds are it was either the object of his ‘affection’ who saved the chat, or someone in IT/DHS who trapped the chat with off-the-shelf sniffer software.  In either case, the transcript wound up in the hands of ABC News.

Unfortunately, it was known to some in the Republican hierarchy that Congressman Foley had been trolling online for a while, his particular taste being underage boys. From the Department of Irony That I Can’t Make Up, Congressman Foley was the co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and helped author a bill to make Internet sexual exploitation of minors, illegal.  To quote Congressman Foley, "They’re sick people; they need mental health counseling,"

Since it was well-established that the young men involved in these chats were minors, Foley was drinking out of the same toilet he wanted to flush.  The chat transcripts themselves are explicitly sexual in nature.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has asked the FBI and the Department of JustUs (Don’t Worry, it’s Just Us tapping your phone) to begin an investigation.  Hastert also sent a letter to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Sunday requesting that he "direct the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct an investigation of Mr. Foley’s conduct."

In his letter to Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, Hastert has also asked that they find out who in the House knew about the emails and when.  Congressman Thomas Reynolds from New York, who headed the House Republican election effort, said he told Speaker Hastert about Foley’s illegal behavior several months ago.  A couple of Democratic Congressmen are also coming forward with allegations they told the Speaker a few months ago that pages they had sponsored had complained about ‘sick’ emails they had received from Foley.

This morning in a letter apparently from Foley, faxed to WPBF in Palm Beach, Florida, he states that, "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and related behavioral problems.  On Saturday, with the loving support of my family and friends, I made arrangements to enter a renowned in-patient facility to address my disease and related issues."

Oh, he’s not a kiddy diddler, he’s a drunkard?  I suppose being an alcoholic is more acceptable to the Conservative right-wing nuts than being a online predator. I won’t mention the power dynamic a sitting member of Congress has over a teenaged House Page, except to say it is heavily weighted towards the Congressperson.

What I’d really like to hear is how the chats got out.  It would be Right, in the scheme of things, that the Department of Homeland Paranoia caught Foley in one of its interceptions of personal communications that are done without such niceties as warrants, under the Patriot Act.

Yesterday, a 20 meter section of four-lane overpass collapsed and fell onto Highway 19 in the Montreal suburb of Laval, Quebec.  The overpass, the usual concrete and steel construction was originally built in 1970 and fell 15 meters to the road below.  At least two vehicles were pancaked under the slab.  Five people were killed.  Three vehicles and a motorcycle fell on top of the collapse, as the road disappeared from underneath their wheels.  Six people who landed on top were injured, two are in critical condition. You can follow the story at www.cbc.ca if you want.

Stop and think about how many bridges you go over, or under, on your way to work, grocery shopping or doing the myriad things you do every day.  Bridges, even the smallish ones that cross highways, or creeks are marvels of engineering.  Thousands of cars, buses and trucks gallop along pounding the pavement every day. 

To understand what bridges do, find a five pound bag of sugar or flour.  Hold the bag in your hand and raise your arm straight out from the side of your body at right angles.  Keep it there for five minutes without letting your arm sag, tremble or move.  You are now, officially, a cantilever, one of the essential engineering structures that define a bridge.  You can put the bag of flour down now.  And stop you arm from throbbing. 

The Laval bridge was only 36 years old.  This is middle-aged for bridges.  The problem is that in most of Canada we have winter.  Winter means ice and snow on the roads, which, especially in Eastern Canada, means salt on the roads.  Salt eats steel.  To keep this corrosion in check, bridges get inspected, usually yearly, depending on the budgets. 

Uh-oh  I said a bad word:  Budgets.  Budgets for infrastructure have been cut to the bone year after year.  Budgets for inspections have just about disappeared.  Politicians have twin demons of getting re-elected, or doing what needs to be done.  Getting re-elected means not raising taxes, or making sure that voters see what their tax money is paying for. 

Bridge inspections and preventative maintenance are not things that a voter can look at and say "Yup.  We need it and we’re payin’ for it, as we should."  Nor for that matter is replacing or fixing the estimated 30 percent of sewer and water systems in most cities that leak.  Pipes are underground and until you get raw sewage backing up into basements, or find a huge sinkhole in a road, the pipes might as well be on Mars.  The electrical grid in this corner of North America is held together with spit, paper clips, gaffer tape and fervent prayer. 

The ugly fact is that the Great Infrastructure Buildout of the 1950’s and 1960’s was a long time ago.

Did the Laval bridge collapse from a lack of maintenance?  We don’t know yet.  I do know that the inspection process these days is pretty rudimentary:  "It is still there?  Yep.  Is it on fire but shouldn’t be?  Yep.  Passed.  Next!" 

Ontario is a good example of how not to do things.  The TSSA (Technical Standards and Safety Authority) in this province is in charge of inspecting elevators.  TSSA is a private company that slurped up the Technical Standards Division of the Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs for the province.  TSSA sets fees to perform inspections, as required under law.  They are non-profit but are expected to cover their entire budget from license and inspection fees. 

There are more than 43,000 elevating devices in Ontario.  This includes escalators, passenger elevators, freight elevators and personnel lifts.  There are 43 inspectors listed on the TSSA website for the whole province.  This means each inspector, including the managers, has to inspect approximately 1000 elevating devices per year to make sure the old stuff is still safe and the new stuff is installed correctly.

By the way, there are 261 workdays in a year, assuming you get Saturday and Sunday off.  Let’s call it 250 workdays a year, as folks do get sick, have to take training, statutory holidays, vacations, or to go to the doctor. 

That means each inspector, having 1000 elevating devices to inspect, must do four a day.  Two in the morning, two in the afternoon.  I’m not counting travel time, lunch, buildings being closed, people not available, time to do the paperwork and so on.  In the downtown core, this might even be doable, except the inspection time is basically 90 minutes per elevating device.  Or, "Is it on fire and plummeting to the basement from the 28th floor with a load of lawyers?  No?  Passed.  Next!" 

To add to the impossibility of inspecting things, the TSSA in Ontario also inspects fuel standards, boilers and pressure vessels, upholstery and stuffed articles, ski lifts, power plants and amusement rides.  I checked the number of inspectors for each category and at first glance the same names are in all the areas of authority.     

How to fix infrastructure failures?  First, it is going to cost a LOT of money that has to come from somewhere.  Somewhere means you and me and our pockets.  Second, we have to have some priorities as we can’t afford to fix it all.  Someone has to look at all the infrastructure components and decide each year where the bulk of the money has to go to keep things from breaking down completely.

As an example, there is a rail bridge that crosses a major road here in Mississauga, not far from where I live.  This bridge carries the GO Train, freight trains and passenger trains.  If that bridge failed and fell across a major north-south artery, Mississauga would stop from a traffic perspective and a big piece of the GO Train metro system would be out of commission for several weeks. 

Now, make that train a freight, carrying anhydrous ammonia, propane, new cars and bulk sulfur, which is a load I have personally seen on that line.  The bridge fails and two dozen freight cars fall into the boulevard, cutting off traffic and burning for a while.  You would have to evacuate most of Mississauga, which means 600,000 people have to go somewhere because of one rail bridge. 

That is the hidden danger of infrastructure failure.  The failure isn’t just one thing, it becomes, very quickly, several dozen things of ever-increasing danger and impact.

However, we don’t know what parts of our infrastructure are in the worst shape.  We have no clue what bridges are merely looking old and tired and which ones are teetering on collapse from abuse, neglect or bad construction in the first place.  Why?  Because inspecting infrastructure is not a glamorous use of taxpayers’ money.  It isn’t sexy like a convention centre, or a modern toll road.  It doesn’t get the politician any publicity mileage whatsoever, therefore what will get cut first?

Bridges, roads, sewers, natural gas pipes, the electrical grid and all the other infrastructure things we rely on daily will last for several decades as long as regular, comprehensive inspection and repairs are carried out. 

Will it eventually turn out that the bridge in Laval fell down because of a lack of inspection and general neglect?  Again, I don’t know for certain, but I can make a well-educated guess.  The answer is yes.