Here in Rochester we have very capable Democratic mayor who can be dead wrong on occasion and a questionably capable county executive (Republican) whose prior experience was as a local newscaster. The mayor was a chief of police. The county is going through a scandal involving contractor pay-offs to county employees that may very well go to the top of several county agencies. Meanwhile we have a very large federally funded downtown project that attempts to combine a downtown community college campus, a transit center and a performing arts center. Federal funding has been found for the college and transit center; the arts center is not funded and probably won’t get built. Despite that fact that this is located in the center of the City of Rochester, this is a county project.

The Renaissance Square project, as it has been named, more familiarly Ren Square, has been brewing for 6 years with no visible physical progress. A major architect was hired (Moshe Saftie) and he came up with an impressive plan while running through a major chunk of the planning budget. He was fired and a consortium of local architects butchered his plan and somehow managed to glom a nineteenth century facade on the thing, an architectural curse that Rochester specializes in.

I used to think this whole thing was questionable but with $4/gallon gas on the horizon again, improving the public transportation experience is important, the college campus is an important project, making access to our excellent Monroe Community College a lot easier and the arts center is off the radar. We need to build the thing now.

Except more politicians have come forward including a Democratic Representative who is lobbying for a high speed rail line to pass through Rochester and somehow she believes that we have a choice of a new train station or a new bus station but not both, in spite of the fact that they have nothing, zero, zippo to do with each other. People ride the buses to work and school, people ride trains to get to other cities.

Now the mayor has joined the Representative in trying to kill the transit station right when the need for better public transit is critical.

I could go on and on without betraying any partisan stance (I’m a Democrat) because all of these politicians are acting deplorably, ignorantly and without thought of what is best for the community. This seems to be the case with politicians everywhere from the local school board to the Senate leadership. They are not competent people in general. I’m giving the President a pass because I think he is truly trying to herd these cats in the best interests of us. It must drive him crazy.

I hope Sterling is wrong but he makes a compelling case.

“1. The climate. People still behave as if it’s okay. Every scientist in the world who isn’t the late Michael Crichton knows that it’s not. The climate is in terrible shape; something’s gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven’t soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.

It’s become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that’s objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely.”

And that’s just one of seven…

Not a single House Republican broke ranks to vote yes for the economic recovery package. Some things never change for the Party of No: They’re still saying no while the country is saying yes.

All they want is tax cuts, in spite of the fact that tax cuts (combined with wildly out of control spending by a Republican administration) were part of the reason we’re in this mess. No infrastructure investments, no alternative energy, no extensions of unemployment, just tax cuts.

Republican House Members, I ask you:

What good is a tax cut if you’re not paying taxes because you lost your job?

And check this out:

Reliably Blue States now represent only 2% of the population and 35 electoral votes. Can’t these guys read?

So much has happened since I first started Burner Trouble in 2005. Frustrated by the total lack of movement on climate change, the idiocy of the Bush administration and their religious adherance to blocking science, enriching oil companies and denying climate change, I started writing my personal responses to these topics. I’m reminded that nearly all of the original 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, not Iraqis or Afghanis, and how we whisked the Saudi royalty out of the country even though there was a ban in international air travel. Of how we started a war to get our hands on a major oil producing country then totally failed to actually repair any infrastructure for producing that oil, spending hundreds of billions in the process for which there is no accounting. And how the company responsible for this mess was once managed by the ex-Vice President of the US.

It goes on and on- until yesterday. Today there is a new government, a new awareness and a new determination and it is bipartisan among the citizens. I have little faith that the Republican politicians get it though as they are already obstructing and delaying for purely partisan reasons. Their constituency does not want them to do this- polling shows widespread support for Obama amongst those who did not vote for him.

I stopped blogging regularly earlier this year. News coverage of climate change and energy issues became much more widespread. Things like the coal ash problem were not buried in the back pages, instead journalists did journalism and discovered that the Tennessee Valley Authority, the EPA and the coal industry had been hiding or minimizing the dangers of the 1800 coal ash dumps nationwide. This was encouraging.

So should I blog? I’m still deciding. I need a focus that excites me and I’m still thinking that over. But change has come.