Apparently Greyhound is having trouble keeping enough bus drivers to keep their routes running.
I took a lady from the downtown Pittsburgh Greyhound station to New Jersey, really the far side of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, yesterday. She said Greyhound had missed the run she’d planned on and she was lacking confidence that a bus scheduled for 9:00 pm would actually run.
I can now confirm that Pennsylvania is lovely from the western edge of the state to the eastern. (At least along Interstate 76.)
A lot of drivers turn down these rides because they assume they’ll have to return empty, which is what I did (as it was, I didn’t get back home until nearly 4:00 am). That deadhead back is costly: My revenue (not counting Uber’s commission) for yesterday was over $400 but after expenses, I probably made less than $100. (I don’t calculate depreciation and I don’t even have a total for tolls on multiple turnpikes yet.)
Oh, and by the way, to give you an idea of the value of a hybrid, I made it there on the tank of gas I’d started the day with, finishing the trip with a little over 100 miles of estimated range remaining (I don’t like running below a quarter tank). I spent a little time searching for a Sunoco station there, and then gassed up again a few miles short of home (my usual Sunoco station isn’t open at even anything close to that hour).
Update, July 20, 2022: Total tolls on the trip exceeded $90. My calculations spread this amount over the now over 65,000 miles I have on that car, but the reality is that this trip, the third and final of the day, was, for all practical purposes, a wash. I made nothing.
Infrastructure
Joe Manchin has been playing this game pretty much since the 2020 election, but somehow it is, according to Tony Romm and Jeff Stein, “stunning.”[1]
The stunning setback late Thursday [July 14] came despite weeks of seemingly promising negotiations between [Chuck] Schumer and [Joe] Manchin in pursuit of a broader deal that would have delivered on the promises that secured Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2020. Without Manchin, the party cannot proceed in the narrowly divided Senate, since Democrats need all 50 votes in the caucus, plus Vice President Harris’s tiebreaking vote, to use the special process known as budget reconciliation to overcome Republicans’ expected filibuster.[2]
For the record, I am sick and tired of hearing about President Manchin. Apparently some folks haven’t noticed that West Virginia is not the United States and I am absolutely not interested in Democrats’ excuses for not getting anything done; these are offered far too consistently to be taken seriously, for the Democrats to be acknowledged as an actually governing party, even when they putatively control the presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.
This[3] is, rather, further evidence of a Democratic Party determination not to win, but emphatically to lose elections (see especially voting rights,[4] in which passing a bill would at least keep Democrats in the game against the all but certainly forthcoming establishment of a white Christian nationalist regime[5]), so they can sit in opposition, a vantage point from which they can take potshots at Republicans without being expected to accomplish a damn thing.[6]
We may despise the Republicans. We must also despise the Democrats for what is inescapably their complicity with Republicans, inescapably their complicity with white Christian nationalists.[7]
Tony Romm and Jeff Stein, “Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy,” Washington Post, July 15, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/14/manchin-climate-tax-bbb/
- [1]Tony Romm and Jeff Stein, “Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy,” Washington Post, July 15, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/14/manchin-climate-tax-bbb/↩
- [2]Tony Romm and Jeff Stein, “Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy,” Washington Post, July 15, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/14/manchin-climate-tax-bbb/↩
- [3]Tony Romm and Jeff Stein, “Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy,” Washington Post, July 15, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/14/manchin-climate-tax-bbb/↩
- [4]Mike DeBonis, “Senate Republicans block voting rights bill, dealing blow to Democrats’ effort to overhaul election laws,” Washington Post, January 19, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-brace-for-likely-defeat-of-voting-rights-push-due-to-gop-filibuster/2022/01/19/2f9a734c-792d-11ec-bf97-6eac6f77fba2_story.html; Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, “Sinema and Manchin confirm opposition to eliminating filibuster, likely dooming Democrats’ voting rights push,” Washington Post, January 13, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-set-to-visit-senate-democrats-in-a-final-improbable-pitch-for-voting-rights-action/2022/01/13/fde533b6-7475-11ec-8b0a-bcfab800c430_story.html; Matt Ford, “The Democrats’ Voting Rights Bill Is Dead,” New Republic, July 13, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/162974/democrats-voting-rights-bill-dead; Carrie Levine, “Why there’s even more pressure now on Congress to pass a voting rights bill,” Center for Public Integrity, July 9, 2021, https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/newsletters/watchdog-newsletter/why-theres-even-more-pressure-now-on-congress-to-pass-a-voting-rights-bill/; Sam Levine, “Voting rights advocates frustrated by ‘same-old, same-old’ meeting with White House,” Guardian, December 3, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/03/voting-rights-advocates-frustrated-meeting-white-house; Greg Sargent, “The damage done by Joe Manchin is likely to get much worse,” Washington Post, December 10, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/10/manchin-filibuster-protecting-our-democracy-act/; Greg Sargent, “Joe Manchin finally makes it plain: He is in favor of minority rule,” Washington Post, January 19, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/19/joe-manchin-filibuster-voting-rights-minority-rule/; Jewel Wicker, “Georgia activists warn Biden against a ‘photo-op’ visit that lacks voting rights plan,” Guardian, January 11, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/11/georgia-biden-harris-visit-voting-rights-bill↩
- [5]David Benfell, “My 2024 forecast,” Not Housebroken, June 21, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/03/10/my-2024-forecast/↩
- [6]David Benfell, “Democrats and contradiction,” Not Housebroken, July 2, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/11/18/democrats-and-contradiction/↩
- [7]David Benfell, “The Democrats as the danger within, enabling the Republicans,” Not Housebroken, July 1, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/06/14/the-democrats-as-the-danger-within-enabling-the-republicans/↩