Shuster family: Communist trains bad, expensive roads to nowhere good

Remember those Commie trains to hell that Joe Biden proposed in Philadelphia yesterday. They've arrived in Congress already, and they're (gasp) dead!

The announcement was met immediately by deep skepticism from two House Republicans that could be crucial to the plan's success, raising questions about whether it can clear Capitol Hill.

House Transportation Committee Chair Rep. John Mica (R) of Florida said previous administration grants to high-speed rail projects were a failure, producing "snail speed trains to nowhere." He called Amtrak a "Soviet-style train system" and said it "hijacked" nearly all the administration's rail projects.

Meanwhile, Railroads Subcommittee Chair Rep. Bill Shuster (R) of Pennsylvania said Mr. Biden's plan was "insanity," adding: "Rail projects that are not economically sound will not 'win the future' " – coopting the slogan President Obama coined in his State of the Union address.

Meanwhile, the actual (sort of) Communists in China are laughing at us (assuming that they're taking a break from those calculus drills). The irony here is Pennsylvania's Bill Shuster attacking government spending as insanity, when his father -- the longtime House GOP transportation guru Bud Shuster -- never met a worthless pork barrel transportation project he didn't like, especially in his district in the Altoona area.

This is from the conservative Cato Institute:

A bit over a week ago the New York Times ran a piece on the recent completion of the final 18-mile leg of Interstate 99 in central Pennsylvania.  I-99 is known as the "Bud Shuster Highway" in honor of the legendary pork-barreling congressman responsible for securing the federal largess to build it.  Federal budget hawks have more derisive labels for it such as "Bud Shuster's Rollercoaster" and "The Road to Nowhere."  The latter nickname stings me personally as I grew up in Bud Shuster's "Nowhere" district.

Nonetheless, critics of the highway who question why taxpayers in the other 49 states should pay for the powerful former House Transportation Committee Chairman's vanity plate are correct.  I recently traveled Bud Shuster's highway for the umpteenth time over the holidays and often went a mile or two before seeing another vehicle. The fact of the matter is that had Bud Shuster not been the powerful chairman of said transportation committee, this road does not become interstate-anything.

You want some more irony. Altoona is famous for...trains. Thanks to the famed horseshoe curve of the Pennsylvania Rail Road, there's now a thriving rail museum there. But trains don't have to be tossed on the ash heap of American history. They are, though, thanks to the small mindedness of people like John Mica...and the hyper-hypocritical Shuster family.