More short-sighted idiocy from our state house gang. The public transit system is in really bad shape, but of course the Pennsyltucky Repugs don’t want to pay for it:

HARRISBURG – After months of debate, the state House failed to pass legislation Monday night that would have provided $2.3 billion to complete long-overdue repairs to the state’s aging transportation infrastructure.

In a stunning 103-98 vote that teetered between passage and defeat until the last moment of the roll call, lawmakers shot down an amendment to fix thousands of substandard bridges, repave hundreds of miles of crumbling roads, and pump hundreds of millions into modernizing mass transit systems across the state.

To pay for the improvements, the bill would have lifted the cap on the oil-franchise tax – which could increase prices at the gas pump by roughly 27 cents a gallon. The measure also would have increased driver’s-license and vehicle-registration fees beginning in 2015, and put a surcharge on speeders and others who violate traffic laws.

Does anyone else see the Obamacare website as the massive end-of-the-world catastrophe the media paints it? Honestly, I see it as a minor inconvenience (operating on the assumption the law can’t require me to meet a deadline they themselves can’t meet.) My brothers were programmers and developers, there were always problems with big rollouts. (That’s where the term “vaporware” applies.)

Sure, Obama fucked up. No question. If you read that “Locked in the cabinet” post from yesterday, you read the part where the White House political team delayed important implementation decisions until after the election.

But it will all eventually get fixed, we will eventually get insurance coverage and hopefully it will all work out. Then we will vote out as many of the assholes as we can and start pushing for single payer.

Am I crazy?

Charles Pierce:

Which brings me to a question to which I do not have a complete answer — is the country ungovernable right now because the Republicans have made it so, or are the Republicans merely taking advantage of the fact that, through its creaky institutional structures and through an unforgiveable lassitude towards the obligations of self-government on the part of the American people, the country has become ungovernable in and of itself.

The apparent lack of oversight and preparation in the implementation of the ACA is unforgivable, and the president and the Democratic party will (and should) pay something of a political price for it. But the fact is that the country wanted its massively fractured health-care system fixed, and it had wanted that system fixed since before Bill Clinton tried it back in the early 1990’s.

A completely ludicrous percentage of the country also wants criminal background checks on gun purchases. Right now, if you believe the polls, it is massively in favor of raising the minimum wage. And, actually, if you go below the surface of the polling on the ACA and health-care reform, you find a substantial portion of the country that doesn’t like the embattled law because it doesn’t go far enough toward health-care’s being a right, not a privilege and, in any case, the country repeatedly stated throughout the last 20 years that the status quo ante was an unacceptable combination of corporate avarice and personal tragedy. And yet, that is where the debate is right now, no matter how much Fred Upton says otherwise from deep in the pockets of the people who make money off human misery.

It has become remarkable how the people of this country, an ostensibly self-governing republic, fail to get what an overwhelming percentage of them say they want from their government, over and over again. You can argue, and I have, about the power of money, increased by an order of magnitude through the egregious Citizens United decision. You can argue, and I have, about the unforgivable vandalism practiced by the Republican party and the modern conservative movement that has been the prion disease in the party’s higher functions that has driven it mad.

But the fact remains that, dammit, there has to be a political price to pay for actively opposing something 66 percent — or, in the case of the background checks, 91 percent — of the people say they want. And the electorate is the only body of citizens empowered to exact these penalties, and it has been shamefully lax in doing so. Parts of the country have contented themselves with electing morons and crazy people. (How in the name of god does a buffoon like Louie Gohmert ever run unopposed?) Great portions of the country can be duped, or frightened, into voting against their own economic interests. And the great undifferentiated apathy that attends most of our elections is a deadweight on the democratic process that grows heavier by the year.

If our politicians are not responsive to our needs, then it’s time for new politicians, and we’re the only ones who can bring that about. And yet, it’s easier to complain about an inconvenient website, or a scary letter from an insurance company, or bullshit anecdotes that fall apart under the barest scrutiny. The country is ungovernable because we, The People, have decided not to govern it any more. That, to borrow a phrase from the president, is on us.