ITEM: The “funding impasse” over federal transportation legislation “may imperil byways,” said the Salt Lake Tribune for March 2. “Although President Bush signed a short-term extension of federal transportation funding …, the House and Senate are still miles apart on passing an overdue six-year highway bill.”

The Tribune continued: “The crux of the holdup is a threat by the White House to veto any highway reauthorization over $270 billion that increases taxes or uses bonds to finance road and transit projects.” As part of the administration’s lobbying effort, “Transportation Secretary. Norman Mineta told reporters at the unveiling of a new Mobil Travel Guide series featuring maps of the nation’s scenic by ways that the routes vital to rural economies will suffer without a long-term highway funding bill.”

ITEM: “President Bush signed legislation … that extends authorization of the federal highway program for two months, a move that prevents nearly 5,000 Transportation Department workers from being laid off,” said a report in the Washington Post for March 1. Secretary Mineta “said that without the temporary extension, the department would have had to furlough 5,000 workers who conduct safety inspections of trucks crossing U.S. borders, and would have had to halt the flow of federal money to hundreds of highway construction projects….”

BETWEEN THE LINES: The White House is feigning frugality with the boondoggle-ridden highway bill, even mentioning the possibility of a veto–something that the free-spending administration hasn’t done in three years. Nevertheless, the Bush team could not resist employing the timeworn “Washington Monument” syndrome–threatening dire ramifications for some highly visible program unless it got temporary funding. Yet, the notion that Congress, in an election year, will suddenly turn thrifty seems remote, especially since the administration has overseen the largest hikes in discretionary spending since President Lyndon Johnson was tossing around greenbacks in the 1960s.

Yes, the bloated transportation bill should be vetoed. The Senate version of the pork-filled legislation is some 46 percent higher than current law, and the House wants to spend even more. The president appears conservative by comparison because he wants “only” a 21 percent increase.

The House Transportation Committee also wants to increase the federal gasoline tax by 5.4 cents a gallon and index that tax to inflation to make future hikes automatic. Upper Chamber lawmakers have other tricks up their sleeves, including an adjustment in funding mechanisms. As a spokesman for the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste put it, “Shifting subsidies from the Highway Trust Fund to the general Treasury fund, as proposed by the Senate, will hide the true cost and is very much like the accounting fraud committed by Enron.”

Little wonder that the Congressional Budget Office projects some $2.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade; spending other people’s money is addictive. It’s not all defense spending either. For President Bush’s first three years in the White House, non-defense discretionary spending is up about 31 percent. The federal government, reports Investor’s Business Daily, is already spending a record $20,000-plus per household. “Total discretionary spending has surged nearly 40% since 2001. Mandatory spending–entitlements–now chew up a record 11% percent of GDP.”

It will take more than one (threatened) veto to get the government in line. Words are the only things that come cheap in Washington. One recalls that Bill Clinton, in his State of the Union Address in 1996, contended that the “era of big government is over.” It wasn’t true then; it’s less true now.

Byline: Fawn Johnson and Dan Friedman

PICTURE THE SCENE

The second-floor lobby in the Rayburn House Office Building sported a Who’s Who ensemble of the transportation world in Washington this week, with three former chairmen of the House Transportation Committee and a plethora of staffers present. The event was the official portrait unveiling of outgoing committee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla. Not surprisingly, a horde of lobbyists attended, a handful wearing festive sweaters and holiday ties. One lobbyist complained, while nursing a mimosa, about overlapping holiday parties where appearances are a must if you want to be considered part of the D.C. political scene. Another bragged about not having a political action committee to nurse. Talk ventured toward who was the most powerful transportation chairman in recent history. (It wasn’t Mica.)

Finally, the blue suits meandered to the committee room where Mica’s wife, Pat, defrocked the portrait of its blue-velvet curtain. The chairman’s whole family was there, including his son Clark, who is getting married in May. “You’re not invited,” John Mica told the assembly. “We’re trying to keep the down.”

Fawn Johnson

COCHRAN AND ROBERTS PLOW AHEAD

A quiet tussle for the ranking membership of the Senate Agriculture Committee is exposing a regional rift among Senate Republicans. Under GOP Conference rules, Mississippi’s Thad Cochran is term-limited as Appropriations Committee ranking member. Cochran has said he will challenge Kansas’s Pat Roberts for the top GOP spot on Agriculture. GOP committee members in the 113th Congress will pick their ranking member in January. The full GOP Conference can then ratify or reverse the result.

Roberts and other Midwesterners split with Southern Republicans over a price-support provision in the farm bill this year. The ranking-member fight is renewing that divide. With five Midwesterners and four Southerners among returning panel members, Roberts holds an apparent edge in a committee vote, although a successor for the exiting Richard Lugar of Indiana could affect the balance. Southerners have the numbers in the GOP Conference, however, where deference to seniority weighs heavier. That leaves insiders believing the job is Cochran’s for the taking.

Dan Friedman

MURMURS

Clearing the Air There must be some awkward moments for Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas–chairman emeritus of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a staunch critic of the Environmental Protection Agency–when his family gathers. His sister, Jan Gerro, is an enforcement attorney for EPA’s Region 6 offices in Dallas, which “has one of the best enforcement records in the country,” Barton said at a National Journal event this week. He referenced the familial connection to make a larger point that, contrary to what some environmentalists think, he is not anti-EPA. “I want a strong EPA,” Barton insisted.

Ohio Rules You didn’t really think the White House focus on Ohio would end just because the campaign is over, did you? Based on the 2012 Christmas ornament from the White House Historical Association, it is still the Year of the Buckeye. The ornament commemorates Ohioan William Howard Taft, the first president to bring a car to the White House. The ornament recalls Taft’s break with the tradition of presidents using horse-drawn vehicles. Instead, he favored a specially made Model M, a green, open-air car brought to the White House in 1909. The ornament depicts Taft seated in the car delivering Christmas presents. Sales help pay for White House historical furnishings and art for the permanent collection.

baggage and sneakers: a sudden flash of light; List: DEATH IN THE SKIES: (Online)

Two thunderclaps on an otherwise still night, plummeting balls of flame in the sky, and seconds later, a return to a now-eerie silence. That was the time it took for all 230 people aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 800 to die, and for the lives of their surviving families, friends and neighbors to be altered shockingly and irrevocably. At 8:48 p.m. last Wednesday, the TWA 747 jumbo jet was 31 minutes into its scheduled six-hour flight from New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Paris, climbing steadily beyond Long Island towards the Atlantic Ocean at an altitude that had reached 13,700 feet. Then came the disintegration, followed by trails of fire and smoke. Afterward, all that remained of the huge aircraft and its contents was debris spread across a 12-by-20-mile stretch of ocean, ranging from huge chunks of fuselage to badly burned bodies to a still-legible postcard and one running shoe, bobbing atop the water when it was found the following morning.

The final circumstances of TWA Flight 800 are all too clear, and marked the worst air disaster since terrorists blew up an Air India flight from Vancouver to London in 1985, killing 329 people. At week’s end, the cause of the disaster was still unknown, but combined U.S. law enforcement authorities appeared to be moving towards a chilling and infuriating conclusion: sabotage. The notion was enhanced by the fact that the world’s eyes were already focused on the United States for the start of the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

A day after the crash, a law enforcement official said that the FBI was “leaning more towards the possibility that it was a bomb that caused the plane to explode.” Jim Kallstrom, an agent with the FBI’s anti-terrorism task force, said his group had set up a home page on the Internet and established a toll-free number in an attempt to exchange and solicit information. And, said Kallstrom, “we are looking at this as a criminal investigation.” But the office of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said only that authorities were investigating “multiple possible explanations.”

Whatever the cause, the explosion rocked lives and sensibilities on both sides of the Atlantic, and left behind a trail of lost lives and dreams that at times seemed almost unbearable in their poignancy. Among the dead: a 25-year-old man whose girlfriend had accepted his marriage proposal less than two hours previously; 16 students and five chaperones from a French immersion program at a high school in the tiny Pennsylvania town of Montoursville; a wealthy philanthropist who decided to take an earlier-than-planned flight home to her husband and children; and an award-winning sports television network executive who took his wife and daughter, but left his twin sons behind, on his last-ever assignment for the ABC network. No Canadians were aboard: the closest connection was the 25-year-old newly engaged man, Michel Breistroff, a Frenchman who played junior hockey in Quebec and Ontario in the late 1980s. He had proposed to his fiancee, Heidi Snow, by telephone from the airport at 6:45 that night.

U.S. federal authorities took great pains to avoid labelling the crash an act of terrorism until they had conclusive evidence. President Bill Clinton, in remarks from the White House, urged Americans to “not jump to conclusions.” The White House was clearly seeking to avoid a repetition of the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which 167 people died. In that incident, suspicion initially focused on Middle East terrorists. Ultimately, however, investigators arrested and charged members of a local grassroots anti-government militia group.

Yet from the outset, it was clear that federal authorities regarded terrorism as the likeliest cause of the downing of Flight 800. Although the inquiry officially remained an accident investigation, the FBI treated it as a criminal case. The bureau moved within hours of the crash to create a joint terrorism task force, with more than 100 FBI agents working alongside other federal law enforcement agencies and New York City police. One of the potential subjects for investigation was a warning note sent to the London office of a Saudi Arabian-owned newspaper the day before the crash, warning that an American target would be hit within the next 24 hours and that “all will be surprised by the size of the attack, the place and the time.” The note, sent to the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat, was signed by the Movement for Islamic Change, one of two groups that have claimed responsibility for a November bomb attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed seven people. As is almost always the case after a major tragedy of indeterminate cause, federal authorities also received an unspecified number of calls from unidentified people claiming responsibility.

But the most compelling signs of terrorism were the circumstances of the giant aircraft’s sudden fall from the sky. There was no advance evidence of distress or mechanical failure, other than a frantic “mayday” monitored on radio just before the flight disappeared from radar screens-and which may not even have come from the aircraft. Although eyewitness reports of sudden disasters are often regarded as inaccurate and inconsistent, the volume and similarity of accounts in this case-with almost all of them describing two explosions-suggested to some experts that the only potential causes were an onboard bomb, a surface-to-air missile or a freak explosion of the aircraft’s fuel tanks, which carry 250,000 lb. when full. That last scenario is considered unlikely, however, because it has never happened before. As one National Safety Transportation Board official put it: “There is no known mechanical failure that can cause the kind of fireball we saw in this incident.”

Similarly, authorities discounted the surface-to-air missile theory because the aircraft was well above the normal range of even the most sophisticated Stinger missiles. By a process of elimination, then, experts said that a bomb appeared most probable: some new plastic explosives cannot be detected by the kind of baggage scanners in use at Kennedy airport.

By week’s end, authorities had recovered the bodies of about half of the dead. The scene of search-and-rescue efforts along the Long Island coast-an elegant area renowned as a getaway retreat for monied New Yorkers-was particularly jarring for the contrasts it offered. Despite police roadblocks aimed at sealing off the area, locals and tourists flocked to watch coast guard cutters unloading pieces from the crash. Meanwhile, workers in white jumpsuits conducted a horrifying shuttle of body bags into white and silver refrigerator trucks where they were kept because the local morgue could not accommodate them.

For the bereaved family members and other mourners, there were visits from trauma counsellors and group therapy sessions at a Kennedy airport hotel to try to ease their anguish. As well, there was one substantive revelation that served as consolation. In spite of the badly burned and damaged state of many of the bodies, the medical examiner conducting autopsies, Dr. Charles Wetli, concluded that “for all practical purposes, it was an instantaneous death.” Regardless of the cause, the trauma of TWA Flight 800 seems likely to remain burned on the collective American consciousness for years to come. For the 230 unsuspecting people who were aboard, there was just one last and sudden flash of light-and then, eternal darkness.

DEATH IN THE SKIES:

-January, 1978

Air India Boeing 747 explodes in midair over the Arabian Sea, killing 213. Cause: terrorist bomb.

-September, 1983

Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashes into the ocean near Sakhalin Island, Russia, killing 269. Cause: Soviet attack.

-June, 1985

Air India Boeing 747 goes down in the Atlantic Ocean south of Ireland, killing 329. Cause: terrorist bomb.

-December, 1988

Pan Am Boeing 747 blows apart over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270. Cause: terrorist bomb.

-July, 1996

Trans World Airlines Boeing 747 explodes off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., killing 230. Cause: under investigation.

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LEAD: A 54-hour general strike called to force the resignation of President H. M. Ershad provoked violent clashes today between the President’s supporters and mobs fielded by opposition parties.

A 54-hour general strike called to force the resignation of President H. M. Ershad provoked violent clashes today between the President’s supporters and mobs fielded by opposition parties.

At least five people died, including two in the capital, and hundreds of demonstrators were injured in the clashes and in firebomb attacks as the strike went into its second day, according to the police. The unofficial death toll is thought to be at least eight.

Fifty-one police officers were injured and one was taken hostage by a crowd, the Government-run news broadcast said tonight.

Most casualties occurred when the police fired on stone-throwing mobs that were attacking the headquarters of the President’s political party, Jatiya, in the central business district. Police officers shot at demonstrators after failing to disperse them with tear gas. Photographers Are Beaten

Four newspaper photographers were beaten by police officers during the attacks; press organizations are protesting the police charge.

The head office of the national airline, Bangladesh-Biman, was also stormed by a crowd of several thousand people. Three vehicles were burned.

Since the strike began, 31 public buses have been damaged or destroyed by supporters of the action, and 15 drivers or conductors have been injured, five of them critically, the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation said.

The strike was called by the opposition after President Ershad refused to step down or withdraw a bill enacted by the legislature on July 12 that allows military officers to serve on district development councils. Charge of Militarization

The restructuring of local councils to give the army a grass-roots role is ”the first step to militarizing the entire civil administration,” the President’s opponents said in statements.

The shutdown or disruption of commerce, education and most public transportation here and in towns around the country has raised political tension to its highest level since the lifting of martial law last Nov. 10, according to residents of Dhaka.

Most people stayed at home today, despite Government pleas that life go on as usual. Only Government workers were reported to have gone to their jobs in significant numbers. Opposition crowds have been stoning people and vehicles that defy an unofficial curfew.

The strike began Wednesday at 6 A.M. local time and is due to continue until noon on Friday, the beginning of the Moslem Sabbath. Issue Unified Opposition

The issue of the district council has unified and injected new life into an opposition that was badly splintered in the spring of 1986 over whether to take part in national parliamentary elections called by Mr. Ershad when he was martial-law administrator. In October, he was elected President.

The alliance of six political parties formed around the Awami League of Sheikh Hasina Wajed – the daughter of President Sheik Mujibur Rahman, who was killed in an army coup in 1975 – decided at the last minute to take part in the May 7, 1986, parliamentary elections.

Another opposition alliance, led by Khaleda Zia – the chairman of the Bangladesh National Party and the widow of President Ziaur Rahman, who was also assassinated – boycotted the voting.

The decision of the two factions to join in calling for a national strike on the issue of the District Councils Bill is viewed here as an interesting experiment in testing the joint political strength of the opposition. President Ershad’s term has another five years to run.

Only two things matter when choosing a car. What is it like to drive fast? And what is it like to drive very, very slowly? Forget about cornering and acceleration. Very little of our time in cars is spent negotiating hairpin bends or revving chavvishly at a junction. Most motoring falls into two distinct categories.

1) Superb driving conditions: driving at night, or best of all in France (whose admirable policy of motorway pricing leaves their best roads free for the enjoyment of British tourists–since paying to use a motorway twice a year is much less painful than paying twice a day).

2) Dreadful road conditions: gridlock; tailbacks; attempting to navigate motorway service stations without ending up in the lorry park; tackling the absurdly positioned ramps in multi-storey car parks. (Most car parks are atrociously designed. But beneath Bloomsbury Square in London is the Guggenheim of underground car parks. Built in the 1960s, it is a perfect double-helix, with the twin spirals connected at intervals–as in DNA–by horizontal links. This means you do not have to go all the way to the bottom and back in order to leave, although you do, obviously, for the sheer joy of it.)

For a car that is good to drive very fast and very slowly, buy a luxury car with automatic transmission. And buy it second-hand. This was always the policy of Edward de Bono, who bought second-hand Jaguars, explaining that ‘the type of people who like luxury cars don’t like buying them used’, which is why they depreciate so fast from new. The best bargains may be luxury cars from non-luxury marques: the VW Phaeton, say, or the Citroën C6.

But there is a further reason to buy second-hand. It allows you guiltlessly to own a car with an insane number of optional extras. My inner Presbyterian would never allow me to pay 2,000 [pounds sterling] for a sunroof or 500 [pounds sterling] for a digital radio, but with a used car you can plausibly tell your conscience/wife ‘No, of course I didn’t pay for it–the damn thing was in the car when I bought it.’

That’s how I ended up with a car with Adaptive Cruise Control. And I love it. You set your chosen speed, as with standard cruise control but, if a car in front is going more slowly, Adaptive Cruise Control will decelerate you to its speed, then tail it at a set distance, braking or accelerating as necessary–wonderfully effortless. Better still, since the driver in front is first to be flashed by speed cameras, you can use him as an early warning system, like a canary in a mine.

The only thing you have to do is steer. And before long, even this may be unnecessary. SARTRE is a European project to create ‘road-trains’ using a further development of this technology. A professional driver headed to Glasgow could acquire a ‘platoon’ of followers as he headed up the M6. Cars can electronically latch on to the hindmost car in the train, allowing the driver to read, make phone calls or even (if very trusting) fall asleep.

Feasible technically? It already works. Admittedly it may be a while before people feel comfortable with the idea. But it is a half-step which may prepare people for Google’s self-driving car.

What both projects suggest is that the potential for significant innovation in road transport is far greater than we realise–and probably much greater than the potential for innovation in rail travel. Road transport allows for tinkering and diverse experimentation in a way that railways simply don’t. So, if we want to future-proof Britain, it isn’t a railway we should be building through the Chilterns: it’s a motorway.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK