Bush's Legacy: Seatte Mariners Edition

Have you check your local community for fucked-up Bush policies that screw regular people six ways from Tuesday while lining the pockets of pampered private interests? You probably won't have to look far.

Here's how he's fucked Seattle over:

Via DMZ, I learn that this year, the Metro shuttles that connected park and rides to Safeco field before and after Mariners games will no longer exist. The Mariners paid for some but not all of the cost and the riders paid three dollars. Congestion is pretty horrible before and after games.

Why has this ended? Because a private company put in a bid to provide the service, at roughly three times the cost, which the Mariners rejected as too expensive. But thanks to a Bush era change in FTA rules, as long as any private company puts in a bid to provide charter services for a public event, public transit agencies were prohibited from providing such services. The quality or the reasonableness of the bid notwithstanding.

That's right. A private company could put in a bid of a trillion gadzillion dollars for charter services, and that would mean nobody gets driven anywhere, because folks like the Mariners can't go laughing all the way back to public transit. Fuck you very much, George.

It's going to take years to get rid of Bush's kudzu, and even then, I'm not sure our native landscape will ever be the same again.