Free Republic

The Texas Transportation Commission unrolled Sept. 28 the long-awaited road map for the Trans-Texas Corridor. Release of the Master Development Plan will result also in public disclosure of the full contract between the state and Cintra-Zachry, a private joint venture between the Spanish firm Cintra and the Texas highway contractor Zachry. Both Cintra-Zachry and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) appealed a ruling from the Texas Attorney General’s office that the full contract is an open record. A trial was scheduled for Oct. 10 in Travis County district court. The master plan calls for the prompt building of seven segments...

Democratic Texas Supreme Court nominee Bill Moody said Monday that a construction firm may be using political contributions to win favor from the state’s highest civil court in a potential eminent domain lawsuit about the Trans-Texas Corridor. “My opponent and other members of the Supreme Court have taken sizable contributions from the Zachry group, well-knowing there is going to be an eminent domain case,” Moody said during a Waco campaign visit with the Tribune-Herald editorial board. Moody cited contributions from Zachry Construction Corporation’s political action committee and executives to his opponent, Republican Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, and four...

We Americans are a suspicious lot. Gas prices go down and a good many of us assume there's a conspiracy that starts and ends in the White House. Take the results of a recent Gallup poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." It's a good yarn, but I can't ignore the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who said they suspected President Bush of pulling a fast one heading into the Nov. 7 elections are registered Democrats. Plus,...

Drivers willing to pay to leave Interstate 35 in the dust could have an alternative as early as the summer of 2013. For 15 cents a mile, drivers could cruise the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor for nearly 100 miles, from Hillsboro to the north Austin suburbs. The rest of the 370-mile corridor could be running in 2017, the report said. That is according to a new 1,600-page master plan for the tollway, railroad and utility corridor that the firm Cintra-Zachry developed as it prepares to build the controversial project. The report said the company’s investment will increase by $3.5 billion, construction...

Revelations of secrecy and possible self-dealing in the compensation of some of the University of California's top administrators expose a problem deeper than the need for more transparent "communication" of the rationale behind them. The more significant issue is the rationale itself: the goal of privatizing higher education in California, which was made explicit in the recent "compact" between University of California President Robert Dynes, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The compact substantially cut base public funding for higher education, required both UC and Cal State to impose large and rapid tuition increases as a...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Locking yourself out of your car is bad enough, but Jeanna Stewart was even more embarrassed when the culprit was not her, but her cat. The Morgantown resident said she was getting a spare house key out her car's trunk on Monday when her cat Mork, one of three in the car, stepped on the automatic door lock. She couldn't unlock the door because she had left her car keys on the driver's seat. "He wouldn't unlock the door for me," Stewart said Tuesday. "He was standing there, saying why aren't you opening the door? I want...

As the Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue their extended studies of Mars, NASA's Mars program appears headed for change. The shift will be driven by a variety of factors including technical and budget issues, as well as a "rebalancing" of science objectives. NASA has been engaged since last year in what the agency calls a road-mapping effort to flesh out the details of a Mars master plan that would lead to an expeditionary crew landing on that remote world. One scenario that has been under active discussion is slipping the mission of the mobile, nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) from...

Che Guevara is more than just a sleazy tee shirt on an aging leftwinger's food-dribbled chest. Che Guevara is a live emblem of hemispheric terror, kidnapping and murder. And not just in the 1960s but happening right now. Today! The news, still in only Spanish, has just come out this afternoon. Colombia's government just released a tape proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that filthy Marxist narcoterrorist FARC and ELN guerrillas are operating a string of working terrorist camps inside Venezuela. And not just inside Venezuela in the way we thought they were, as Hugo Chavez-hosted recreational guerrilla spas,...

WASHINGTON — Retired general Wesley Clark warned Sunday that the failure to capture Saddam Hussein was likely to undermine any new Iraqi government. And he said it was important to capture Saddam alive so he could be tried for war crimes. Clark's comments, at a session with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service reporters and editors, came as the Bush administration was accelerating the turnover of civilian authority to Iraqis. Clark praised the decision as a move "in the right direction" but said no regime was likely to succeed if Saddam stayed on the lam. "It's going to be...