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I’ve been involved on all sides of the train issue for some 20 years. In that time I’ve seen a drive towards getting one thing, and one thing only, built – Consultants bank accounts. Here in Florida we seem too apt to repeat the disaster of 100 years of Everglades cleanup. Millions and millions of dollars to people who claim to be working on solutions and the most that is produced is 100s of pages of “solutions” and very little work for the money.

This time it’s BILLIONS of tax payer dollars for something that the polls consistently show the people want but the people won’t ride. My argument, from the very first time I heard of this when I worked in government, was let the private sector pay for this. I learned early on that they won’t from their very employees, who stated they can’t build it because they know this can’t make money.

So the lowly taxpayers get stuck with a worthless project that will bleed them dry and probably will never see a train built.

What’s interesting about the “Orlando” to “Tampa” route Obama is touting is that so little work has been done for that proposed route. Most of the effort and money has been put into a trail that goes from western Volusia County to western Orange County. More reason to need to blow away more taxpayers dough!

I could go on. This is a financial disaster that will never meet its expectations. 1 million riders is a conservative estimate of ridership. Dade County’s MetroRail would love to see that number in 5 years. And they’re in a more congested area.

The cartoon is an amalgam of ideas from Ken Culotta, Sally Baptiste and Mark Duren.

Those dunderkinds Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod all gave various high ranges of Obama’s job creation abilities, ignorring the vast amount lost in the past year that wipes out all gains.

I slipped in my dear friend Lucile Fair who turns 102 today. If you watch the UStream video you’ll see a different person in the drawing. Click here to see it. I decided to place Lucile in the drawing despite her not really fitting in it. I thought she only turns 102 once (And most turn it at all), so I’ll place her in it anyway.

As it turned out, Coakley didn’t need Al Franken’s advice! 🙂

A terrific Ken Culotta gag! I penciled and inked this live using UStream. You can watch the film by clicking here. Because of how I’m having to configure myself I’m having some trouble with proportion and I’m not real nutty about this caricature of Franken.

Click here and you can watch me draw the original cartoon for January 15th. Dick Daniels joins me and talks politics, too. I realized my concerns were too much and I scrapped it and zipped out the above instead. The cartoon above was entirely done using Photoshop.

Click here to watch this cartoon being drawn. This cartoon came about because of an interview with Cristina Romer on ABC News This Week. WD from Sarasota pointed out the interview was coming up by way of Twitter. Thanks to WD for giving me the heads up. I would’ve ordinarily have missed the interview because where I am ‘The McLaughlin Group’ is what I watch when that part of ‘This Week’ is on. Ken took the concept and wrote the gag.

Pure transparency.

This is another Ken Culotta gag! This is the second editorial cartoon where I made full use of Adobe Photoshop filters. The Wall, floor and TV screen are all from filters.

No matter the administration, this whole occurance was handled badly.

Another Culotta gag! This was very quickly done. The original idea was to break it into two panels, until I realized one would do.

A really funny Ken Culotta gag!