Side-by-Side: Absolutely Nothing To Do With The Bakken

These two stories were side-by-side in the Los Angeles Times today. First:

In Death Valley, California, some students have a two-hour round trip to school and back. They depend on public transportation (a yellow school bus). The folks in rural North Dakota can relate to this. Because of budget constraints, the state has pulled funding for school transportation for the rest of this fiscal year and may eliminate it entirely next year. For those students, the cut is 'catastrophic.'

Then, just below that story is this story:

Governor Jerry Brown presses on with his plans for a $100 billion bullet train in central California that will go nowhere, be ridden by nobody, and never reach bullet-train speeds. 

Incredible.