David Kreutzer of Heritage has a great item up on The Foundry, on WaPo’s remarkable (it was WaPo!) exposé of the miracle Chinese bullet trains actually leaving a trail of, well, leaving fiscal and other wreckage in their wake. He concludes, “Well, the Chinese finally have a green-energy idea worth stealing: arrest government officials who foist overpriced, underperforming, debt-ballooning, money-losing projects on taxpayers.”

In case you missed the WaPo piece, the man in charge of China’s model train set:

“is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. … his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.

Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.

Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.”

In short, it’s an awful lot like Spain’s wind- and solar program President Obama also longs to impose here.

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When it comes to conservative political satire, there’s probably no more popular practitioner of the form than P.J. O’Rourke. Having overcome his own crazy hippie days in the ‘60s, O’Rourke went on to become one of the defining writers of the National Lampoon in the ‘70s and burst into politically-themed writing with an astonishingly funny series of articles for Rolling Stone throughout the 1980s, in which he planted himself as a white American guy into some of the troubled and anti-American places on earth. (The best of these can be found in his collection, “Holidays in Hell.”)

In 1991, he took on the U.S. government itself with a furor and viciously funny intelligence that would make Mark Twain proud, when he unleashed the book “Parliament of Whores” upon the world. The massive bestseller exposed the abject corruption and bloated nature of a modern-day government whose expanse vastly exceeded the roles which our Founding Fathers intended for it.

O’Rourke has continued in that vein for much of the past two decades, but his ability to settle into domestic bliss with his second wife and their two young children led him to focus on the still funny yet less pointed collection of fatherhood essays, “The CEO of the Sofa.” He also took on Adam Smith’s classic economics primer “The Wealth of Nations,” and broke it down in a funny yet informative way that made the tome accessible for modern audiences.

But as he stared down a cancer scare in the last two years, O’Rourke reclaimed his former fire and has written his angriest, funniest book since “Parliament” with the new “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.” Caught amid a nation gripped by Obamamania and a 21^st century set of problems, O’Rourke tackles all the big issues – from gun control and health care reform to terrorism and climate change – in a profane and defiantly funny set of essays that’s perfectly timed to the midterm elections.

Speaking exclusively with Big Government via phone from the Union Club in New York City on Monday, Sept. 27, O’Rourke spoke at length about his personal and professional transformation into conservatism and about the state of the union. He was loose, engaging, laid-back yet undeniably opinionated – just the way we like him.

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P.J. O’Rourke attended the World Environment Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992, the confab that gave us the first “global warming” treaty, a document which Kyoto amended and the ongoing Copenhagen meeting is also to amend to get Kyoto II. There, he wrote, in the scrum caused by typical UN ineptitude an earnest lass cried out something along the lines of “this is what life would be like in an overpopulated world!” To which O’Rourke replied, no, dear, this is what life would be like in a world run by the United Nations.

Well, similarly, you may by now have heard that Copenhagen is proceeding in even worse than normal fashion, thanks to 45,00 attendees — either Party, Observer or Media — having been accredited. The hall being used holds 15,000. The spillover is not so much from the welfare-seeking countries and their delegates but delegates from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These include mostly green pressure groups but also groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Chamber of Commerce.

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