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Its no secret that infrastructure across the United States is badly in need of repair. Local roads and highways are pocked with potholes, many large enough to cause significant and costly damage to vehicles; bridges are crumbling with several along the largest trucking routes named to priority fix-it lists for states and the federal government. The things we can see tend to get fixed first, but what about the infrastructure we dont see? The pipes that run under our homes, schools, offices, and roads, and carry either fresh water for drinking or wastewater, are some of the most important infrastructure in the country but we rarely pay attention to these until something breaks.

There are more than 1.2 million miles of water pipes running underneath the streets and countrysides in America. Most of those pipes have a service life of 75 to 100 years, but for many municipalities, their pipes are either nearing or have reached the end of their lifespan. About half of Philadelphias water pipes were installed before 1930, but there are some pipes that were, incredibly, laid before the Civil War. Many of Milwaukees pipes were put in the ground prior to the mid-1950s, and officials there, as in most other cities, are looking at tightening budgets and wondering how far their dollars will stretch.

The spending question is one that will soon takeover the national debate. During his campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to rebuild the countrys infrastructure, which is expected to cost upwards of $1 trillion. That cost will be split among local jurisdictions, states, and the federal government, but thats still an enormous amount of money that must be spent wisely. This is where Republicans must forcefully exert their political will to make sure that infrastructure dollars are used prudently.

According to a report from the Congressional Budget Office, in 2014, more than 75 percent of the $416 billion in public funding spent on transportation and water infrastructure came from state and local governments with the federal government chipping in $96 billion. But most of the money 57 percent went towards operations and maintenance, while rehabilitating existing pipes took a backseat. The same report also noted that starting in 2003, the cost of materials to build and operate water infrastructure began to rise rapidly. The more expensive the price tag to replace our aging infrastructure, the more important we get it right, and that means using the right kind of pipe to ensure that new or replacement systems last for as long as possible.

While there are still a few remaining wooden pipes in the country, the first water systems were constructed from cast iron. Theres a reason cast iron pans are handed down through generations of families its durable, safe and long-lasting. Theres even a Cast Iron Century Club, founded in 1947, that honors public utilities with cast iron water mains still in service after 100 years. The Cast Iron Sesquicentennial Club, formed in 1989, is for 150-year-old cast iron water mains.

Ductile Iron Pipe is the construction parallel to your grandmothers frying pan. It, too, is durable, safe and long-lasting and is the only infrastructure material with a service life upwards of 100 years. Given the constraints on public dollars, it makes sense to use these funds to buy the longest lasting pipe available. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each year, there are about 240,000 water main breaks that cause anywhere from minor to severe disruptions around the country. When officials were putting together their wish lists for the Obama Administrations stimulus package, the list from Ohio totaled $3 billion for drinking water infrastructure projects alone.

For as advanced an industrialized country as we are, our infrastructure is woefully in need of repair. We take for granted that when we wake up, our sinks, showers, and toilets will work as expected. But the 156,000 public water systems we count on to make all that happen are essentially working on borrowed time. President Trump was right to focus on the great need to repair and replace these systems, and congressional Republicans would be wise to work with him to fund these priorities, which will create jobs and provide a true economic stimulus.

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Republican Fiscal Sense Will Be Needed As We Replace Aging Infrastructure - InsideSources

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

The voter identified himself as a cancer survivor, and he had something to say to Republican Rep. Justin Amash: "I am scared to death that I will not have health insurance in the future."

The comment earned 61-year-old retiree Paul Bonis a standing ovation from the crowd packed into a school auditorium in Amash's Michigan district Thursday night. And the congressman was booed for his response: That the Affordable Care Act has "hurt a lot of people," and he supports his party's plans to repeal and replace it, even though the GOP still hasn't united around an alternative.

It's a scene that's played out around the country over the past several weeks as Republicans and President Donald Trump have assumed control of Washington and begun moving forward on their long-held promise to undo former President Barack Obama's health care law.

In an echo of the raucous complaints that confronted Democrats back in 2009 as they worked to pass "Obamacare" in the first place, Republicans who want to repeal it now are facing angry pushback of their own at constituent gatherings from Utah to Michigan to Tennessee and elsewhere, even in solidly Republican districts.

People shout to Rep. Jason Chaffetz during his town hall meeting at Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, Feb. 9, 2017. In an echo of the raucous complaints that confronted Democrats back in 2009 as they worked to pass "Obamacare" in the first place, Republicans who want to repeal it now are facing angry pushback of their own at constituent gatherings from Utah to Michigan to Tennessee and elsewhere, even in solidly Republican districts.

And just as the protests in 2009 focused on health care but reflected broader concerns over an increasingly divisive new president and Democrats' monopoly control over Washington, now, too, constituent complaints at town hall meetings appear to reflect more general fears about the Trump administration and the implications of one-party GOP rule of the nation's capital.

In a Salt Lake City suburb on Thursday night, GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz faced irate constituents chanting "Do your job!" as they pressed the House Oversight Committee chairman to investigate Trump. Chaffetz struggled to be heard as he faced a litany of sharp questions and screams from a crowd of people who grilled him on everything from Obamacare to Chaffetz's desire to overturn a new national monument in southern Utah.

"Come on, we're better than this," Chaffetz protested over the hubbub at one point, practically pleading with the deafening crowd to let him speak.

In Tennessee, GOP Rep. Diane Black faced questions from impassioned and well-informed constituents defending the Affordable Care Act, including one man who told her that he and others with health conditions might die without insurance.

"And you want to take away this coverage, and have nothing to replace it with," the man said. Black argued that the Affordable Care Act has been ineffective because although 20 million people gave gained coverage under the law, millions more have chosen to pay a fine and remain uninsured.

And in southern Wisconsin, GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner faced a voter who asked him: "Who's going to be the check and balance on Donald Trump?"

Like others interviewed at town halls around the country, the woman asking the question, Barbara Kresse, said she has not been politically active, another similarity to 2009 when the advent of the Obama administration seemed to cause enough anxiety to awaken groups of voters who had never previously gotten involved.

Indeed the recent protests are being amplified by liberal activists modeling their opposition to Trump on the tea party groups that sprang up to oppose Obama and the Democrats.

Calling itself "Indivisible," a non-profit group that grew out of a how-to guide written by former Democratic congressional staffers has advertised town hall gatherings nationally, suggesting at least some level of coordination, which was the case with the anti-Obamacare protests as well. Some Republicans, including White House press secretary Sean Spicer, have dismissed the protesters as orchestrated and even paid, though there's been no evidence of that.

Noor Ul-Hasan reacts during Rep. Jason Chaffetz's town hall meeting at Brighton High School, in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, Feb. 9, 2017. In an echo of the raucous complaints that confronted Democrats back in 2009 as they worked to pass "Obamacare" in the first place, Republicans who want to repeal it now are facing angry pushback of their own at constituent gatherings from Utah to Michigan to Tennessee and elsewhere, even in solidly Republican districts.

House GOP leaders have taken note of the protests, and took time during a regular meeting of their conference this past week to give lawmakers "best practices" advice for dealing with them, including to treat protesters with courtesy and respect, consider hiring security or a moderator for town hall gatherings, or even "kill them with kindness" by offering cookies or coffee.

Lawmakers insisted that they are not changing their public schedules out of concern over being met by protesters, but town hall meetings have grown rarer in recent years anyway, with some lawmakers citing the shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords at a constituent gathering in Tucson, Arizona in 2011 as one reason.

In some districts and states, constituents have been trying to shame lawmakers into holding town halls to discuss Obamacare or other issues, showing up at district offices with signs demanding a meeting.

In a letter to fellow House Republicans on Thursday, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, vice chairman of the GOP conference, downplayed the opposition and sought to encourage lawmakers to stay committed to their agenda.

"We have been charged with holistic reform," Collins wrote. "And to the extent that we are leading our communities in a new direction, we remember -- with sadness -- that, because a broken system became the status quo, even those who have suffered under that brokenness may resist its repair."

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Republican Lawmakers Face Angry, Worried Constituents at Town Hall Meetings - Voice of America

A permanent U.S. resident living in Texas has been sentenced to eight years in prison for illegally voting, a punishment that will probably result in the womans deportation after she completes her sentence.

On Wednesday, a Tarrant County, Tex., jury convicted 37-year-old Rosa Maria Ortega on two felony charges of illegal voting, for casting a ballot as a noncitizen in 2012 and 2014. Ortega is a green-card holder who was brought to the United States from Mexico when she was an infant, her attorney said.

The decision was hailed by some including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who prosecuted the case as a sign the state intends to crack down on voter fraud.

This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure, and the outcome sends a message that violators of the states election law will be prosecuted to the fullest, Paxton said in a statement. Safeguarding the integrity of our elections is essential to preserving our democracy.

However, Ortegas lawyerand others said the punishment was unusually harsh and meant to appease those who are swept up in the Trump hysteria where he is trying to find an explanation for why he lost the popular vote.

President Trump has alleged, without evidence, that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots were cast against him.

Though his claims about widespread voter fraudhave been debunked, that has not stopped Trump from resurrecting them, most recentlythis past week while speaking with senators in New Hampshire.

Ortega did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, her attorney, Clark Birdsall, told The Washington Post by phone on Saturday.

Ortega was a registered Republican who had been voting for more than a decade, he said. On her voter application, Ortega was faced with only two options to mark herself as a citizen or a noncitizen and didnt know better, he added.

She doesnt know. Shes got this [green] card that says resident on it,so she doesnt mark that shes not a citizen, Birdsall said.She had no ulterior motive beyond what she thought, mistakenly, was her civic duty.

In 2015, Ortega applied to vote in Tarrant County, indicating on the form that she was not a citizen; her application was rejected, NBC DFW reported at the time. However, five months later, she filled out another form and claimed the second time that she was a citizen, the station reported. A subsequent investigation found she had voted when she wasnt supposed to in Dallas County, the NBC affiliate reported.

Birdsall said Ortega has voted in five elections since 2004, each time casting only a single ballot. Ortega voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election andthen somewhat ironically for Ken Paxton for Texas attorney general in a 2014Republican primary runoff. Paxton would go on to win and, less than three years later, deal the eight-year sentence to Ortega.

Its a single vote that shes casting each time, Birdsall said. The fact that she got eight years is off the rails.

[Trump supporter charged with voting twice in Iowa]

Birdsall also claimed he and Paxton had an agreement worked out, in which he would dismiss the felonies as long as Ortega accompanied him to the state legislature and spoke in favor of changing voting procedures.

However, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson killed that resolution, Birdsall said.

What resulted, he said, was an unnecessarily harsh prison sentence that dwarfed punishments most people receive. Birdsall, a former public integrity prosecutor in Dallas County, said he never filed a voter fraud charge in five years.

These charges are exceedingly rare, he said, citing one past case in which a Houston-area group was sentenced to three years in prison after they listed a hotel as their residence in an effort to sway a local election.

They were doing some shenanigans that needed to be punished, Birdsall said, of the other case. He said Ortega, who only obtained a sixth-grade education, did not intend to commit a crime.

Although [Ortega] was arrested in 2015, [the case] didnt reach fruition until right in the middle of all this Trump hysteria, he said. The timing of this was the perfect storm.

Wilsons office did not immediately respond to an interview request Saturday. A spokeswoman for the district attorney told the New York Timeson Friday that there were only discussions, not negotiations, before Ortegas trial.

[There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election]

The sentencing has thrust questions about voter fraud as well as a controversial voter ID law in Texas back into the spotlight. In July, a federal appeals court ruled that the states strict voter-ID law discriminated against minority voters. In January, the Supreme Court declined to review the lower courts ruling.

The Tarrant County district attorney used the case as an example of why stricter laws were needed.

At a minimum, statements made in applications to vote should be verified before handing out voter registration cards, Wilson said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News. In all aspects of society, people verify their identity. Why not for voting? This case shows a clear need to enforce the laws we already have.

A 2015 fact-check by PolitiFact found that there had been 85 election fraud prosecutions since 2002, among about 72 million ballots cast in Texas between 2000 and 2014.

Youre more likely to get struck by lightning in Texas than to find any kind of voter fraud, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said at the time,according to PolitiFact.

Birdsall said Ortega will probably be deported after serving her sentence because she will be a convicted felon. He plans to start an online crowdfunding page forOrtega, a single mother of four children ages 13 to 16.

They also plan to file an appeal, though the conviction is unlikely to be overturned, he said.

An appeal is a very uphill battle, Birdsall said. I dont see any joy at the end of that road, but it will be appealed. We will do our best.

Read more:

Once again, Trump claims that just enough fraud cost him an electoral victory

A Trump supporter was charged with voting twice. Her lawyer says she shouldnt stand trial.

Donald Trumps indefensible claims of rampant voter fraud are now White House policy

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Republican green-card holder who voted illegally in Texas gets 8 years in prison - Washington Post

Republicans in Congress are currently coming up with a plan to repeal Obamacarebut many of their constituents are speaking out to make it clear that they are not doing so with full support.

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Republican Rep. Diane Black held a town hall about the Affordable Care Act in Murfreesburo, Tennessee, and several of her constituents gave passionate defenses of the Affordable Care Act and why it's important. CNN reports that one of her constituents, a 35-year-old teacher named Jessi Bohon, was visibly emotional as she gave a powerful defense of why the individual mandate to have health insurance is so important. Here's what she said:

"My name is Jessi Bohon and I'm in your district. It's from my understanding the ACA mandate requires everybody to have insurance because the healthy people pull up the sick people, right? And as a Christian, my whole philosophy on life is pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick. If we take those people and put them in high-risk insurance pools, they're costlier and there's less coverage for them. That's the way it's been in the past, and that's the way it will be again. So we are effectively punishing our sickest people. And I want to know why not, instead of fix what's wrong with Obamacare, make companies like Aetna that pulled out and lied to their consumers about why they pulled out, and said they pulled out because Obamacare was too expensive, but they really pulled out because of a merger. Why don't we expand Medicaid and have everybody have insurance?"

Rep. Black responded to Bohon by saying that the individual mandate still allowed many people to be insured. "About 20 million people did actually come into the program who were uninsured," she said. "You don't want to hurt one group of people to help the another. We can help both groups at the same time."

"How many of those people were in states where they played a political game with people's lives?" Bohon retorted. "I'm going to pass this one," Rep. Black replied.

Bohon told CNN that she voted for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, and said that growing up in a coal-mining town in Virginia taught her why helping the needy was so important. "Growing up in the community that I grew up, in Appalachia, because we were so poor there that we had to take care of each other," she said.

Follow Marie Claire on Facebook for the latest celeb news, beauty tips, fascinating reads, livestream video, and more.

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Tennessee Woman *Shuts Down* a Republican Town Hall About Obamacare with One Epic Question - MarieClaire.com

There's nothing to see here. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.

I am a firm believer in the people, Abraham Lincoln supposedly once said. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

While Republicans love to refer to themselves as the Party of Lincoln, they seem to disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of this quote. They certainly dont want the American people to have facts and nobody in their right mind would ever refer to their current standard-bearer as Honest Don.

The GOPs War on Information, however, goes back much further than the current national gaslighting campaign spearheaded by Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway. Republicans and their allies have been fighting against facts for years.

One of the best-known examples is the so-called Dickey Amendment, which was first passed in 1996 and effectively ended the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions research on gun violence. Rep. Jay Dickey (R-AR), after whom the amendment is named, has since expressed regret that the language he introduced has had that effect on this type of research.

In the area of climate science, the fossil fuel industry and its GOP allies in Congress have been trying to obscure facts for decades through a well-funded campaign. Most recently, this effort included trying to cut back funding for climate change research conducted by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and denying funds to the Department of Defense to investigate what impact the warming of the planet would have for the US military.

Last year, Republicans also backed an effort to prevent the IRS from collecting information on big money donors who give to nonprofit organizations, many of which are used for influencing elections. While national sunshine groups opposed that legislation, the Koch brothers supported it.

With Trump in the White House and a GOP majority in Congress, these (and many other) efforts to keep the government from collecting data that could prove harmful to those funding the Party of Lincoln will likely be revived and expanded this year.

But the Republican anti-information crusade is not limited to big ticket items that capture national attention, such as gun violence or climate change.

A little-known bill introduced last month by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) called the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017 would prohibit the use of federal funds to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.

We dont know what such a database would show but we also see no reason why there shouldnt be one. Republicans obviously feel differently.

In addition to trying to prevent the gathering of new information, there is also a growing concern that the Trump administration will fudge existing data in areas far more important than, for example, determining how many people showed up at the inauguration.

According to the Guardian, US statisticians are concerned that Donald Trumps administration might suppress or manipulate public statistics that dont fit his narrative of the truth.

The reason that Republicans seem to be at war with information-gathering or facts in general goes beyond GOP lawmakers doing the bidding of their wealthy backers: The more educated voters are, the more likely they are to back a Democrat.

In November, Trump held an 8-point edge over Hillary Clinton among voters who did not have a college degree. This already significant gap jumps to a stunning 39% among whites. In George Orwells 1984, this is referred to as Ignorance is strength.

But it would be incorrect to assume that Republicans dont recognize the value of information gathered by the government. In North Carolina, for example, state GOP lawmakers were suddenly very interested in data collected by the Tarheel State that showed how people voted and what kind of IDs they had. They then turned around and used that information to write a law that would make it more difficult for minorities to vote.

What all of this means is obvious: By fudging existing data and preventing the collection of any information deemed undesirable by Republicans, the GOP can create an official alternative reality in which the world isnt warming, people who lost their health insurance arent dying, acts of terrorism are only committed by Muslims and millions of people show up whenever Trump speaks.

Abraham Lincoln would counsel against this course, because he also said: If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Paul Ryan caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr CC BY 2.0), Ryan body (U.S. Department of State / Flickr), Uncle Sam caricature (Paul ORear / Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0), manhole cover (Rusty Clark ~ 100K Photos / Flickr CC BY 2.0), manhole and lid (J. Samuel Burner / Wikimedia CC BY 2.0) and Capitol (Vlad Podvorny / Flickr CC BY 2.0).

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The Republican War on Facts - WhoWhatWhy / RealNewsProject (blog)