Some items as I get things squared away for the holiday weekend:

• New York State politicians push for HSR - NY applied for $4.7 billion in stimulus funds to build 110mph rail from Niagara Falls to NYC. More about the plan here.

This is a welcome letter:

In an effort to deal with California's spiraling unemployment rate, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the state's two senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, sent a letter Monday to President Obama urging funding of the state's high-speed rail project and improvements in its intercity rail service.

They urged Obama to fund the projects through federal stimulus funds, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

As we await the Federal Railroad Administration's decision on awarding the $8 billion in HSR stimulus funds, some observers are wondering how exactly the projects will be selected - and what the role of merit and politics will be. Over at Railway Age, editor William Vantuono suggests the FRA will be caught between those two considerations:

One of the consistent points this blog has made since we launched in March 2008 is that HSR is part of an overall effort to revive passenger rail in California. HSR isn't a substitute for other forms of local rail - in some places, like the Peninsula and Southern California, it enhances local rail by enabling more and faster service on commuter lines such as Caltrain and Metrolink. Prop 1A recognized the need for a linked system by offering about $1 billion for non-HSR passenger rail in the state.

As the decision point for awarding $8 billion in federal HSR stimulus nears, and with some $50 billion in applications submitted, California's federal representatives are making a strong push to ensure California gets a significant portion of those funds:

We've been calling for federal representatives to speak up and help resolve some of the key HSR disputes in California, and it looks like that's exactly what they're starting to do. Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote a letter to Ray LaHood calling for the feds to fund the construction of an HSR train box at Transbay Terminal, as is currently called for in the plans:

This week the debate over high speed rail - which, bizarrely, we're still having even after California voters approved Prop 1A a year ago - returns to the opinion pages of two of California's most prominent newspapers. Two op-eds examine the project and reach very different conclusions about the project's value to the state. First up is Daniel Curtin, president of the California Conference of Carpenters, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, 23 of California's Congressional delegation have signed a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo supporting the CHSRA's application for federal HSR stimulus funds. The presence of Pelosi and the two Senators alone is significant, as they are among the three most powerful members of Congress, but the other 20 members of Congress are significant as well in that they show widespread support in California for this application.

There seems to be a growing consensus that when it comes to doling out federal HSR stimulus money, California should get the lion's share. Earlier this summer The Business Insider suggested CA get "all" the HSR funds, arguing that if the money was spread too thin, nothing would actually get built and we thus wouldn't have much to show for the stimulus spending, whereas giving it "all" to California would help produce an actual bullet train.

Thanks to @TedNguyen and OCTA for this short video of the HSR stimulus funding rally yesterday at LA Union Station. Included are snippets of remarks by OCTA CEO Will Kempton, CHSRA Board Chairman Curt Pringle, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: