So the banks – some of them, anyway, who bet long on toxic assets and lent like 14 year olds with too-big-allowances – are in trouble.  The government, rightly or (koff, koff) wrongly, is stepping in and socializing the major bank industry in all but name, and spreading the love downstream with an immense “stimulus” program that promises money to just about everyone.

The question is, how is this going to be paid for?

“Borrowing?”  Sure – but eventually loans need to be paid back (unless the government has ordered Fannie and Freddie to underwrite the loans, but that doesn’t apply in this situation).  And that’ll be “The taxpayer”

Who is this “taxpayer?”

Well, let’s find out who it’s not.

For starters, let’s leave out the 91 million Americans who pay no tax at all, leaving 209 million people to pay taxes.

Who are the patriarchs who caused the problem?  Men!  That leaves out the 51% of the population that are women, taking us down to 98 million.

Remove those in State and Federal prison, (3.8 million), as well as the 3% of Americans on parole (another 9 million), and you’re at just under 86 million people on the hook for these plans.

Of course, you can’t count the 73.5 million Americans who are below age 18, obviously.  They’re kids.  It’s not their fault.  That leaves 12.5 million of  us – except we’re going to have to leave out 10 million illegal immigrants, leaving us at 2.5 million), the military (since they’re busy), the employees of federal and state governments (since they’ll be the ones solving the problem and…

…that leaves two Americans.  You, and me.  We are the ones who are going to wind up paying for all this.

(more…)

The “The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” (GIVE) act passed the House yesterday by a depressingly lopsided margin, and has passed cloture in the Senate.

The bill, promoted by the Obama administration as a means of encouraging America’s youth to participate in voluntary community service, has received little scrutiny from Congress or the public.

Innocuous enough?  Sure.

The Obama is in the details (emphasis added):

Yet, a version of the bill in the House proposes to establish a Congressional Commission on Civil Service tasked with determining whether a mandatory service requirement for all young people in America could be developed and implemented, though it is not clear that provision will survive a conference committee.

Moreover, an amendment to the bill introduced by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., one of the bill’s 37 co-sponsors in the House, appears to severely restrict the First Amendment by prohibiting the youth participating in the program from attempting to influence legislation, organize or engage in protests, petitions, boycotts or strikes.

While this isn’t quite to the point of the Administration’s overaching proposal to create a new “Civilian Conservation Corps”, conscripted and in uniform and living in barracks in the countryside working on “shovel-ready” projects (the”Mandatory Volunteerism” provisions – Orwell alert! – have been stripped out) it’s a necessary step to get there.

Oh, and the First Amendment restriction would be irrelevant; the government bodies for whom the draftees would be working would do all their political thinking for them, thankewverymuch:

Funds under the bill are designated to be distributed through AmeriCorps, even though AmeriCorps volunteers have a history of being recruited and employed by community programs with an ideological purpose supported by Democratic Party politicians, including Planned Parenthood.

Under terms of the legislation, volunteers recruited into AmeriCorps through the GIVE Act could end up counseling Planned Parenthood clients to recommend and arrange abortions.

It is uncertain whether restrictions will survive into the final legislation that would prohibit GIVE Act participants from being recruited under the program to work in ACORN, a radical community organizing group facing criminal charges in several states for voter fraud.

Look, I have teenagers; there are times I’d welcome the draft starting at age, oh, 16 or so.  But could there be a less cost-effective way to get work done, unless the “work” is to “shred decent paying jobs for adult workers”, in which case the plan sounds marvelous?

Look – there’s a case to be made for national military service (provided that it’s genuine National Service, as in Israel, Switzerland or Finland, as opposed to a selective draft that leaves the children of the “elites” cooling their heels in college while the rest of their age group carries backpacks around South Carolina); it makes the nation’s military policy more conservative, for better or worse.

But National Civil Service lumps three bad ideas – compulsory labor, bigger government, indoctrination of youth into the Big Government way of life – into a perfect storm of self-perpetuating stupid.

The stock market does well for a president – Clinton – who, to be fair, was forced to do a decent, hands-off job on economic policy by a conservative congress, and to be even more fair was benefitting from the “Peace Dividend” Ronald Reagan gave him:  “The President is responsible for the strong market!”

The stock market starts correcting into a mild recession as overvalued tech stocks correct at the very end of his term in office:  “The President is not responsible for the market!”

The already-ailing market tumbles after 9/11:  “The President is responsible for the weak market!”

The stock market reacts to epic, welcome tax cuts by jumping to all-time record highs (taking employment and prosperity to equally-record levels):  “The President has nothing to do with the market!”

The real-estate bubble – which inflated largely due to socialistic policies that largely pre-date his administration, and which his administration fought (albeit in an inconsistent and dilatory fashion, albeit less so than the Congress) – deflates, eating up a quarter of the market:  “The President is responsible for the weak market!”

The stock market reacts to the election of a fabian socialist by shedding another 15% (from its high – 30% using election day as a baseline):  “The President has nothing to do with the market!”

The stock market reacts to the new administration’s inept, disastrous first six weeks by burning up another 8% of its pre-crash value (15% using election day as a baseline):  “The President really, Really, REALLY has nothing to do with the market!”

The market bounces back a few hundred points, amounting to less than 10% of its shrivelled value (around 5% of its Bush-era peak) in what most economists are calling a bear-market rally :  “Look at this wondrous market The President has, in His infinite wisdom, given to we who are not worthy!”

This crisis will not be wasted – especially since he created it.

I can’t even pretend to be surprised by these scumbags’ designs to socialize America any more:

In comments before testimony from both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed chief Ben Bernanke Tuesday, Frank said he wants to regulate pay on Wall Street — even for companies that aren’t getting bailouts.

Frank, one of the chief architects of the housing mess that’s brought us so low, isn’t satisfied merely with pretending he and his Democratic pals aren’t to blame for all this. No, exploiting voter anger over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, he also wants to dictate to American capitalism what it can earn and what it can’t.

This is the kind of thing that normally happens in Third World countries ruled by tinhorn dictators, or in fascist states, where the democratic rule of law has collapsed. Not the U.S.

Yet, that’s where we find ourselves today, isn’t it? Democrats in Congress, who steadfastly rejected virtually all efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went on the wildest, most irresponsible lending binge in the history of finance, now pose themselves as the saviors of fallen capitalism.

The hypocrisy is nothing short of stunning.

Click through and read the whole thing. Liberals are doing everything they can to destroy our country from within.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name

A month ago I wrote that Obama was having trouble filling his commerce post: I Will Not Go Down With This Ship

It turns out Treasury is having the same issue – there aren’t enough democrats desperate enough to have That Won on their resume.

The fact that Treasury is having trouble staffing its upper 14 appointments below Geithner means that people in the know about Obama’s economic policies are running scared. They don’t want to get involved, even if they have hungered after those plum jobs their whole lives. That tells you what the savviest Democrats are thinking.

Why? Policy.

Even the Europeans are resisting hyper-deficits, because Europe always has that memory of the 1920s and 30s: hyperinflation, unemployment, crushing poverty and despair, followed by Hitler and Stalin. They are refusing to follow Obama down that road. If the dollar crashes, they don’t want the euro to go down with it.

When the socialistic economies of Europe think Obama’s policies are too far left…

Washington Democrats are having panic attacks. They know you can’t turn the country on a dime; either you end up shafting the economy and lose the House in 2010, or you get slapped in the face by Putin or Ahmadinejad and also lose the House in 2010.

The American people still haven’t quite figured this guy out, probably because they can’t believe their eyes and ears.

What – we didn’t warn you about his far-left associations? You didn’t get the Che Guevara memo? You didn’t take an inventory of the few times he voted as Senator?

The saner Left is beginning to worry out loud. Yes, Nancy the Eternally Youthful really believes she is “saving the Planet,” but her House members are seeing their numbers tanking, and they have to start running this year to get re-elected next year.  Harry Reid is one of the nastiest characters in DC, but he is a survivor. Somebody is going to hit the brakes, and then an almighty struggle will break out on the Left.

The nations largest economy and sole superpower is now a lady in waiting for her savior – the saner left.

Harry Reid?

This might be a good time to panic.

…or at least sweep out a corner in the basement and start looking for sales on canned goods.

…but not to That One That Won, comrade.

The captain of the USS Jimmy Carter II is painting opponents to his plans to Socialize America with a broad brush as if Republicans are the villains in pointing out the flaws in his plans for the bankrupting of America Federal budget.

President Barack Obama said he won’t scale back his plans to revamp the health-care and education systems in his proposed $3.6 trillion budget and challenged Republican critics to do more than “just say no.”

They should say “Thank You.”

Thank you Mr. Obama for demonstrating to America so quickly and efficiently why we don’t usually have Democrats in power during an economic crisis and thereby restoring America’s short memory.

Thank you Mr. Obama for making George W. Bush look like a fiscal conservative by comparison.

Thank you for making me forget about my athlete’s foot fungus by starting my hair on fire.

Obama, gearing up for a fight in Congress over his fiscal 2010 spending blueprint, met privately with the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees before issuing a public rebuttal to Republicans who have criticized his plan as including too much spending at a time when deficits are ballooning.

Silly Republicans. You picked a fine time to grow some cojones. Quit worrying so much about fiscal responsibility and living within our means and focusing on the crisis at hand rather than thirty years of pent-up liberalism.

“‘Just say no’ is the right advice to give your teenagers about drugs. It is not an acceptable response” to economic policies “proposed by the other party,”

…unless their timing is monumentally assenine and most Americans are against them.

“The American people sent us here to get things done and at this moment of enormous challenge, they are watching and waiting for us to lead,” he said.

…and they will be waiting a long time it appears. Picking up where the last liberal majority left off is not leadership – especially given the current environment.

I think our junior President might be surprised to find that those “things to get done” didn’t include a much larger government, policies that amount to kicking the can further down the path and a crippling national debt.

So stay out of the way Republicans. It’s Barack and his posse’s turn to screw our kids.

Leave it to an economist to emit understatement so monumental as to be particularly humorous.

Several economists have said the stimulus package will not meet the administration’s goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year because the final package was smaller than expected and contained several provisions that they say are unlikely to be particularly effective.

…which is to say our misguided federal government is going to keep borrowing and spending; not because it will prove to be “particularly effective,” rather because that’s what liberals do.

Sort of reminds of the old saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Four years ago, I and most thinking Americans had a field day, roundly ridiculing a couple of risible strains of “liberal” whinging:

• Stars who claimed they’d “move to France” if George W. Bush won the election.
• Vacuous lefty blog-gerbils who yapped about the Blue States seceding from the union and joining to form “The United States of Canada”, and leaving the red-voting “Jesusland” states to themselves (I had particular fun with this, as well as pointing out the political and historical illiteracy of the idea; most of Canada west of Ontario is as red as Montana).  I had extra-special fun with these morons.
• Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.

These were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.

But I digress.  The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.

It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.

We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.

“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”

I often ask these people – why?

“It’s never been worse than this!”

I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.

Whenever anyone says anything is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.  They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve seen”.

Politics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…

…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.  But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.

Spending?  Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.  So far.

Gun control?  While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment, from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.

Civil Liberties?  Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.  Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.  Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.  But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).

Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”  OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.

Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?  The seventies were worse.  They had everything we have today and more – instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.  I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).

And even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.  In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.  There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.

The point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society has faced – yet.  And while the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it.

Not yet.

It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.  It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo.  It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.  But it’s not a communist dictatorship.

It was elected, for better or worse.  And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.

If they do?  Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.

Until then?  It’s still America.

As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.

Speaking of “The Surge” Mitch, Erik Sorenson, Emmy-Winning TV Executive and former President of MSNBC has some advice for executive-level job-seekers:

The word “surge” got a bad rap during Hurricane Katrina when related to Gulf waters breaching the levees and flooding into New Orleans.

In some circles, it was further tarnished when used to describe troop buildups in Iraq (though that Surge is now widely believed to have been effective).

Wow, Erik. Can I quote you on that?

Now, the word surge is being used to describe hiring mandates for government agencies and programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – informally known as “President Obama’s economic stimulus package.”

Dude. No one I know is calling the Stimuless Package “The Surge.” What you heard was “The Scourge.”

…or was it “The Gouge?”

…or the “Re-Gurge.”

The legislation from Congress requires certain agencies to hire high volumes for mission critical programs. And the challenges facing those agencies (overhaul the health-care system, police new banking regulations, dismantle our dependence on oil) also require a higher quality of executives, managers and team leaders. And the technical nature of the challenges requires federal employees with more specialized skill-sets.

All the more reason these programs should be left with the private sector – save regulating the banking industry – let’s leave that to Barney Frank.

There is no shortage of wonderful, qualified people currently unemployed and looking for quality work, so what’s the problem? “The federal government is a terrible recruiter,” according to Max Stier – President of the Partnership for Public Service – a nonprofit group which promotes federal employment. Stier notes that private companies out-recruit the public sector in the trenches and that it often takes six to nine months to get a hiring decision.

How ironic is it that a bloated and inefficient federal government can’t become more bloated and inefficient, even under mandate from Congress and the President…because it’s so bloated and inefficient.

If you are a capable executive or manager who is part of the 8.1% jobless, you might be interested in government work.

If you are an executive or manager, we can probably assume you are college educated, and among college graduates, unemployment is only 4.2% according to the latest data, unless you consider the “seasonally adjusted number” which is 4.1%; either way, only 2% more than a year ago.

So, probably not.

…a properly executed recovery effort will lift the economy.

We’ll be sure to alert you if a properly executed recovery effort is in the offing.

Finally, our economy’s ability to sustain America for the next generation (your kids) and the one after that (your grandkids) [thanks for explaining what generation means Erik-JR] will be very dependent on government decision-makers and their success in engineering an improved health-care system, innovation in the energy industry, an upgrade in our schools and the impending overhaul of the financial and auto industries.

Nice try, Erik. I think you meant our economy’s ability to sustain America for the next generation (my kids) and the one after that (my kids’ kids) will be in spite of government decision-makers.

You keep drinking that Kool-Aid, Erik. Tell us when your leg stops tingling too.

Earlier, we noted Minnesota state officials saying that the economic downturn had curbed congestion.

An isolated claim?  Read this appearance by SecState Clinton at the EU (to which I’m adding emphasis) and tell me:

“Never waste a good crisis,” Clinton told a hearing at the European Parliament. “And when it comes to the economic crisis, don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.”

The United States is seen as the key player in global climate talks in Copenhagen in December, after President Barack Obama signaled a new urgency in tackling climate change in stark contrast to his predecessor George W.

First:  is anyone checking Algore’s bank accounts?

Second:  Is this the most tone-deaf administration in history?

First things first;  it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly.  He’s one of the better policy bloggers out there, and has been for years.

And he dips into a subject

I’ve been dying to write about for weeks:  the idea of the “shovel ready” job:

What we need is not a bunch of make work jobs. Exactly what would Mr. Herbert’s plan look like? Should we take an unemployed financial analyst from Manhattan, hand him a shovel and have him dig a ditch or fix potholes on I-95? Is that really an effective use of his skills? Of course it isn’t- it’s a waste of human capital.

Leaving aside the undeniable Schadenfreud many would feel at the idea of Bernie Madoff pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken cement (or, to be honest, that I’d feel to watch my the guy who wrote my ARM five years ago cleaning the ape cages at the Como Zoo in July), I’ve wanted to ask – beyond the absurdity of thinking one can take unemployed auto workers and bank workers and put ’em out on the prairie fixing roads, has anyone noticed that building roads is a completely different operation than it was seventy years ago?  That it doesn’t involve armies of guys with shovels and pickaxes hacking the roadbed down to size?

Here’s where the standard argument about government jobs comes in: “but you’ve built a road!” they exclaim. Great, you have a road. Does that mean anyone will use that road? Sure, that road would be nice for all the trucks that aren’t going anywhere to take all the goods that aren’t being produced, but here in the real world just building a road produces a strip of concrete that may or may not get used. “If you build it, they will come” is a line from a movie, it’s not a theory of economics.

So, what do we really need? We really do need jobs, and we really do need infrastructure fixes. But those are two different problem with two different solutions.

If we want to get out of this mess, we need to tear down walls rather than build them up. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was an act that dramatically expanded liability for employers. You want to create jobs? Try not hobbling the people who create them.

The tax holiday is looking better and better.

And the earliest shot for one of those is 2013.

Hang in there.

I don’t believe in public subsidies of broadcasters – but I listen to MPR.  I mean, my tax dollars go to them, whether I support the concept of socialized radio or not, so it doesn’t give me any moral qualms.

I didn’t support public money for the Midtown Greenway – but my taxes pay for it, so I ride it with pride.  Dang skippy.

And Jason Lewis is wrong, wrong, wrong; I bike to work on roads for which I pay no gas taxes for my bike, and I do it without a single sleepless night .  I pay plenty of gas taxes when I’m not biking, and my bike does no damage whatsoever to the road that – I haste to add – I already paid for.

I’m not going to join with my conservative friends who are bagging on Governor Pawlenty for not rejecting Minnesota’s share of Porkulus, because, well, we’re ponying up our share.  While Pawlenty has not been the perfect fiscal conservative,  he’s done the best anyone could do under the circumstances under which he’s operating, at least trying to veto the DFL’s worst excesses.

The money’s leaving Minnesota.  Better that it had not left in the first place, of course; better still that we slash the size of Minnesota’s government.  But this is the hand we’re dealt.

Imperfect?  Sure.  But he makes some sense – and makes Rachel Maddow look like the gabbling, overpromoted ninny fighting four intellectual classes above her mental weight she is in the process, to sweeten the deal:

Pawlenty recently appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, and fairly effectively rebutted the host’s charge that those who criticized the stimulus bill were hypocrites for accepting the funds now that it had passed.“I have a number of responses to that argument,” Pawlenty said. “Minnesota ranks forty-sixth in terms of getting federal spending in relation to the amount of taxes paid — for every dollar we sent in to Washington, we get about 72 cents back. We’re a major payer of the federal government’s tabs, unlike many other states that I won’t mention. I say, when you’re paying to buy the pizza, it’s okay to have a slice. Now, if you were a liberal Democratic governor and you opposed military spending, are you not going to take National Guard funding? If you were a liberal who opposed No Child Left Behind, are you going to take federal funding in education? So I’m wondering why that standard is only being applied now to conservatives.”

Snap!

“All the governors are going to take almost all of the money. I’m not aware of any governor turning down a substantial amount. There’s some talk about not taking unemployment insurance — about 2 percent of the stimulus — because it expands obligations in unemployment insurance, and might require a tax increase later on down the road. But the point is moot to Minnesota, because our benefit level is already beyond what the federal government would require.”

Of course it’s politics – on Jindal and Barbour’s part no less than Pawlenty’s.  Pawlenty has a hideous, DFL-fathered deficit to close, while trying to buff up his rap sheet for a presidential run in the next 4-8 years; Jindal, Barbour and Sanford are aiming to be seen to Pawlenty’s  right.

Does it make a fiscal budget hawk happy?  Of course not; and Minnesota’s not a state of budget hawks.  Yet.

Fresch Fisch asks:

The “stimulus” money coming to Minnesota will be full of strings and conditions in order to accept the money. Will our state elected officials let us read the details of the handouts before they accept them?

Oh, goodness no. Any good con man knows that getting in and out fast is the key to pulling a fast one on a ripe suck.

To:  The 40% of Americans who will pay no income tax under the Obama “stimulus”

From:  The other 60% and I

Re: The Future

Dear Deadbeats:

Well, you went and did it.  You voted yourself a President and Congress who promise to give you goodies and make someone else pay for it.

All the rest of the Someone Elses and I need to ask you, though; what if we just decide to quit?  Quit working, quit ponying up and paying the freight for ourselves and, with all due respect, your freeloading asses?

What’ll happen to your entitlement to our tax money?

By the way, “But you have to keep working and paying!  It’s not  your money, it’s taxes” is not an answer.

Think about it.

That is all.

When you have some downtime today, I have an assignment for you.

Jeff Rosenberg at the Daily Liberal looks at the bill apportioning Minnesota’s share of the Porkulus spending, and asks “Where’s the pork?”

It’s interesting to see Minnesota Republicans not just adopting the national Republicans’ strategy, but also their talking points.

[Ahem.  Grrrrrrr.  Ed]

And of course, they do it even when it doesn’t make sense. Session Daily reports:

Rep. Keith Downey (R-Edina) was one of several Republicans who criticized the bill as being hastily constructed and potentially filled with “pork.”

Pork? Really? You might disagree with those spending priorities, but are they really pork? Or is this just another example of the word “pork” being used as a meaningless political buzzword?

I have an idea. I’ll post the entire text of HF 680 below; it’s actually not too long. Righties, please tell me where you think the “pork” is.

Jeff asked for help.  We should lend it to him.

Jeff helpfully posts the entire bill.  Why not skip on over there and show Jeff – not a bad guy, by the way – where the pork is?

I’ll see you over there.  Over lunch, anyway.  Time to run to work.

Judd Gregg tells Pres. Obama I’m doing my hair for the next four years:

New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew from consideration as Commerce secretary Thursday, saying his differences with the Democratic White House ran too deep.The announcement was a fresh embarrassment for an administration rocked by a number of setbacks. While his recent predecessors each lost one or two early cabinet nominees, Mr. Obama has lost three less than a month into his term. And Mr. Gregg’s withdrawal comes two days after a bank rescue plan was widely panned by financial markets and lawmakers from both parties, partly because of its lack of detail.

Note to Oly Snowe, Arlen Spector, Sue Collins et al:  if he’s smart enough to spit out the Kool Aid, aren’t  you?

Last Saturday, whilst appearing as a guest on Marty Owings’ internet talkradio show “Radio Free Nation“,  a liberal caller said that Obama’s stimulus package wasn’t pork, because the Merriam-Webster definition of “pork” was something that a lawmaker put into a bill to benefit his constituency,and the President wasn’t a lawmaker, so it couldn’t be pork.

I sat back and let that sink in for a bit.

And I made a mental note; being a longtime observer of liberals in action, I knew among lefties, memes are like whack-a-mole.  If they pop up in one place, they’ll soon pop up everywhere else.

And sure enough, it did.

A look at some of Obama’s claims in Elkhart, Ind., and the news conference called to make his case to the largest possible audience:OBAMA: “Not a single pet project,” he told the news conference. “Not a single earmark.”

THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork — tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.

For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other “priority procurements” by the Coast Guard.

Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on “roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on.” He added, “And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart.”

So it’s not pork.  It’s pancetta.

There are indications the Dems are going to be scraping to get to sixty in the Senate.

Here’s the complete list of Senators and their staffs.

Naturally, pick the ones from your state (singular in Minnesota – perhaps good under the circumstances) and get cranking.

It’s unlikely Amy “A-Klo” Klobuchar will be one of the wobbly ones, but it wouldn’t hurt to show her how very upset people are over this legislation.  Last week, House staffers reported that call were running 100-1 against the “stimulus”.

While we Republicans fight to make sure our own party doesn’t cross over to the dark side on the biggest act of intergenerational larceny in history, it’s important to remember that since Obama is basically getting the “Stimulus” terms dictated to him from his party’s left wing, there is a fair number responsible, centrist Democrats who aren’t thrilled with the idea of saddling our next generation with trillions in debt, either.Mike Brodigan has a good list to start with – 47 of ’em to be exact.  I’ll reproduce the whole list below the jump.

Of regional interest (to my largely regional readers) – All my Minnesota readers should call Collin Peterson – he’s in a fairly conservative district, and by Democrat standards is one of the good guys.

If in the Dakotas, naturally, Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota is on the bubble, as is South Dakota’s Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

But wherever you are, check the list.
(more…)

E. J. Dionne on the leftymedia’s approach to all of us uppity peasants who are rooting for the GOP’s red-zone play:

Obama’s network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans — short on new ideas, low on votes, and deeply unpopular in the polls — have been winning the media wars over the president’s central initiative. They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to “less than 1 percent of the overall package.” But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.

The fact that the “stimulus” would “stimulate” more if it were paid directly to the people in cash -that it creates a tiny film of jobs, mostly for Democrat constituencies, in exchange for a ruinous avalanche of pork – is the “least significant part?”

Heather Cromar responds:

Just imagine for a moment if my two daughters took my credit card on a spending spree of their own and came back with a whopping $80, 000 bill. Now try to imagine that the little sister, who flat out opposed the whole nonsense, in complaining to me about it, happened to mention that the older sister had bought some items that were sure to make my hair stand on end the moment I found out about it. Which would be the bigger issue to me? The couple of no-nos, or the total bill that is going to set our family budget back by a considerable amount for decades?

The thing to remember as you watch the media rally, legs a-tingle, around The One; they need you to be stupid.

From a local email politics “discussion” group that’s been locked in a DFL-upsucking stranglehold for a decade or so, writing about the “stimulus”:

Here we have a potential doubling of the national debt over a span of months to years and here is as much transparency as the run up to the Wars in both Vietnam and Iraq.  There is as much transparency as Medicare Part D.

That is a truly pathetic level of disclosure in a democracy and the direct product of partisans.

That’s a liberal writing.

One guy with enough brains to read past the hagiographic hype isn’t a trend, of course.

But it’s a sign that we fiscal conservatives aren’t the only voices in the wilderness.

TARP money is being distributed to banks as we speak, and more is on the way.

Sounds like a plan, right?

Anyone want to borrow money at 10-12%?

…when Treasuries are in the tank?

Didn’t think so.

But  Obama wants to force banks to lend these dollars.

The $350 billion second half of the federal government bank bailout—aka TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program)—funding was released by the Senate. According to the Wall Street Journal, President-elect Barack Obama intends to “spend $50 billion to $100 billion on a ‘sweeping’ foreclosure-prevention effort” as well as “impose tougher restrictions on banks that receive government aid, including requirements on banks to lend money, increased restrictions on executive compensation and curtailed dividend payments for some firms.”

The spankings will continue until moral improves.

Forcing banks to lend money…hmmm. Sound familiar?

C.R.A. anyone? That worked well for the economy didn’t it Mr. Jimmy?

TARP money costs banks 8-9%; it’s debt that shows up on their books as an “asset.”

Huh?

To make money, banks need to lend it out somewhere north of what it costs them, to make what we here in the real world call a profit.

As such, the good banks want nothing to do with TARP money and are simply waiting for the banks that took it or are otherwise soon to be insolvent, and then take advantage.

As they say, assets return to their rightful owners. Capitalism will prevail until liberals extinguish it’s last breath.

Now you know why TARP has done nothing to free up credit and get banks lending again.

…and why government intervention in a free market is almost always a bad idea.

To:  President Barack Obama

From:  Mitch Berg – American, Citizen, Accidental Constituent

Re:  Geese and Ganders

Mr. President,

As a person with an innate notion of common sense and right and wrong, I don’t disagree that it’s really, really bad PR for Wall Street firms and banks that are asking for government bailouts to be giving out nearly $20 billion in bonuses.

The tongue-lashing you gave them…:

Summoning reporters after a closed meeting with Mr. Geithner, Mr. Obama blasted earlier news that Wall Street had paid out $18.4 billion in bonuses, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” and “shameful.””There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses,” he said. “Now is not that time.”

The tough talk suggested a firmer stand from the administration in its oversight of banks. But it also had a political purpose: eliciting support for an expensive and unpopular bailout program that will likely require more cash from Congress.

…makes political sense.

On the other hand, the bonuses are attempts to retain top “talent” at firms that do drive this nation’s economic engine.  Right?  Wrong?  I’m not sure.

But it’s certainly no worse than the hundreds of millions – billions – your administration is planning to give to ACORN, the National Endowment for the Arts, global warming cultists, unions, and Trojan-brand condoms – none of which brings a single job to this nation (other than, I suppose, at Trojan – although I suppose you know that recessions actually help the market for contraceptives, among other less-clinical goodies).

If I didn’t know better – and as a bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you just know I don’t, right? – I’d almost thing you were trying an FDR-like bit of populist displacement, to focus the people’s attention on these (ill-timed) bonuses via the lens of your friends in tingly-leg media, to drown out questions about the pork your “stimulus” plan is shoveling.

Please get back to me.  Thanks.

That is all.

How bad is the stimulus?

Look – I’m a Friedman guy; free market uber alles.  The only justification for any Keynesian frippery in this sort of situation is if it creates jobs, directly or (not very) indirectly.

Plenty of better bloggers than I have covered the overdose of pork that the stimulus provides; my associate editor Johnny Roosh has done a good job of that as well.

How bad is it, though?  When you hear people saying “aren’t artists’ paychecks just as important as factory workers’ paychecks?”

No, they are not.  Art is a good thing; I can even justify some public purchase of art on some level (say, public architecture).  But art as a rule isn’t a job creator – certainly not in any major numbers.  (And let’s not jobs at Broadway theatres, here; Broadway isn’t art, it’s commerce).

The good news?  At least the Republicans sacked up and voted unanimously against the stimulus bill yesterday, for all the good it did.

But even some Democrats get it:

Senate Transportation Chair Steve Murphy has some big problems with the federal stimulus package working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Red Wing Democrat said it spends far too little on transportation, while funneling money into education and health and human services, which will not generate the jobs needed to jump start the economy.

“That bill that came out of the House of Representatives is a pile of donkey dung. It’s not going to do any good,” Murphy said. “They’ve got their priorities bass-ackwards. The majority of that money should be for infrastructure.”

He’s pretty smart for a DFLer.

I bet he has an interesting time at his next convention…

Cato has published a full page ad from a swarm of serious economists who aren’t jumping on the stimulus bandwagon:

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.

 

More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth. Below you’ll find some recent Cato work on “stimulus” packages.

Click through.  Read.  Show it to your friends at the water cooler.