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Breakfast Scramble (Thursday)

DavidL's Breakfast Scramble
Ain’t no free lunch, from Thomas Sowell, RCP [1]:

Once you buy the idea that the government should be a sort of year-around Santa Claus, you have bought the kinds of consequences that follow.

The results are not pretty, as we can see on TV, in pictures of rioters in the streets, smashing and burning the property of innocent people, who had nothing to do with giving them unrealistic hopes of living off somebody else, or with the inevitable disappointing of those hopes with cutbacks on the giveaways.

Nothing is easier for politicians than to play Santa Claus by promising benefits, without mentioning the costs– or lying about the costs and leaving it to future governments to figure out what to do when the money runs out

Really! From John Stossel, Human Events [2]:

Last year, Congress passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act. It was supposed to really end the alleged abuses perpetrated by the credit card companies. The law forbids some penalties and interest-rate increases on existing balances.

[…]

How has it worked out?

Not so well. George Mason University Law Professor Todd Zywicki points out that the new restrictions hurt more consumers than they help.

Since the Card Act passed, mortgage and Treasury bill rates have dropped a little, but credit card interest went up — from 13 percent to nearly 15 percent. Some banks also stopped offering credit to some people. JPMorgan Chase cut off 15 percent of its customers

Throwing Dumbo a life line,  Tucker  Carlson weighs in on Dumbo, b/k/a Barack Obama’s Micheal Vick remarks, from Mediaite [3]:

Carlson differentiated between Vick and others because Vick “killed dogs…in a heartless and cruel way.” This is true. But what Carlson believed to be the proper punishment for Vick is sure to get some attention:

“I think, personally, he should have been executed for that.”

Whoa. The conversation eventually turned to whether it was appropriate for Obama to weigh in on this matter at all (although, as the White House said, the primary focus of Obama’s discussion with Lurie was alternative energy) – golfer Ben Crenshaw, on the panel for some reason, came off as a Vick supporter but sounded unsure of whether the president should be discussing the matter. Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez voiced similar views, whereas Fox News contributor Doug Schoen didn’t see an issue with Obama’s comments.

Carlson’s re;marks were unfortunate.   Not because he dared to defy the Supreme Court’s theory on capital punishment, but because Carlson’s remark takes the attention away from Dumbo’s grandstanding.   It would have been better if Dumbo were the only person taking the heat for his ill considered Michael Vick remarks.   Drop and give me twenty Carlson.

Labeling Mayor No Labels, Micheal Bloomberg, Mayor No Labels, acquires a label, from Erin Einhorn andHelen Kennedy, New York Daily News [4]:

A testy Mayor Bloomberg fended off criticism of the city’s failure to clear hundreds of snow-choked streets Tuesday as an avalanche of critics attacked his reputation as a supermanager.

[….]

“The whole world is laughing that the greatest city in the world cannot manage to clear the streets. New York today looks like a Third World country.”

Mayor No Labels is now Mayor Incompetent.

Mayor Incompetent, wants to run your life, but he can’t run his own city, from Charlotte Hayes, National Review [5]:

The blizzard is definitely a force for conservatism, and not only because it has had the global-warming crowd scrambling for explanations.  The blizzard reveals something basic:  Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives. But when reality knocks, they can’t do the basic stuff such as clearing the streets so that newborns don’t die in bloody apartment-building lobbies [6]. Mayor Bloomberg may be receiving an unfair amount of criticism for his lackluster performance in coping with Mother Nature, given the almost unprecedented nature of the storm, but the unplowed city streets provide a metaphor for the nanny state: It can order us to do anything, but it can’t take care of the basic obligations of government.

Government, like people, needs to learn how to walk before it can run.  Government needs to manage is core requirement, public safety before they attempt to micromanage our personal lives.

Even WaPo notes Dumbo Care broken, Obama Care costs more but does less than advertised, from Amy Goldstein, Washington Post [7]:

An early feature of the new health-care law that allows people who are already sick to get insurance to cover their medical costs isn’t attracting as many customers as expected.

Don’t mend it, end it.

Wussification, Ed Rendell vents, err fumes, at the National Football League’s weather cancellation of last Sunday Minnesota at Philadelphia game, from Washington Times [8]‘.

First, to call off this game because of snow is further evidence of the “wussification” of America. We seem to have lost our boldness, our courage, our sense of adventure and that frontier spirit that made this country the greatest nation in the world. A little snow, a potential traffic tie-up, a long trip home caused us to cancel a football game? Will Bunch, a writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, said that if football were played in China, 60,000 Chinese would have walked through the snow to the stadium doing advanced calculus as they did so. He’s probably right, and it’s no secret why the Chinese are dominating on the world stage.

What would Western New Yorkers call a meaningful late season game played in Buffalo is the middle of a raging blizzard, especially against the beloved Miami Doplins?   A  dream game.   Should the league cancel such I game, I’d expect a riot.