Nightly Ramble: The “When Cows Fly” Edition

Welcome to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “When Cows Fly” edition

• So, the Gloved One is now the Buried One. Someone, and I don’t know who, on Twitter last night, called him a “Shovel Ready Project” . Yeah, that fits.  Someone else called him “America’s version of Princess Dianna”.  They … whoever they are… should be taken out and shot… quickly. Else, the oughta be given an award for pun of the year.  Unlike  Jacko, who never really knew what kind of princess he wanted to be when he grew up,  Dianna wasn’t hard to look at.  Jackson, meanwhile, looked like a Mary Shelly novel on acid. More,  Dianna’s problems were not self-inflicted, best I could tell at the time, or since.  Nor was her demise nearly as predictable as that of Jackson. Of course, now comes the decade or so of legal fights, which will be much more public than the ones surrounding Dianna’s death. After all, there’s more money involved and more hands out for it, and less shame about legal maneuvers to obtain it. Ah, Hollywood.
• Slow Burning Fuse? Gotta tell you Billy, I find this attitude far more prevalent among cops than apparently is your experience.
• What page are we on, again? As flat out stupid as I find Obama’s foreign policy… (Can anyone explain to me in 30 pounds of BS or less how yesterday was anything but a loss for the US?) … apparently, Joe Biden isn’t a team player.  Either he’s smart enough to see the disaster of the course Obama’s taking, or too stupid to see the consequences of not following the boss’ lead. And I won’t lay odds for either one.
• Why we’re in financial trouble:  Here you go.
• Job Killer: We’re having troubles keeping folks in jobs. Every time the minimum wage has been raised, we lose jobs, particularly among lower income families, and teens. So, come July the 24th, the Democrats are raising the Minimum wage.
• The Stimulus had the opposite effect:  Now comes a report that the Stimulus killed off jobs, too.
• Democrats- King Midas in reverse:   Donald Lambro a couple days ago in the Washington Times points up:
  

  President Obama’s domestic agenda is losing steam in an increasingly contentious Democratic Congress amid growing public doubts about the veracity of raising taxes in a deep recession. 

  

  Lambro

  The economy remains sick. The stimulus plan isn’t working. Investment capital, the lifeblood of a vigorous economy, is still on strike. Over 40 House Democrats voted against his energy tax bill, which barely passed by a seven-vote margin and now faces huge obstacles in the Senate. His health care plan is on shaky ground. His promise not to tax middle-class workers is in shreds, and massive deficits are piling up as fears mount that the economy may face months if not years of anemic growth.

  The White House fashions new, defensive arguments weekly in behalf of Mr. Obama’s stimulus. The latest argument coming out of the president’s economic advisers is that they never actually expected the stimulus bill to trigger growth this early in the year. It’s going to take a lot longer to show results, they say now.

  The gross domestic product, the measurement of all the goods and services the economy produces, shrank at an annual rate of 5.5 percent in the first quarter. It is expected to shrink further in the second quarter but at a slower pace.

  Americans are not spending; they are saving. The savings rate jumped to 6.9 percent in May, a 15-year high, while spending barely budged by 0.3 percent. “As the first half of ’09 ends, investors are growing more anxious about whether the economy can bounce back later this year,” the Associated Press reported last week.

  Holding the economy back is unprecedented borrowing and a raft of higher taxes Mr. Obama intends to impose on the country – from energy taxes that will increase the cost of everything we buy to health care taxes to pay for the president’s grandiose national health insurance plan.

  One cannot help but wonder if we’re not dealing with intent to harm, here. After all, one can only be so wrong so often by sheer force of will. They even admit they know their moves are job killers.

• Why they insist on putting in programs that don’t work: The ability to screw things up ranges farther yet…The soon-to-be-married Megan McArdle notes, today:
  

  Now, everyone on the left was united in favoring auctions over giveaways. Auctions also had a fair amount of support on the right, mostly from people who hate corporate welfare even if they also oppose cap-and-trade. And you can whine all you want about how the Republican party had a god-given moral duty to provide political cover to Democrats from coal states (though frankly the complaining about your party’s 60-seat senate majority is really starting to sound quite idiotic), but the fact is that at the end of the day, you couldn’t do this perfectly obvious thing that has surprisingly broad support among the policy elites of both parties.

  

  McArdle

  Instead, the bill was passed in a form that makes it more expensive, and almost totally ineffective.The fact that you can imagine some perfect bureaucrat administering a beautifully-designed law does not mean that this is actually possible in the American political universe.

  There’s something else that has been bothering me. I have been urged to support Waxman-Markey on the grounds that we musn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and maybe I do. But the mediocre can also be the enemy of the good. Even if you support national healtch care, you certainly wouldn’t build Medicare in its current form. But there is path dependance in institutions: once they exist, they’re precious hard to change. Enacting a crappy climate trading system in order to do something forestalls the possibility of enacting a better design five or ten years from now. Given that this bill is universally expected to accomplish virtually no significant emissions reduction in the foreseeable future, that should worry people. Other than me, I mean.

  See, Megan… the thing you’re missing is, there’s one advantage they’re not telling you about to acting now. In a hurry. Like it was a crisis. It turns the whole thing over to government with a lot less question. As we found with the stimulus, not only are the opportunities for graft astoundingly large, but what should be a commodity becomes a political football to be used at the next election.  And therein lies the center of the whole thing. They’re about growing government power, not fixing the problem.

•  Global warming and other myths: Boortz has a great bit on that today.  He’s spot on.  You know who will get my vote? Someone who will campaign against “cap and trade” and any other global warming nonsense. Do you suppose there’s any chance someone who have the balls to do that? Besides Sarah Palin, of course.
• Speaking of Sarah: Yes, I’ve seen the arguments about how she bailed on legal expenses.  Actually, that firms up my thinking that she’s coming out in 2012.