Archive for November, 2010

Brett Noel

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Dan Calabrese

Your government hard at work.

Sort of shatters the image, if you embraced it to begin with, of earnest, dutiful feds conducting themselves with the utmost sense of high-minded purpose. Hey! When we’re driving nuclear weapons around . . . people will get out of the way!

Anything valuable in the car? Well, uh . . .

This seems to be a symptom of the bureaucratism that afflicts everyone in large organizations after awhile, but especially public-sector ones. And while I’m sure some of you will point out that these were private contractors, the real point is that the culture of any organization – public or private – is what lends itself to this sort of thing.

Letting the work out to contractors allows the middle-management department paper-pusher to claim plausible denial. And being an outside contractor means you know that no one is really watching you all that carefully.

By the way, if all of American culture had not so completely intertwined alcohol with “unwinding” and relaxation, would this still have happened?

Herman Cain

There’s one message from the 2010 elections that many so-called policy makers, political elites and analysts did not hear. Namely, the American people are not as uninformed and stupid as they think we are.

Not the answer.

President Obama’s Debt Commission and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force have both floated its ideas for reducing our nation’s runaway national debt. As CNNMoney.com reports, both sets of ideas echo each other in broad strokes. And both sets of ideas could confuse and confound the leaves off a tree.

These ideas are a long way from becoming law, but they are generating, as intended, much discussion about the merits of each idea.

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Bob Maistros

Rising health costs.  Problems with access.  Epidemics of chronic disease, from obesity to diabetes to asthma.

To address all that, do we really need a trillion buckaroos for the President’s healthcare boondoggle with its hydra of government panels, commissions and agencies?

A mom all the day keeps Doc Barack away.

Nah.  Turns out that when it comes to improving the nation’s health, the real answer is not Obamacare but rather Mamacare.

That at least according to the lead article in the latest edition of my personal favorite journal, The Family in America.  Dr. Bryce Christensen shows us that as in so many other areas of society, being married and having two natural parents at home – especially when one of them is a stay-at-home mom – is the best prescription for better health.

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Brett Noel

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Bob Maistros

There’s a lot to complain about with the Gropegate scandal outraging citizens across America.

Certainly there’s the creep factor of turning a whole column of low-paid government workers into Peeping Toms and Thomasinas, literally undressing passengers with their eyes … and controlling highly embarrassing images.

TSA employees go GAGA.

(Rules schmules.  Remember:  Murphy’s law and all its corollaries can and do apply to government – if revealing views of some hot babe can become tomorrow’s Facebook entertainment, they ultimately will.)

Not to mention having said employees groping and grabbing at the most private parts of the most innocent passengers– from three-year-olds to nuns.

(Personally, I think the whole thing is really a marketing campaign aimed at allowing the feds to increase the return on their investments in GM and Amtrak.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s certainly good news that General Motors has returned, at least for the moment, to profitability. And the next time the CEO of a troubled company insists “bankruptcy is not an option” because it would destroy all consumer confidence in the company . . . actually, would any CEO ever say such a thing again?

Probably not.

Delusions abandoned?

So as GM’s initial public offering today starts it back down the road to independence from government ownership, anyone would have to cheer the changes GM has made, and the restored hope that the entire domestic auto industry might one day become a truly viable, self-sustaining, even (gasp) wealth-generating enterprise.

And yet . . .

One wonders if the factors that are giving us short-term profits today are really sustainable over the long term. It starts with the question of whether GM’s current and future executive leadership (it seems to change a lot these days) really understands what went wrong and led to the automaker’s collapse in the first place.

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Dan Calabrese

Let’s deal with this notion propagated by Mitch McConnell, who’s come late to the party in support of the earmark ban, that banning earmarks doesn’t actually save any money. The argument is that Congress passes a budget with all this spending authority, and that earmarks simply determine where specific chunks of the money will go.

If you're serious, Mitch.

So say you pass a transportation bill that authorizes $60 billion in spending on infrastructure. It’s got to be spent somewhere, right? So here come the senators and congressmen earmarking portions of the money to go to their states and districts. If they didn’t put in the earmarks, they argue, the federal government would still spend the money. It’s just that one of those dastardly left-wing socialist bureaucrats in the Obama Administration would decide where it’s spent.

So you see? It’s really a separation of powers question. Earmarks are a right-wing smile factory!

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Bob Maistros

News flash:  Outrage grows over the choice passengers face between submitting to a highly revealing full-body scan and an invasive pat-down, as a video of a screaming three-year-old being body-searched goes viral on the Web.

(to the tune of “The Way You Look Tonight,” with apologies to Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields)

Scanning from your head to toe
What the x-rays show
No one else can know
Just leering at you
And the way you look pre-flight.

Glove me.

Yes, you’re naked, your revealed form
Your butt cheeks so soft,
There is nothing for me but to glove you.
And your private parts pre-flight.

With each view your wariness grows,
But I have got these regs…
Let me reach where no one else goes,
Groping between your legs.

You’re three … though it may seem strange
Lift that tiny arm.
Won’t you please arrange it
While I frisk you …
For an undie bomb pre-flight.

Mm, mm, mm, mm,
For an undie bomb pre-flight.

Brett Noel

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