Back in 2008, this sort of news would probably get my dander up. The upshot is that the federal Highway Bridge Program is going to force various levels of Texas government to pay for replacing little-used bridges rather than repairing them, even if some only get 25 cars a day and there are alternate routes available, in order to keep getting federal funds.
There’s lots wrong with the program: Taxpayer money wasted for one, and the principles of Federalism violated for another; there’s absolutely no reason for the federal government to take money from taxpayers in the various states, put it in a big pot, rake off their bureaucratic maintenance fees, and then redistribute it to states, counties, etc. Let counties and states repair their own bridges, and decide which ones to repair and how to pay for them.
But even given all that, my outrage meter is barely quivering. Unlike so many Obama-era boondoggles, at least we’re getting something tangible and useful. At least it didn’t line some corrupt solar power company CEO’s pockets before his firm went bankrupt. At least it didn’t screw non-union pensioners to line the coffers of the UAW. At least it’s not a multibillion dollar high speed train boondoggle that will never be finished. At least here’s a public works project that’s actually shovel ready. And, as long as you think that there should be public roads in the first place (there’s a libertarian case for completely private roads, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago), then at least we’re getting something at least vaguely within the purvey of some government entity.
And at least the program didn’t end up killing a border patrol agent and 300+ Mexican civilians.
So corrupt, incompetent and scandal-ridden is the Obama Administration that I have a hard time working up indignation over the fact that a significant fraction of $150 million will probably be wasted on bridges we don’t really need, mainly because I’m sure Obama or his cronies will find a brand new way to waste ten times that one something completely useless sometime over the next week…
I haven’t been doing much coverage of Fast and Furious, mainly because bloggers like Sipsey Street and Snowflakes in Hell/Shall Not Be Questioned were doing such good jobs moving the story forward I didn’t feel a need. But now that the Obama Administration is in full cover-up mode, well, bring the swarm.
Remember: Over 200 innocent people have died due to Fast and Furious. So when liberals tell you that “It’s not Watergate,” they’re right. It’s much worse.
Finally, the Obama Choom Gang story finally breaks through in the one medium the MSM can’t possibly ignore: wacky Taiwanese animation.
Again, the issue isn’t that our 44th President used to regularly get baked out of his gourd, the issue is why the MSM was unwilling to investigate and report such stories in 2008, and the hypocrisy of Obama carrying out a futile War on Drugs and imprisoning people for the same laws he used to habitually break.
I wonder if the “Choom Gang” VW Microbus our 44th President and his friends used to habitually smoke pot in also had tools and rakes and implements of destruction in it.
Do liberals actually expect this patronizing, passive-aggressive condescension toward Judge Roberts to work? I’d like to believe that treating the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America as though he’s as easy to manipulate as an insecure teenage girl would be counterproductive if it weren’t so transparently laughable.
I have a few major posts in various stages of gestation, so here’s a LinkSwarm to tide you over in the meantime:
Mark Steyn on our heroic Secret Service agents: “It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.”
Does Obama have an $8 billion slush fund to soften the impact of cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the election? (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Pew Survey: GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
Borepatch reports on the Dallas Blogshoot. I was too busy and it was a bit too long of a drive for me to make. Which is a shame, since I would have liked to try some of the machine guns, and the .50 cal. Bonus: Ponies!
According to this article in the Houston Chronicle, “Sixteen small counties across Texas appear to have more registered voters on their rolls as of 2010 than qualified citizens of voting age.”
As the icing on top of the voter fraud cake, here’s James O’Keefe (who you may know from such classics as ACORN’s Hardest Working Pimp) obtaining Eric Holder’s ballot.
And the cherry? “I’ll be back faster than you can say furious.”
And next week the Supreme Court will hear arguments on its constitutionality. Many are suggesting that a decision in ObamaCare’s favor will actually damage Obama’s reelection chances.
More specifically, eight out of the eleven “Stupak Block Flippers” (i.e., the theoretically staunch pro-life Democrats who swore up and down they would never, ever, ever vote for ObamaCare if it included taxpayer funding for abortion, right up until they voted for taxpayer-funded abortion) went down in electoral defeat. At the time, the insistence for public funding for abortion seemed like a tactical error on the part of liberals. After all, why bother with that tiny sop to feminists when you’re busy nationalizing one-sixth of the economy?
But since then, the fervor with which Democrats have pursued imposing this mandate on Catholics (part and parcel of their contempt for religion), their white hot fury at Rush Limbaugh’s (admittedly foolish) remarks, and the continuing overheated, drama queen “war on women” rhetoric coming from the left side of the blogsphere suggests that yes, that was what ObamaCare was really about, and they’re willing to remain a permanent political minority to maintain it.
So be it. If forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions is the hill they want to die on*, I suppose we should let them. (Though not at the cost of failing to mention Obama’s failure on the economy, on creating the conditions for private industry to create jobs, Fast & Furious, or his naked cronyism.) As Mickey Kaus has noted, this issue is a serious political loser for Obama, and we should keep hammering away on it, not despite the shrieks of outrage from liberalism’s feminist amen corner, but because of them.
*”Violent, eliminationist” military metaphor offered up as free rhetorical bonus!
I had a maid service come clean my house in advance of a family event I’m hosting this weekend. It’s amazing the difference between “Bachelor Clean” and “Clean Clean.” It’s almost as big as the difference between “Obama Smart” and “Actually Smart”…
Rick Perry tears into “Big Government Conservatism.”
Comptroller Susan Combs denies a wind farm subsidy. Personally I’d end all “green subsidies.” Let the market pick energy winners and losers, not government.
If we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things.
After blowing over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, Obama’s green energy crony capitalism favorites are asking the bankruptcy judge to let them pay bonuses to remaining employees. And that’s on top of the hefty bonuses they paid executives right before declaring bankruptcy. Your tax dollars at work…
Since that piece came out December 19, it’s hardly cutting edge news. But I’ve been ruminating on it for a while to try and figure out if I have anything more to add. I think I do. And with the Iowa Caucuses looming, I probably should.
I haven’t covered much of the 2012 Presidential race, mainly because I’ve been focusing on the Texas Senate Race and everyone and their dog was blogging every twist in the POTUSA race.
OMG! Ron Paul is up 3 points!
Plus I don’t have cable, so I wouldn’t be able to watch the interminable numerous debates.
Finally, a baseball team the Astros can beat
Which is why I didn’t see Perry commit his brain freezes, of which there were many. (My theory is that he was still hopped up on goofballs from his back operation.)
Percocet makes me see tiny little Jim Hightowers, and I have to grab and crush each and every one of them
Having lived in Texas for the entirety of Rick Perry’s tenure as governor, I can attest that he is not a perfect candidate. There have been times (Gardasil, the Trans-Texas Corridor) when he’s strayed from conservative principles. And he’s not as polished as Mitt Romney or as articulate as Newt Gingrich.
But Perry isn’t running against the second coming of Ronald Reagan, or even Sarah Palin. Every other major Republican contender is not only at least as flawed, they’re considerably more so.
Despite cheer-leading from the likes of Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jennifer Rubin, Mitt Romney has always struck me as a phony without any real core convictions except that he should be in charge; sort of the Republican answer to Bill Clinton, without the charm or adultery. Pick an issue and Romney’s been on both sides of it at one time or another. He seems the most likely of all the major candidates to be praised by The New York Times and The Washington Post for “growing” in office. Romney is most likely to disappoint me in caving in to D.C.’s usual free-spending, pork-barrel log-rolling.
I could get behind voting for the Newt Gingrich of 1994, the one whose laser-like focus on the holding the Democrats accountable for their misdeed and promoting the Contract With America helped Republicans take the House and Senate, set the stage for a welfare reform and helped (temporarily) balance the budget. Sadly, that Gingrich is not up on offer. We have to deal with the idea-a-minute-and-many-of-them-bad, ex-lobbyist, “Big Government Conservative” Newt Gingrich of 2012, the one so devastatingly and accurately skewered by Mark Steyn in this week’s National Review. (As Bruce Sterling once said at a Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, “Cruel, but fair!”) No matter how many times he tries to sound like Reagan, there are all those other times when he sounds like everyone from Al Gore to Faith Popcorn. I imagine that I would be disappointed many times in a Gingrich Presidency. Unlike Romney, I’m sure Gingrich would find entirely new and innovative ways to disappoint me.
I could almost get behind Ron Paul, based on his absolute, rock-steady position on the biggest problem facing America: out-of-control government spending and ever-increasing size and power of the federal government. The debt bomb is an existential threat to American prosperity, and If we don’t shrink government and get the deficit under control, none of the other issues really matter. And I lean heavily on the libertarian side of the spectrum. But even given that, there’s just too much weirdness (what Kevin Williamson called “his Ronness”) about the rest of Paul’s policies: the newsletters, the footsie with racism, the conspiracy theories, the weirdness about gays and wishing Israel didn’t exist, the running against Reagan. Being just one of 435 House members was a great place for Paul to be, since he could bring up conservative and Libertarian issues without any chance that his wackier ideas would ever end up in legislation, but the Presidency is a different kettle of fish. Plus there’s the problem of his electability, or rather lack thereof. With all his diverse baggage, I believe that Paul is the GOP candidate Obama would have the best chance of defeating. Ignore all the hard-left liberals talking up Paul as a better choice than Obama; it’s just a smokescreen that would evaporate at the first excuse to jump back on the Obama bandwagon. William F. Buckley always said conservative should support the right-most viable candidate. I don’t think Paul is a viable candidate.
Michelle Bachmann’s star has faded even more than Perry’s, and she doesn’t have Perry’s executive experience or record on job creation. The fact she’s neither dumb nor crazy doesn’t mean the MSM won’t pull the Full Sarah Palin Treatment on her (Andrew Sullivan womb-diving optional) were she to get the nod.
Rick Santorum: Too little, too late, he lost his last election, and his strengths don’t lie in the economy and job creation.
Jon Huntsman: Which part of “Republican” was unclear?
By process of elimination, that leaves Perry. As I said before, Perry isn’t perfect, but he has a record on holding the line on government spending and enabling job creation that puts Romney to shame. One again, let’s go to the charts that the indispensable Will Franklin of Willisms has provided on Texas job creation:
And the case for Perry over Romney (again thanks to WILLisms) is even more stark:
While I have criticized Perry’s campaign budget proposals for being too timid, Perry insisted on balancing the Texas budget without tax hikes. I assure you that California would love to have Texas’ budget. Indeed, adjusted for inflation, population growth, and federally-mandated spending, the Texas state budget has actually gone down under Perry. His guiding principle has been “don’t spend all the money,” and it’s one that Washington desperately needs.
One final, very big reason to support Perry: He can win. Perry’s never lost a race, because he’s a tough and tenacious campaigner who’s not afraid to hit his opponents hard. Everyone thought Kay Bailey Hutchison was going to cream Perry in the 2010 governor’s race, and he beat her like a rented mule.
Or maybe a rented donkey.
In the general election against Bill White, he ran an ad featuring a police widow talking about how her husband had been killed by a multi-arrested illegal alien while White was touting Houston as a “sanctuary city.”
Even professional MSM Perry hater Paul Burka says that Perry is a hard man. “He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved.” Perry will have absolutely no fear of taking the fight to Obama and going negative early and often, and he won’t let political correctness cow him into treating Obama with kid gloves.
Will the media savage Rick Perry for his flubs? Of course they will. But, as Ace noted, they’ll always find a way to crucify any Republican candidate to make Obama look better. They’ll use the same “he’s an idiot” line of attack they used on Reagan and Bush43…and you saw how far that got them.
If you’re still undecided on Perry, this video should at least give you a more rounded picture of him:
For those who think Perry is already out of the race, remember that at this point in 2004, the consensus was that Howard Dean was going to be the nominee. There’s a reason Americans actually get to vote, and they frequently prove the pundits wrong.
Several Austin bloggers are suggesting that people gather to “welcome” Eric Holder to Austin, where he’ll be speaking at the LBJ Library on UT campus. I won’t be able to, due to commitments with my new job, but I encourage others to do so if it fits into their schedule.
