Incompetence from the Majority

I was going through my email, and I find one from MoveOn(left).org.

(Okay, before you you start typing WTF, I ended up on their mailing list when I went there to mess around with one of their petitions and ended up on the mailing list. What I've found is that it's great opposition research. So let's get back to....)

The email begins: We knew the Republicans were going to be a problem when President Obama called on Congress to invest in a clean-energy economy and universal health care.

Wait a minute. I thought it was a Democrat Congress and Democrat president in Washington now. a good majority in the House, and two votes (until Stuart Smalley finally wins in Minnesota, then one) short of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (and with the three stooges (Specter, Snowe, Collins) easy pickings.

This begs the question: Do they really have a majority? Here's more: This is the nightmare scenario: a few conservative Democrats teaming up with Republicans to stop the progressive pieces of the President's agenda.

Ah, makes me feel hope that they aren't an ironclad bunch of asshat ideologues. It means there's hope (the real kind, not the Obama brand).

And speaking of the POTUS (and his teleprompter, who was in another room feeding him answers by shoddy telepathy last night), President Obama was back before us again with his second prime-time news conference/snoozefest. Of course, as is my wont, I listened to everything he said, punctuated only by random expletives when he spewed bullshit (thus giving my children a vocabulary I have to beat out of them (irony, indeed (and kidding about the beating, you pansies (good ol' bar soap!)))).

Specifically insane was the continuing insistence that he's going to cut the budget in half in two years. The only way I see this as possible is if he quintuples it first, then slashes that number in half (which means it's still 2 1/2 times larger).

And he still insists on harping on his holy trinity of "recovery: Education, green energy, and health care (possibly the whole reason for the press conference?). So I'll have to bash him a little for this.

I'm trying to think of a time in my life where anyone has cut the education budget (although I'm sure someone will come up with an example). We continue to pour money into this problem and are seeing diminishing returns on our money. Is it because we're not "investing" (the quotes are because we're not investing; it's Barry's buzz word) enough in education? Simply put, no amount of money will educate a child unless there is a drive (usually parents) for the child to learn. So throwing more into education is merely an attempt to look like he's doing something.

As for the green energy, there is a partial logic to this. After all, our dependence on foreign oil is a problem we have to address, and something that has led (due to policy to protect that oil flow) to some of the terrorism we now face. However, even in the shambles of a free market we have, there's one way to make green energy work: Make it comparably priced to the traditional alternatives. There's two ways government can do this. They can subsidize the shit out of it to make it affordable (the ethanol debacle), or they can tax the shit out of the current fuels to raise their price to the prices of the green ones. With c(r)ap and trade, Obama is leaning toward the latter. He said as much when he "lamented" about the high gas prices, indicating the only problem with this was the speed at which they had risen. As this is tied in with manmade global warming hysteria, there's no solution that won't cost us money. Especially if the government breaks out its third way to change our energy habit: Mandate things in and out of existence (and passing the cost on to us).

Now with health care, I absolutely agree with him inasmuch as the skyrocketing costs are kicking our ass. Okay, now I'm done agreeing. I'll expand on this in a future post (probably the next so Satyavati doesn't yell at me for procrastinating), but the cost of health care began skyrocketing when we stopped paying for it ourselves. During my foray back into the dentist over the last couple of weeks, I got a few laughs and at least one look of mild surprise when I was asked about insurance and responded that I had a checkbook. And our solution to the medical prices will be found in the same way.

One last thing. When you have your teleprompter removed to blunt criticism, you should probably make sure they don't get a wide shot of you reading from a TV in the back of the room. Then everybody just knows your teleprompter is hiding in another room. Whoever came up with that idea should get an AOTW honorable mention. There's always note cards.