George Rebane

People in Washington state are considering making divers state funded commissions – e.g. Commission to Rehabilitate Cross-Eyed Returning Salmon 😉 – to re-justify their purpose, reason for existence, and therefore getting funded this year.  In happier times these do-nothing-but-impede outfits just got their annual stipend, and went about their busybody business.  Now someone thought they should start doing what heads-up businesses call zero-base budgeting.  Estimates say that should save the state several hundred million a year.  Obviously, California is not paying attention.

For some decades now I have fostered the opinion that a career politician is a sleazebag politician until they demonstrate otherwise.  In short, we can’t go far wrong in the aggregate to brand them as such and treat them accordingly – guilty until proven innocent.  That almost all of them support ‘hold hostage legislation’ is one of the prime reasons for my sticking to this view.  These self-serving pilgrims continually concoct bills that combine needed single-issue government funding with all manner of pork, special interest addendums, and secret codicils.  And then they threaten to withhold their vote until their favorite add-on gets included.  Hence the eternal truth that one should not examine too closely how sausages and laws get made.  Well, the bastards (that used to be a dirty word before out-of-wedlock children became the norm) are at it again.  The bill to continue routine funding of government departments – the “omnibus funding bill” – has become so omni that everyone has piled something on so that the rest can purchase their vote.  I would like to see just one legislator say ‘Enough!’ and walk out.  If we can’t vote on the crap as standalone bills, then they shouldn’t be made into costly laws.  And that’s why professional politicians remain first and fundamentally sleazebags.

It brought a smile to many faces that The People’s Republic of North Korea is now rattling its rusty but very large saber.  Their ‘Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea’ is threatening war if the US and South Korea don’t stop their warlike withholding of aid to prop up the pinheads who run the world’s largest concentration camp.  And our state department is taking all this very seriously.  Hillary should send them a video of our people laughing their heads off at these silly charades – that is, if we're really smart enough to be laughing.

Speaking of the new administration and its sing-along Congress.  General Dynamics is headed for the rocks because its Gulfstream division is suddenly non-profitable.  Gulfstream makes the business jets that are now vilified by the beltway social engineers.  We apparently didn’t learn that attacking what the socialists consider the ‘excesses of the rich’ causes massive loss of jobs for those not so rich.  Perhaps the newly unemployed can take comfort in the ‘well, we showed them’ attitude which is all that they have left.

US Bancorp’s president says that “TARP is a lousy program.”  This after his company and Northern Trust were among the ‘weekend fourteen’ called in a couple of months ago and told to accept government bailout funds whether they wanted them or not.  It turns out that these two companies are now busy returning as much of those monies as quickly as possible.  I guess they didn’t like what was printed in the user’s manual that came along with the dollars.

Finally, we see Treasury Sec Geithner going after the oil and gas companies (here).  He wants to do away with “tax loopholes” for the industry, because …, well because …, actually he needs to find some money to fund what the government cynically calls the stimulus.  And he figures that making energy more expensive will bring back the economy faster.  Go figger.  What is amusing to many of us on the outside is that the notion of ‘loopholes’ is accepted without argument.  It’s clear to the post-thinking crowd in our country that money earned by others belongs first and foremost to the government.  And right off the bat they know how much of it is theirs, and that any amount less than that is nothing short of being an unjust and immoral ‘loophole’ through which the pre-convicted tax-dodger escapes with his illegal hoard that actually belongs to (drum roll please) “the Peeepuuhll!!”