George Rebane

So much bad stuff is happening that it’s literally hopeless to keep track of it any more.  A few samples follow.

Asylum for climate change refugees.  A correspondent sends me this heads up on the latest from the idiot senator from Hawaii.  He writes, “Sen. Brian Schatz’s bill would create a sort of political asylum for global warming refugees.  Senator Brian Schatz’s (D-HI) filed an amendment for the immigration bill Wednesday that would allow stateless people in the U.S. to seek conditional lawful status if their nations have been made uninhabitable by climate change.  Who decides what is uninhabitable? Does that mean all countries without air conditioned buildings?”  You can’t make this stuff up.

Speaking of the immigration bill, it looks like the Republican heartthrob Senator Marco Rubio has caved.  No more requirement for a secure border.  The new bill would keep it porous and plug the holes with ‘best efforts’ rhetoric directed at the isheeple (q.v.).  Things will really look bad when the Border Patrol agents strap on their buttons that read ‘Pardon me, but you have me confused with someone who gives a crap.’

The Dow has dropped about 550 points in the last three days.  Helicopter Ben has now told everyone in the world that his chopper will soon be running out of gas thereby quenching QE whatever its number is.  Is this a Black Swan event?  Hard to believe that it is since everyone has been anticipating it for at least six months.  As predicted here, everyone thought that they could get out whole when the time came, because they would know it ahead of time.  Well, had they known, then the markets would not have plunged as they have, and it ain’t over yet.

“Signs of ObamaCare’s failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law’s most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a “death panel,” threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution’s separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.” So say DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and ELIZABETH P. FOLEY in the 20jun13 WSJ of these un-fireable appointed bureaucrats. And the bad news on that law will get a lot worse before serious attempts to repeal it are mounted.  Attributed deaths will have to number in the thousands before progressives will take notice (if then).

But there is an outside chance that this monster may collapse on itself from the gross incompetence at HHS according to the auditing arm of the GAO.  It seems that the HHS dunces in residence have not done their homework, and are having one hell of a time setting up the infamous insurance ‘exchanges’.  In fact, no one really knows what all is supposed to happen in these new bueraucracies that will dot the national landscape – that is one of the many reasons why HHS is running Obamacare as a black ops mission that is as opaque as it can possibly be – and the band starts playing in October.  Nationwide support for Obamacare is now down to about one out of three Americans, true believers all (more here).

To feel better, just go to the lamestream and/or any of the leftwing blogs where you will be burdened with none of this.

[21jun13 update]  The kids will get to ride elephants at the Nevada County Fair.  The fair board listened politely to the protestations of local ‘animal activists’, and then refused to cancel the contract with Have Trunk Will Travel.  To me people from organizations like Center for Animal Protection and Education comprise the faction of soft-headed, politically correct busybodies that have done so much to take our nation into the cultural oblivion and proscribed property rights mess in which we now wallow.  It’s good to celebrate a rare sparkle of sanity here and there in the public forum.

The WSJ’s enthusiastic editorial policy on immigration reform continues to miss the mark.  They celebrate the CBO’s analysis that the present bill would slightly lower our deficits by supplying new workers to boost GDP.  This is supposed to represent CBO’s new approach to ‘dynamic scoring’ instead of the ‘static’ type that they usually do in which every law is evaluated as if it will act in a hermetically sealed container from which collateral effects are removed.  Well, the CBO’s analysis and the WSJ’s assessment (‘Mi Casa Su Growth Casa’) of it both overlook the overriding effect of technology induced systemic unemployment (much discussed in these pages).  Neither organization recognizes that the existing legal American workforce continues to have trouble selling their outdated and rapidly diminishing skillsets into job markets that today demand so much more.

I expect this from the gang that can never shoot straight at the CBO, but the WSJ error continues to surprise me.  The new beneficiaries of amnesty that this immigration bill would create will be able to add significantly to the lines at the various welfare windows that the feds and state governments operate.  And we haven’t even begun to consider that the illegal alien problem will continue under the new perpetually porous borders provisions of this so-called immigration reform.