The bill, if it were a country, would have the 15th largest economy in the world — right in between Australia and Mexico, greater than the Gross Domestic Products of Saudi Arabia and Iran put together. And the American people will be forced to borrow 100 percent of the unprecedented $1.2 trillion price tag, including interest. The stimulus bill will cost well over $1 billion dollars for every page it is printed on and $400,000 for every job it hopes to create or save.

But after the accolades from the newspaper editorials have been printed and politicians finish slapping themselves on the back for “doing something,” there will be little to show for all this new spending. That’s because this bill is based on hope, not reality. Democrats have spared no expense to show how much they care but in doing so they have sacrificed common sense.

via United States Senator – Jim DeMint.

$81 billion for Medicaid

$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits

$20 billion for food stamps

$83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don’t pay income tax.

$1 billion for Amtrak

$2 billion for child-care subsidies

$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects

$40 billion for broadband and electric grid development

Only $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects.

What else can we say?  There is no “STIMULUS” in this s0-called Stimulus bill.  This is nothing more than payouts to Liberal interest groups.  Liberals are using the power of government as their personal piggy-bank.

As a recent legal graduate and future attorney, I care deeply about not only what the law IS… but what the law should be.  In fact, this blog is devoted (in theory) to debate and commentary about how the Constitution (hence blog-stitution) should be interpreted–although it often gets bogged down in petty politics.

Many of us (myself included) tend to look at the law and see nothing more than a series of issues on which a position is to be had.  We look and see and hundreds of different solutions and changes that need to be made–and often find ourselves in a relentless, uphill battle.  Philip Howard, in Today’s Wall Street Journal, challenges this piece-meal approach.  Instead of focusing on the specifics, Howard asks us to take a step back and address the fundamentals–the most important of which is the need for what I would call “positive freedoms” (although this may not be the most appropriate term).  I am very impressed by Howard’s ability to write… the jury is still out (so to speak) on the merit of his arguments.

Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different — a belief in the power of each individual.

[But] Americans don’t feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices…

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom — where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree…

The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. We think of freedom as political freedom… [F]reedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense…

Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. Teachers lose their authority… doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues…

When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school — you name it. Law has poured into daily life.

The solution is not just to start paring back all the law — that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law — to define an open area of free choice…

Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . .” The goal is not to change our public goals. The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.

I suggest you read the piece in its entirety.

The utter hypocrisy of the environmental left in Congress deserves our full attention (and ridicule).  From Saturday’s print version of the Wall Street Journal:

For the last seven years and counting, the green entrepreneur Jim Gordon has been trying to build a fleet of wind turines in federal waters near the upscale seascapes of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.  The site seemed ideal, given the stiff ocean breezes and the eco-friendly politics in Massachusetts.  The company says its 130 towers could meet 75% of the region’s electricity needs and reduce carbon emissions by some 734,000 tons every year.

While Ted Kennedy was castigating President Bush for destroying the environment, the Senator was working furiously behind the Congressional scenes to kill Cape Wind. He even had the inspiration of getting former GOP colleague Ted Stevens of Alaska to slip wording into a spending bill that have handed a veto to then-Governor Mitt Romney, another aesthetically minded opponent.  Robert Kennedy Jr., a Time magazine “hero of the planet,” tried to get the Sound designated as a national marine sanctuary to bar development.

I recently stumbled onto the writings of Ambrose Bierce… and was immediately sucked into reading the entirety of his work “The Devil’s Dictionary” — which, evidently, is out of copyright and available on the web…   I simply cannot remember the last time I read such a cynical author… or had as much fun with a book.

Here are but a few of my favorite definitions:

ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

CONGRATULATION, n. The civility of envy.

CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.

DICTATOR, n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy.

ENVY, n. Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

INDISCRETION, n. The guilt of woman.

INFLUENCE, n. In politics, a visionary quo given in exchange for a substantial quid.

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; it meant “own,” and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

PLAGIARISM, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

RESOLUTE, adj. Obstinate in a course that we approve.

via The Devil’s Dictionary (by Ambrose Bierce).

Contempt: “The feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed” – Ambrose Bierce

Or as Ann Coulter puts it: “contempt is the emotion we feel for an opponent who’s arguments are too formidable to refute”

Finally… a conservative who fights back.

What is so funny about the entire interview is how John Ziegler is trying to prove there was media bias… and all David Shuster could do was cite polls–using a perception he helped create to prove there wasn’t partisanship in the media.

This at best, a classic appeal to popularity, at worst, a lame attempt at ass-covering.

John’s whole documentary is, of course, trying to explain how that perception was created… but Shuster either had no clue what John was trying to say… or didn’t care… which had the rather unintended effect of further re-inforcing John’s credibility.

OBAMA: We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war.

OBAMA: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

OBAMA: My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now.

OBAMA: Finally, in 2006-2007, we started to see that, even after an election, George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn’t withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled them and initiated a surge and at that stage I said very clearly, not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.

OBAMA: “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.

OBAMA: “After putting an additional 30,000 troops in, far longer & more troops than the president had initially said, we have gone from a horrendous situation of violence in Iraq to the same intolerable levels of violence that we had back in June of 2006. So, essentially, after all this we’re back where we were 15 months ago… So, I think it is fair to say that the president has simply tried to gain another six months to continue on the same course that he’s been on for several years now. It is a course that will not succeed. It is a course that is exacting an enormous toll on the American people & our troops.

OBAMA: “Tonight Pres. Bush said that the surge in Iraq is working, when we know that’s just not true.

———————————————————————————

OBAMA NOW:  I had no doubt, and I said when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.

Let’s pray to GOD that we don’t get attacked again during Obama’s administration because I don’t think he has a clue how warfare works, or what progress looks like.

Yes, THIS is the CHANGE we were all hoping for… revisionism masquerading as principled pragmatism.

via Obama: ‘I Had No Doubt…

In 2008, Obama was saying whatever it took to get elected:

“We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction,” Obama said. “We should only sit down with Hamas if they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.”

But now that he’s got the election in the bag… he’s  towing a completely different line:

The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush’s ­doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organisation, sources close to the transition team say.

The next 4 years will be a blast; I can already tell…

Obama on George Stephanopoulos,

“I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,”

“everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good…”

Funny how politicians will promise anything to get elected.  Typical…

I guess this raises the obvious question… how are we all better off if we are all sacraficing?  It seems to me I would be better off if I didn’t have to sacrafice.  I just love Obama’s logic.  We are all better off if we are all worse off.

When Dems were in the minority…  their cause célèbre was the concept of PAYGO… where all spending increases (and even tax cuts–although the logic there is a bit perverse…) had to be offset by reduced spending.  Funny how now that they are in the majority (and therefore can control how pork is spent)… they have conveniently forgotten all about the subject.  Via WSJ.com:

But there’s more. None of that includes the new fiscal “stimulus” that President-elect Obama has promised to introduce upon taking office in two weeks. The details aren’t known, but Mr. Obama and Democrats have been talking about at least $800 billion, and probably $1 trillion, in new spending or various tax credits and reductions over two years. Toss that in and add more expected bailout cash, and if the economy stays slow the deficit could reach $1.8 trillion, or a gargantuan 12.5% of GDP. That 2006 Democratic vow to pass “pay as you go” budgets seems like a lifetime ago, which in political terms it was.

We’ve long argued that deficits per se are not worth losing sleep over, though we do recall when Robert Rubin and Larry Summers claimed that reducing them was itself an economic virtue because it reduced interest rates. With their acquiescence in the magnitude of these deficits, we trust they will now admit to burying Rubinomics as a serious economic philosophy. Democrats are once again all Keynesians now — at least until they want to use the deficits as an argument to raise taxes in a year or two.

Funny how quickly principles get thrown under the bus…

John Dickerson in Slate NAILED it in his latest article:

President Bush’s use of the phrase “war on terror” has created a “culture of fear in America,” argued Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, undermining “our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.”

Obama campaigned against Bush’s use of fear as the justifying language of public policy. But he has almost matched his running mate Biden in his use of dire language to describe the severity of the economic stakes. Perhaps they are taking their cue from FDR, the Democratic president who faced an even tougher economic mess and who sounded the war theme in his inaugural address: “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

One would think Liberals would pay attention to their own advice… but they obviously hold themselves to different (lower) standards than they hold their Republican counterparts.