back in the u.s.s.a.

always tilting blog ^ | 2-6-2009 | mike reinhold

[excogitate]

am i alone in not feeling too optimistic about all this beautiful bipartisanship bartering going on over the pork-laden stimulus bill? i mean, wasn´t public support of it dropping when it was at around $825 billion? now it´s up to somewhere around $937 billion and everyone´s frolicking through the daisy fields because they think the group of moderates in the senate will be able to knock off about a billion!?!

A group of nearly 20 moderates from both parties -- more Democrats than Republicans -- huddled off and on all day Thursday in hopes of cutting as much as $100 billion from Obama's plan, which ballooned up to $937 billion on the Senate floor, with further add-ons possible during a long day of votes Friday.

The Collins-Nelson [moderates] group is hoping to bring the measure's cost down to the $800 billion range, though they were working from the $885 billion measure that came to the floor -- ignoring the more than $50 billion in add-ons added over the past three days. A recalculated cost for a popular plan to award a $15,000 homebuyer tax credit pushed the overall price tag to $937 billion.

doesn´t that just put us right back where we started when everybody was thinking that sounded like a preposterous sum of money? they shift around a few pay-offs and, voilá; we go from 12 cents of every $1 that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus to 12.7? 14? even 20 is a joke! so 4/5 of nearly a trillion dollars goes to the likes of those who helped bring nancy pelosi into power? sorry, that´s not relieving news to these ears. especially not hot on the heels of the already unprecedented intervention by the federal government, in the form of a $700 billion relief package for financial institutions after the credit crisis last september; followed by billions of dollars more in federal assistance to the auto industry in order to prevent their imminent bankruptcy.

so much for american enterprise, self-reliance and a free market. we´re quickly going from an equality of opportunity society to an equality of results society, from a market-based economy to a political one, where government activism is a way of life rather than an anomaly.

don´t think this is where it will stop either. we´ve not even begun to delve into the health care issue; mr. obama's next step in the revamping of the american system. as peter wehner of the ethics and public policy center informs:

[Mr. Obama´s] plan will almost certainly use a price-control system similar to the one in place for Medicare, allowing it to charge artificially low premiums by paying fees well below private rates. These low premiums will serve as a magnet for enrollment and will devastate the private companies trying to compete in the health-insurance market. The result will be the nationalization of the health-care sector, which today accounts for 16% of U.S. gross domestic product.

Nationalizing health care will be profoundly detrimental to the quality of American medicine. In the name of cost control, the government would make private investment in medical innovation far riskier, and thus delay the development of potentially lifesaving treatments.

It will also put America on a glide path toward European-style socialism. We need only look to Great Britain and elsewhere to see the effects of socialized health care on the broader economy. Once a large number of citizens get their health care from the state, it dramatically alters their attachment to government.

and history has shown, even in the united states, once the government has control, you can be 99.99% certain it will never be reversed.

imagine my further dismay, when, after contemplating this for the last couple days, i head over to the ap wire service to check the latest news this morning, where, lo and behold, in the midst of a radical transformation of a country founded on democratic capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit into yet another experiment in socialism destined to fail, on top of it all we´re also going back to the old liberal pipedream of world peace through the disarmament of our nuclear weapons.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration, reversing the Bush administration's limited interest in nuclear disarmament, is gearing up for early negotiations with Russia on a new treaty that would sharply reduce stockpiles of nuclear warheads.

UPDATE: feb. 6 - [putin] leaked details of naval and air bases to be established on the shores of the Black Sea in the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, whose independence is recognised by Moscow alone. Then they signed an air defence treaty with the former Soviet republic of Belarus, apparently paving the way for an anti-missile defence system to counter one planned by the previous US administration across the border in Poland. Moscow appears to have persuaded the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan to oust the US from its air base at Manas, outside Bishkek, in exchange for $2bn (€1.6bn, £1.4bn) in loans, and $150m in financial aid.

perfect timing! putin´s invading neighboring countries, taking over all the private enterprise in his own, threatening european states who cooperate with the u.s. and sending its own nuclear technology to ahmadinejad in iran so it can accessorise its next missile launch with some warheads of its own.

all that´s left to dismantle now is the bill of rights, and i guess the battle over the 1st amendment begins again march 5.

[excogitate]

As for the Stimulus Package, I think most people have just resigned themselves to it. People had resigned themselves to it before the election, and I suspect that, had McCain won, he, too, would be offering a Stimulus Package with a similar price tag, and people would still be screaming about pork. There really is no doubt about it passing...there never was.

As for disarmament, this is the first I've heard of it. I suspect it will get a lot more reaction as word gets out.

[nuconvert]

From your page it looks as if you’re in Spain. That’s probably why you aren’t familiar with Obama’s disarmament agenda. But it’s always been there. Nothing new to us here on FR.

[Minn]

It’s hard to take a writer seriously when he apparently knows nothing about capitalization.