Wednesday's Economic Rant And Other Absolute Jokes

William Cohan
Eugene Robinson

"Airports are considering dumping TSA and hiring their own security. You see these TSA guys just standing around with their thumbs up our asses." – Jay Leno

"It's so cold back east, Christine O'Donnell is using her leftover campaign funds to buy a new house in Florida." – Jay Leno

"Christine O'Donnell is being investigated for using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. I think it's a witch hunt." – Jay Leno

I had forgotten that the end of the world will happen this year in 2011. According to wikipedia: "Since late 2007, there has been a worldwide movement of people who believe that the Rapture will take place on May 21, 2011 and that the end of the world as we know it will take place five months later on October 21, 2011. These predictions were made by Harold Camping, president of the Family Radio Christian network, who claims the Bible as his source. Believers claim that on May 21, 2011 there will be around 200 million people raptured (approximately 3% of the world's population)." Really, what do you take to a Rapture? So, I guess it was needless making those resolutions, and any predictions will be rendered moot come Springtime... The problem with all folks who use the Bible, or any other source, as basis for predictive events, is that the information doesn't work hundreds or thousands of years in the future. All predictions are guesses, the better ones are based on the person's knowledge of a subject, like the stock markets, or marketing trends. People who use remote viewing or psychic viewing try to see farther in advance, and have a less than 40 % chance that their guess is accurate. And all psychic predictions are only good for about a hundred years, so Biblical prophesy was only good for events up to 100 years after they were written down. If the prophetic events didn't happen by then, they were never going to happen at all, so thinking that events predicted in the Bible will happen in our times is just wrong, forget about it, it will never happen... But, still, look forward to a lot of end times stories beginning next month. Consider the blackbirds falling from the skies over Arkansas and Louisiana, and the fish dying in the Arkansas River just a prelude, or we could flip it to mean that they were the use of secret weather manipulation machines being practiced on animals before being pointed at us... Best of all, it could be portents from the Devil himself, telling Bill Clinton to get back to Arkansas and fulfill his part of the bargain he made at the Crossroads those many years ago...

"You know why I think the birds fell out of the sky? Tweeting." – Jay Leno

So, why bother balancing the federal budget or cutting federal spending? I think the tea party candidates are going about this all wrong. I don't know anyone in the country who doesn't think that our federal government is too big and bloated, but coming in like gangbusters, shouting to the rooftops in advance what programs you are going to cut, is setting yourselves up for failure. Who will listen to you once you fail the first time, who will pay attention to you once they find out how many parties you've already been to that were sponsored by lobbyists? Two things that all incoming Senators and Representatives could do to help lighten the financial load is: one, to give all money that was given to you by lobbyists to the federal government to help balance the budget. If you or I took this kind of money, we'd end up in jail, charged with receiving bribery, so why is it OK for our Congressmen to get away with it? Two, it would be helpful if all Congressmen would lower their entire staff to five people. Any staff amount over five should be paid by the Congressman, not the US public.

Attempts at rewriting history are already happening. Mitch Daniels, who was the budget guru under George Bush, and would like you to consider him as a strong possibility for the GOP Presidential candidate in 2012, is already saying that none of it was his fault and you can't predict freaks of nature like the economic collapse under his watch. From TPM: "The nation went into a deficit then because the bubble burst and we had a recession," Daniels told CNN this afternoon. "It wouldn't have mattered what policies you tried to implement, we were going to have a great big reversal."


Daniels' presidential ambitions could be hampered by the fact that he was one of the men in charge of the Bush budget that dramatically increased the size of federal government spending and slashed revenues thanks to the tax cuts. That helped create the gigantic federal deficit that Republicans used as a rhetorical cudgel to bludgeon the Democratic House majority to death in November. Tea partiers also like to use the deficit cudgel on Republicans, especially those that voted for Bush's budgets.


Here's a talking point Daniels' potential GOP primary opponents could use against him, courtesy of a question from CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "The national debt doubled during the eight years of the Bush administration," Blitzer said. He then pointed out that the government increased in size as well -- which runs counter to GOP dogma -- and asked Daniels to explain how that happened.


"I think there's plenty of blame to go around," Daniels said. "And we could spend the next couple years trying to apportion it and assign it between Republicans and Democrats and the economy in which two bubbles popped and led to a plunge in revenues."


"I will just say that the choices that were made in those years were not all accurate, not all good ones, but far better than what we've been doing over the last two years." The choices made in the last two years has actually done a lot to get us out of the financial mess we are in. We have actually made profits from the TARP loans, as banks and businesses pay them back, Wall Street has rebounded, blah, blah, blah.

The reason that unemployment remains so high, which fuels anger and despair, is that during the Bush administration we closed down over 64% of our factories and sent a lot of that overseas. In order to create more jobs, we will have to open new factories that manufacture new products that people will want to buy, and the best that we have done so far is to come up with apps for our iphones...

Unfortunately, the House Republicans have already revised their stated goal of cutting the Federal spending by at least $100 million, now saying that it would be more like half of that. The expected reaction from the tea party base: "Tea Party Patriots leader Mark Meckler expressed disgust Wednesday in response to the news that congressional Republicans plan to reduce their goal of $100 billion in budget cuts, saying the GOP needed to cut more, not less.

According to CBS News, Meckler called the move an "absolute joke," and didn't find Republicans excuses of time constraints acceptable." Will Republicans be able to stop squabbling with each other enough to get some work done? Others, like the deluded Michele Bachmann, are dreaming of riding the tea party wave all the way to the top, as our next presidential candidate. But only if she hears God calling her to do so. Michele, what you are considering as God calling you, is really Him putting His hand over His mouth, and laughing... On the other hand, hearing voices is the first certifiable sign that you are going crazy...