Reflections on the Pork-a-Palooza

This has been a long day away, by necessity, from Oklahomily HQ, but it's given me a chance to catch up on the news and commentary while driving across the Sooner state. A few impressions on a very short post.

1. The Stimulus Bill, aka the Pork-a-Palooza or, as Rush would say, Porkulus, is in deep trouble with the American people, mostly because they are beginning to read what's actually in the thing. However,

2. I expect that pressure will be applied by Harry Reid & Co. to get it passed pretty much as it appears tonight. That passage could come as early as tomorrow (Friday). If it passes with few GOP votes, it will become The Litmus Test for the 2010 midterms. If the economy continues to tank, especially after the president's exhortation that only passage of this bill will save it, the blame will rest squarely with the Democrats. For the sake of the economy and the people who will be hurt, I would rather see the bill go down in flames and either do nothing (preferable, but it won't happen) or start over to craft a real, but smaller stimulus bill.

3. President Obama is pushing too hard, too soon. He's maxed out his bets and is rolling the dice on a very flawed package. I watched a bit of Obama's speech tonight at a restaurant while eating dinner. I couldn't make out everything he was saying because of the noise levels, but it appeared that he was not just annoyed, which he often seems, but genuinely angry. That is not the image he projected in his campaign and it is not one which the American people are going to welcome. A man who loses his cool is not in control, and Americans do not want to see their presidents out of control.

4. The embarrassment of liberals over the exposure of details of the stimulus package is triggering calls for "hearings" into the lack of balance on talk radio, as if that should be any business of the government, regulating free speech. Considering that liberals control academia, most of the mainstream media, most of the federal government, and the National People's Radio, do they really need to regulate talk radio and the internet?

5. Speaking of NPR, I tried to listen to some of it this evening. I really did try. But after the third or fourth story glorifying the Obama Era, or hailing the heroism of some environmentalist student who fraudulently bid on oil and gas leases in Utah, I began to realize that the editors are so far gone on their leftist agenda that they no longer view the world as the rest of us do. The latter story in particular was illuminative in that NPR somehow had audio recordings of the lease auction proceedings, leading a listener to conclude that they were in on the 27-yer-old student's plan from the git go. And yet they portrayed him as a lone vigilante for environmental justice. Not bloody likely. And we're paying for this stuff!

6. And speaking of paying for this stuff, if you want to know where many, many billions of the Pork-a-Palooza would be spent - and we're talking much more than 1 percent here, Mr. Obama - you might want to check out this fact-filled report on the 50 most egregious items (so far). Among the items:

$83 billion for the earned income credit. This is just a tad under 10% of the total cost of the Porkulus Bill. There are no other details. I assume that it would be used to paid earned income credit checks to all those people who are getting them already, you know, those reverse income tax checks that largely go to people who pay no net federal income taxes. It might actually be somewhat stimulative, but it's an accelerating of wealth redistribution and not particularly healthy when it comes to encouraging people to work harder.

$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24. Doing what? Is this a "down payment" on Mr. Obama's Civilian Security force that he has proposed?

$4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”. A whopping Pork-a-Palooza for community organizer's including ACORN, the lead agency in voter fraud and fraud related activity.

There are 47 more items detailed. Read it and weep.