Just thought I’d throw out a quick link to this post at Reason detailing some of the lovely stuff that’s included in the handout stimulus bill that passed the Senate today.

No doubt some will argue that each and every one of the things included in the bill involves a transfer of money from one party to another and so constitutes a “stimulation” of the economy, but the bulk of this stuff looks like plain old fashioned pork.

Added thought: Is anyone else getting tired of legislators justifying every law and every massive spending increase with the word “green”?

Update:

According to the Register, Californian Senator and all-around waste of space Diane Feinstein is trying to use the stimulus bill to sneak through language that would let ISPs snoop on network traffic, a clear violation of privacy*:

Obama’s stimulus bill sets aside between $6bn and $9bn for expanding American broadband into rural areas, and Senator Feinstein hopes to augment this Broadband Technology Opportunities Program so that it “allows for reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement.”

Despite Obama’s laughable promises to clean up Washington, the massive handouts he’s promising are encouraging every lobby to try to get in on the action. Moreover, the President’s apocalyptic doomsaying, promising “catastrophe” unless the legislation is rammed through Congress at as fast as possible, is making it that much easier for utter rubbish like this to get attached to ostensible “stimulus” items and avoid any real scrutiny.

The whole thing is a monumental screw.

* Never mind that there are good arguments why spending money on broadband is a waste of time in the first place.

(via Slashdot)

Update:

Slashdot is reporting that Feinstein’s amendment apparently did not make the final cut, a conclusion that was reached by searching for her name in the final text of the legislation, rather than trying to actually read through the whole document.

Speaking of which, one wonders how many of the people who voted for it actually read it. My bet’s on “not many.”

The handout bailout stimulus package has passed the House 244-188. It will now proceed to the Senate, where the battle will (hopefully) be tougher.

At HuffPo, some bloke is calling everyone who voted against the bill (even after a “face-to-face” with President Obama! For shame.) a traitor who “voted against their country” and accuses them of “ersatz patriotism.”*

On the other side of the spectrum, Jacob Sullum at Reason says:

Even as President Obama promises that the federal government will spend the $1 trillion or so contemplated in the stimulus legislation in a utterly open, totally transparent, and absolutely accountable way, he demands that members of Congress vote for the 647-page monstrosity before they can possibly have time to read and digest it.

Did everyone forget how the USA Patriot Act got rammed through the legislature before anyone had the time to read it. Did everyone forget what a horrible piece of legislation that was?

What could possibly go wrong with $825,000,000,000 of our money on the line? Oh, right. Hope. Change. New dawn, and all that. Let the professionals do their jobs.

* That thumping sound you hear is the progressives’ newfound patriotic chest-beating.

This year’s stable of ODE columnist is hardly a dream team, to say the least. On one end of the spectrum are writers like Matt Petryni, who is frequently readable if often conceptually dodgy (though kudos for standing up to OSPIRG). On the other end are the insipid scribblings of Alex Conley, whose columns often come across as clumsy and self-conscious attempts at trolling.

Situated somewhere betwixt the two is Truman Capps, who comes across like that good-natured Mormon kid you knew in high school who really dug marching band and was preternaturally enthusiastic about just about everything. Mr. Capps’ latest piece, “Do your part for America” echoes the suddenly popular calls to “serve the nation” now that President Obama has assumed power (mercifully, Capps avoids the sort of nauseatingly earnest grovelling that has become synonymous with many Obama supporters). Interestingly, he hits a slightly different note than some of the others currently pimping the “national service” idea:

It’s important now that we start pulling our own weight – not because President Obama wants us to, but because it’s what we should have been doing all along. We’ve got to start taking better care of our parks, roads and neighborhoods – our community gives us more than we realize, but its [sic] up to us to keep what we’ve got in good working order. [emphasis added]

What Capps actually seems to be describing (whether he realizes it or not) is not President Obama’s “mandatory volunteerism” so much as a renewed sense of individual responsibility. Even supposing that “President Bush… did not want or need the help of the American public”, as he claims, if we really wanted this “change” in our communities Capps admits that we could’ve been doing something about it all along. You know. If people hadn’t been spending their time whining about the Bush Administration and waiting for Obama and the government to come along and fix everything for them.

This is in stark contrast to “self-ascribed moderate” Alex Conley, who is apparently unaware of individual volunteer opportunities and practically chomping at the bit for the government to mandate service so he can “again be proud to be American.” One suspects this noble sentiment arose ex nihilo on January 20th and will wane the next time a Republican occupies the White House.

But volunteering was a worthy pasttime long before the Patriots of January 20th started bombarding us with schlocky YouTube videos and behavior that would be frankly embarrassing from prepubescent girls who got to meet Miley Cyrus backstage. By contrast, Truman Capps seems to grasp that volunteering is a fundamentally individual decision. It’s also one that loses much of its significance and takes on a new, somewhat more sinister character when mandated by the government.

So Truman Capps gets a gold star sticker today. Check plus.

Now that Barack Obama has ascended moved into the Oval Office, our country is ready to tackle the big problems, the tough questions, the fundamental issues that have bedeviled us for the past eight years and dragged this once-great country into the gutter of financial ruin and international ignominy.

I am, of course, talking about perverts with cell phone cameras. Hot off the desk of Representative Pete King (R-NY), we have H.R.414, which has been given the dramatic moniker “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act.” If passed, this crucial new law

[r]equires any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera’s phone. Prohibits such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan basically wrapped up and the economy on a confident upswing, it’s heartening to know that our government is finally able to spend at least some of its time writing laws forcing cell phone manufacturers to include a “camera shutter” sound that can’t be disabled so that we, the public at large, will know when some degenerate is taking our photograph.

What more could one expect from as dedicated a public servant as Representative King, who was last heard exhorting his colleagues to join him in “supporting the goals and ideals of the Knights of Pythias“?

Indeed, as we begin to get our W-2’s in the mail, we can rest assured that our tax dollars will not only end up as part of a massive bailout package for failing industries and pay raises for our bold civic leaders. Some of that money will go toward making sure wasted sorority girls receive an audible cue whenever a sleazefuck frat boy takes a topless picture of them on their iPhone.

America breathes a sigh of relief.

The United States now has more people engaged in the business of government than in the business of manufacturing goods that can be sold for a profit.

When our new President declares that “[w]e’re all going to have to tighten our belts. We’re all going to need to sacrifice. We’re all going to need to pull our weight,” surely he means government payrolls, too?

(Via Instapundit)

For me, the words “New Era” have become the latest buzz word in this political season.

America is entering a “new era” of peace.

Obama is leading the United States and the world into a “new era.”

It’s a “new era” for American politics.

I just saw an article the other day with the blurb, “Obama team faces new era of counter-terrorism.”

I honestly want to know what’s so new about it all. Sure, a black man as president is “new” but I don’t really care about that.

Looking around in the past few weeks, months even, it doesn’t look like we’ve entered a new era. In fact, it looks the same. The politicians haven’t changed; they seem worse than before. Tell me, how has Blago not been impeached yet? And Dems, where’s the conviction you guys fought so hard to get? Letting Burris take a seat seemed like the same ol’, same ol’ from the sorriest party in America.

Here’s the best part, supposedly under this “New” administration we’ll be changing for the better. You know, the one with roughly the same Democrat controlled Congress that didn’t do anything for for four years now, and we expect them to do something now? Ha.

The only thing that I’ve seen that’s new in the past 3 months is the Arizona Cardinals making it to the Super Bowl. That’s new.

So, I just want to know, I want someone to explain to me how and why this country is entering a new era. Because to be honest until Barack Obama actually starts doing new things as President it all looks the same to me. Then again, the world is giving Obama the best blow job he’s ever had, so I suppose that’s new, but not really.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama only days away and and the Eugene Weekly trumpeting that “Our Long National Nightmare is Over“, I found today’s column by Peter Beinart in the Washington Post both refreshing and instructive. In the context of a plea for Democrats to finally recognize the success of the “Surge” in Iraq,  Beinart cautions liberals and progressives, especially young ones, the likes of which one frequently encounters around the University, against excessive hubris:

Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported — and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn’t happen.

Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the “Colbert Report,” the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.

In this way, they are a little like the Bushies themselves….

Come Tuesday, there’s likely to be a lot of celebration and triumphalism among Democrats and other liberals here in Eugene and indeed nationwide. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’d do them well, though, to keep in mind that Peter Beinart isn’t really talking about the “Surge” at all. He’s warning against the temptation to believe that, after eight years of the “national nightmare,” the return of the Democratic party to the Oval Office has vindicated the “progressive” worldview as being inherently superior to competing ideas.

The idea that the Republican party has become a “permanant minority” or little more than a “regional” Southern party might be comforting to some, but it’s more than a little reminiscent of Karl Rove’s “permanent majority” rhetoric. Conceiving of conservative thinking as a whole — from the Republicans to the Constitution Party, Libertarians, and others — as wholly discredited and fundamentally unserious (as Beinart argues the Bush Administration treated its critics) or simply viewing them as an undifferentiated mass of Bible-thumping racists might feel good on a visceral level, but it’s not really grounded in reality and it certainly isn’t good long-term thinking.

Indeed, anyone who thought Barack Obama was going to work that way has already tasted disappointment. Some have already begun to jokingly refer to the Obama Administration as the “third Bush term“. While such quips are obviously tongue-in-cheek, they do reflect “progressive” disappointment that Obama himself hasn’t shown much interest in waging an ideological crusade against Republicans and conservatives in Washington.

“Being proven right too many times is dangerous,” Beinart concludes. “It breeds intellectual arrogance and complacency.”

If Democrats and “progressives” follow the same path along which the Republican Party has trudged since 2000 (Or 1994. Or 1981.), toward arrogance and complacency, they might find themselves hunkering down and bracing for the next “national nightmare” in 2012. After all, what happened in November 2008 wasn’t a revolution. It was just a Presidential election. And these things happen.

… because your country’s going to tell you what to do, where to do it, and what time to report for duty, citizen.

I’d like to use this space to make Alex Conley aware of great opportunities like this, this, and this. All of these offer excellent volunteering opportunities that don’t require the creation of yet another vast and inertial government bureaucracy that uses millions of taxpayer dollars for the express purpose of violating citizens’ freedom of conscience by forcing them to labor on government projects under penalty of law.

Who wants to bet that all this enthusiasm for mandatory volunteerism will vanish the next time a Republican is in the White House?

I came across this today.

Let it soak in a moment…

Okay, so we have Larry Flynt and the Girls Gone Wild guy (who I could have sworn was in jail for tax evasion or something along those lines) asking the government for a $5 billion bailout. Their DVD sales have slipped, but their website growth has actually increased in the past year.

And their reasoning for this is not that they need money but rather:

[T]he industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

I am as pro-porn as the next pro-porn person, but this is just god-damn ridiculous. What I’d like to see is exactly what Flynt’s plan is for rejuvenating the sex lives of Americans. Personally, I’m doing alright, but still …

I guess we’ll see how broken the government is depending on what they do with Flynt’s request (ignore it, I imagine).

A final note, the quotes from that article are the most amazingly vague quotes I’ve seen in some time, and we just had an election.

$1,000,000,000,000 isn’t so “shockingly large”, you know (it’s just a “really big number“). It’s a “revenue problem” not a “spending problem”, after all.

Doesn’t have the same ring as Mac Court. Knight Arena. Meh.

For those who want more proof that Phil Knight and company own the University of Oregon, I refer you to the Register Guard and the Ol’ Dirty:

UO President Dave Frohnmayer was happy to comply and on Saturday, at a news conference in the Rose Garden arena just before the Papé Jam basketball double-header tipped off, he announced that excavation will begin on the Matthew Knight Arena this week. The $227 million stadium will replace 82-year-old McArthur Court — Mac Court to students and fans.

Maybe Susan Palmer just hates Nike and Phil Knight but I do enjoy the way she wrote the first sentence there. Frohny was happy to comply. Ha! Who wouldn’t be happy to comply with Phil Knight when he’s bankrolled 3 other buildings on this campus, two of which already hold the Knight name. Let’s list them: Knight Library, Lillis Business Complex, and Law School/Library.

I for one am not complaining about Knight’s money. The dude is rich, bored, and likes sports. However, other than the uniforms and various other Nike donations to UO athletics, the three buildings noted above are not athletic facilities and do support the entire campus.

Mostly I’m just waiting to hear the bitching and moaning from the rest of the UO campus and Eugene area.

It seems that an “internal review” by the incoming Obama Administration has concluded that the incoming Obama Administration wasn’t involved — no way, no how — with any of disgraced Democratic Illinois governor and political albatross Rod Blagojevich’s shady dealings. Phew! Thank goodness we’ve got that cleared up!

In other news, Bush Administration officials have produced an internal review that shows that the Bush Administration had absolutely zero knowledge of torture during interrogations of suspected terrorists, the ghost of Franklin Roosevelt produced an internal report proving that the Roosevelt Administration didn’t know about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and Bill Clinton maintains that he didn’t inhale.

You might be unaware that the Library of Congress instituted a pilot program earlier this year with the intention of uploading some of the millions of historical photographs in its archive to Flickr and allowing members of the public to help tag and identify them.

According to Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason, the program has been “a roaring success”:

One year on, some impressive stats:
• 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
• More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.

The Library of Congress taken a poorly-indexed photo archive that was, in practical terms, available to almost nobody and found a way to make it available to pretty much anyone who cares to look at it. Not only that, but the integrity of the archive itself is being improved by allowing the public to assist in identifying and tagging photos. All of this is presumably at far less cost to the taxpayer than paying a team of professional archivists to do the same thing.

It’s nice to see the government do right by the taxpayers for once.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in historical photography, you could do worse than to check out Shorpy, which is a blog dedicated to high quality historical photos, some dating back to the 1840’s and 1850’s. A lot of interesting information about the photographs shows up in the comments section.

Briefly came across this on yahoo news.

The gist of the article is that President-elect Barack Obama is alienating himself from the liberals that supported him with such stances as:

-Letting the tax cuts of people who make $250,000+ expire in 2010

-A “responsible drawdown” from Iraq

-Appointing Hillary Clinton, keeping Robert Gates, and having a centrist cabinet

-Not taxing the windfall profits of oil companies

To sum up this article:

Now it’s Obama’s Cabinet moves that are drawing the most fire. It’s not just that he’s picked Clinton and Gates. It’s that liberal Democrats say they’re hard-pressed to find one of their own on Obama’s team so far – particularly on the economic side, where people like Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers are hardly viewed as pro-labor.

Apparently, what they want is a cabinet made entirely of Nanci Pelosi.

Over at Reason, Catherine Mangu-Ward has a long piece that helps to deflate the notion that Congressional Democrats and many on the left have been pimping lately: namely that “excessive deregulation” is chiefly to blame for our current financial woes.

I don’t really have time to summarise the whole thing right now, so I’ll just offer this quote:

Letting Freddie and Fannie get away with murder wasn’t deregulation. It was bad governance. And letting deregulation take the primary blame for a credit-fueled housing bubble and its aftermath isn’t an argument. It’s misdirection.

Today’s economy has done a lot to discredit the free market in the minds of a lot of people. Nanci Pelosi and friends are doing their best to put even more nails in the coffin and drooling over the prospect of the Federal Government assuming even more control over the commanding heights of the economy. Why let them go completely unchallenged? Read the rest.