Buyer's remorse, etc.

Scattershooting while wondering what ever happened to Demetrius Calip:

Mark Tapscott: “The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it’s between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and beyond partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, an uncertain hand on foreign policy, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.). Put another way - what we see now is neither what we were promised, nor what we expected.”

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Bizarre box score of the year: in their loss to Cleveland, San Antonio had five players in double figures, but nobody scored more than 11.

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Random stat, from a study in the Journal of Macroeconomics: “a 1% increase in government size decreases the rate of economic growth by 0.143%.”

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Oh what a difference an election makes; Glenn Reynolds with some links showing that, suddenly, dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism and that, suddenly, it’s ok to question the patriotism of anybody who disagrees with the president. None of those “Question O-thority” t-shirts tolerated there, I suppose. They said there would be change we can believe in, and they were right!

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On the same theme, it is apparently now not a problem for the president to twiddle his thumbs while FEMA responds late and weakly to a storm and many Americans, coincidentally mostly of a different race than the president, die. That the obvious analogy between Obama’s response to the early February winter storm and Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina was not drawn is yet another indictment of a mainstream press that has become nothing more than a vehicle for disseminating Democrat Party talking points.

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Lest you think this is a recent phenomenon, recall the beginning to the New York Times story on drunken Senator Ted Kennedy’s vehicular homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969: “Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family.”

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Nancy Pelosi rightly drew a lot of abuse for her statements that STD prevention stmulates (an unfortunate choice of words, that) the economy. I liked Mark Steyn’s take:

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off—but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won’t be any children or grandchildren, so there’s that problem solved.

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From the same column, an etymology lesson: “Stimulus” comes from the verb stimulare, which is Latin for “transfer massive sums of money from what remains of the dynamic sector of the economy to the special interests of the Democratic party.”

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You might be a Taliban if…you refine heroin for a living but have a moral objection to beer.

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Did you catch that Hamas legislators voted to introduce crucifixion to the Palestinian Territories? When your defining characteristic is the desire to exterminate Jews, you wouldn’t want to avail yourself of any of the tools of the trade, now would you?

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Don’t they really have to have a revote in the Minnesota Senate race? With more than 25 precincts having more ballots than voters who signed in (one ended up with 177 more votes than voters, even more were more ballots than there are actual voters in the precinct, but they counted them anyway), and opposite standards being used to count votes in different precincts, it’s pretty obvious that any result from the November election will not be legitimate.

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A “Those who don’t learn from history…” lesson from Walter Williams:

In 1893, there was a depression; we got out of it without a stimulus package. There was a major recession of 1920-21; though sharp, it quickly reversed itself into what has been call the "Roaring Twenties." In 1929, there was an economic downturn, most notably featured by the stock market collapse, after which came massive government intervention — you might call it the nation's first stimulus package. President Hoover and Congress responded to what might have been a two- or three-year sharp downturn with many of the policies President Obama and Congress are urging today. They raised tariffs, propped up wage rates, bailed out farmers, banks and other businesses, and financed state relief efforts. When Roosevelt came to office, he became even more interventionist than Hoover and presided over protracted depression where the economy didn't fully recover until 1946.

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And, of course, Japan tried 10 stimulus bills in eight years and trillions of yen in public spending in the 90’s, yet unemployment grew worse and the economy remained stagnant. The track record for massive government spending to combat an economic slowdown is thus: zero successes, two spectacular failures.

But I’m sure it’ll work this time!