Political news continues to dominate in . . .

JULY

. . . when Sarah Palin unexpectedly announces that she will not complete her term as elected governor of Alaska, explaining, in a prepared statement, that she has a hair appointment. Asked by reporters if she plans to seek the Republican presidential nomination, she replies, “You leave my personal life out of this.” Elsewhere in state politics, the FBI arrests pretty much every elected official in New Jersey on suspicion of being New Jersey elected officials.

On Independence Day the nation takes a welcome break from its worries to celebrate in traditional fashion with barbecues, parades and — as night falls — spectacular aerial North Korean missile detonations.

In government news, top Washington thinkers, looking for a way to goose the economy along, come up with the “Cash for Clunkers” program, under which the federal government provides a financial inducement for people to take functional cars, which are mostly American-made, to car dealers, who deliberately destroy these cars and sell the people new replacement cars, which are mostly foreign-made. This program, which was budgeted for $1 billion, ends up costing $3 billion and is halted after a month. The administration declares that it has been a huge success, which everybody understands to mean that it will never, ever be repeated. With this mission accomplished, the top Washington thinkers are free to train all of their brainpower on the nation’s health-care system.

Then again…

“Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009″ – Entertainment – MiamiHerald.com

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/warren-buffetts-big-bet.html

As it happens my son sent me a long DOE report the other day that made me think things aren’t as bad as I had thought even if global warming fears are wholly reasonable. Or perhaps I’m just in an optimistic frame of mind.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/pubs/Bituminous%20Baseline_Final%20Report.pdf

If the assumptions of the study and the analysis leading to the executive summary aren’t too far wrong electricity from coal will cost about 50% more with very high CO2 capture and storage. That means fossil fuels alone can support recently normal rates of economic growth for a hundred years or more. If the transition can take place over twenty years it’s not an insurmountable economic problem, if only because many existing uses of electricity are pretty inefficient and the economy will enforce a lot of energy conservation as electicity costs rise. So the actual economic effect of the energy cost change in terms of living standards will be less than a 50% rise.

And that leaves out the possibility that the public will eventually get comfortable with nuclear fission, which is operating now at cost levels that must be at least comparable to coal plants without carbon capture (or else it wouldn’t be operating). It also leaves out the possibility that fusion will eventually become possible at some cost that’s reasonable in the context of rising fossil energy costs due to carbon capture and depletion. It also leaves out wind and solar and biomass and such; but they strike me as nearly trivial in the 20 year term next to the bigger sources of energy despite all of the hype.

The economy commonly reacts to such cost changes, and even worse cost changes, over time without too much disruption if the politicians don’t meddle too much, as they did in the 1970′s for a time. For instance oil and thus gasoline prices can rise and have risen in the past by more than 50% in a year or two without causing more than moderate pain, at least to anyone who has access to the technology to read this, despite all of the whining that always attends such price changes.

Perhaps that’s why Warren Buffett made his big bet on coal.

“Reform politicians not only tend to be dishonest but stupidly dishonest – whereas the business politician is honest. . .

“I don’t mean the business politician won’t steal; stealing is his business. But all politicians are nonproductive. The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity – meaning, if he gives his word, can you rely on it? A successful business politician knows this and guards his reputation for sticking to his commitments – because he wants to stay in business – go on stealing, that is – not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he’s smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.

“But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people – an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions. If indeed it can be defined in meaningful terms. In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast – not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so – but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.

“All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He’ll geek.

“After he gets hardened to this, he’s capable of cheating at solitaire. Fortunately he rarely stays in office long – except during the decay and fall of a culture.”

The only link I can provide is to page 110 of the 1973 paperback edition of Time Enough for Love.

Looking at the sports vid over and over again and seeing a guy bend over without showing his crack.  Mom Jeans are good for something, although the residents of Altgelt Gardens will tell you they would have welcomed The Great Rift Valley if it were attached to a plumber rather than a snot-nosed community organizer.

Hillary, sporting a particularly bad set of hair, in Bombay, calling the bombings in Indonesia “senseless acts of violence.“  This is part of the problem.  That Hills, et al., don’t or won’t admit that there is sense to the acts of violence. HRC, you’re the Secretary of State, not Roseanne Rosanadana.

Larry  Summers and Joe Biden are on the Looking Glass Tour, telling us everything’s OK with the economy.  JB always reminds me of the Shakespearian “fools” who end up saying the truth in a way that sounds foolish.  So when he  says, “You have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt,” normal people think he’s a blithering idiot.  For liberals, this phrase translates directly into pidgeon business-speak, that is, “You have to spend money to make money”  which only makes sense if you intend to invest (a term that has been coopted by Obama and friends to describe what they’re doing to GM and Chrysler with taxpayers’ money) and make a profit (translation: save or create jobs.)

Sonia Sotomayor said, about a jillion times, that her job as justice was to apply the law, not make the law.  I’m not a lawyer, but don’t prosecutors apply the law?  Why do we need judges? And does anyone believe her when she says that?  Why does she sound so “conservative?” Did Torquemada get to her and make her recant her faith (note: clearly didn’t use the rack)?  Why do Democrats always nominate truly homely women for the Supreme Court?

Sarah Palin is either gunning for the title of Top Maverick, or she really thinks she can cobble together a grassroots base of Reagan Dems and Basic Middle American Republicans to go national.  Stay tuned.  I hereby register doubts about the wisdom of campaigning against Republicans…

Dennis Kahane thinks there’s a musical in all this.  He says “Evita!,” I say “The Producers” (see Larry Summers/Joe Biden, above.)  Can’t you see all the little brown-shirted volunteers in the Swastika Dance numbers?  You know Rahm is itching to twirl his way into our wallets hearts.

Mark Sanford: what a schmuck.  He’s Episcopalian, too, as if we don’t have enough to live down.

And we have dueling “pay to play” scandals involving highly principled non-profits.  David Keene at American Conservative Union offers support to FedEx in exchange for big bucks, and Human Rights Watch raises money in Saudi by touting the nasty stuff they make dig up on the Zionist Entity.  On the one hand, I think the latter is objectively more despicable (because it’s people’s lives at stake, really,) the former I find truly sickening.

Ending on the upbeat: Daniel Hannan on the EU elections.  There go those Poles, clinging to their “old ways of thinking.”  God bless them, everyone.

After the reaction they received on their Cap and Tax fiasco, which will cripple the economy, I actually thought they wouldn’t go forward with this. I obviously underestimated the degree to which they are beholden to their special interest groups.

Make no mistake, there can be no other reason for this behemoth of a bill, over 1000 pages long, to be introduced. According to the Heritage Foundation, the economic fallout from Waxman-Markey would be staggering: 1.1 million lost jobs at any given time, farm profits down by 28%, GDP reduction of $400 million annually, all on top of the estimated $400 dollars per year in higher energy costs. If the Pelosi-Waxman Health Insurance Nationalization scheme becomes law, Waxman-Markey will seem like an annoying gnat buzzing around the economy.

Most of you have by now seen the news that Charlie Rangel, who apparently never met a tax he’d pay, has proposed “surtaxes” on “the wealthy”, starting at 1 percent over $350,000 in joint income (Mr. Rangel has probably never seen how poorly a family can live on $350k in Manhattan if they don’t have 4 rent-controlled apartments). That part is just a small piece of this socialistic nightmare.

So of the other, ahem, “highlights”:
• 2.5% tax penalty on those who elect not to purchase insurance
• 8% payroll tax on small businesses ($400k in annual payroll) who do not offer insurance
• Payroll tax begins at $250k in annual payroll—a business with only 5 or 6 employees
• Drug price controls
• If a company’s employees elect to go through the public option, due to government subsidies, the firm still has to pay the payroll tax.
• IRS will exchange information with the insurance “exchanges”

So, what if you like your existing plan? You’re in luck…for now. While your plan can be grandfathered, by 2017, it will have to conform to the rules of the public exchanges, with the mandated minimum coverage. What this will mean, of course is further economic dislocation, as private health insurers find that they cannot compete with a plan that has one-size-fits-all coverage as its goal, rather than profit.

The plan’s effect on the deficit, according to the CBO’s preliminary scoring will be at least 1.043 trillion. This, according to Pelosi, will “reduce costs”.
With the minimum wage rising at the end of this month, Waxman-Markey’s effects, and an ongoing recession with its likely jobless recovery, Health Insurance Nationalization will kill the American economy.

Neither I nor my mother live in California, but we had a one-time tax obligation this year. The FTB sent us both notices that we owed taxes, but they failed to account for the withholding, so I have to alert them to that. I didn’t oprime el dos for Spanish, but I nevertheless have had various canned directions repeated in Spanish, including the one that tells me I have a 30 (thirty, as in three-zero) minute wait for a live person.

So I thought I’d use the time by taking CK’s generous invite seriously and posting to this blog. Thank you, CK- you are easy, I must say. It only took two suck-up emails and I’m in.

But I digress. I was in California only a few days ago and we stopped by Arnold’s office- really- and I hung out with the press guys and took pictures of the door to the governor’s office with my cell phone. It was close to closing time (in Texas, where I reside, the Capitol never seems to close, but then, we pay people. With real money, not worthless scrip.) The state trooper finally told the non-pressers to scram, and after the second “Shoo!” I donned my RayBans and said, “I’ll be back.” No one thought it was funny, but it embarrassed my children.

California’s money problems are reaching out across the nation, in big ways and small. We’re just the small, although to us, $2800 is real money. My husband was irked that we owed taxes there at all, but I said, presciently, better to owe than to be owed.   At this moment I have no doubt that my wait and the notice are both results of not enough money to staff government offices and a concerted effort to squeeze more money out of people who don’t actually owe it.

[rrrrring.....rrrrring!] I’m finally out of Muzak hell.

Dhammika (I’m thinking call center in India) asks me for some information (ssn, address, phone) then tells me that I will have to fax him my return because he can’t locate any records on his computer. I try kittenish flirtation to get him to really look up the records- no go.  My kitten just ain’t what it used to be.

916.843.0466 Station 1271- that’s Bangalore.

While I was in CA, the big news was that all of the banks have decided to stop cashing the state-issued warrants, the IOU’s. Credit unions still can, as a service to their customers, because they are relatively cash-rich. The banks’ decision, though, provoked John Chiang, the state comptroller, to complain that the banks were causing hardship- the recipients of the IOU’s had been “punished enough” and it was mean of the banks to stop cashing the scrip.

Feelings of entitlement apparently pervade all levels of society and government in California.