It seems he’s found a really cool way of pretending he’s still a Republican. He now opposes the Cap and Trade legislation being crafted in the Senate. Politico.com describes how McCain has sawed his good old buddies off at the knees.

Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have been working overtime to craft a climate bill that can attract significant GOP support. But they aren’t exactly scoring points with their mutual best friend in the Senate, John McCain.

“Their start has been horrendous,” McCain said Thursday. “Obviously, they’re going nowhere.”

I never imagined I’d say this, but somewhere by the banks of The River Styx, the incubi are having a snowball fight. I feel glad that Senator McCain is a invertebrate, disloyal, back-knifing, weasel. God bless his gelatinous spine.

Now that people actually contemplate voting for Republicans, Our Good Friend has decided that it might be smart to at least act like one. This has lead to the following atypical behavior. Here’s Politico describes the latest Rouge behavior from Senator McCain.

McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”

Senator Graham, in the words of cartoon character Johnnie Test, didn’t see that one coming. He must really feel like the rube that went to bed with a Roadhouse Harlot and woke up the next morning nursing a tequila hangover and without his keys and wallet. Senator McCain’s “Good Friend” voices his incredulity.

”I wouldn’t be here on this issue without him,” said Graham, a South Carolina Republican who spent much of last fall campaigning for McCain. “He’s the guy that introduced me to the climate problem.”

Well, Lindsay Old Bean, he’s now introducing you to the dung heap of used up friends. John McCain is selling his shares in the coming apocalypse the way people of Lindsay Graham’s intellectual caliber wish they’d sold their investment portfolios with Bernie Madoff.

One advantage of having a spineless rock-o-tofu like John McCain in the party is that he serves as a barometer of where the winds on a given issue are blowing. He has a knack for getting out of “bubble issues” before the pop. Tell Senator McCain that no one with a Ph D. in Climate Scatology can explain the “Ten Year Warming Holiday,” and he feels no moral imperative to remain stuck on stupid. It’s what you can expect from this rotting, old husk of a once great man, who generally feels no moral imperative at all.

As you can glean from just two paragraphs of this, I like John McCain about as much as I appreciate my Jockey shorts chaffing. While he glad-hands, befriends you and calls you a Great American, the dagger lies concealed somewhere in the conversation. It’s always good to remember around Senator McCain that only eighteen inches separates a good, firm pat on the back and a roundhouse kick in the Gluteus Maximus.

What Lick-spittle Lindsay and “Holy” Joe Liebermann forgot was the essential nature of John McCain. He’s prototypical of nearly every “Friend of The Earth” in modern political life. He’d love to save the planet – as long as you guarantee his fee. Just because John McCain hasn’t garnered the ROI to match Al Gore, don’t think for one second that the man supports Global Warming hysteria out of misguided moral decency.

People who go on Crusades do so with a sense of great commitment and decency. They do so prepared to fight and die for the cause. John McCain is no Crusader. He rides gravy trains. As the political winds hue to a different tack, the gravy has run out and it’s time for “Mavarick” John to go cut a dashing figure elsewhere.

For Barbara Boxer, George Miller and Henry Waxman, losing McCain is a bellwether. Losing him on Global Warming is a tell. It tells us that they’ve lost momentum. They are no longer chic, they are no longer in, they are no longer with it. Nobody watched the Hollywood movies or went to the rock concerts. Al Gore recently received the Nobel Bull-fertilizer Prize.

Nobody in their right minds wants their Senator to vote for a Cap and Trade Bill. Senator McCain enjoys remaining Senator McCain. Senator Webb and Senator Landrieu would prefer to remain Senators Webb and Landrieu. This Cap and Trade Bill will get no warmer than the actual planet it would supposedly protect. This we learn from observing, in his natural habitat, a spineless jellyfish named Senator John McCain.

Cross-posted (with slightly more accurate title) at: The Minority Report

So just how would this X-Files Episode proceed? How does the government deliberately not know something? Wouldn’t deliberately not seeing the obvious look suspicious?

It would be kind of like letting a guy who hated the US Army’s involvement in Iraq, join the US Army, have his medical training paid for by US taxpayers, spend years saying things like “infidels should have their throats cut open and filled with boiling oil”, drive on post with semi-automatic weapons and then gun down fourteen of our soldiers. We all know the US government wouldn’t be stupid enough to allow those sorts of man-made disasters to ever happen again after 9-11.

Thus, they lay the groundwork carefully. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that breast cancer detection and treatment really bent the Cost Curve of Orszag in the wrong direction. Let’s say the tests are expensive, the treatments uncertain and the political ramifications of not spending this money generously quite daunting for the professional office-seeking class. How do you go about shunting this money to uses that generate more Quality-adjusted Life Years per dollar expenditure?

It all starts with science. You can do anything with science. Just ask former divinity student and Vice President Al Gore. You need lots of science to deprive people of their healthcare. Especially after Senator Burris assured them it was a constitutional right.

Thus, the US Government has to prove that they can take away the mammograms without endangering the actual mammary. Once they’ve “proven” this statistically unlikely piece of truth, then they can move on to the policy implications. Otis W. Brawley, Chief Medical Officer of The American Cancer Society, describes recent research that argues against routine mammography for women between 40 and 49.

On Monday, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force took a step backward in the fight against breast cancer. The task force announced that it would no longer recommend routine mammograms for women between the ages of 40 and 49, a group that accounts for about one out of six breast cancers. The recommendation is based on data that find that mammograms do reduce the risk of death in these women, but apparently not enough deaths to recommend that all women 40 to 49 should be screened.

This development has once again raised a heated public discourse on the benefits, risks and harms of breast cancer screening. This rigorous discussion is an important part of reaching clear and understandable public health guidance. But it can be messy and confusing to the public. And, in this case, it could result in fewer women getting screened and a return to the days when we caught cancers only when they were big enough to feel. That’s a step the American Cancer Society does not want to take.

Not taking the mammograms seems to be taking unnecessary risk. Davey Johnson, a former manager for the New York Mets, used fundamental precepts from Operations Research to help him make better baseball decisions during games. He hated it when a player on his team committed unnecessary chance deviations. Even if the official scorer didn’t ring that player up for an error in the box score, Manager Johnson made sure that guy heard it in the clubhouse.

Unnecessary chance deviations involve doing something that lowers your chance of success without any sort of compulsion. Nothing good gets accomplished by one of these and they only make failure more likely to occur. People who speak English rather than Math Nerd call these sorts of things bad decisions.

If cost rationing plays no part in anyone’s thinking, reducing the currently accepted regimen of mammography that most women undergo is a negative chance deviation. It’s only in the Land of Orszag, where the shadows lie, that this type of policy has a positive outcome. Take out ten years of routine mammography from every member of the current female population under forty, and that cost curve starts bending exactly where President Obama promised us it would.

Female GOP Congresswomen wasted no time in beating Democrats soundly with this issue as a shillelagh. Politico describes the immediate connections that were drawn between Orszag’s cost curve bending and the sudden advocacy athwart routine testing for breast cancer. Representative Rodgers of Washington State lead the GOP pushback.

“This is the wrong approach, especially as we’re debating health care reform in America,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said. “It is concerning to us that these recommendations mirror policies in single-payer nations like England.”

Marsha Blackburn wasted no time supporting her colleague. She issued the following critical statements regarding the report.

“This is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water. And this is where we start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician. As we have gone through this health care debate over the past several months, this is what we have warned about,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said.

Thus, with push-back running rampant, it was time for Democrats to prove their party has female members as well. Secretary Sibelius was trotted out to clean up the remains of Barack Obama’s initial experiment in Cost as An Independent Variable analysis outside the domain of defense acquisition. She issued the following statement cum denial regarding the recent study.

“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” the statement said.

So, in much the same way that Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence never recommends specific patient treatment regimes, this panel of doctors just issues advice. This just so happens to be mathematically calibrated advice designed to effect a Pareto Optimal outcome that supersedes the particulars of any particular patient.

Republican Candice Miller very effectively pointed out why Pareto Optimal societies are great to live in – unless you happen to be an individual human being.

“What is the driver of many of their decisions?” Rep. Candice Miller asked about the numerous task forces created by the new health care bill. “Will cost be a consideration? If that is the case, for instance, why have all these mammograms because it is very costly, they could test 2,000 women and only one is a positive. I guess it doesn’t matter. If you’re the one, it matters.”

Sibelius can dissemble. She can announce that George W. Bush hired the doctors. She can claim Barack Obama is way too caring an individual to ever take away people’s mammograms. The final hypothetical advice could even be God’s own truth whispered only to Kathleen Sibelius’ privileged ears.

Yet why should we even consider passing a healthcare reform bill that gives Barack Obama the opportunity to be that caring and nice? He’s got seven more years of such swell niceness left in the tank at most - unless he’s taking his advice in Constitutional jurisprudence from Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin.

At some point reality intrudes upon the fantasy of universal healthcare as a basic human right. The people peddling these delusions understand this already. The efforts to lop off a huge cost driver by denying the necessity of early detection to better fight breast cancer were laying the groundwork not to have the state-run health insurer pay for them. That would have given the badly strapped Federal Treasury a whole bunch more change to believe in.

It appears these taxes are not being collected. Missing sales tax revenue indicates that most people just aren’t buying the taxable goods. A point of sale tax can’t be levied absent sales volume. As a result of these revenue shortfalls, the states have been forced to reduce social spending.

The budgetary proration that has hit Alabama’s education budget is typical of what has happened nationwide. Schools here struggle to employ enough teachers to meet their enrollments. Disappointed children ask their underemployed parents to subsidize extra-curricular activities that no longer get funded. It seems like a perfect use for the almighty stimulus dollars that were passed to save the day.

This brings us to the following astounding revelation. All those shovel-ready projects that we heard about last Winter – they went bye-bye! Those stimulus funds are now being expended to keep the teachers employed so that the next generation of Americans can learn how to read. Maudlin describes this process below.

“Fully nine states are in fiscal distress and only two have balanced budgets. States like Michigan are planning 20% budget cuts for the coming year. Indiana is planning a 10% spending cut in light of a 7.4% YoY revenue decline. How can the economy really be out of recession if government revenues are still deflating?

The logical answer to that would be private sector employment growth. That fails to occur if the stores can’t sell anything. These lost sales particularly hammer salespeople on straight commission. The employer signed them on to assume the performance risk associated with the job. Having no customers equates to a commission equal to 3% - 5% of nothing. These people starve on the Raman Pride Diet, but they don’t show up in the unemployment numbers. It’s a good thing they aren’t officially having economic difficulties. Maudlin continues his tour through the revenue wreckage at the statehouse level.

“The states are filling around 40% of their fiscal gaps with the federal stimulus (so much for spending on “shovel ready” infrastructure projects). Even after the fiscal help from Washington, the state governments will still face a projected deficit of $142 billion for 2011 (versus $113 billion in 2010).

The Federal Government thus substitutes Federal Spending for what the states would have spent if they had revenue. At the expense of Federalism, which serves as a vital constitutional check against the largesse of the DC leviathan, we can keep the broken machine functional three more years. At that point, 81% of the stimulus funds will have been expended. Which brings us to the sordid bottom line.

All in, the restraint in the state and local government sector is estimated to drain a full percentage point from U.S. GDP growth in 2010 and more than fully offset the stimulative efforts from Washington. The U.S. economy is more likely to post growth of little more than 2% next year, rather than the 5% currently being discounted by the equity market.”

That last sentence really explains the problem. When statistical analysts ignore the existence of the states as thoroughly as The Federal Government does, things look like they’ve turned a corner. Prescient geniuses like Andrea Mitchell insist that “Happy Days are here again!”

Yet, we can think of this economy like a newly constructed McMansion. The walls can be painted a nice, happy color and the aluminum siding looks tinny. The Chinese drywall rotting within only becomes a problem when the holes appear in the wall. But it only has to hang together until mid-November 2010. Then, as far as Speaker Pelosi is concerned, the warranty has expired.

Maudlin finishes his potential sequel to “2012 – The Disaster Theory” with a cheery vignette describing what the economy would have to do in order to get back to 5% unemployment measured by U6 in 2020. An economy that has no double-dip recessions, and the orderly retirement of everyone eligible at age 65 only has to produce 14.44 million jobs in a decade to get us there.

We deconstruct that further and get maybe 125,000 jobs per month that need to be born. We have a mechanism under stimulus, that creates and saves those things at a wrap-rate of 733%. This equates to $500K per job created.

Just toss off $62,500,000,000 in additional, unbudgeted Federal expenditures per month, and we can fix that economy right up. We can run those printing presses right into the ground. The bubbas downstairs at the mint would appreciate the overtime.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could consume all the seed corn that we grow next year’s harvest with in order to tread water amidst the rising flood. We could be attempting to swallow the poisonous digitalis pills faster than the sclerotic cholesterol of our suffocating plutocracy kills all incentive and desire amongst our private-sector entrepreneurs. We could just be coding on the table as the only likely end game of spasmodic, hedonistic nihilism.

All of that is possible. On our current trajectory, without course correction, this is the most likely outcome. However, we can also vote these idiots out and begin the vital reconstruction. We can lower our sights, improve our performance and admit to ourselves as a nation that we need to work more and eat less.

As the stimulus just gets burned to keep the fat people from starving, the hideous logic of modern Liberalism becomes more and more apparent. The Great Society of the Paternalistic Left becomes a death trap in which previously successful nations lose their societal character and die in the flaming ruins of their own stupid cupidity. We are kidding ourselves by attempting to recover via this stimulus that could kill us.

Aristotle spoke these words and inspired an entire philosophy of how mankind should relate to the society they live in. Thinkers, theologians and revolutionaries from diverse backgrounds, all over the world, have drawn strength from this precept. Namely that a man who does right, with a true and decent nature, transcends law by holding to a code of conduct that makes it unnecessary for the governance over his daily existence.

From Paul the Apostle, to The Barons at Runnymede, through Frederick Douglas, and perhaps even the courageous man who stood in front of the Chinese Tank in Tiananmen Square, the truly elite among moral philosophers have understood that laws that constrain the righteous from right are steeped in sin and evil. Laws that deliberately constrain choice and individual initiative without protecting members of a society from mendacious or vile intent are not born of a noble source. Laws that deprive people of their means for the sake of installing others in power over their existence are the very opposite of true emancipation. We may well have seen this happen in the recent Health Care Reform Bill passed by the US House of Representatives.

Paul the Apostle said the following concerning his pending execution under The Neronian Persecution.

“When the commandment came, sin lived again, and I died–was sentenced by the Law to death. For I through the law died unto the law, that I might live unto God”(Roughly taken from Rom 7:9)

In other words, Paul believed in something, the law forbade it and put him to death. His death became a challenge to the assumption that these laws were designed to protect citizens from wrongdoing. In fact, the death of Paul illuminates a very important principal that people in our day and age who are vexed by confiscatory taxation and restrictions of freedom have to understand. Laws ultimately exist to protect those who govern.

When those who govern do so with noble and honorable intent, the laws further the commonweal. This engenders loyalty to the body of laws and thereby strengthens a fundamental compact between the governed and those who lead. More simply, if we as a society appreciate the law, we feel cooperative towards those who govern, gladly work with law enforcement, willingly pay our taxes, volunteer for the armed forces, and proudly proclaim our loyalty and devotion to a nation that best resembles a “shining city on a hill.”

When those who govern use the law to coerce our citizenry into servitude, the results become opposite. People protest the burden of taxation. People say the word “politician” as a vile epithet. “Rap Artists” write songs entitled “Kfuc Tha Police.” People wind up dead if they don’t stop snitching. This happens because the people fear the law and are apprehensive that it will destroy their dreams regardless to what standard they conduct their lives.

Both of these extremes and all points in between occur within the borders of our nation. Eventually, one mode or the other will win out. This depends upon the evolving nature of the laws we live under. If good conduct, noble aspirations and decency (Christian or otherwise) win us Freedom From the Law in a manner similar to how Aristotle described it in days of yore, our nation will enjoy great happiness and unity.

If our citizens go to jail for not buying the Volks-Insurance peddled by Speaker/Ostengropen Fuhrer Nancy Pelosi, its NWA time. This bill represents a law that requires a citizen to hand over $15,000 of paycheck or face prison. Details of this odious bill of unjust confiscation follow below.

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.”

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…”

“Criminal penalties—

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

This brings my constant reader to where in this impromptu Freedom From The Law Sermon cum Gonzo Law Lecture we address just what Emancipation truly is. Emancipation, fundamentally defined, involves the right of all citizens to enjoy the fruits of their own labors. It’s part of the pursuit of happiness thing that Jefferson threw into the Declaration of Independence.

This brings us to a topical misunderstanding that leads to evil being codified into our laws. The pursuit of happiness is a grueling marathon with a subjective, indefinite finish line. Like any other marathon race, it hurts and can lead you to overexert yourself. Most people don’t want to pursue happiness, they want government to pull out a butterfly net and catch it for them.

However, once you’ve asked for a right to guaranteed happiness instead of an unfettered pursuit, you’ve just jettisoned at least part of your freedom from the laws. The government has to control the experiment to guarantee you anything. They can no more give you happiness without expanding their dominion than a taxi driver can get you to the airport without treading upon the accelerator.

Thus tyranny flourishes whenever the people demand guaranteed happiness under the laws. The laws then have to reach out and acquire the resources to provide that happiness. They have to be ruthless if the resources are not forked over by a willing donor.

Thus, when Nancy Pelosi wants to allocate the health care costs of self-destructive behavior over a large enough pool of donors to make them affordable for the government, she has to force people to pay for the choices of others. At this point, nobody involved in the transaction enjoys the opportunity to be free of the law. The self-destructive people who eat too much, smoke, or engage in careless sexual practices expect to have these problems lifted off their shoulders. They become beholden to Nancy Pelosi’s continued desire to provide them this service.

The people, smarter than I, who have no bad health habits, are always deprived of their freedoms. They have to become the forced donor pool that coughs up the money to pay for the foolish or iniquitous choices made by others. Thus, through no fault of their own, they are also deprived of their potential freedom from the law - even though they weren’t asking the DC HHQ to help them in the first place.

Thus the law confiscates the fruits of people’s labors to pay for the desires, wants and whims of others who are not earning enough to provide for their own demands. The laws that empower Nancy Pelosi to confiscate your money to pay for someone else’s healthcare work against the principle of emancipation.

The fruits of your labor now belong to Nancy Pelosi and all the various vagrants who asked her to give them health care. Don’t be deluded enough to believe that laws like the health care bill that passed The House, or the Cap and Trade Bill, poised like a sword of Damocles above the economy, allow you to work for anybody else.

Thus Election 2010 becomes an employment decision for the American electorate. Do we choose who we work for, or do we all get stuck running on the treadmill for the gubbermint cheese? Do the laws protect us or control us? Do we define emancipation as the absence of physical incarceration at the present time, or is it control of the fruits of our labor?

When you vote in 2010, you choose between total security under the law or the potential of freedom from the law. You choose between pursuing happiness and between having it defined for you and then jammed down your throat –whether it pleases you or not. What we decide in 2010 is whether we have the right to continue deciding. I don’t believe that will be a very hard choice at all.

To get a sense of the current academic climate that flourishes amongst our intellectual elite, in the rarified air of a top-drawer university, you would have had to have been a fly on the wall at Toast. Toast is a bar in 125th St that caters to the Columbia students and faculty. On Friday, 6 November, 10:30 PM, you could have seen Columbia University Architecture Professor, Dr. Lionel McIntyre punch female university employee, Camille Davis squarely in the face.

It turns out Dr. McIntyre, an African-American and Mrs. Davis, a Caucasian, were ruining a perfectly good evening out with Mr. Brewski by arguing about white privilege. The New York Post describes Dr. McIntyre’s response to the Dreaded Platinum Card of Albion as follows.

McIntyre, who is known as “Mac” at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said. “The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise,” bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. “I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me.”

McIntyre went on to slug another patron. It seems neither the other guy, or Camille Davis, had done enough to curb the vile White Privilege virus and thereby deprive Dr. McIntyre of his excuse for perpetrating violence against women. It leaves me confused and wondering what happened to the soaring campaign rhetoric of last November. Do Barack Obama and Joe Biden have to attend every last one of these beer summits to make sure we can all just get along?

Dr. McIntyre described the incident as some unfortunate event. It was if a pseudo-random number generator just dialed it up. The august professor’s decision-making process had nothing to do with the amateur plastic surgery performed on Camille Davis’ face. It was the White Privilege Poltergeist. The poor man couldn’t fight back all the incoherent rage.

This whole incoherent rage phenomenon brings us to the issue that quite literally is killing us. It’s the issue that helped kill thirteen US Army soldiers the other day at Ft. Hood. Nobody has the moral courage to call a misbehaving minority to justice.

The US Army knew the Major who shot our soldiers was a radicalized Muslim upset about America’s military role in Iraq and Afghanistan. They knew the man had previously attended regular services at the same mosque as two of the 9-11 hijackers. They knew he posted to a blog about the courage and heroism of suicide bombers in the Middle East. The ones blowing up soldiers that wore the same uniform and served in the same Army as the Major.

Several of the Major’s fellow officers had authored complaints about incidents of bizarre conduct and conflicting loyalties. They knew the major had announced to his classmates that infidels deserve to have their throats slit open and have boiling oil poured down into the wound. And just to put a nice Maraschino Cherry atop the cake, they knew he was in regular communication with an infamous Imam who specialized in recruiting young, disaffected men to blow up Americans.

However, the Army now tells us that they decided not to take action because the Major’s correspondence seemed relatively benign. I somehow can’t quite fathom that General George Patton would not have taken action against one of his soldiers communicating with Der Fuhrer as long the soldier restrained himself to wishing Old One-Nut Adolf a mellow evening.

I’m just glad our diverse and accepting Army took a courageous stand and didn’t elect to profile. The consequences of hurting this guy’s feelings would have been way worse than having the entire processing station shot up. I don’t think the troops at Ft. Hood have to worry about committing suicide anymore. They can relax and let the guys in charge of force protection take care of that for them.

In conclusion, I doubt Dr. McIntyre, for all his incoherent rage and the unfortunate random happenstance that follows, will actually kill someone. That would totally dick over his pension. Dr. McIntyre, like the Ft. Hood Killer I will not name, plays the diversity racket like Eric Clapton does the Fender Stratocaster.

Either man would stop when they faced a rational limit to what they could get away with. What should scare the average American is that those limits haven’t even been reached after last week at Ft. Hood. If we die as a nation it will be this thinly veneered self-loathing, not Al Qaeda, that kills us.

An examination of what is wrong with the economy, shows that the Democratic Party’s efforts in this regard have very little to do with what is wrong. The Democrats have faced an economy that is not featuring consumer spending, has lost a significant number of jobs and has been badly hurt by questionable and morally compromised decision-making by powerful members of the banking industry.

To boost consumer spending, Barack Obama has thrown out short-term tax credits with loud, splashy press releases. He has also passed an $800Bn stimulus plan; adorned like a gaudy Corinthian Column, with pork barrel bonanzas such as The Austin Frisbee Golf Course and The Chula Vista Dog Walk. He also has Joe Biden out hawking a website that brags about jobs that have been created or saved.

To solve the job loss problem directly, The Obama Administration has taken over the laggard firms of the failing automotive industry faster than they can finish canning their workforces. These companies still continue to fail badly in their respective markets. A sales report survey of Ford Motor Company (still a private corporation) and a similar look at GM and Chrysler (now government employment programs) demonstrates that several months of hope and change haven’t changed either into a reliable automaker.

A look at the current state of the banking industry reveals the impacts of over-connecting, unaccountable decision makers playing with money that belonged to others. These unaccountable decision makers were Congressmen and Senators in impregnable seats. When they passed the Community Reinvestment and banking Act and repealed The Glass Stiegel Act, they ordered the banks to lend money to people with no means to repay these loans.

The banks took advantage of this deliberate and callous non-regulation. Congress then turned around and yelled at the banks when the scheme failed. Our President, who previously sued banks to force them to issue more high-risk loans, told the CEOs of major banking institutions he was “the only thing between them and the pitch-forks.” Never underestimate President Obama’s mordant sense of irony.

The response to this failure by Congress to behave with one scintilla on ethical probity has been for President Obama to appoint a Pay Czar. The Pay Czar monitors the executive compensation given to bankers; rather than Members of Congress.

The Pay Czar is like the entire Democratic reaction to the current economic crisis. The Pay Czar is loud. The Pay Czar gets headlines. The Pay Czar satisfies angry populists with an axe to grind by redirecting their spleen towards less culpable targets than Democratic Congressional Leadership. Most importantly, the Pay Czar gives the Democrats more control over how other people make their living.

Nolan Finley, OP-ED writer for The Detroit News, describes how the Democrats have played the economic crisis as an issue.

Last week’s job numbers show unemployment nationally bumping past 10 percent and surpassing 15 percent in Michigan. Unemployment keeps climbing, even though President Barack Obama and Congress nine months ago committed $787 billion to creating jobs.

Since then, neither the White House nor Congress has spent a minute honestly analyzing whether the stimulus program is accomplishing its goal, and if not, what other approaches might work.

Instead, the administration is spinning dismal economic reports into positive news, allowing both it and Congress to ignore the economy while they pursue their ideological ends.

The ideological ends being pursued represent nothing more than a fundamental restructuring of the entire United States. They perform this restructuring by targeting their reforms at both Health Care and Energy. Again, these reforms, if passed and signed into law, would centralize all control over these two vital industries in Washington, DC. Mr. Finley describes the fundamental trade-off Barack Obama has made in pursuit of his goals.

Democrats are revealing that putting the country back to work is a lesser priority than passing their social agenda. If that weren’t true, they wouldn’t even consider any measure that would raise taxes on job creators. Higher taxes, particularly on business, always result in fewer jobs. Both the health care and climate change bills will trigger huge tax hikes for every taxpayer.

And this fundamental trade-off is what drives and shapes the fundamental policies proposed for economic recovery. The current leadership in Washington has chosen to trade economic recovery in return for the traditional liberal wish list of the Leftmost Wing of the Democratic Party. They were not elected to do this and know it will make for an extremely angry electorate.

They therefore fabricate loud, impressive-sounding do-nothing economic policies aimed at distracting the desperate public. Thus the Democratic Party offers America a smokescreen rather than an economic solution.

Michael Steele can change the GOP bylaws so that all national level races where sufficient time exists for a primary occur have primaries if more than one GOP candidate chooses to vie for the nomination. The GOP booted NY-23 by selecting Dede Scozzafava to run for the seat. They did so in a closed-door meeting of local party officials. Few members of the NY GOP had any actual input as to whether they wanted Scozzafava as their standard-bearer.

This would probably have been a non-issue, if Dede Scozzafava favored a set of beliefs consonant with the party she was nominated to represent in the special house election. She did not. She disagreed with the GOP Base on abortion, Obamacare, environmental issues and gun control. If I knew more about her positions, I could have ended that sentence with et cetera.

She, like Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chafee and perhaps also Charlie Christ, took the GOP banner as a flag of convenience. This obvious fact of life did nothing to dissuade the GOP from pumping $900,000 into the coffers of a pro-Obama vote who fraudulently dressed in their colors.

The legacy of Conservative Stalwart, James Buckley was another thorn in the side of the bumbling beareucrats of the New York GOP. He founded the New York Conservative Party to run against apostate GOP members who struck him as being to closely identical to liberal Democrats. Doug Hoffman saw the opportunity to run against two left-wingers and used the Conservative Party as a vehicle.

Those of you following Steve Foley’s travels up North know well what a heck of ride Doug Hoffman went for. He came from single-digit obscurity to within two points of a stellar victory. All of this was accomplished despite GOP Candidate Scozzafava’s endorsement of his political opponent and her obstinate determination to leave her name on the ballot. As a result of this and some other political shananigans, The Democrat, Bill Owens appeared on the ballot twice, Scozzafava appeared on the ballot twice, and Doug Hoffman only appeared once. Not that these people were trying to influence the outcome or anything.

This stirred the souls of Conservatives everywhere dissapointed in John McCain’s and Linsay Graham’s servile civility towards political enemies determined to see us all off once and for all. It also teed up a valuable opportunity for Chairman Michael Steele.

Here are Michael Steele’s most fortuitous courses of action. He needs to reach out to Doug Hoffman by no later than this Friday. He needs to congratulate the man and apologize on behalf of the party for Dede Scozzafava. He then needs to let it be known that Doug Hoffman was welcome in the GOP anytime he wanted to renounce the NY Conservative Party and compete against Scozzafava in a head-to-head primary to run in 2010. Let the opportunity for condign payback be a recruitment motivator.

Michael Steele then needs to pass a party bylaw that no opposed candidate may bypass a party primary and then run for a national office as a Republican. No advertising, funding, endorsement or any other activity will be taken out in that candidate’s name under the GOP aegis. In other words, any local party machinery that sabotages the will of the GOP people shall be placed under Michael Steele Interdict. A candidate represents our people when our people agree that that candidate represents our people.

This change in GOP bylaws would send a message to the party pettifogs in Florida, New York and in every other state. Let Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel operate the Aristocray of Pull. We toughen our party by making our candidates hardened by combat. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Jim Webb and now Chris Christie all have something in common aside from successful careers in politics. All four men won the right to run for office in tough, contested primaries and went on to defeat candidates that a lot of K-Street experts didn’t believe they could win against.

As for these primaries being stacked against moderates, Chris Christie was the moderate primary candidate in the New Jersey GOP Primary. The conservatives accepted that he won fair and square and supported him in droves against Corzine. This proves that conservatives will loyally support a moderate candidate who properly honors both party and process and retains the will to draw distinctions from his opposition and actaully fight against liberalism.

Michael Steele can make the GOP tougher, fairer and more united against the Democrats by making all national candidates with inter-party opposition win a primary to run for a national office. If he learns that lesson from NY-23, than Doug Hoffman has done at least as much as Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie has to make the Obama Agenda a whole lot harder to pass without serious political consequence.

For this to happen, Chairman Steele has got to man up and make the decision that will turn last night’s blown election into a valuable turning point in GOP strategy and inter-party relations. Mr. Chairman, you may lead at any time.

Thus, it should shock no one that Senator Lindsay Graham has stepped off the GOP short bus and seeks to revitalize this maundering cadaver of a stupid legislative idea.
It seems Senator Graham has decided to strike a compromise with Senator Kerry. He believes he can find the perfect formula to pass this bill. Marc Morano offers us insight into the level of delusional me-too-ism at work in Lindsay Graham’s low-wattage brain pan.

Graham is now touting his view that man-made global warming fears are real and can be “solved” by passing Congressional cap-and-trade legislation. Graham teamed up with Sen. Kerry to write an October 11 New York Times op-ed explaining that the GOP and Democrats should “work together to address an urgent crisis facing the world.”

Graham has latched on to perhaps the silliest of all arguments and the most insulting to voters’ intelligence: that somehow passing a congressional climate bill will lead to fewer wars in the future.

Scientist Chip Knappenberger has examined the extent to which this bill will actually forestall temperature growth due to CO2 admissions restrictions. His results suggest that successfully reducing US CO2 emissions by 83% will cool the global temperature by 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. He examines three separate IPCC worming scenarios in detail below.

By the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result in a global temperature “savings” of about 0.05ºC regardless of the IPCC scenario used—this is equivalent to about 2 years’ worth of warming. By the year 2100, the emissions pathways become clearly distinguishable, and so to do the impacts of Waxman-Markey. Assuming the IPCC mid-range scenario (A1B) Waxman-Markey would result in a projected temperature rise of 2.847ºC, instead of 2.959ºC rise— a mere 0.112ºC temperature “savings.” Under the IPCC’s high-emissions scenario, instead of a projected rise of 4.414ºC, Waxman-Markey limits the rise to 4.219ºC—a “savings” of 0.195ºC. In either case, this works out to about 5 years’ worth of warming.

In another article, Mr. Knappenberger engages the question of what would happen to IPCC warming scenarios if China, Russia, India, Canada, Australia, and the Eurozone all gladly joined into Waxman-Markey and reduced all of their CO2 emissions by 83% by 2050. Again, Knappenberger’s results present a viable argument that CO2 emission restrictions are an expensive alternative that produces minimal results. Knappenberger’s world-wide results follow below.

The U.S. acting alone under Waxman-Markey (as we have seen) reduces the projected global temperature rise by the year 2100 by 0.195ºC, if the rest of the OECD90 countries come along, the reduction increases to 0.402ºC—still less than 10% of the total projected rise. Even with the help of the REF countries, we only get a reduction of 0.602ºC.

Then we examine what we get in return for putting off Global Warming for five exciting and fun-filled years. To understand this, we have to think about what needs to occur for the US to reduce CO2 emissions by 83%. This in turn, requires an understanding of what sort of things emit CO2. Human lungs, car exhaust systems, and electrical power generation systems of almost every sort imaginable come to mind without effort.

A world in which everyone emits 83% less CO2 could easily take on the dystopic hue of the scenario described in James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand. Life in this sort of a world would again be nasty, brutish and oftentimes very short. A more factual account can be obtained from reading 1776 by David McCullough.

Scottish Genius James Watt defined the definition of horsepower as the force produced by the average brewery horse over 1 minute. We perform tasks that require many times what James Watt reported as 1 Hp every day. The little motor that grinds up my coffee every morning may use more than 1 Hp. Watt’s best estimate follows below.

Watt judged that the horse could pull with a force of 180 pounds.
This resulted in a value which was rounded to an even 33,000 ft•lbf/min.

Without a further dissertation into how much horsepower is needed to get to work, perform most of your basic tasks on the computer and then microwave your lunch, suffice it to say things would be a wee-tad harder if you were only allowed to burn 1/6 as much of whatever you burned to produce this horsepower. This anticipated difficulty already has the Barbara Boxers, John F. Kerries and Lindsay Grahams of the world buying up CO2 offsets so that they don’t have to eat the consequences of the elitist energy stupidity enshrined in Cap and Trade legislation. The people predictably forgotten are the ones that pay the taxes to make all of Boxer, Kerry and Graham’s official CO2 emissions possible.

These people feel great enough anger to spit nails. They feel profound enough outrage to chase the current ruling clique out of Washington with burning torches and pitchforks. They feel the alienation, outrage, injustice, condescension and generally snootiness of official DC so repugnant that they could do something even more revolutionary and epoch-making. They could vote in droves.

That brings us to the crux of why Lindsay Graham becomes so inimical to the general commonweal. In order to vote out the looters, voters have to have a clearly delineated, non-looting alternative. With Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid pulling all the elected levers in power right now, the GOP has a moral responsibility to be the UnObama. They owe the American people a valid alternative; a legitimate change.

Lindsay Graham’s mee-too-ism on immigration, on Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and now on Cap and Trade shirks this democratic duty and undermines the rationale for conservative voters to bother getting up in the morning on election day. This is change that only Barack Obama and his churlish, looter sycophants still genuinely believe in.

When the GOP base attempts to explain the obvious to Lindsay Graham, it just doesn’t quite permeate the smug cloud. Senator Graham has been sent by God to lead the poor, little undereducated conservative bigots by the hand towards enlightenment. It has to be a burden on the poor guy. He should seriously contemplate retirement.

Until Lindsay Graham does retire or get primaried, the Democrats frequently have a sixty-first Senator in Washington, DC. So the conservatives thinking that GOP Senator Lindsay Graham should represent their intrests are left with the following lines from the old-Hollywood Western Cool-Hand Luke.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week — which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it anymore than you men.

Vice President Joe Biden shows surprising humility when he describes this
as better than expected. If I were Joe Biden, my personal expectations
would remain pretty low as well, but this is patently ridiculous. By any
fair and objective means of evaluation, this program has careened past
Failure-Land; afar into the darkling plain of Clusterkfuc Morder!

Measuring the effects of stimulus against the same efficiency standards
used to rate major defense contractors gives us a snapshot view of just
how rapidly our stimulus dollars are going up in smoke. When the Defense
Contract management Agency evaluates the cost effectiveness of a defense
contractor, they look closely at how much the contract costs per hour of
labor performed.

After subtracting off material costs, they look at the actual salary being
paid to the worker, and then they look at the costs that have nothing to
do with that salary. The percent of costs that have nothing to do with
paying for labor performed are termed overhead. The total cost of labor
per hour is called the fully-burdened labor rate. The percent of that
cost that is for stuff other than salaries is termed in shorthand the wrap
rate.

Assuming the stimulus plan isn’t buying wholesale lots of raw materials
for industrial plants, the material costs are negligible. They’ve spent
the $16Bn in question on hiring people and on other stuff that goes into
the wrap rate. To put 30K to work at $16Bn implies approximately $500,000
in spending per individual hired. (I’m being nice this morning, the
unrounded figure is less flattering.)

In 2007, the median US income tallied approximately $50,000. If the typical stimulus job is about at this salary, we get a wrap rate of 900%! Defense contractors will feel the wrath of Uncle Sam for rates over 300%. Our stimulus plan is performing three times worse than the level of contract performance that helps get weapon systems terminated.

Realistically, the programs in question probably gold-plate these salaries
a wee-bit. A case where the average stimulus job pays $100,000 a year to
people for not showing up in unemployment stats and making Congress look
bad, would imply a wrap rate of only 400%. A contractor who knew
Jim Moran or Jack Murtha would indubitably be allowed to continue
“working” at that scale of waste, fraud and abuse.

Typically, the truth lands somewhere between the extremes. Nationwide,
the median adjusted base pay for a federal government worker equals
$60,000 in rough order of magnitude terms. Fedsmith.com gets more specific.

So, according to OPM, here is the median adjusted base pay for
Executive branch (non-postal) employees as of March 2006:$60,636.

So we take the $500,000 figure apart and assume stimulus workers have my
rough approximation of the median government salary. This gives us $60K
in actual stimulus and $440K in overhead. Our overhead percent comes in
at 733.33%. Keep in mind once Boeing or Martin-Marietta get over 300%;
these guys are profiteering scumbags! Only in the magical kingdom of Joe
Biden’s head could a 733.33% wrap-rate equal anything other than “what was
my attorney’s phone number again?”

This vastly ineluctable kfuctitude befuddles your humble blogging
correspondent’s pedestrian mind. It probably fries circuits on smarter
models than Little, Old Moi. I’ve been a loyal Washington Redskins fan
for decades and still can’t figure out how Biden’s Boyoes managed to
perform this poorly.

Yet, to read Thomas Friedman, to read Paul Krugman, and to read Robert
Reich, we need more stimulus. We’d do better subsidizing Tony Montana
from Scarface. That guy put people to work on every street corner.
The turnover rate was high, the working conditions left much to be
desired. However, the .45 Caliber Lean Six Sigma initiatives insured that
his employees were good stewards of the company product.

What this stimulus program does is enshrine inefficiency as the officially
approved American business model. Massive government largess is now how
things don’t get done in business today. Absent a major electoral
turnover, there will never be any penalty for doing twice as poorly at
stewardship as a major defense contractor libel to be judged fraudulent or
indolent by officially published standard.

Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis once proposed
voting in an upcoming election based on competence; not ideology. I
personally don’t have to go that route. I hate Barack Obama’s ideology as
well as Joe Biden’s professional standards of negligence.

But if you straddle the fence on Lib Vs Con type stuff, ask yourself a
very important question. How long can an organization of any type, on any
scale, under any conditions expect to survive if it spends $25 to obtain
$3 of useful value on a daily basis? People will argue contra that Rahm
Emanuel and others of his ilk, are among the most competent sharks
swimming in a vicious, primordial political ocean.

I remind these people that the authors of our government’s liability for
negligence rules lumped waste, fraud and abuse in the same category for
intelligent reasons. At the end of the day, they all have the same
effect. It doesn’t matter how the Kansas City Chiefs got to 0-5. It
doesn’t matter how people got roped into investing with Bernie Madoff.

Regardless of the causal vectors, the Obama Administration still spends
$25 of stimulus money to get $3 of useful result. You don’t have really
care whether Rush Limbaugh ever owns an NFL team to understand that this
pathway leads to darkness. You don’t have to think Michael Steele is
making the GOP all down wit’ it and fly to understand that the Democrats
will never perform any better than $25 of stimulus spending to generate $3
of useful performance until reality kicks their rectums good and hard.

If this election isn’t about anything else. If we truly don’t care
whether Iran gets the capability to burn Jerusalem off the face of the
planet, this election is about what management model pervades American
society. We cannot be as wasteful as General Motors and avert tragedy.

The Federal Government cannot continue to spend $25 and get back $3 in
return. There is no Mommy around to make this all better when it blows up
in our faces. DCMA has no authority to audit this terrible stimulus
program or to reprimand the cretins who executed it with almost
intentional lack of precision. We, the voters, have that power. In 2012
we must use it.

A wrap-rate of 733.33% is not just some abstruse statistic. It is a
symptom of a nation dying in a state of ill-grace. A nation worthy of a
one-way ticket to Hell. Redemption comes from firing these idiots.
Redemption can come in 2012.

This overblown hyperbole offers just another example of the American Media seeing the world as the world is not. Tyler Durden at Zerohedge.com patiently explains why the children at CNBC badly need a few minutes of time out rather than recess.

On a real basis (not nominal) the Dow at 10,000 ten years ago is equivalent to 7,537 today!

This means that if you pick a year, present the DJIA in constant dollars and compare across the years, the DJIA has fallen from 12,000 in 2000 to 7,537 today. So, if you start out in 2000, stick $10,000 in a fund that tracks the DJIA and check back in this AM… Pffffttth!!!! (Sound effect of horrified investor spitting coffee on computer screen). That leaves $6,280 of your American Dream.

Just to really twist the knife a wee tad, Durden shows us another happy chart to make our days. The DowGold Index reflects the number of troy ounces of gold to buy an index share of DJIA. In 2000, this price was 40oz. Today the price is 10oz. You can do the $10K math, while I wipe off the computer screen before my boss gets back.

David Goldman (AKA Spengler) explains why this surge in Gold is an ominous sign. In his post “Gold a Hedge and No More – Yet” he examines some of the disadvantages of Gold-bugging.

Even a rather wobbly reserve currency is a better asset than gold, whose price again crossed the US$1,000 mark last week. Gold is far less liquid than US Treasury securities, costly to store and insure, and above all far more volatile in price. Gold’s price volatility since January 2000 (the standard deviation of the daily price divided by the average) is 45%, almost triple that of the US dollar-euro exchange rate.