[Swiftwater Gazette] Fooling People

[pdgrand at nospam.wmis.net]

Bill - I couldn't agree more.  Very scary. - Paul

> Paul,
>
> Most people focus on the "can't fool all of the people..." part of that
> quote, but what has always bothered me the most was the "You can fool
> some of the people all of the time." part.  That's true, too, and it
> just scares the hell out of me.
>
> B.
>
>
>
> pdgrand at nospam.wmis.net wrote:
>> You can fool some of the people all of the time.
>> You can fool all of the people some of the time.
>> But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
>> Good article below.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> The Fierce Urgency of Pork
>>
>> By Charles Krauthammer
>> Friday, February 6, 2009; A17
>>
>>
>>
>> "A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
>>
>> -- President Obama, Feb. 4.
>>
>>
>>
>> Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural
>> address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear."
>> Until,
>> that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
>>
>> And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence
>> peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning
>> lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen
>> current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury
>> secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions
>> in
>> his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword
>> according
>> to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax
>> delinquent.
>>
>> The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more
>> than
>> taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal
>> isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing.
>> But
>> what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that
>> amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
>>
>> He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a
>> lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money
>> to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for
>> picking
>> up the phone and peddling influence.
>>
>> At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been
>> working for years as a humble international civil servant earning
>> non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a
>> year
>> (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private
>> equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington
>> to
>> upend.
>>
>> And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the
>> appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He
>> inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the
>> House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just
>> bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
>>
>> It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways
>> and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade
>> war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new
>> construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee
>> Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and,
>> quite
>> logically, no plans for new construction.
>>
>> It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal
>> rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are
>> suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate
>> job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions
>> that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office
>> says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than
>> the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that
>> Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
>>
>> Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where
>> the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give
>> way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what
>> made
>> Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now"
>> includes
>> $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish)
>> insurance.
>>
>> The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics
>> influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus
>> bill
>> reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and
>> high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate
>> overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine
>> growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single
>> phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market"
>> would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation"
>> incentive.
>>
>> After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that
>> at
>> some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would
>> rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory
>> Obama
>> would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations
>> promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and
>> that this president told better than anyone.
>>
>> I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half
>> weeks.
>>
>> letters at charleskrauthammer.com
>>
>>
>>
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