OK, Sherlock, what do you make of this?
“ U.S. business climate worst in 27 years”
Whoa–bad news, what? Reuters explains: “Slack demand and lack of credit are forcing firms to cut capital spending and axe jobs, according to the survey. About 39 percent of firms said they planned to reduce payrolls over the next six months, while 17 percent expected to hire people.”
OK, let’s say you are the President of the United States and you wake up to headlines like that. What do you do? Do you set about trying to create an environment that is business friendly, that promotes growth by reducing red-tape and onerous regulations that make it more difficult for U.S. businesses to compete at home and abroad? Not If you’re Barack “I won” Obama. No siree. If you rule with his divine mandate you end your first week in office by making things more difficult for U.S. businesses, especially the suffering automobile industry:
“ Obama acts to reverse Bush climate moves”
Yes, that’s right, “U.S. President Barack Obama will start reversing former President George W. Bush’s climate change policies on Monday with steps to raise fuel efficiency standards and grant states authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars.” It’s part of Obama’s promise “to take aggressive action to fight global warming and reduce emissions blamed for heating the earth.”
Blamed by whom, pray tell? Everyone outside of Al Gore’s extended family now knows that man-made global warming is an urban legend cooked up by painty-waist eco-nuts who never got over the fact that George W. Bush was (twice!) elected President of the United States. Doesn’t matter. Combating an illusory beast like Manmade Global Warming ™ is a perfect task for this administration: it produces the necessary Green Vibrations to soothe liberal anxieties and–the really important thing–it is incredibly expensive. Indeed, Manmade Global Warming ™ is the ultimate Democratic boondoggle, potentially even more costly than nationalized health care. There may be a limit to how much you can spend on health care–granted, we don’t know what that limit is yet–but Manmade Global Warming ™? The sky’s the limit. After Nancy Pelosi gets done bankrupting your children by adding another zero or two to the TARP package, she can move on to bankrupting your grandchildren as well. (If there are any grandchildren, that is: Pelosi’s latest idea seems to be that, babies are a dispensable and expensive luxury: “the family planning services reduce cost,” she said. “They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now [and] contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”)
If only one had a safe spot from which one could watch this exercise in self-righteous melodrama unfold it would be almost amusing. Alas, no such safe spot exists: we’re stuck here on planet earth. Exactly what planet the Obamas and Pelosis of the script inhabit is not yet clear.
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