Friday, February 6, 2009

Pork, Politics & Poor People -Say Stimulus

The stimulus package? Pork, pork and more pork Thank heaven for the Democrats. Had it not been for them, I wouldn't have learned that broadband and wireless Internet were God-given rights. Yeah, and after-school snacks and contraceptives and those digital TV converter boxes, too. They're all part of President Obama's so-called economic stimulus package, the one he promised would be devoid of earmarks. I guess that depends on your definition of pork. It spends $20 billion in additional money for the Food Stamp program. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says food stamps will stimulate the economy more than tax cuts. Now you know why we're doomed. She actually believes that the government buying groceries with your money is better than you buying groceries with your money. "It's about jobs, tax cuts and accountability," she said of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Don't you love that name? Well, it's about jobs, all right. It's about jobs created by the federal government; and so-called "green jobs" at that. It doesn't matter if these jobs aren't really needed. Obama and Pelosi are smarter than all of the economists who say make-work plans dreamt up by the government won't work. The tax cuts she refers to are just for the middle class, by the way. Forget those who pay 60 percent of the income taxes – the top 5 percent of wage-earners, according to the IRS. They get no relief whatsoever. Oh, and her claim that this bill is about accountability. You be the judge. Here are some highlights: • $726 million for an after school snack program. Since when did it become the federal government's job to buy a kid a bag of Cheetos? • $8.2 billion to bring broadband and wireless to unserved areas. How can we expect these people to use satellite Internet or dial-up? What kind of cruel society are we? • $650 million for more of those coupons for people to buy a $40 converter box for their analog TVs. Technology changes, people. Change with it or buy your own converter box. I wonder if they'll give me a rebate on my old 8-track? And here's the one I love. • $52.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects. This is where they suck CO2 out of the air and pump it underground. I'm not allotted enough column space to tell you all the insanity in this bill. For those of you who are now starting to recognize that the whole global warming issue is a farce, you still may wonder what it would hurt to take measures to fight it. This bill spends, at a minimum, $537 billion to fight this phantom called global warming. Al Gore fought sleet and freezing rain to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this past week, stating that even if we halt greenhouse emissions now, we could experience a rise in temperatures by up to 7.5 degrees that "would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten life everywhere on Earth, and this is by the end of this century." Dun-dun-dun! This, in the midst of record cold temperatures and record snowfall. Dr. David Gee of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, a renowned scientist who has authored 130 peer-reviewed papers, asks a simple question. "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" Of course, he's correct. We've been cooling since 1998 yet the Branch Algorians trudge forward, waist-deep (and that ain't snow), as the vacuous vanguard of the "New America" follows closely behind. Not one of these people can give me a single concrete link between what mankind is doing and any kind of temperature change, yet people like Sen. Bob Corker lap this stuff up. Corker is actually pushing a carbon tax! This seems to be the problem. Many of the folks we sent to Washington to fight all this lunacy are now in league with the very people who are in the process of looting our country. If you ever saw Disney's animated film The Lion King, understand this: Scar and the hyenas have now taken over Pride Rock. Phil Valentine is an author and syndicated radio talk-show host heard locally on SuperTalk 99.7 WTN weekdays 4-8 p.m. His column appears in The Tennessean on Sundays. Web: www.philvalentine.com.

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