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"Because Americans can do Anything..."

Maybe I'm jaded but that was a pretty trite thing to say.

If Americans can do "anything", maybe they can fix broken government instead of just giving up on it and saying it should just get out of the way of ordinary citizens and let them bail themselves out.

But it wasn't his cynicism about government that got me shaking my head.

Here's what he had to say:

Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us. Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina -- we have our doubts. ... [Quaint story about an insurance and registration bureaucrat holding back rescue boats ommitted] ... There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens. We are grateful for the support we have received from across the nation for the ongoing recovery efforts. This spirit got Louisiana through the hurricanes and this spirit will get our nation through the storms we face today.

To solve our current problems, Washington must lead. But the way to lead is not to raise taxes and not to just put more money and power in hands of Washington politicians. The way to lead is by empowering you, the American people. Because we believe that Americans can do anything.

There's so much wrong with this that I've got to use a list to describe them.

• First, the failures of the Republican Bush administration played front and center in the fact that the tragedy of New Orleans happened in the first place, and that it was as bad for as long as it was.
• Second, what's happening in Washington isn't the raising of taxes, they were reduced with the stimulus plan, even though tax cuts are not as stimulative as other types of spending.
• Third, how exactly do tax cuts help the unemployed? If we're trying to fix unemployment, how does cutting someones income tax rate from 30% to 25% save them any money when their income is $0.00? Because last I checked 30% of 0 is 0 just as much as 25% of 0 is 0.
• A person without a job wants a job, not a tax cut.

The suffering that happened with Katrina was not preventable or remediatable by any individual's ability or desire to "be empowered". The people stranded on rooftops waving "Rescue us" signs weren't waiting for a tax cut. They weren't waiting for Washington to empower them to extricate themselves. They weren't waiting for Washington to give them engineering degrees so they could fix the levees. They were waiting for real leadership from a federal emergency agency that had competent leadership instead of a horse breeding specialist. They were waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers to get funding to fix the levees for years before Katrina struck. They were waiting for recommendations from FEMA to evacuate. For FEMA to dispatch helicopters and the national guard and to rescue them from their rooftops.

But just when you think the ridiculousness stops, it actually gets worse. In the very next breath, Jindal states:

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

Seriously? I mean What The F____? Are you kidding me? Where's Ashton Kutcher? Because I think I'm getting punked right now. Are you serious?!

I feel another bulleted list coming on...

• Yeah, make sure we don't buy new cars for government that have "higher fuel economy, including: hybrid vehicles; electric vehicles; and commercially-available, plug-in hybrid vehicles"... If the Federal government isn't using a Humvee for all official business, then some rich Saudi Arabian friend of George W. Bush doesn't get to buy another dozen Mercedes Benzes, while he keeps down democratic reforms from taking place, and we can't have that. I mean Iran is the axis of evil, there their women must wear headdresses in public. Whereas in Saudi Arabia, with all the wealth from their oil, women live lives much like women in New York city do... Hijab? What's that?
• As factcheck.org puts it "A widely repeated claim that $8 billion is set aside for a "levitating train" to Disneyland is untrue. That total is for unspecified high-speed rail projects, and some of it may or may not end up going to a proposed 300-mph "maglev" train connecting Anaheim, Calif., with Las Vegas."
• Note that the only reason to call it "Disneyland" is to make it more incendiary as if transportation between the greater Los Angeles area and Las Vegas is a bad idea simply because Anaheim contains Disneyland.
• Even the wording of "magnetic levitation" seems to mock the idea which is actually stated in the bill as "high speed passenger rail systems".
• Oh yeah, I forgot, Republicans think everyone should drive solo in a Hummer to get from city to city, or use jet airplanes that, mile for mile are far more polluting and use more foreign oil than maglev trains would ever have to.
• Right, because Germany and Japan aren't far enough ahead of us on these technologies, that we should continue to cede our science and technological leadership to them some more.

But the one that really takes the cake is his plainly idiotic and ignorant statement about "volcano monitoring".

Boy, that sounds about as foolish as "hurricane monitoring". We should disband the USGS, right after, of course, disbanding NOAA and the National Weather Service.

After all, look at what lack of warnings that they provided us about Katrina. Look, if FEMA can't save us, and the Army Corps of Engineers can't protect us, then why bother funding NOAA and NWS? We can't trust government.

Jindal is right! Americans can do anything! They can either take a cynical look at government spending, and mock volcano monitoring, which could save millions of lives in the Rainier valley and the city of Tacoma, and presume that government is the problem (a problem that, ironically they don't even realize they have created)...

Or, we can call these incompetent fools for what they are, openly ridicule and mock them, call their ideas bankrupt (just like the lack of oversight and regulation that would have prevented the same fate for our economy and Wall Street), and point out that even the examples they give-- of Hurricane Katrina no less-- serve as examples of what can happen when we are cynical about government, and when we give leadership of our key agencies as perks to flacks who don't know jack squat about emergency management.

When in one sentence they mock the programs that would protect millions of Americans, and then call upon examples where millions of Americans were affected by the lack of funding and the incompetence and indifference of the Federal government when it was most needed, these people need to be recalled from office and ridiculed into submission.

Bobby Jindal, you are simply the latest example of idiot that the Republican party has foisted upon us. We are stupider for even having to listen to your brand of "folksy, gosh-darnit, we just need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps" brand of populist excrement when what we really need, and what the American people have resoundedly voted for, is a distinct change in Washington and where our Federal government is working with us, to build a stronger nation, rather than one that you would have ripped apart only because you lack the intellect to recognize that volcanos, like hurricanes, threaten real Americans in real cities from real threats.

The "American Issues Project" is running one of the dumbest ads I've heard in a long time. It's a criticism of the stimulus package, and it tries to shock people into thinking that somehow $800 billion is a huge number to get our economy on track. Here's how they paint it:

"Congress just spent nearly $800 billion of your money. How much is that? Well, suppose you spent $1 million every single day from the day Jesus was born. $1 million a day for 2000 years. You wouldn't have spent more money than Congress just did."

Well let's see here. So their point seems to be:

2000 years * 365 days/year * $1M/day = a lot of money ($7.33B)

Let's massage this equation to make it a little more meaningful because I just don't see how Jesus fits into the picture here other than to get some kind of quaint association with "what would Jesus spend"...

Another way of spending $7.33B is to spend that money since the birth of the US. 233 is about 1/9th of the duration of 2000 years, so if you spend $9M/day for 233 years, you end up at the same amount:

233 years * 365 days/year * $9M/day = a lot of money ($7.65B)

And while $9M/day really looks like a big number, let's consider that the population of the United States is over 300 million... So lets gather the per-capita spending based on this "reasoning"...

233 years * 365 days/year * $9M/day / 300,000,000 citizens = $2,551.35

Interesting when you look at it within the scale. Now the amount of money doesn't seem so outrageous does it? So in one fell swoop, to extricate ourselves from the biggest financial crisis we may ever know in our lifetimes, Congress has spent the equivalent of $2,500 per day per citizen alive for every day since the US has existed.

Does that sound unwieldy? It should. Does $2,500/person sound a little less than "$1M/day since Jesus"?

As a concoted figure, it doesn't mean anything. It's like deciding how much to bet on a horse race based on a formula like "number of days in a year * the amount of change in your pocket / the number of cars you've owned * the mileage per gallon of a prius (highway) * your shoe size".

A much more meaningful look at a $800 billion stimulus package is the ratio of this cost to our GDP. Let's start with the intended outcome of the stimulus package. Obama has stated that this stimulus package will create or save 3.5 million jobs. That means our current unemployment rate at 7.6%, with 11.6 million unemployed, would drop to 8.1 million unemployed and a reasonable unemployed rate of 5.3%.

Our GDP is currently $13.8 trillion. On a per capita basis of employed workers (which hovers at around 50%) it is $92,000. In other words, on average, every employed person contributes about $92K to the GDP.

Now, what we are doing is spending roughly $800 billion over two years to get 3.5 million people re-employed or from losing their jobs. In other words, we're spending $228K per unemployed person to get them to contribute $184K to the economy.

At first, this sounds like a bad investment. Why spend $228K to get $184K per person? For one, it fills homes with working families. It raises market confidence and stock prices and personal investments. It keeps the fabric of society healthier by keeping people employed, and probably reduces suicide rates, depression rates, and makes for happier families. But beyond all these intangibles, remember that the combined federal, state, and local government tax rate for most workers is about 40% of income. In other words, $91K of that $228K is going to come back to the government in revenue anyway...

...Not to mention the other benefits, such as modernizing or health care records, saving billions in health care costs, doubling domestic renewable energy over 3 years, reducing our energy consumption by weatherizing and modernizing federal buildings and 1 million homes, investing in our young peoples' futures by funding Pell grants, and cutting taxes on 4 million students, and a huge investment in our infrastructure, which will compound the investment over the next decade (at a ratio of 1:1.6 or so), and cutting taxes and providing tax credits, which tends to have a 1:1 stimulative effect on the economy.

Now, this math isn't near perfect, but it is "order of magnitude" accurate. Much like an estimate that $100 of gas won't get you from Seattle to New York, and that $10,000 is probably too much, $1,000 seems like "on the order of" the right amount to spend.

And based on the logic above, $800 billion is "right sized" to fix the problem we're facing, arguments about $1M/day since the day Jesus was born, notwithstanding.

And she's more articulate and comprehensible than her mom.

Here's Bristol on abstinence and contraception: "Everybody should be abstinent but it's not realistic at all." Bristol continues, "Kids should just wait, it's not glamorous at all... You should just wait ten years [to have kids], it'd be so much easier."

What's the best way to get there, where young mothers wait until their 20's to have kids?

Not abstinence... "not realistic", according to Bristol.

And mom is opposed to sex ed or abortion, so teaching about contraception is out of the picture.

What other options are there? If there's no sex ed, and abstinence isn't realistic, then isn't Bristol Palin the poster-child for what happens when unrealistic ideology meets bad policy?

When Sarah imposes herself on Bristol's interview, she says that Bristol's early pregnancy was "...less than ideal circumstances but you make the best of it."

"Less than ideal circumstances", Sarah? Really?

As if teenage pregnancy is unavoidable or something?

The supreme irony is that this isn't just some bad parent pontificating on substantially flawed ideology. This is the executive of the State of Alaska, for goodness sakes.

Would it be any surprise if the harebrained lovechild of bad ideology (abstinence works!) and flawed policy (no sex ed for you!) is a teenage pregnancy in your very own household?

I guess it is to Sarah Palin, to whom "less than ideal circumstances" doesn't drip of irony in the least when she is at the forefront of the debate about sexual education and abstinence in the state of Alaska.

If you can stomach it, watch Bristol tell it like it is, and mom to gloss it all over here:

part 2

P.S. I also love how Sarah talks about how families should just pitch in and help out teenage moms and how it's not the government's job to bear the burden of a single teenage mother who doesn't have help from her lack of an extended family... It's not government policy that is keeping them ignorant of their sexual reproductive health, and everybody has a huge supportive extended family, right?