Needlenose

It galls me to admit it, but the vile Repugs have got a point – the ‘stimulus’ bill is overladen with pork.  It’s just another bloated omnibus spending bill like the Repugs spewed out over the last 8 years, business as usual.  

I don’t buy the complete Foxublican spin, that pork items such fixing State Department computer systems or cleaning up the National Mall won’t create or preserve jobs – of course they will!

But the nation is looking for national stimulus, targeted at Joe Sixpack’s home town, not at the offices, home towns and garages of our overpaid politicos.

Likewise, while I am a firm believer in better healthcare, familiy planning services, and child care for our troops, these items have little or nothing to do with stimulus; our fat & lazy politicos should get off their asses and create and debate legislation specifically for these items.

The stimulus package must stick to core infrastructure investment and development, those things that the venal Repugs of yore were too corrupt and stupid to address, such as improving our transit systems (rail, road & bridge), investing in local, regional and national mass transit, assisting local governments in mixed-use, urban infill development, modernizing our archaic national ‘grid’ and making it distributed, renewable green-energy ready.

This type of spending would cover the U.S. and provide local and regional jobs from unskilled to professional type.  It would address the neglect of previous misAdministrations, mitigate future disasters (bridge collapses?   train derailments?), and start moving the economy to sustainable jobs (wind & solar energy, local business in mixed-use development).

And it would only be a start.

On the flip side, somebody should tell the vile Repugs to shut-the-fuck-up about more tax cuts.   We don’t need to repeal the AMT, we need to adjust the salary limits to account for decades of inflation.  We should rescind the Shrubyian tax cuts for the rich.  In fact, to my first point, all the tax shit should be stripped out of this bill, and the lazy-ass politicos should deal with these tax change issues in a separate bill.  While ramming the changes down the throats of Boner and his cronies.

Now is not the time for timid half-measures, or more groveling to Billo the Clown and Limp Boy.  Nor is it time for Congressional pork barrel politics.  If Obama doesn’t get in front of this cart, he’ll find himself being dragged behind it in 4 years, watching his squandered mandate transform into Shrubyian approval ratings.

The latest in novel renewable fuel sources – one for which the U.S. and Western Europe have vast reserves.

As the energy bill wends its way through the Greedy Old Pig-party controlled Congress, it’s rapidly shedding any vestige of public interest and looking more like the same-old same-old. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. (who heads up the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources) has managed to whack out the bill’s renewable portfolio standard (mandated that U.S. utilities purchase a meagre 10% of energy from renewable sources, eliminated a ban on toxic MTBE additives (and put in legislation to protect MTBE polluters from lawsuite), put back in the caribou-killing plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and open more protected federal lands to exploration and drilling.

For the one self-style Libertarian that peruses this blog (are you reading this Gun Buddy?) who doesn’t care much about nature and stuff, but always rails on about corporate welfare and government waste, The Greedy Old Pigs have sequestered themselves in a smoke-filled room behind locked doors to go about the business of slingin’ pork in earnest, including:

* $33 billion in tax credits and incentives for for oil, gas, nuclear, coal and electric utilities
* $1.1 billion for making a hydrogen fustion reactor (what’s 1 billion more after we’ve already wasted $10 billion on perpetually ‘around the corner’ fusion energy?)
* $800 million in ‘targeted pork’ to build a Minnesota coal-burning power plant (watch Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn flip-flop and vote yes to drilling the ANWR now. )
* $125 million in loan guarantees for Healy Clean Coal Plant – to retrofit the failed ‘clean coal’ experiment back to a traditional coal plant!!!!
* $1.3 billion in new loans to the money-losing Bonneville Power Administration – sure, enterpise is ‘free’ when the taxpayers foot the bill!
* price subsidies (of as-yet unknown cost) for the to-be-developed Alaska Gas Pipeline

Energy Bill? Energy Scam is what this is! Trash the America of tomorrow – today!