A 40-Year Wish List: You won’t believe what’s in that stimulus bill.

Via Brutally Honest, where the bill is delightfully mocked as a “stifle-us bill.”

Neither mentions the windfall ACORN may be in store in this $90 billion short-term stimulus package riding athwart close to $750,000,000,000 worth of pork projects and state business that does anything but stimulate private sector job growth and wealth creation based on actual market demands (yelling, “STOP!”).

From Rick Moran (no relation) on the possible Obama presidency:

What it means is that where what he proposes to do is reasonable and doesn’t conflict with our principles, he should expect our support. It means that we don’t have to delegitimize his presidency to oppose him either. People of good will and good conscience can disagree without tearing each other and the country apart.

Behaving like an adult is, of course, the right thing to do. And it’s good politics, besides.

(Judging from the comments, though…)

I would’ve given the win to whoever would’ve, at least once, felt uncompelled to use up 130% of their allotted time to answer a simple question with a simple answer instead of bloviating on and on and on. And on.

I say: they both lost. Again.

Seriously, the question about Afghanistan’s political future could’ve been more effectively answered in less than 12 words than either of these candidates to lead the Free World.

And I’m astonished that McCain can’t respond to Obama’s criticisms of his corporate tax cut when just about any decent undergrad in economics or business, or even any freshman College Republican could. Or any small business owner, for Pete’s sake—to give him a hint. Tie the knot, man!

I think I’m going to pull an all-nighter tonight for the first time in a long time. Getting tons done.

(By the way, I think what McCain was proposing last night was some variant of Martin Feldstein’s plan for addressing negative-equity mortgages. On CNBC, Feldstein also suggested that the gov’t set up a bank to allow all positive equity mortgage holders on their primary residence to refinance their mortgages to 30-year amortized at a fixed 5.35% interest rate, where he thinks the market rate sits right now. I don’t want the gov’t in this business for very long, but if they restructured Fannie and Freddie for this purpose and began selling off pieces to private banks, I suppose that could be helpful. It’d be damaging to the sane banks, though, who’d lose more profitable contracts offered to credit-worthy homeowners.)

did we start referring to pork and bribery as sweeteners?

The corruption in our nation’s congress is staggering to behold.

This is a nice article, although I would’ve liked to have seen Sheila Bair given a shout-out. From what I can tell, she’s done a fantastic job brokering deals for banks (even in the recent case where Wells-Fargo did her one better). She’s been quietly performing as a model public servant.

Biden just said that Dick Cheney is the most dangerous vice-president in the history of the office. I would’ve been tempted to retort that Aaron Burr takes that particularly saucy taco.

I’d make a terrible politician.

Watching the debate is like watching a good ballgame. Always think I could do better until a slick 6-4-3 comes along.

I would have liked if Palin would’ve stressed her outsiderness by saying something about the RTCII thing that congressmen won’t vote for something they claim to believe is needed unless they can secure graft in return for their votes.

(Watched on CNBC, by the way, the most tolerable network around.)

to the Post-Partisan era.

Egads.

This would seem to be a good time to ground myself from reading up on politics and economics for a couple of days step away from all the nasty and focus on work. My chapter’ll be done on Tuesday—that’ll feel very, very good. If all goes to plan, two weeks from today I’ll be able to answer any question about just about anything that happened during the 2007 and 2008 MLB seasons.

In her acceptance speech, Gov. and VP Nominee Sarah Palin said this of Barack Obama:

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state Senate.

Obama was, however, one of four senators to introduce the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that required the creation and maintenance of USASpending.gov, a public, searchable database of federal expenditures.

I consider that to be a major, and very welcome, law; and I give Obama a great deal of credit for backing it from the start (a total of 47 senators eventually sponsored the bill and two (Byrd and Stevens) installed secret holds to temporarily block its passage into law until September 26th, 2006).

I imagine nobody’s touting this as a counterexample for two reasons: Tom Coburn likely wrote the bulk of the bill as this sort of reform is his baby and John McCain was one of the other four senators to introduce the bill. Tom Carper, a centrist Democrat from Delaware and whom I count among the few honorable politicians serving our great nation, was the fourth.

A little further commentary: Back in my younger days, I recall a strong movement to pass a law giving President George H. W. Bush a line-item veto so that he could remove earmarks (and riders) from pieces of legislation without having to veto the entire bill. Thankfully, the line-item veto was never granted to the president—this would have created a destabilizing imbalance of power among the branches of government. But moves towards transparency like the Obama-Coburn-McCain-Carper reform are the correct sort of baby steps we need to get our government functioning and the national debt payed down. I’d like to see the anti-earmark movement gain traction down the stretch in the congressional races.

1. Creationism in the schools: this popped up right away at TPM and is overblown and easy to damage-control.
   

   “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

   She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum.

   Sounds sensible enough to me. One of the most important things kids need to develop in early grade school is their nascent BS detector—parents try to help out with that by asking, “So what’d you learn in school today.” I expect she’ll probably nip this bud in her appearances this Labor Day weekend.

2. They’ll go after the State Trooper controversy. This one will backfire badly once they find out what the guy did and that Palin herself wasn’t involved. The prospect of seeing leftist defending a dirty cop must be the stuff of Karl Rove’s most ticklish dreams.
3. They’ll dig up anyone who’ll say anything bad about her. The star will be a professor emeritus at the University of Idaho who’ll try to help out the Obama campaign by saying disparaging things about her scholarship while she was getting her degree there. It’ll turn out that she never took his class and he has ties to CPUSA or whatever they call themselves now and backfire.
4. Obama’s campaign has already stepped into the experience trap. They’ll find that hypocrisy isn’t such a mortal sin outside of hard-left circles (see the failure of the flip-flop charges to make a whit’s difference in the 2004 campaign), and McCain’s camp will direct it into a debate about cabinet membership—McCain, not Palin, would be setting his (and the left will absolutely freak if McCain wins and names his ANSA, if it’s who I think it’ll be—one of my favorite people ever to serve publicly in the federal government); and it’ll be the inexperienced Obama, not Biden, who would assemble the Obama cabinet. That hasn’t come up yet, but it’s something that’s greatly concerned me).
5. The misogyny of the “netroots” has already come out in force. Hillary’s 18,000,000 voters won’t come over in a block, but some will and these elections are won in the margins: I’ve heard compelling arguments that GWB won his first presidential election by outperforming expectations in the African-American vote in key states. They won’t peel off many traditional-Democratic voters from the under-30 crowd, but they’ll get some from the over-40 group, who’ve been around long enough to know that Roe v. Wade isn’t going to be overturned (although I’d like it to eventually be supplanted by legislation that guarantees women and their doctors freedom from prosecution for certain types of abortion and secures their privacy in such matters from future scrutiny). And I’ll guarantee that they’ll break off a large number of traditionally democratic women voters over 70 who’ll want to see a woman in power before they shuffle off their mortal coils. The amount of crossover will largely depend on how Biden behaves himself (I think the man’s a self-important buffoon who doesn’t know when to shut his pie-hole). The conventional wisdom in Democratic circles that this is a desperation move, reminiscent of Dan Quayle, or referring to Palin as “Britney” isn’t going over well as far as I can tell, even with younger women I’ve talked to who I’d consider Democrats or left-of-center independents. In any case, that line of attack is setting up such low expectations that she’d be hard pressed not to exceed them. I don’t expect her to refer to Pervez Musharaff as “The General,” for example, and she’ll know that Uribe is the president of Columbia, a nation that’ll come up later in the campaign as an example of Obama’s foreign policy naivete and manipulability during his Senate tenure.

Ed Morissey is thinking along the same lines but giving away all the plays. Give ‘em more rope, Ed!

In unrelated news, I’ve been monitoring membership in the Facebook group, I SUPPORT RUSSIA IN ITS CONFLICT WITH GEORGIA, and note that they’ve lost 125 members since last night(5250 to 5125) when Russia announced that they’re annexing S. Ossetia and Abkhazia. I’m hopeful that membership will continue to decrease over the weekend… but prepared for disappointment.

Another update: Kleinheider provides an exegesis on some of the points made in here. I would admonish him for giving away the playbook—but look at the comments he’s getting…

John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I’m frankly blown away by this. My top two choices would have been Fred Thompson and then Sarah Palin, and thought neither were at all likely—I’d prepared myself for Romney, who’s stronger on economics than McCain and would have made Biden look foolish in the debates, but has little else going for him.

Palin’s a fantastic choice—Obama’s post-DNC bounce won’t last the weekend.

A few quick thoughts on the candidate, Sarah Barracuda (that page will probably have quite a bit of graffiti on it: she’s rock-solid on energy policy, the biggest domestic issue this season; she’s inoculated against charges of inexperience, because she can correctly say that she’s done more in the past two years as governor of Alaska than Obama’s done in his past four years as junior Senator from Illinois; she’s as extreme a beltway outsider as you could find, so the Democratic strategy of “Bush: Term III” won’t fly as gracefully anymore; she’s solidly conservative and will be well received by the core Republican constituency, as well as libertarians like myself; and she’s as personally appealing as a politician can be in these times.

There’ll be plenty of analysis about her over the next few days, but I’d like to discuss her husband a bit.

I’d been more than a bit nervous that Bill Clinton would be the first husband of a female President or Vice President. (First Lord? First Gentleman?) I expect there’ll be plenty of women elected to the presidency in my lifetime, but the first husband of one of these women will set the precedent for those future first Gents’ roles, and Bill Clinton would be unideal for setting that precedent, being a globally beloved, high profile fellow. He would have been a traveling celebrity, and something of a policy nuisance, given his depth of knowledge coupled with his presumed lack of security clearance. (I hope to God that Jimmy Carter doesn’t have access to anything sensitive.)

I don’t think I could imagine a better man to define that role than Sarah Palin’s husband. Father of five (including a very recently born infant with Down’s Syndrome She’ll get Pujols’ vote in his first presidential election as a citizen), outdoorsman, and continued to work for an honest living in spite of his wife’s election as governor of the largest state in the US. The typical role of first lady is to take up a social cause and promote volunteerism and charitable giving for that cause, except for Hillary Clinton in Bill’s first term, who took up a social cause and promoted socialist government policy. Laura Bush has quietly advocated for early childhood education and childhood literacy over the past eight years.

If the McCain/Palin ticket wins in November, I expect Todd Palin will need to quit his job, if only to placate the Secret Service. It’ll be interesting to see what sorts of causes or ideals he champions as he pioneers a new position. It’d be nice if he promoted traditional fatherly values—hard work, taking the kids into the outdoors, etc.; promoted the National Parks; and possibly raised the issue of the growing problem of boys underperforming at school for whatever reason (that’d get him some good press from Dr. Helen, who’s already ecstatic with the pick, as are the other two women I’ve talked to about Palin’s selection this morning).

Also, this may be the dumbest line I’ve ever read (over-the-top hyperbole there) in a news article:

She and her husband Todd Palin, have five children. The latest, a baby, was born with Down syndrome.

No shit? A baby, huh? (I assumed the hack had meant to type, a boy, but apparently she must be a non-native speaker.

Added later: I should mention my distaste for Barack Obama… I’m not enthusiastic about finally finishing my schoolin’ only to be talked down to by an egotistical, socialist academic for another four long years.

Good call, Beldar.

Impressive: Before I’ve even left work, the McCain-Palin team already seems to have set up permanent residence within Obama-Biden’s OODA loop.

It’s not gonna be Fred tomorrow.

That would’ve been fun.

Apparently Sarah Palin either. The VP debate there would’ve been the two candidates wrestling to change the subject from energy policy to foreign policy and back again. Update: Well that was an effective smokescreen… Watching fireworks, indeed.

In completely unrelated news: HURGY FURGY HURGY!

I’d hoped that McCain would get out in front on this particular issue. I thought he was about to earlier in the campaign when he made hints about “Wall Street greed,” which I assumed to be laying the groundwork for a radically different philosophy for monetary policy and growth vs. inflation.

Big missed opportunity: “Strong Dollar” is an appealing phrase, when it results in prominent economists discussing how it would lead to lower fuel prices and reduced inflation on commodity goods on the cable news shows, you hit pretty hard where you need to.

Of course, Bernanke’s a smart guy and probably saw the bubble for (largely) what it was.