Geez, why didn’t they just re-title it “Pass SCHIP Expansion Now Before the Middle Class Falls Off the Cliff”?

From MSNBC (HT to Brendan Cronin via e-mail):

“Life is harder now, experts say — Generation gap: After paying the bills, middle-class pockets are emptier”

With all due respect to Correspondent Bob Sullivan and the frequently-quoted Elizabeth Warren (who was right on the unfair burdens of 2005’s “Bankruptcy Reform” and the Act’s lack of reciprocity, but is rarely right about anything else) — The prevalent attitude reported in this article, if it indeed reflects how people feel, is an insult to previous generations who labored under far more difficult burdens than paying for day care, pre-school, redesigned closets, and family rooms chock full of gadgets they only saw in science fiction. But this generation of middle-class consumers is somehow sooooo stressed that it must have government-provided or government-subsidized health care, education, housing and child care — or it just won’t make it. Puh-leeze.

Check out this inadvertently revealing excerpt:

If a person is arguing that middle class families are worse off in every way, that person hasn’t spent enough time at the mall,” he said. “But these are things you don’t see at the mall: housing, health care, child care, saving and saving for college.” The price of those (are) rising more quickly than inflation in general, rising more quickly than family income. And they are largely responsible for the squeeze that families report feeling.”

Uh, guys –

• What are the three things that the government has stuck its nose into most during the past 30-40 years, either through direct subsidies, the tax code, and/or regulations?
• What has gotten incredibly and mind-numbingly more difficult to buy, with gobs and gobs of paperwork, rules, and other impositions?
• What has gotten much more expensive to purchase in the meantime, usually going up in cost much faster than inflation?

With apologies to Walter Williams for stealing his technique (example here): If you said “housing, health care and college, go the head of the class.”

So I’m supposed to believe the Bull-SCHIP proponents when they say that a massive level of even more government intervention and involvement in health care for children and adults in the middle class, the upper-middle class, perhaps up to and including non-working heiresses (or Parises, as the case may be) will make things better?

Sorry, folks. No sale.

Cross-posted at Wide Open.

….. but I’ll engage in it a bit of it anyway. :–>

Using the report by the PD’s Mark Naymik as a peg, Matt, a co-proprietor at Weapons of Mass Discussion, lets loose. It’s a sentence-by-sentence skewering that is unfortunately all deserved.

Matt’s bottom lines (not in the same order as at the original):

….. You have been in Washington far too long, Senator, when you start believing your own spin… Mike DeWine thought that too…how’d that work out again? Oh, yeah, he lost to a socialist.

….. Senator, if you really want to help Republicans in the state of Ohio, allow me to recommend that you announce your retirement and then serve out the rest of your term as quietly as humanly possible.

George’s crying jag over John Bolton, his refusal to learn despite all the evidence that reducing the right taxes raises federal receipts and grows the economy, his stubborn, ignorant support (last sentence at link) for continuing the objectively immoral death tax, and his hyperventilation over terrorist zebra mussels (OK, “invasive species”; go to near the end of the link) were all bad enough. But the last straws were his breathtakingly hypocritical Immigration bill change of heart in June (a level of hypocrisy that Sherrod Brown managed to match), and the Sean Hannity radio meltdown that preceded it.

When he in essence says in the PD interview that there aren’t other worthies in the wings who can win, it’s a slap at several very qualified folks I can think of without breaking a sweat: Portman, Kasich, and Jim Jordan, for starters.

George Voinovich should consider this his last term, and then exit the political stage.

Cross-posted at Wide Open.

Boring Made Dull has yet another game of “Name That Party.” This time it’s Atlantic City’s mayor.

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Patrick Poole notes that the “HAMAS at the House” party is partially taxpayer-funded. Those attacking him have stepped in it bigtime by naming many of those involved in the event. Many of them also happen to openly support terrorists and terrorist organizations.

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Mark at Weapons of Mass Discussion had plenty to say about Google’s ban on anti-MoveOn.org ads.

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Conservative Culture: (It’s) “Terminated” — for now. But here’s a strongly worded dissent against most of California Governor Schwarzenegger’s moves in related areas.

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Eye Hacker discusses Giuliani v. Clinton.

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Glad to see that Dan Wismar blogged on the disgraceful fake hate crime at George Washington University.

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Interested-Participant notes that No Child Left Behind may be accomplishing something good.

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Liberally Conservative notes something I did too (with my math added) – General Sanchez spent about 40% of the body of his speech strongly criticizing Old Media coverage of the War on Terror, and Old Media barely mentioned it. He spent the other 60% criticizing the entire Beltway contingency from the President to the Congress to the State Department to the Defense Department to the NSA, and Old Media concentrated on his characterizations of the president. This is why reading transcripts like this one (converted to HTML and sentence text) is important.

From St. Petersburg, FL:

Keep it? ‘It didn’t even cross my mind,’ she says
Updated: 10:41 p.m. ET Oct 4, 2007

A county garbage operations employee found a plastic bag on the road stuffed with $65,000 Thursday — and immediately turned it in to authorities.

It turned out the money had fallen off a Loomis armored car a half hour before Debbie Cole found it near the Pinellas County solid waste operations facility where she works. First she thought it was a turtle in the road.

The 53-year-old Largo woman found the bag just before 7 a.m., full of enough $50 and $100 bills to pay her salary for two years. She immediately contacted a supervisor, who called deputies.

It is not clear how the bag fell from the truck, said Mark Clark, spokesman for Loomis, a Houston-based cash-handling company.

Extra time off

Cole’s boss, Bob Hauser, said he can’t give her a raise or a bonus for her good deed because she’s a government employee. But maybe, he said, he can arrange some extra time off.

Cole, who grew up in Long Island, said she was raised to be honest. She said she raised her four daughters the same way.

Go here for the rest of the story.