Lucid Links (122109, Noontime)

As statist health care, death panels, and government-paid abortion on demand (just give it time, because we must not forget that killing pre-born babies is a “fundamental right”) all loom, Mark Steyn echoes my thoughts almost exactly (internal link added by me):

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: It drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

But no, Mark, it isn’t “heading there.” It’s smack dab in the middle of that “dark heartland” already.

Harry Reid, with the cooperation of his fellow senators, has no right to steal from me to give money to Ben Nelson’s Nebraska, or Mary Landrieu’s Louisiana, by having different rules under what is supposed to be the same federal program (Medicaid) for different states.

This isn’t how representative government works. It is how tyrants work to satisfy their more “clever,” more greedy fellow travelers.

This Senate fiasco proves once again that the “progressives” who thought they would improve the Senate with the 17th Amendment a century ago failed to do so by not including a recall provision, and should never have pursued it without one.

P.S. I suppose to be consistent, Ohioans should be asking Sherrod Brown why he didn’t pretend to oppose statist health care so he could collect “our” bribe.

P.P.S. Another Cash for Cloture bribe — “A Whodunit: The $100 million mystery hospital.”

P.P.P.S. Also, Vermont will receive $600 million over 10 years, while Massachusetts will receive $500 million. The money to Nebraska, previously reported to have been $45 million, is really $100 million. Wait — I thought VT (according to Howard Dean in his 2004 presidential campaign) and MA (according to Mitt Romney) were places where statist health care is working out well. Why do they need money? VT’s $600 mil is about $600 $1,000 for every resident of the state ($100/year). Perhaps Dean also got bribed to change his tune (Dean “seemed to change his tone a bit on Meet the Press this Sunday”). As to Romney, would somebody PLEASE tell Objectively Unfit Mitt that his presidential aspirations are finished?

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In the kerfuffle over the issue of faux conservative, gay marriage- and Sarah Palin-obsessed Andrew Sullivan using ghostwriters and researchers while passing off all of the work as his own — a fact that has been acknowledged and can’t be taken back (the cat came out of the bag when one of his ghostwriters said on Sully’s blog that “24 of the 50 posts currently on the front page were written by me”) — two questions that should be asked and apparently aren’t are:

• What did The Atlantic know and when did they know it?
• What did Time (Sully’s previous home before he went to The Altantic) know and when did they know it?

Are these outfits really okay with a false pretense that may go back several years?

Lo and behold, the posts at Sully’s place have authors now. And counting back from this post on Saturday evening, 49 of the 50 are from “under-bloggers,” and Sully’s sole contribution is a post with a picture and no words.

Okay, so maybe Sully wanted the weekend off. But counting back from this post on Wednesday morning, at least 47 of 50 aren’t his (one has no author ID’d). Sully’s current contribution to the Daily Dish is about the equivalent of a salad plate at a formal table setting for six.

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Speaking of Sully, his snide, lying reference to this Pajamas Media column (with reax to the reax here at BizzyBlog, also mirrored here) primarily sneered at without substance at the original critic’s link (as is apparently a time-honored custom), needs an economic reality-based update.

Since that April post, we have learned that federal tax receipts in the quarter that ended in June, the most important quarter for federal collections and the quarter that marked the end of the recession As Normal People Define It, continued to plummet at a rate (over 25%; see Item B at link) that far exceeded:

• the percentage by which the economy contracted (3.8%) during the previous four quarters.
• the percentage by which employment decreased (4.0%, per the more comprehensive Household Survey, comparing June 2009 to June 2008) during the previous four quarters.
• the combined percentage of almost 8% by which the economy AND employment decreased (you can perhaps add another point for the reductions in hours worked by those who are lucky enough to be still working).

Not only that, even though the economy grew in the third quarter (largely artificially induced, but it still grew), preliminary readings from the fourth quarter indicate possibly higher growth, and job declines aren’t as steep, federal receipts continue to come in at double-digit levels below last year (third quarter, -14.7%; October and November, -13.2%), even though at this time last year the recession As Normal People Define It was well underway.

How can this be, if purely recession-related factors are the only items influencing receipts?

Answer — The “Going Galt” phenomenon is very, very real, and yours truly correctly pegged when it began, i.e., at the same time as the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy began.

I will now return to ignoring Sully and his five or more underlings. At one time he was probably what he apparently called himself until just days ago — “the most popular one-man blog on the internet.” His post-9/11 work was often very good. Sadly, he degenerated into reflexive paranoia at about the time of the Goodridge decision six years ago, and has never recovered.