WhatsAPundit

"There is nothing in Internet gambling that adds to the G.D.P. or makes America more competitive in the world," Mr. Leach said. "Everyone loses if this industry continues its remarkable growth trends."New York Times, Oct. 3, 2006.

So sayeth Representative Jim Leach, Republican of Iowa.

Of course, nothing about my willingness to shell out too much money for years on booze has made me more competitive, and now I'm really sorry my preference has always been for domestic products. By all means, in honor of Mr. Leach and Senator Frist, (Republican from Tennessee), I will endeavor at all times to buy foreign goods, just because.

More Scotch! More Tequilla!

Note to you jerks in Congress; you work for the American people. We do not work, or play, or do anything at all, for you. You are our bitches, do you understand? Just because you've rigged the system so that getting you unelected is harder than do-it-yourself wisdom tooth extraction, don't think that it can't be done.

I like playing on-line poker. God help me, I like doing it with fake money. Meaning, it costs me squat. Meaning the Almighty U.S. Government isn't losing any tax revenue. (And don't get me started on how reamed I feel by my current tax burden....)

It is not my duty as a citizen to maximize the GDP or make the United States "more competitive", whatever the hell that means.

What's next, you outlaw masturbation because it decreases the incentives to date, resulting is less tax revenues generated through retail and service industries? (Oh, that's right, the government heavily persecutes the Adult Entertainment industry already, I forgot. Not being a customer of said industry, of course. Never mind.)

And Frist, you sorry excuse for a man, sneaking the legislation through as a last-minute rider on a must-sign bill, why don't you try the same trick next time with a measure to outlaw College Football? After all, every year far more people are killed or seriously injured on college football fields than are injured playing online poker. (Damn that carpal tunnel syndrome....) And god knows millions, nay billions, of dollars change hands every year through gambling on college football. That's obviously money that isn't going through the taxable "engines of competitiveness", so....

Ban College Football! Make America Great Again!

See how THAT affects your hoped-for Presidential run. (Speaking of masturbation....)

I have always identified Libertarian, but the vast majority of my votes have gone to Republicans. No more. The Democrats are (as a group) blithering idiots when it comes to national security issues, but the Republicans have proven themselves to be blithering idiots everywhere else.

Hey, if the Republicans have decided the citizens of this country are supposed to be beasts of burden in the service of the Greater Economic -- and Moral -- Good, I might as well switch sides.

Better to be a Donkey than a mule.

Cross-posted at PhantomMut

Melanie Sloan, the liberal head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was cheered on by Democrats six weeks ago when she helped reveal the Mark Foley scandal. Now she says that "Ms. Pelosi"s endorsement of Rep. Murtha, one of the most unethical members of Congress, show that she may have prioritized ethics reform merely to win votes with no real commitment to changing the culture of corruption." [Emphasis added.]

I for one am shocked!, shocked!, by this turn of events.

* The Nac Mac Feegle view on the role of the State looks better and better every day.

This guy is the answer to a question that was bugging me earlier:

A Martian from Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!

The question is below the fold:

There's an old saying that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, and Liberals think Conservatives are evil.

Well, the House of Representatives today showed that it's not an either/or proposition.

What everyone who says "the rest of the world has socialized medicine" forgets is that the rest of the world they admire was bombed into abject poverty during WW2. No one in it could afford anything for a generation, and governments stepped in. (Canada being the exception. I'll come back to that.)

We were the only non-communist (or soon-to-be communist) country left with an infrastructure. And when an infrastructure works the wise polis focuses on maintenance and not on plow-it-under-and-build-anew approaches.

Downside: wrecked economies get to build with state-of-the-art technologies, while those not-so-wrecked muddle through. (This is why Japan and France have bullet trains, and England and the U.S. do not. Of course, neither does the former USSR or did the pre-capitalist PRC. Some things simply can't be done unless people can actually make money doing it.)

But the United States HAS the state-of-the-art health care already. That's why top Canadian politicians come to the U.S. for heart surgery. (Canada having decided years ago that what was good for the Queen was good for her, I guess; now they pay the long-term cost.) And if you were really screwed before Obamacare, we had Medicaid, which is why visits to the emergency room have been so damned expensive.

The irony is of course that our current economy is so bad that fracking (translation: throwing 3000 pages of legislation at something) a sixth of it could really lead to a Great Depression scenario. But then again, one should never let a crisis go to waste, and if the political situation is dire, hell, one can always create a crisis.

Good luck, everyone. We'll need it.