In “GOP House leader criticizes decision to air partial video of Shirley Sherrod“, our putative future most powerful man in America says, “They only put a little piece of the story out there and people make judgments and they rush and they make bad decisions. They make rash decisions.”

Which is completed by “I don’t want to say bad because I haven’t seen all of this.”

Okay, maybe the reporter sandbagged Boehner. But is Boehner so stupid that he doesn’t understand that he should spend all his time criticizing the New York Times and other assorted socialists (and yes, John, you can use the word socialist)? Why spend even a moment criticizing the only conservatives actually doing anything?

Oh, of course. Because Republicans hate conservative principles more than they hate socialist principles. My apologies; I’m the stupid one.

Good Lord, no. Choice is not rationing. Choice is the free market response to scarcity. The fact that there is scarcity does not imply that rationing must exist. Scarcity always exists. Rationing exists only when the free market is upended.

Think of it this way: I want to buy your house (or car or services as a doctor) but I can’t afford to. No rationing has occurred, but scarcity has raised its head and my budget can’t overcome it.

Now I want to buy your house, etc. and I can afford it, but some third party steps in and interferes with our ability to exchange goods. THAT is rationing.

The only way that’s going to be interpreted is in light of the dominant Arizona story now, the state law fighting back against illegal immigration.

But you read the story and it clearly establishes that the issues is along the entire border, not Arizona, and that in fact deaths are DOWN historically. They have one guy pulling out a tiny subset and saying, in effect, “Boy, if this continues, it’ll be HUGE.”

But that’s obviously stupid manipulation of data. Just as the headline is a stupid manipulation of narrative.

The real story is, why hasn’t AP been reporting that 500 people a year die sneaking across the border?

It’s not hard, and it’s literally the most valuable thing in the world. And here we are destroying it, because of infantile posturing and ridiculous public policy.

Instead they’ve chosen to help destroy both. They might be saved, but if it happens it will be against their will.

After each rep established that they were firmly on the side of good, and made it very clear they were opposed to bad, the first witness stepped up. Of course that, too, has its own pablum tradition, so it had to begin with lauding the witness, who was now the head of a non profit that was invested in The Problem To Be Solved. So, after spending 20 minutes establishing the bona fides of The Problem and themselves as slayers of the The Problem, the committee chair had to go through the charade of establishing why This Witness was God’s gift to the committee who would tell them Just What To Do.

To establish the witness’s bona fides, the chair introduced the witness as having been the leader of . . . the last Medicaid reform. That is to say, the last effort that had led to the situation they had just spent 20 minutes describing as a catastrophe.

As soon as he said it, there was a momentary awkward pause as even these Solons recognized the implication. So the chair quickly noted how times had changed and the testimony began.

And so the Solons acted wisely and solved the problem and this is why Medicaid is no longer the subject of droning legislators. The End.

Recently reading Obama’s Feb. 2010 announcement of his “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” I saw that the nation was in crisis (Oh! My! God! That hasn’t happened since yesterday’s press conference!), “brought on by years of bad habits in Washington. . . . [the] government routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in. . . . our government was spending about 25 percent of GDP but taking in only about 16 percent of GDP. Without action, the accumulated weight of that structural deficit, of ever-increasing debt, will hobble our economy, it will cloud our future, and it will saddle every child in America with an intolerable burden.”

Sure sounds like a crisis.

But not to worry. We’ve got just the man to fix it: “Alan Simpson is a flinty Wyoming truth-teller . . . Through nearly two decades in the United States Senate, he earned a reputation for putting common sense and the people’s welfare ahead of petty politics. As the number two Republican in the Senate, he made the tough choices necessary to close deficits and he played an important role in bipartisan deficit reduction agreements.”

And so the budget problem was solved, and that’s why we no longer hear about it today. The End.

Hasn’t this always been the case? Wasn’t the U.S. founded on the idea of majority minority, which is another way of saying limited government?

You only get to the point of remarking on this if you start with tortured definitions of race such as “white”.

For many years, now, I’ve been waiting for some acknowledgment of my Swiss ancestry and all the special recognition that should entail.

Unfortunately, the issue isn’t majority minority. The issue is, we’re plurality socialist. We can be open to the whole world so long as we preserve property. And without property, we’ll extinguish the last, best hope of mankind on earth.

“The primary purpose of a government is to help maintain and improve the well-being of its citizens by providing services.”

The answer is . . . incorrect! Thank you for playing, and please come again.

–GASB, request for comment on SEA Performance Information