Inflated real estate values, cease your deflation! Creditors, pause not in your lending to the riskiest of debtors! The House passed an $819,000,000,000 version of the Obama Plan for Government Enormity, 244-188. Just Congress putting our money where their mouths are:

“Another week that we delay is another 100,000 or more people unemployed. I don’t think we want that on our consciences,” said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the leading architects of the legislation.

A bold, statement, that, if you work Obey’s formula in reverse. This bill is going to reduce unemployment by 100,000 a week? Is that from the date it’s passed by the Senate, or…? Golly, if Congress can prevent 100,000 firings per week for the low low price of $819,000,000,000, who could say no? The entire House GOP (thank you, Boehner, Cantor, et al), and 11 Democrats – who are no doubt being stripped of all desirable committee positions as we speak – that’s who!

The party’s leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, said the measure “won’t create many jobs, but it will create plenty of programs and projects through slow-moving government spending.” A GOP alternative, comprised almost entirely of tax cuts, was defeated, 266-170, moments before the final vote.

Those lousy GOP scum, introducing a bill full of tax cuts when The Middle Class needs The Fatcats’ involuntary assistance more than ever! Don’t they know that outrageous marginal and corporate taxes are the Hopeful foundations upon which President Obama’s promises of Change rest?

Looks like Timothy Geithner has been confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury after all: thus Obama deems it, thus shall it be. It seems odd that President Obama couldn’t find someone who had, I dunno, paid his taxes a little more consistently.

Many Republicans were willing to overlook Geithner’s failure to pay all his taxes on income received from the International Monetary Fund in 2001 and in three subsequent years.

I get the feeling many Republicans will be willing to overlook all kinds of things in coming months in order to avoided being lambasted as desbicably squeaky cogs in the Machine of Change. The Holder nomination? Ah, he only pushed through the Rich pardon and commuted sentences for a handful of terrorists. The stimulus package? Pft, not even a trillion dollars… and we’ll even get a nod or two towards lower taxes in the deal.

The worst part of the Geithner non-saga? A nominee for one of the nation’s most important accounting jobs misses a good chunk of his taxes for 4 years, and it’s not difficult for the public to shrug. If federal employees chosen specifically for their financial expertise cannot get their taxes straight, the country’s tax code is horribly broken.

How does one deal with a recession? By creating jobs, of course!

…Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. said, “Immediate job creation and then continuing job creation” were the twin goals of the separate stimulus legislation.

I dunno… creating millions of permanent jobs sounds like a humble goal. What else?

It recommends tax cuts for businesses and individuals while pouring billions into areas such as health care, education, energy and highway construction.

That’s more like it. Nothing beats a good, focused spending plan, with the United States government distributing various billion dollar allotments to a list of no more than twenty to thirty industries. Every problem’s just another opportunity for our federal government to get bigger and better.

Ick. Before long, I’m going to have to stop paying any attention to the news. Why can’t Washington substantially reduce taxes on corporations and capital gains, simplify taxes on individuals, and see what the market does? Why does every government action have to be a complicated intervention?

But this part of the AP story is my favorite:

In it, Lawrence H. Summers, pledged that $50 billion to $100 billion would be dedicated to a “sweeping foreclosure mitigation plan for responsible homeowners.”

Wouldn’t the definition of “responsible homeowner” be “a homeowner whose mortgage is not in or nearing foreclosure,” if words from bureaucrats had any shred of meaning? According to census.gov, there are 305,623,245 people living in the U S of A at the moment. Maybe we could split up Obama’s proposed $825,000,000,000.00 and give every man, woman, and child 2700 bucks — that’d get people feelin’ good. And that’s government’s job… right?

The Ohio News Network website is carrying a brief article about former Congressman Rob Portman’s rumored consideration of a 2010 run for Voinovich’s Senate seat. The only bit I hadn’t already heard is a sort of wishy-washy quote from Portman saying he’s “leaning toward deciding to run,” which sounds like he’s either going to try it, or he’s going to consider thinking about it.

For a quote that goes beyond awkward to downright stupid, Professor Tim White at Xavier takes the cake:

“it’s going to be very hard for republicans to win in 2010. If you look at Obama’s approval rating near 80 percent. That makes it very difficult for any democrat to latch on to him to lose,” said Professor White.

I hadn’t realized it, but for a change of pace we’re actually having the 2010 elections on January 14, 2009. Golly, President-elect Obama has a high approval rating? I could manage decent approval ratings myself, given years to prepare, hundreds of millions in PR, and no responsibility to do anything but talk. I’m no Political Science professor, but maybe we should see what the man does before we usher him into a second term, with Democrats from sea to shining sea riding his imagined future coattails.

On the small Australian island of Macquarie, environmentalists took harsh measures with… upleasant results. In order to rescue sea birds nesting there, the island’s nonnative feral cat population was killed. Which led to a surge in the population of invasive rabbits. Which, in turn, has destroyed much of the plant life that serves as habitat for… you guessed it… Macquarie’s sea birds. Caught this story on Yahoo! News, from the AP:

“Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007, there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised,” Bergstrom said in a statement.

The unintended consequences of the cat-removal project show the dangers of meddling with an ecosystem — even with the best of intentions — without thinking long and hard, the study said.

These environmentalists who no doubt fought long and hard to Save the Birds are cut from the same cloth as American and international groups who insist they be given oversight of American industries to fight global warming. Admittedly, concerned parties in this case are aware of where they fell short:

“What was wrong was that the rabbits were not eradicated at the same time as the cats,” University of Auckland Prof. Mick Clout, who also is a member of the Union’s invasive species specialist group. “It would have been ideal if the cats and rabbits were eradicated at the same time, or the rabbits first and the cats subsequently.”

Maybe, when a 2010 initiative to remove the invasive rabbit species is complete, all will be well on Macquarie. Nonetheless, the story scares me a bit. Wiping out one population of critters goes horribly wrong, and the environmentalist’s response is to brush himself off and plan another critter’s removal. What happens if the Obama administration takes similarly desperate measures to stop “climate change,” and cripples American businesses in the process? America will be blamed for the horrible global effects that somehow were not predicted, and Presidential advisors will go to work tweaking their formulas and carbon pricing charts.

An excerpt from President-elect Obama’s comments on the Gaza situation, from CNN:

But what I am doing right now is putting together the team so that on January 20, starting on day one, we have the best possible people who are going to be immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process as a whole, that are going to be engaging with all of the actors there, that will work to create a strategic approach that ensures that both Israelis and Palestinians can meet their aspirations

Emphasis mine. Itty bitty, teeny-tiny problem: the Palestinians want the Israelis to die. That’s their “aspiration” – the Palestinian people, in a relatively free election, chose as their leaders a group whose stated purpose is the destruction of Israel. So unless Barack and State Department 2009 can diplomacize the Palestinians away from their bloodlust, or convince Israel that existence is overrated, it’s going to be more American time and money wasted on the same old “strategic approach”es.

And what a euphemism, “Middle East peace process” – it’d be interesting if we could quantify peace in any meaningful way. I suppose life under Saddam was peaceful enough, if you didn’t mind the risk of Ba’athists grabbing you in the night and torturing you until you died. Same for Afghanistan, if you’re down with sharia – which, in the case of women, means you don’t mind being property. It’s a little silly that we have this big responsibility to keep Israel’s hands tied when it comes to Palestine, while whatever terrorist-breeding basket case we kick the doors in on retroactively becomes none of our business.

…Again. I will admit, much as I love the Buckeyes I was not optimistic for tonight. Tressel is a great coach who for whatever reason has trouble putting it together in big non-conference games. So in a way it was good to see a close game against a great, heavily favored Texas team; but it’s still a bummer to end another season on a sour note.

Stifling run defense, but over 400 yards passing allowed. Beanie continues to rock everyone’s world, until he’s hurt again. Dumb offside, holding, and roughing the passer penalties lengthened Texas drives and crippled our own. And late in the 4th when the offense really got firing, it was just in time to blow through a drive that should have managed the clock. I was afraid the D couldn’t buckle down for one last Texas possession. Crappy time to be right.

It’s disappointing, especially, for the seniors who have worked so hard to improve themselves and be a winning team.  For those who stayed in Columbus when they could have been millionaires by now, thanks again, and God bless…

Another entry for the Government Should Manage Fewer Things file, with a story on Yahoo! Tech about the idiotic digital transition plan. The converter box subsidy is running out of money:

To subsidize the converter boxes, most of which cost between $40 and $80, the government has been letting consumers request up to two $40 coupons per home. But any day now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the arm of the Commerce Department in charge of administering the coupon program, expects to hit a $1.34 billion funding ceiling set by Congress.

I sort of understand the FCC mandating the broadcast switch to all-digital. I can also see the argument for providing converter vouchers, since the government is essentially removing analog as an option for broadcast viewers with dated TVs. But two per household?

I’ve pissed and moaned about the stupidity of this from the first day I heard of it. Must be my poor grasp of the founding fathers’ intentions: Life, Liberty, and Federal Subsidies for Multiple-Television Families. This is such a small but pathetic example of bureaucracy run rampant. Someone in a meeting somewhere said, “why not offer two $40 vouchers per household?” and suddenly, twice as much taxpayer money is gone. Sorry, but if you can afford two televisions, you can afford a $50 analog-to-digital converter for one of them.

Just think of the disasters that await on February 17th! Converter vouchers lost in the mail… half the population of New Orleans joins a class action lawsuit for mental distress due to daytime dramas missed… op-ed columnists the world over go into apoplectic shock from this final, spiteful injustice committed by the Bush administration. America falls into darkness without the guiding lights of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Agence France-Presse.