Sunday PG ... (always good for a snark)

In today’s Post-Gazette, Jack Kelly is still trying to whip up that sense that conservative internet bloggers and commenters express that Democrats have reached up from behind to influence destroy the economy and cause a recession/depression. Yes, the Democrats have held the Congress for the last two years, but as I have pointed out previously and elsewhere, Harry Reid has done an insufficient job confronting the Senate Republicans. The Republicans threatened to change the rules of the Senate because four of President Bush’s more radical appointments to the federal courts where held up (while literally dozens of seats were left unfilled during the Clinton years, causing a case back log in the federal courts). But Harry Reid has chosen to remove legislation from consideration just because Republicans threaten filibuster. Reid could force the Republicans to make good on the threat to filibuster, make Republicans stand up for hours or days talking. Sure, Congress would get less done, but it has not gotten much done now. The Republicans blocked the auto bailout that even President Bush realized was needed, so President Bush was forced to dip into different money to provide it. My point being that the Democrats have been so far unable to initiate reforms needed for the current crisis the economy faces.

Jack Kelly’s point is that things are bad now, but the Democrats will (future tense) probably make things worse. “An example of moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the $1 trillion "stimulus" package Congress is contemplating to encourage us to continue the behaviors that got us into this mess in the first place.” Key word: “contemplating”. Meanwhile, who was in charge in the last eight years while the “behaviors that got us into this mess in the first place” were taking place? Well, Bush was in the White House and the Republicans held Congress outright from January 2003 to December 2006. Yet Kelly says: “Democrats will run things for the next four years, so the recession should last at least that long.” (obviously Kelly thinks that Congress, even if it changes hands in the midterms, is not terribly important). But he sees the period of our excesses as a longer time “We're like alcoholics who've been on a 30-year bender.”. In other words, we went off course in 1978, when credit cards were first made available nationally. During that time we had twenty years of Republican Presidents and ten years of Democrats, but whose counting. Kelly also says “The stimulus package Congress passed last spring didn't work, and this one probably won't either. But it will delay necessary reforms and could make the inevitable crash more painful.”. Necessary reforms? You’ve got to wonder why the necessary reforms weren’t put in place in the last eight years. We did have Congress deciding that people couldn’t take a deduction on their credit card interest, more then ten years ago. Kelly does say “America can't in the long run be prosperous unless we make things other people want to buy, and finance most of our investments through our own savings.” So Kelly is an old fashioned isolationist. We need to sell everybody else stuff, but allow no foreign investment or imports into our country. I suspect he also wants the results of the election overturned and John McCain and Sarah Palin put in charge. It’s an interesting image, but not exactly practical.

Meanwhile, just to point out, the Cutting Edge section of the PG has simply given up trying to find local blogs to quote from. The PG has decided that no one around (online) here has anything interesting to say.