UPDATE: New poll numbers for the Obama health care reform plan are discussed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 After attention was focused on the Congressional appropriations bill in which members of Congress bumped up the order of new executive jets for themselves and other government VIP\u2019s, now John Murtha, the powerful head of the Appropriations Committee, is saying<\/a> the jets order may be scrapped.\u00a0 It is possible that I was wrong in my characterization of the order.\u00a0 According to Murtha, this is not a matter of purchasing new jets but of replacing older jets with maintenance issues.\u00a0 The new jets, he claims, will be cheaper to operate.\u00a0 Presumably it would take an awful long time to pay off the $550M price tag, however, and the fact remains that this was a foolish bit of extravagance for a Congress that recently berated CEO\u2019s for using executive jets when they were receiving taxpayer money.<\/p>\n Readers of this blog might recall the slow-drip scandal in London when a light was shone on the extravagance lifestyle of the members of Parliament and etc.\u00a0 I have little doubt that a similar scandal would erupt here in the United States if all of the perks and luxuries of members of Congress\u2013especially the more powerful ones\u2013came to light.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 To underscore the point: the California state government, in the midst of the worst fiscal crisis it has faced in generations, facing an unprecedented deficit in the tens of billions of dollars, actually added <\/em>employees over the past 12 months.\u00a0 While the private sector lost 760,000 jobs (a 6% loss), local governments shrunk by only 1.5% and the state government grew by 3,600.\u00a0 Now, state jobs (this may be counter-intuitive, but it\u2019s true) tend to pay more, on average, than private sector jobs (about 54K\/year compared to 42K\/year).\u00a0 So $3600 jobs at an average of 54K comes out to nearly $200M.\u00a0 Small potatoes compared to the federal budget, where the $550M for the 8 jets is a rounding error, but in any state budget, even California\u2019s, $200M is a lot of money.<\/p>\n A big part of the problem, of course, is the immense power of the public employee unions (teachers\u2019 unions, police unions, etc) over the government of California.\u00a0 Steven Greenhut writes<\/a> about the union demands, in the midst of an 11% unemployment rate, for higher pay and more perks: \u201cBut these unions really aren\u2019t crazy. In fact, they understand reality better than the rest of us, who still hold to the quaint belief that public employees serve us. The unions know the truth: that the public servants are now the public\u2019s masters.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of California\u2019s workers receive a pension, at the age of 50 (!!!), for the rest of their lives, at 90% of their final year\u2019s pay\u2013and many use \u201cspiking schemes that allow many employees to retire with pay well above their final year\u2019s salary.\u201d\u00a0 This is outrageous.\u00a0 But where is the outrage?\u00a0 When will those who do not <\/em>work for the state stand up and demand fiscal responsibility, an end to the excess, a tightening of the belts?\u00a0 Right now, the organized public employee unions are far more powerful than the disorganized employees of the private sector.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Ross Douthat writes<\/a> on the social conservatism expressed in Judd Apatow movies, which tend to affirm traditional values under a barrage of crude penis jokes.\u00a0 Apatow\u2019s new book, \u201cFunny People,\u201d is more serious, and tends to show the messy complexity of life (it is \u201cthe first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins\u201d)\u2013the poor reaction of American audiences shows, Douthat claims, that Americans are more conservative in theory than in practice:<\/p>\n More than most Westerners, Americans believe \u2014 deeply, madly, truly \u2014 in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We\u2019re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.<\/p>\n In other words, we\u2019re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ouch.\u00a0 For those who are <\/em>social conservatives\u2013that is, those who oppose abortion and experimentation on embryos or embryonic tissues\u2013this is a painful and yet apt point.\u00a0 In my view it is because we have this strange notion that our laws ought not to reflect our shared moral values.\u00a0 We are legal libertarians more than we are legal moralists, whereas the Europeans have long had laws that reflect their own moral traditions.<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0 Another sign of the fall: human traffickers snatching children<\/a> away from their families, away from their homes, and sending them off to live (and often die) as slaves.<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0 The Obama administration is starting <\/a>to pay a price for its deal with Big Pharma.\u00a0 And Obama is having to hit the campaign trail <\/a>again, as he will hold his own town hall meetings, presumably to counter the bad press of the Congress town hall meetings.<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0 Sign of the Times: \u201cViagra ice cream to go on sale at Selfridges<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n 7.\u00a0 I don\u2019t mean to harp on the story of the North Korean former-hostages, but Christopher Hitchens has a piece<\/a> on the ordeal today.\u00a0 Whether or not one agrees with him, Hitchens is one of the sharpest, most pungent political writers working today.<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0 Speaking of sharp writers, Roger Kimball<\/a> is well worth reading on the subject of health care reform.\u00a0 Also writing from the right, Shawn Tully has a fine explanation<\/a> of people\u2019s concerns with the health care reform.\u00a0 From the left, consider Eugene Robinson\u2019s piece<\/a>, and Lee Siegel<\/a> from The Daily Beast.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UPDATE: New poll numbers for the Obama health care reform plan are discussed here. 1.\u00a0 After attention was focused on the Congressional appropriations bill in which members of Congress bumped up the order of new executive jets for themselves and other government VIP\u2019s, now John Murtha, the powerful head of the Appropriations Committee, is saying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n