There Is No Plan

I got your back, you old redneck.

Thereisnoplan Prediction: Tom Coburn will unlock the Deal on the Debt Ceiling and help Obama get re-elected.

It was such a romantic moment. Obama’s first speech to a joint session in ’09. He walks down the aisle of the chamber of the House of Representatives and saves his biggest hug for one of the most conservative senators in the GOP line-up. Tom Coburn, Junior Senator of Oklahoma.  Turns out they’ve been firm friends since Barry first showed up for Senate Orientation back in ’04. They worked together on aisle-crossing bills and helped establish Barry’s bipartisan bona-fides.

Cut to now.

Grover Norquist is frothing at the mouth at the idea that Tom Coburn is in favor of rolling back individual and corporate deductions to help reduce the nation’s massive debt, and go the ball rolling with a handy victory in the Senate on Ethanol subsidies. Old Grovey knows that if Coburn buckles to new taxes, his whole No Tax Pledge in blood deal isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on – and as an added (and thoroughly welcome) aside – he finally gets exposed as the malevolent Kook that he truly is. It won’t be government that’s small enough to be drowned in a bathtub – but his whole cockamamie movement.

Coburn hasn’t made a big deal of the fact that he’s buddies with Barack because that wouldn’t be good for business in today’s supercharged world of political silliness. No doubt the President suggested in the strongest terms that Tom keep their affair on the down-low, for the benefit of both of them. Read the rest of this entry »

a brand new bridge. this one's in france

Things are turned way around when Liberals are agreeing with quirky, flat-tax Steve Forbes, but when called Hank Paulson the “worst Treasury Secretary in living memory” there are few diehard progressives that would disagree.

But old Hank has at least done us one big, big favor. By steamrolling through the TARP at a cost of $700 billion and then doing precisely squat with it, he turned $700 billion into the new $7 billion. Suddenly, with the exception of the bailout for the once mighty now hopeless auto industry, fears of excessive spending seems petty next to the cost of TARP, the Citigroup, AIG, and Fannie and Freddie bailouts. We’re awash in borrowed money, and nobody seems to care. Another day, another dollar, or a hundred billion of them. Whatev.

So when Obama announced his massive public works program (let’s call it the New New Deal or NND) and didn’t even bother to mention a pricetag, the only Cassandra was the ever-predictable American Enterprise Institute. With the economy losing half a million jobs a month, the American people are ready for it. So don’t expect the whining from Club for Growth knuckle-draggers in Congress to be anything more than mumbled griping at worst. Read the rest of this entry »