Keith Olbermann decries alleged hate speech by Michelle Malkin thusly:

“She received death threats and hate-filled voice mails all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

Thanks for the lesson in hypocrisy Keith!

I’ve got a great idea for a deficit reduction program.  It would work similarly to the “cash for clunkers” program.  Except this time instead of the government paying for your clunker vehicle, taxpayers could pay to have clunker politicians removed from office.  If given this opportunity I am quite confident we would have entirely new leadership and a budget surplus in next to no time.

A classic win-win, don’t ya think?

The idea came to me after reading this article in the WSJ:

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs.

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

The joke’s on us folks…

And lame.

Ok, so The One told us without the stimulus pork recovery plan unemployment would exceed 9%.  So, we spend billions on worthless projects and now have unemployment at 9.7%.  A truly scary number is that when you count folks who have taken part time work and those who have just given up, the rate is at 17%.   Well, Barry did promise us CHANGE, and we sure are getting it.  Let’s HOPE he doesn’t have any other tricks up his sleeve.

Er, well.  Then there’s this:

GM’s sales are down 45% from last September (when sales were already bad enough to drive the company into banrkuptcy). Chrysler is down 42%. Ford is only down 5%. Car buyers are clearly punishing the two bailout recipients brutally. Robert Farago of Truth About Cars–who has been right before–predicts that GM and Chrysler will both “go down by the end of next year” without a second, new federal bailout. The only question, he says, is whether the two manufacturers will need the cash before the 2010 midterm elections.

I’m really not all that surprised.  I for one would never purchase a vehicle from GM (government motors) and although I have been a near lifelong customer of Chrysler (Dodge trucks and Jeeps) I don’t think I could bring myself to buy a Fiat (whatever the name on the car).

Sad to say, but the country might be a helleva lot better off if little Barry would confine himself to Olympic bids.  At least there his failures only impact one city at a time.

God help us.