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ox News Radio on Sirius doesn’t get many paying advertisers at night when I frequently listen to it while driving home from meetings, so I get to hear a lot of public service announcements from the federal government.  Oh, joy.

One that’s running a lot nowadays features a little girl who’s afraid to go to sleep.  It turns out she’s afraid because of what happened during Hurricane Katrina, but don’t worry, the soothing voice of the announcer tells us, just bring the little girl to us, the government, where there are caring people ready to make everything all better.

What?! Isn’t that the family’s job? The pastor’s job? When did America become so trusting of the government that a parent would hand a frightened child over to a bureaucracy?  Surely they know that this is the sort of thing you should expect from government:

A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.

The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.

But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were ‘significantly’ more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.

A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People’s Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes. (Daily Mail)

That’s what that mom with the frightened child should consider – if the rate of little girls going crazy in the general population is six percent, it’ll be 16 percent for those given over to the U.S. Department of Love & Caring.

Now let’s see … the Prez tells us we’ll be healthier if we just let government take care of our health care ….  Sure – that sounds like a great idea!

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R

ay LaHood has caught Obama fever and it’s wracked him so badly that you’d never know our new Transportation Secretary is (was?) a Republican, or that he once understood, quite literally, what plays in Peoria, the congressional district he represented until the One gave  him the Nod.  Now suddenly a righteous evangelist for bikes over cars, he’s no longer interested in keeping government out of our lives; instead, he’s working to use government to, as he puts it, “change our behavior.”

I prefer a different spin:  He’s using government to force change on us.  As George Will lamented recently,

But LaHood is a Republican, for Pete’s sake, the party (before it lost its bearings) of “No, we can’t” and “Actually, we shouldn’t” and “Not so fast” and “Let’s think this through.” Now he is in full “Yes we can!” mode. Et tu, Ray?

Will sat down for lunch with LaHood a while back to ask him about his newfound love of transformational government, and LaHood was not about to cover up his newfound giddyness over having the power to rip people out of the cars they love and stick them on bicycles:

Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a “transformational” administration: “I think we can change people’s behavior.” Government “promoted driving” by building the Interstate Highway System—”you talk about changing behavior.” He says, “People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work.” High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is “the wave of the future.”

Yes, my fellow Americans, one day you’ll take a train or your bike to the soccer game, riding the inherently inferior transportion of the future to the inherently boring game of the future. Sigh. I remember when the transportation of the future was the Jetson-mobile, larking its way through the clear, clean skies. Now the car of the future is the bicycle?! A mode of transportation that went out of style in 1910?

The DC press corps apparently read Will’s column, so when LaHood appeared a few days later at the National Press Club, they pounced, according to CNS:

At the National Press Club on Thursday he attempted to respond to George Will’s column and to explain his vision for using the power of government to change people’s transportation behavior and to change the nature of American residential communities.

“We want to really–and notwithstanding the fact that George Will doesn’t like this idea–the idea of creating opportunities for people to get out of their cars–and we’re working with the secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, on opportunities for housing, walking paths, biking paths,” said LaHood. “If somebody wants to ride their bike, if–to work or to the place of employment or to other places–mass transit, light rail–creating opportunities for what we call livable communities.”

The moderator of the press club event asked LaHood: “Some in the highway-supporters motorist groups have been concerned by your livability initiative. Is this an effort to make driving more torturous and to coerce people out of their cars?”

LaHood answered: “It is a way to coerce people out of their cars.

“Yeah,” he continued, “I mean, look, people don’t like spending an hour and a half getting to work. And people don’t like spending an hour going to the grocery store. And all of you who live around here know exactly what I’m talking about. You know, the dreaded thing is to have to run an errand on a weekend around here or to try and get home at 3:00 in the afternoon or even 5:00 in the afternoon.

Someone tell LaHood people don’t like having to ride a bike through rain, snow or dark of night to work.  Or having to go to the grocery store every day because the trunk on the ol’ Schwinn just isn’t all that big.  Or having to get shoved into a crowded subway, where the pervert du jour can rub up against you. Or having to pay $75 for a cab because the boss kept you late and you missed the last train. 

Someone tell LaHood that the minute streetcars, then cars, made it possible to get out of the idealized planners’ vision of a compact urban core, we did, fleeing by the millions to suburbs, where we continue to live because we don’t like crack dealers on the street corner, gangstas in our kids’ schools, and car alarms going off at 3 a.m.

One reporter asked LaHood to respond to conservative concerns that he’s just another fascist know-it-all loon he’s supporting government intrusion into our lives.  His response?

“About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives,” said LaHood. “So have at it.”

Meanwhile, GM bond-holders did not respond warmly to government mandated depreciation of their bonds, forcing the automaker to the brink of bankruptcy.  The GM that emerges could be as much as 70 percent government-owned.  And who, then, would become a pivotal decision-maker for GM’s future?  Roy LaHood, the man who lives to make cars less attractive than bikes and subways.

It’s a brave new world.  Full speed backwards! 

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I

wrote yesterday about how the Dems lost in an effort to shove the Omnibus Land Bill through the House, using their tried and true “transparent” tactic of shoving a 1,000+ page bill through with minimal debate.  Today, we learn more about what was in the bundle of 170 bills with a price tag of $10 billion. (And c’mon people, remember!  $10 billion is a lot of money!)

Here’s an example of how bad – and little understood – the bill was.  There was a provision to protect fossiles from those who would gather them up willy-nilly. Great.  But what lurked beneath?

First, the bill did just envision a slap on the wrist here – it gave the government the authority to sieze the vehicles and equipment of those found pilfering fossiles.  Imagine the Girl Scout troop losing its bus, tents and camp stoves because a federal agent saw little Sasha picking up a fossilized shark’s tooth!

But wait, there’s more!

… the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences believes the language actually gives the federal government the authority to seize private lands as well.  So if you had some pretty pieces of petrified wood or a few trilobites or a tiny fish skeleton on your fireplace mantle — the federal government might be able to seize your ranch or farm or home.

That’s from a news release from the National Center for Public Policy Research, as is the rest of the stuff quoted here.

Fossils are the minutia of this mess. Wait ’til you get to energy.

This massive omnibus bill would lock up millions of acres of land at the height of an economic recession and at a time the U.S. is struggling to improve energy security.  Instead of creating jobs and increasing resources, energy supplies and wealth, it would destroy them.  It will shut down cattle grazing, mining, timber harvest, energy exploration and production and recreation.

And it would add another $10-12 billion of federal spending.

Hundreds of millions of barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas would be locked up.  It would kill a vital new liquefied natural gas terminal/port in Massachusetts so that Congressman Barney Frank — who frequently rails against oil companies for pushing energy prices higher — won’t have it spoil his view.

I doubt if Frank trumpeted that in a fit of newfound Dem transparency.

The bill goes on to federalize just about anything that can’t move out of its way:  National Parks, National Trails, National Heritage Areas, National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, National Preserves, National Historical Parks, National Historic Sites, and probably National Spots Where Obama Once Blew His Nose.

It would create 82 National Scenic Rivers. Sounds nice, eh?  It’s not.  Once a river is designated as “scenic,” and they don’t have to be particularly scenic to be so decreed, they’re put off limits to all sorts of societally useful uses, like having neighborhoods built near them, or sand and gravel extracted from them. (The picture shows the sort of folks who support this kind of thing.)

And, without so much as a public hearing, it would have given 26 million acres of land managed by the BLM near-wilderness status.  People who make their living by running grazing and timber operations on that land would be booted and deprived of their income – again without as much as an opportunity to let their voices be heard.

Bipartisanship of a sort killed this bill. The Republicans in the House voted overwhelmingly against it and three … count ’em, three! … Dems crossed over to stop the madness:  Dan Boren (OK), Jim Marshall (GA) and Colin Peterson (MN).  And such is the sorry state of the GOP that nearly 20 percent of our elected representatives actually voted for this mess, 34 in all.

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Q

uestion #1: Who’s big idea was it to put government in the middle of the digital TV conversion game? After all, the government doesn’t operate TV stations (yet), sell TVs (yet) or run cable/satellite systems (yet). But there they are, managing the consumers’ switch to a consumer product.

Question #2: Did anyone think they’d do it well? No, I thought not:

The Senate today approved a four-month delay in digital TV conversion. The Obama administration sought the delay because the government program to provide coupons for converter boxes needs more money. (AP)

Question #3:  Why should any federal money be required?  Is TV now a constitutionally guaranteed right, so every loser, meth head, spendthrift and bum (not to mention otherwise delightful poor people) is entitled to a government voucher if they can’t come up with the 12 cents or whatever that’s required for a converter?

Can we at least get them to pay us back when Obama starts sending them welfare checks tax refunds?

The broadcast industry, wisely, had no comment.  PBS offered up that the government goof would cause its network alone $22 million in extra power costs, since they’ll have to continue to have two systems fired up for another four months.  The total cost of this screw-up will be far, far greater.

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A

s the Obama Admin stands poised and ready to impose their statist regime on America, injecting government into every layer of our life in the grand tradition of FDR, it’s not a bad idea to spend a little time analyzing just how government performs.

Here’s a handy case study:

Facing forecasts of wet weather that could flush tons of urban trash out to sea and onto local beaches, Los Angeles County authorities scrambled Thursday to reinstall a boom across the outlet of the Los Angeles River to keep debris out of Long Beach Harbor.

The boom had been decommissioned Monday because the county Department of Public Works ran out of money to keep it operating.

The problem, according to a spokesman for the department, was that a company which had been paid $450,000 to operate the boom this year [sic? $450,000 in three weeks?!] — and remove the trash it harvested — had completed its contractual obligations ahead of schedule.

As a result, Frey Environmental Inc. of Newport Beach on Monday was ordered to take the boom out of service while public works authorities sought permission from the county Board of Supervisors to renew its contract.

Complicating matters, the board canceled its meeting Tuesday because several members had traveled to Washington to attend the presidential inauguration. (LA Times)

It’s expected that trash will flow unfettered to sea until well into February.  Now, we used to just let that happen because none but the fringes of society cared much whether trash washed out to sea or not, but now at least the enviro-packed regulatory agencies care greatly, so they have imposed regulations (more statism) with fines to boot, in order to force municipalities to pick up after their littering citizens (more statism).

Imagine what would happen to a private sector manager if  his operation had to shut down for several weeks because he let a contract run out.  Expect no such repercussions here.

What you can expect is higher costs, since Frey needlessly had to shut down and now will have to re-start its operations – and because one branch of government, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, will impose a hefty fine on another branch of government, Los Angeles County, for being out of compliance with the trash TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) regulation.

So government incompetency leads to  higher cost government and fines, which government does not have to pay. We do.

And they want us to trust government with our health!

Hat-tip: Jim, whose group Trails 4 All has picked up tons of trash from local watersheds without being forced to by government.

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