Lagniappe

Look - up in the sky! It’s a joke! It’s a farce! It’s the Super Committee! As expected, the Super Committee failed to agree on how to pretend to cut $1.2 trillion from the deficit over the next ten years. In order to achieve the stated objective, the committee would have had to reduce Federal spending by $120 billion annually (from Federal budgets in excess of $4 trillion each year). So even if they had succeeded, they still wouldn’t have made any discernable improvement to the government’s finances. Is there a word in English for failing to succeed in failing?

Landrieu Air – Senator Mary Landrieu (D – Louisiana) has sponsored a bill to prevent airlines from charging for checked bags. Think of it as a Dodd-Frank bill for the air travel industry. I miss the days when she was governor of the great state of Louisiana - at least then her incompetence only harmed the people in her state. As Senator, she gets to inflict pain on all of us.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition – Earlier this month CBS hosted a GOP debate focused exclusively on foreign policy. There were eight Republican candidates, seven of whom seemed to be engaged in a contest to see who could bay for blood the loudest, waterboard the most enemy combatants, or be the first to start a war with Iran. The one candidate in the debate who has consistently called for a non-interventionist foreign policy based on the Jeffersonian ideal of "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none," received ninety seconds of airtime. Because his views are just “nutty.”

Maybe They’re Focusing on the Wrong 1% – Two police officers have been placed on “paid administrative leave” (in the private sector, we call that “vacation”) for casually pepper-spraying a group of Occupy Wall Street protestors who were sitting down quietly on the UC Davis campus. This was not the only unpleasant interaction the Occupy movement has had with the nation’s police forces. An 84-year old woman in Seattle was also pepper-sprayed, tear gas was used against Occupy Oakland, and some New York protestors got the business end of police batons and riot shields as their encampments were broken up. And yet Occupiers still seem to believe the same government that’s beating them senseless will protect them from banks.

The Benedict Arnold of the Drug War - A US immigration officer was arrested for drug smuggling after leading Arizona police on a high-speed car chase for 45 minutes. During the chase he allegedly tossed 10-14 bales of marijuana out of his government-issued car. According to the Department of Homeland Security, 129 US customs officers and border agents have been arrested on corruption charges since 2003. (No word on how many TSA agents have been arrested for sexual assault).

Hey, That’s What I Said! – In a debate with a team of American lawyers in Philadelphia last month, British lawyers argued that the American Revolution was illegitimate. The British side invoked Lincoln to support their argument that secession “was not only illegal, but actually treasonable.” (A point I made back in 2010, in a post titled “Roach Motel”). Sorry, Justice Scalia, but you can’t have it both ways. If there is no right to secede, then the entire American experiment itself is illegitimate. By the way, the “jury” in the debate sided with the American (i.e., secessionist) side.