Amid the Fog and Gloom, A Dim Light Sputters

It had to happen. If you shoot enough times, you'll finally hit the target. Bush did by admitting that all the illegals in our country shouldn't be deported. Someone finally did the math, fuzzy or otherwise, and realized it would take $200 billion in additional debt to deport all the illegals, that paying a living wage and health care would probably add a few dollars to a hotel room or a bushel of fruit, convinced King George the Obfuscated that math really works and the Shrublet opined, it would be wrong to deport them. Maybe he'll convince his Republican buddies like Tom the Xenophobe or James Jail 'em Sensenbrenner that it's just wrong. By that, he means it isn't right.

Now to his misses: Rumsfeld is still employed. He's looked into his murky crystal ball, the same one that told him that he could do Iraq on the cheap and that their oil would pay the bills, and told us that both Iraq and Afghanistan are key to Iran. Actually I'm glad that Don the Mistaken is still SecDef. We've realized that he and Bush are Siamese twins of different mothers and that he is a proxy for the Shrub. He's wrong and by default, so is his boss. Of course, we knew that there had to be something of terrorism hiding in the Iran problem....

Republicans in the House are taking advantage of high gas prices to gut ethics reform. Very quietly, they removed provisions requiring lobbyists to disclose what lawmakers and aides they contact. Their bill maintains the status-quo, keeps K-street alive and the oil companies in charge of the Government but hey, it's the system that got them elected. No one is maintaining taking back Government by requiring public financing of elections, the only way to clear out the mess that is election finance but hey, they're Republicans. Expecting ethics?

And George the Decider has all but abdicated on doing anything about gas prices. You pay and the CEO's play. Can someone tell me who in this world is worth $400 million? That's what they're paying the CEO to retire. Keep paying, people, keep buying SUVs and watch sheiks and CEOs gold-plate their toilets, if not make them out of fourteen carat. The answer isn't a windfall profits tax but a tax on consumption. Slap a ten percent federal tax on gasoline and watch consumption and the price fall. Make it twenty percent and earmark the proceeds for alternative energy development and watch it drop back to last Spring's levels. Tax cars by horsepower as in Europe and watch the prices fall. Eliminate the tariff on Brazilian ethanol and watch the numbers on the pump spin the opposite direction. Stay the course and watch them increase. Enact a windfall profits tax and watch the shortages begin as companies shift their production elsewhere. Expect more bad policy from Republican Washington as the cloudy crystal ball produces more bad data.

One of Bush's priorities, Katrina recovery, is predictably stalled. The levees will not be ready when hurricane season begins on June 1st. Typical of a Bush initiative, faith-based, the answer to the failed levee system and to the citizens is have faith and pray that another storm doesn't hit New Orleans.