Over at my own blog this morning, I griped about what I saw as some off-topic distractions in the Senate’s version of the bail-out bill. At the time, the full breadth of the Senate’s madness hadn’t been revealed.
But it has now. From Hot Air:
New Tax earmarks in Bailout bill
– Film and Television Productions (Sec. 502)
– Wooden Arrows designed for use by children (Sec. 503)
– 6 page package of earmarks for litigants in the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, Alaska (Sec. 504)Tax earmark “extenders” in the bailout bill.
– Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)
– American Samoa (Sec. 309)
– Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)
– Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)
– Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)
– Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)
– Railroads (Sec. 316)
– Auto Racing Tracks (317)
– District of Columbia (Sec. 322)
– Wool Research (Sec. 325)
How small the federal government seems when its business includes trivia like wooden arrows… but even more to the point, this stuff has no place in an emergency bailout bill. If this was the only vehicle the Senate could find to enable them to vote, they should have waited.
And it isn’t just conservatives who are going to find some issues. Here’s Big Tent Democrat, at Talk Left:
And the idea of giving more corporate tax breaks and suspending the Alternative Minimum Tax in the face of record deficits is absolutely outrageous. Harry Reid has produced a travesty.
This bill has something to tick everybody off. You can read it, in all its 451 pages of embarrassing glory, here. Buried somewhere in there is a bailout bill.
As bad as the financial crisis is, Congress’ full exposure as incompetent and malfunctioning is worse. They couldn’t blow out a match, much less react to a fire, and I were a foreign government or bank watching the much-vaunted US system at work, I’d be sucking my money home as fast as possible.
It couldn’t be more obvious that we are ungoverned.