I was thinking over a post at Sic Semper Tyrannis by Jim Schmidt, Blame, an effort to understand the thinking behind what the Shrubbery has been doing for the past six years. He wonders if it isn’t tied to the philosophy that led to Rudyard Kipling writing The White Man’s Burden, to encourage the American government to colonize the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.

While I don’t disagree with the conclusions that it is a matter of a form of conservative philosophy, it doesn’t evince any consistency in execution.

‘Noz of Rubber Hose points to the source of my disquiet in his post, crescent crazed. The US was attacked by Sunni fundamentalists on 9/11/2001. Without capturing those responsible, we turned our attention and military might on the most secular state in the region, and are now being belligerent towards a Shi’ia country. By doing this we have allowed our attackers to recover and rebuild their organization after the initial damage caused by the war in Afghanistan.

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Via Robert at Interstate 4 Jamming, a Lakeland Ledger editorial, Don’t Sell The Cash Cow, about a suggestion that the state sell the Florida Lottery to a private company.

The Florida Lottery has been a generally stable source of revenue for the schools, and for college scholarships. It has been making money for years and all of the infrastructure, rules, and regulations are in place. It has been shown over the years that whenever the Republans get a large, one-time infusion of money, they slash taxes, which are a steady, long-term revenue source. The Lottery was sold as providing money for school enhancement, but it quickly became an excuse to cut funding to schools.

The Republans keeping telling people that government should be run like a business, but when they are in charge they act like they want to make it target for a hostile take-over by selling off the profitable segments of the “business.” They keep out-sourcing functions which end up costing the state more than they had before and delivering less.

The simple fact of the matter is, Republans don’t understand how to operate a profitable long-term business because they are only interested in short-term get-rich-quick schemes.

Next we’ll hear that the move to get rid of property taxes will work because of the money infusion coming from a Nigerian business deal.

This is what CNN thought was breaking news at 6:53PM EST today – a group of entertainers about to receive trophies were entering the hall where the trophies were to be handed out.

And the MSM wonders why people are losing interest in their product.

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