Politics and other nightmares

The list of new diseases to worry about just keeps growing:

Cases of nausea, headaches, insomnia and other ills have become common enough in states with wind farms that they've been given a name: "wind turbine syndrome."

When is pork not pork? The president speaks in Elkhart County and brags about how the Recovery Act was passed without any "earmarks or pork-barrel spending," then later tells the audience how much of the $2.4 billion in grants Indiana will get:

At least the audience is consistent--no applause for the opposition to pork barrel, but tons of applause for the pork-by-another-name that will be sent to Indiana.

A city this size isn't going to have an Al Sharpton or a Jesse Jackson to keep the racial-resentment pot boiling, but we can always count on City Counilman Glynn Hines to play the race card. Last fall, Hynes went public with his "lack of trust" in the Henry administration because it wasn't diverse enough to suit him.

Government is teasing us with piecemeal bailouts. We can get out of our mortgage difficulties, trade in that old clunker for a cash bonus, perhaps soon get health "insurance" for pre-existing conditions. Why not go all out and just give us Whole Life Bailouts? Oops, looks like somebody else already thought of that:

Young adults, hit disproportionately hard in the current recession, are asking Congress for targeted aid to help them recover.

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U.S. Rep. Mike Pence apprently had a lot of applause lines during a recent town hall meeting in Muncie, including this one:

The time has come for America to build 100 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years.

The IRS has released data on 2007 income taxes, and, among other interesting pieces of information:

In 2007, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 40.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 22.8 percent of adjusted gross income. Both of those figures—share of income and share of taxes paid—are significantly higher than they were in 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes.

So how's that stimulus package working out for you, Elkhart?

Benjamin Zycher, who refuses to be very ashamed of himself because gaming the system is the obvious response to half-baked government ideas, decided he wanted to get in on the economics-for-lunkheads cash-for-clunkers program:

 Alas, the rules specify that the big, powerful, safe truck that I want does not qualify.

Do as Congress says, not as Congress does:

Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

If we start seeing an epidemic of young people getting loaded on beer, blame it on the president: