Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The Bump On The Road To Nowhere

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Thoughts from Mark Steyn on the state of the economy:

The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I’ll bet it’s got no plans to downsize.

Nor has the TSA. A 24-year-old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. “We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience,” said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

9 thoughts on “The Bump On The Road To Nowhere”

  1. Steyn earns his entire year’s salary with the single neologism “spokesgroper” IMHO.

  2. “I regret that my victim had an unpleasant experience.”

    I suspect something like that was thought up by whatever caveman was the first to serve the role of a criminal defense lawyer, back in the Stone Age.

  3. It doesn’t surprise me that DoE has its own police force.

    If you spend any time in DC, you will notice that quite a few Federal agencies do. You see their marked cars around town. There are Congressional Police, Supreme Court Police, even NASA has its own police.

    There was an incident last year where a Park Service police officer arrested a NASA police officer for the crime of carrying a gun.

    http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-08-25/news/bs-md-hermann-parkway-gun-20100825_1_police-officer-federal-court-federal-officer

    The funniest one I’ve seen is the FBI Police.

    Yep, it’s come to that. We have cops to protect the cops.

  4. Austan Goolsbee, the genius who in 2007, just before the subprime hit the fan, wrote in the New York Times that this exciting new form of home “ownership” was an “innovation” that had “opened doors to the excluded” and was part of an “incredible flowering of new types of home loans.”

    You know, the types that don’t have to be repaid. But never fear, it was all evil Wall Street that screwed everything up. And we’re getting them back, that’s for sure.

    “Flowering”. A good set of 70’s-80’s vintage SNL writers could have field day with that.

  6. The issue I have is that the sheer number of armed and search-warrant-bearing agencies is too high for a random citizen at their own door to verify ID. Last count I heard was 47 federal agencies, but this is a new one on me.

    “Department of Education Police? Am I on Candid Camera?!?”

    All federal police powers should devolve from a single central agency – two if we include federal military police (NCIS?). Take the base FBI field training as the framework, such that everyone involved has firearms proficiency and the course on how and when you’re able to serve a warrant, etc.

    Then the FBI -loans- officers out, still with FBI badges -and- whatever agency they’re seconded to badges. Their allegiance and hierarchy could shift, if need be, but their credentials and certification remain with the FBI.

    All of the discussion, training and identification of the core police powers comes from one source then.

    Unarmed bureaucrats are perfectly capable of finding a cop to sic on someone as needed, hell, even the FBI spends a fair chunk of time using local and state police as aides.

  8. I’ve come to really appreciate Mark Steyn over the last few months. Nobody can turn a phrase like he can, and he really makes me laugh sometimes. I ordered a tee-shirt (says “viva Steyn” on it) from his website a couple of hours ago and so we’ll see how that goes over with the public- probably as well as my home-made “I SUPPORT ARIZONA” bumper sticker.

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