Sharif don’t like it / Rockin’ the Dogma / Rock the Dogma.

Ok, maybe not.

First up, a nice article from David Brooks highlighting the ways the Obama Administration has “scrambled the conventional categories”, but more importantly, what more they could do.  Specifically a long-term growth agenda based on “Path to Prosperity” and “The Pro-Growth Progressive“.   I’m sure you’ve memorized both.

He calls for Obama to “lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies.”

Innovation, simplification, reform . . . my nipples are hard. And lonely.

Next, climate change legislation or lack thereof. I could not be more fucking tired of the knee-jerk deniers. Those who choose to ignore overwhelming evidence of climate change because the messengers and solutions they propose don’t fit into their myopic view of the world. “La-la-la-la-la-la-la”

There can and should be healthy debate as to the ultimate affects and the best policies. One of the more interesting views is by Bjorn Lomborg. He often gets lumped in with the skeptics, which is unfortunate because he not skeptical of the problem, (he writes: “global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century”). He is just skeptical of the proposed solutions. BIG difference. Even bigger than Newt Gingrich’s ego.

On his website, Lomborg says, “many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years.”

Finally, this from that noted socialist hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks?”

Last up, tax cuts. In the debate on extending the Dubya tax cuts from 2001 and 2003, the GOP will tell you tax cuts are guaranteed to create jobs and spur the economy.  Right.  Or right?

In the years since those cuts, the U.S. economy has lost 1.6 million jobs.  In contrast, after Bill Clinton’s tax increase and higher tax rates, the economy gained more than 22 million jobs during his presidency.  Read more about it here.

Certainly there are other factors involved here, as always.  But it does goes to show there are only two undeniable truths – there’s no crying in baseball and there’s no sure fire way to positively influence the U.S. economy.   Those who ignore either are surely “a talking pile of pigshit”, (even if your parents drive all the way from Michigan to see you play.)

“The crowd caught a whiff / Of that crazy dogma jive”