Like I thought, I ended up laughing at the President's speech.  And yeah, the guy really doesn't understand.  Seriously, he doesn't get it.  Spending half a trillion dollars isn't going to do jack-shit about "creating jobs".  As I noted on Twitter, the guy seriously cannot even conceive of a plan to get people back to work that doesn't involve spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

So, here's The Marshall Stack Plan to Create Jobs That Requires Zero Spending.  This plan won't require that a single dime be removed from the US Treasury, and the whole stinking thing could probably fit on one or two pieces of paper.  Seriously.

Here it is:

1. Repeal Sarbannes-Oxley: This bill was passed in haste in response to the Enron scandal.  Guess how it worked out.  Not good.  It's a huge regulatory burden on smaller businesses (and larger businesses ae well, but they can absorb it better) and has had a rather drastic effect on the desire and ability of companies to go public and raise captial.  Repeal it and you remove a huge burden on business that they'd much rather spend on capital investments.
2. Repeal Obamacare: Come on -- a year later does anyone believe that this is anything more than a huge steaming pilie of horse manure?  It's already driving health care prices up, the requests for waivers from it's requirements are pouring in (and being granted) and it's going to cost small business and the US tax payers untold billions.  All that, and it won't even get everyone covered.  Repeal it for the same reasons above:  Small businesses really bear the burden here.  And when small businesses bear burdens, they don't hire.
3. Double the company size exemption on every regulation on the books:  Jerry Pournelle thought this one up, and it is brilliant.  If a regulation kicks in when a company has ten employes, double it to twenty.  If it is 50, make it a hundred.  Fifty is a magic number for a lot of laws and regulations, and as a result, there are a startingly large number of companies that have  -- surprise! -- 49 employees and will not cross that magic threshold to 50.  Double the exemptions, and they can make the move.  That's a lot of jobs.

That's the simple one.  I could probably hunt up about a thousand more laws to repeal, but those two are a good start.  And as I said, repealing two laws and doubling the numbers in all regulations would be two pages, tops. It would loosen the flood gates inside every small business in America -- and small businesses are the place where most new jobs are created.

And it wouldn't cost a cent.

Jonah sums up the speech perfectly: 

 Tell voters poll-tested things they want to hear and stay quiet on what they don’t want to hear while lecturing your opponents about their refusal to make the tough decisions.

I'm  not going to watch the speech tonight.  Despite his alleged overwhelming oratorical skills, I can't stand listening to The One speak.  And I have better things to do.

However, I'll likely read about it later.  And if it turns out that his plan is to just spend a bunch more money -- and it doesn't matter where he says he's going to get it -- to "create" make-work "jobs", I'm going to laugh out loud.  Seriously, I'm going to laugh out loud. LOL.  Really.

Because as my wonderful mother tells me -- if you don't laugh, you are going to cry.

My Dad is constantly pointing to Paul Krugman and is crappy editorial in the New York Times.  "He won a Nobel Prize for Economics" -- as if that some how immunizes him from writing craptastically assinine columns in the alleged "paper of record".

Krugman may have won a Nobel, but it seems like he failed statistics somewhere along the line.  The always interesting IowaHawk rightfully rips him a new one about his crappy analysis of Texas schools.  It's a post from last March, but made current again by Rick Perry's entry into the Presidential race, and the commensurate misinformation that results.

The flaying continued, too. 

Nobel Prize, my ass.

I don't know about you all, but I've had about all the "stimulus" I can take.

Man, that Sarah Palin, she is soooooo stupid. She must be, because everyone says so, right?  I mean, let's look at what she's done in her life:

Palin graduates college, marries her high school sweetheart (who both appear to be very much still in love) and uses her lack of intelligence to start and run a successful business.

Some kids come along, and so she gets involved in the PTA.  Despite her stupidity, the PTA elected her president. 

Again, despite her deceased grey matter, she did such a good job as PTA President that the people of Wasilla, AK encouraged her to run for mayor. She somehow managed to conceal her stupidity and win the election.  Continuing her subterfuge, she managed to dupe the entire group of mayors in the state and get elected the president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.

Not letting here clear mental handicap stop her, she then pressed on and somehow managed to get then-Governor Murkowski to appoint her to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.  Apparently the people on the commission weren't able to see here dullness and elected her Chairman of the Commission.

But Palin's crazed spree of duping Alaskans wasn't over -- she had her sights set on duping the entire state.  She succeeded by beating an incumbent  and getting elected Governor -- again despite her limited intelligence and stupidity.  Here deceit was so successful that despite her obvious mental limitations, she routinely received upwards of 80% approval ratings from her constituents

From there, of course, she ran for Vice-President, debated on national television, became a Fox News analyst, and a huge draw for speaking engagements across the nation.

So, in examining Palin's accomplishments, it is obvious:  Sarah Palin is stupid.  I mean, why would anyone think she's a smart, capable woman?  Surely the above litany of success and recognition shows that she's of low intelligence.  Who could possibly believe that the above impressive list of accomplishments would actually require intelligence?  I mean, come on.  

"All of which proves what, exactly? That male homosexuals should be jailed? Run out of town on rails? Surgically altered? Burned at the stake? Of course not. In a free society, the things people choose do do with each other in private, even if unhygienic and unhealthy, are nobody else's business. They become someone else's business only when the people concerned go into the public square and start advertising their tastes, and recruiting to them. If my neighbor wants to be buggered in the privacy of his home, I wish him joy of it; if he wants to get on my school board and agitate for the establishment of a "gay" students club at my son's school, I shall have something to say about it. These elementary social principles seem to have been mislaid in recent years. Look: in a civilized modern society, majorities owe a debt of tolerance to harmless minorities. But minorities also owe something to the majority: a decent respect for its tastes and opinions, and careful restraint in challenging them. The second part of this arrangement seems to have been forgotten. The issue, as one current joke has it, is not whether society is willing to tolerate homosexuals, so much as whether they are willing to tolerate the rest of us."  - John Derbyshire