Words of the Weasel Part XVII

Subsidy. Sen Chuckie Schumer uses subsidy where he should say "tax break". There is a difference. A subsidy is a cash payment from Uncle Sam to a favored industry. It can be spent, on inventory, wages, rent, tooling. It's real money. A tax break is different. It only pays off after the industry makes money. You cannot buy stuff with a tax break, you have to earn real money first.
Of course Chuckie knows this, he uses subsidy because it sounds worse. He's manufacturing a sound bite.

Global Warming caused Mississippi floods

At least that's what NPR was pushing this afternoon. This isn't true, the Mississippi has been flooding in springtime since the end of the last ice age. This one river drains the entire center of North America, of course it's going to flood from the spring snowmelt. This year's floods are much worse than usual, about as bad as 1937. The floods work terrible hardships upon the people living along the river.
I find it distasteful to hear NPR pundits using this disaster to push their narrow political agenda. After blaming global warming they moved on to blame federal funding cuts, something about a single weather satellite not getting replaced on schedule. Talk about single issue politics.

Are we back on the air?

And, my last, terrible witty post seems to have vanished, at least for now.

The OBL raid according to Aviation Week

The helicopter that crashed was a previously undisclosed stealth chopper, a heavily modified Sikorsky H-60 Blackhawk. The one chopper to crash was brought down by a miscalculation of air temperature in and outside the compound. The Blackhawk ran into lift trouble due to a 15F difference inside the courtyard said Rep. Buck McKeon(R-Calif). "They couldn't hold the hover."
Two Blackhawks and two Chinooks carried the raiding party in. Four choppers is plenty of lift for only 40 raiders. Even after the loss of a chopper they had plenty of seats to get everyone out.

Cats of War

This one is funny.

That $4 billion oil industry tax break

Obama has been running around and running his mouth about a $4 billion tax break for the oil industry. Unfortunately Obama never actually says just what this tax break might be. Some net surfing suggests that he might be talking about Section 119, the Domestic Manufacturing deduction. This is a deal that allows all companies (and individuals too) to deduct 9% of their earning from domestic (US based) manufacturing, construction, movie production, and a few other opaque things, one of which apparently is drilling for oil.
This is a fairly general US income tax loop hole drilled back in 2004. Reading the opaque language of the statute hints that the intent of the statute was to give a tax break to domestic manufacturing to encourage investment at home, rather than in China. Just about every kinda company is eligible, it's by no means an oil industry tax break. It must have been buried pretty deep in the 2004 tax cut law, I never heard of it before.
Obama gives no indication of what he wants to do, close the loophole (raise taxes) for every one, or just oil companies.
At a time when cutting spending is the serious problem, why is Obama touting a chicken feed tax hike on the oil industry? Does he think the voters can be distracted from their quest for spending cuts by promising tax hikes on unpopular industries?

Egypt to go Islamist

Apparently Egypt is going the way everyone, yours truly included, predicted. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist extremist group older than, more extreme than, and just as violent as, Al Quada, is going to control the Egyptian parliament. This comes from an Egyptian who is likely to become president, which means he has a fairly good idea of what's going down. The Muslim Brotherhood has been around since the 1920's when it worked to drive the British out of Egypt. It has survived severe prosecution by Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarik. They are the group responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. They are survivors, and they are the only organized political party in Egypt. There is nobody to resist them.
Once in power, the Muslim Brotherhood will make trouble for Israel, impose Sharia law on the population, prosecute the Christians (10% of the population) and team up with Iran to cause trouble for the United States.
Egypt is important. It is the center of the Arab world. Cairo has the same prestige in the Arab world as New York City has in the real world. Egypt sets the tone, writes the books, makes the movies, prints the newspapers that go all over the Arab world.
Aren't you so glad that Obama called for Mubarik's ouster?