I must confess, I fell asleep last night before I posted. I had actually written a couple paragraphs about the $208,000 redistribution to Thermo Fisher Scientific. We can’t call it corporate welfare anymore because the state is making recipients live up to vague promises. In this case, Thermo Fisher has to “invest” $5 million over three years. Since “invest” is normally thought of as being transitive, I assumed the indirect object was implicitly government. My paragraph sounded smart-alecky, and I couldn’t get past that “so la-dee-dah” attitude, and my brain was too fried to fix it.
Something there is about me that demands more than 1 hour of sleep every 72 hours. (OK. I actually got 1:08.) I am not saying this to elicit a chorus of “Poor you!” Rather, I would like to call attention to a coincidence. The last time I fell asleep before posting, Congressmen were churning out 2000-page health care bills. This time, they churned out a 1000-page amendment. Bills, of course, are not blogs. They are carefully researched to be legally unassailable and consistent with the volumes upon volumes of existing legislation. Right?
Well, the last time, I suggested that Congressmen might draft more reasonable legislation if they laid off the caffeine and harder uppers. Considering how tightly and arbitrarily civilians are regulated, couldn’t we get the National Science Foundation to, for at least a year, conduct an experiment to see what kind of bills Congressmen produce if they can’t consume anything stronger than peas, carrots, and mashed potatoes? I mean, what’s better, Congressmen in their cozy feather beds with visions of sugar plums dancing in their wee little heads or what they’re doing now?
