Inside Baseball

Does anyone even use that term any more, inside baseball. It's the world cup we're talking about. The international parlay of members of the House and Senate, from el Fumar and his iron grip on the Senate Ds to Il Duce, and up and comer quick with the soundbyte on the House R side. You try to learn what you can if you're any good at what you do. Sometimes that's all you can do with the gig - collect information in the eventuality you will need to use it.

Did anyone have fun last week in the House. I know I did, from the complaining about having a palate better than the shipped in staff food, the basest of eats, makes you long for your own home cooking. Personally, my first meal after exile from the old horse stalls was a nice chicken salad, garlic and olive oil...now of course the members eat better catering, not the, wee need to feed 500 people fast sort of food...Yeah, you can imagine. If I were a member, I think I would have to eat that crap to see what the staff are subsisting on, like a good general does to see what sort of meals are in the stomachs of the infantry.

There's nothing like watching the process. Being immersed in it. It's not the whole making sausages aspect of the system that is evident to the seasoned observer of a political microcosm. The ebb and flow is sort of like baseball, you can place events in the time it takes for the season. Football is more of a finite and measured game. Consider the July 2 at 1:45 a.m. adjourn time as the extra innings needed for all sides to win the game, like a nil nil football match playing right now over there in Stuttgart.

These newbie recruits, may they not get picked off rushing the defenses of the enemy like running the thin red line on Guadalcanal. May they outflank their foes, and find a way to use and adapt the system as it pleases them, and forget jousting the windmills, unless it's to corral (cant use that word in English only) more votes for a state wind farm alternative energy grant program for the likes of Somerset County and other areas where a wind farm makes sense to power the state. Now, the Big Cheesesteak, he knows this, but let's take a look at the DEP and DCNR budget to see what programs are offered there in toto...What was it peeps, $3 million for a new program for alternative energy. Yes, I too believe it can be an economic development tool for the state - wouldn't it be nice to earmark some of these tax credits floating about EITC, the capital stock and CNI reductions, to specific types of businesses, the manufacturers of the parts for the alternative energy industry, or for the industry itself. Someone has to make the steel and alloys for the windmills. Give em some props for using their brains where the federal government is not.

Talking to an expert about the D spin on why the welfare budget is so out of whack, and coming to realize point blank that it is about defederalization, or devolution of federal funding, a change in rules in DefRA, the federal deficit reduction act, stops payment on the checks written the last time the welfare system was reformed, about a decade to a dozen years ago it started - under Clinton finally, with the momentum of the years playing to his benefit, like it does for some many politicos.

So, where do the programs go when the funding is renounced. Does the state choose to drop them as the House Conservative Caucus would have you believe. They can argue that because the only villian in the funding is the Democrats, who we associate the social program with the liberals, who created it - make sure you spit out the word liberal like the swear word conservatives have made it, because liberal D or Liberal Republican like me (not an oxymoron), face it, if you dont take time to understand what is going on, you're just a tool for the PTB.