Eric Zorn takes issue with Tom Roeser, who called U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin “the Dick” (citing as precedent “the Donald” for D. Trump) and complained that Durbin has no townhall meetings about health care/insurance/whatever-the-latest-name and that reporters don’t press him on sensitive issues.

Because, you know, how else could one possibly gauge public sentiment or consider the various sides of the debate other than to participate in a spectacle?

And [Roeser] wants an immediate disquisition from Durbin about the latest developments in the CIA/torture issue.

Oh? It’s not good for D. to meet people in unscripted venues and reporters’ looking for comment from a senator is seeking a disquisition?

Not so, Eric Z.  However unbridled the adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and flourishes Roeser employs, it’s not that easy to deal with the substance therein contained. 

When does “the Dick” — upper case and definite article take it out of the realm of the out-and-out contumelious — meet with citizens and take their questions?

And why wouldn’t the mediums ask him about the CIA and torture?  Look, he might come up with something good, as when he went off in 2005 about Nazis, Soviets in Gulags, Pol Pot and our Guantanamo guards. 

He did apologize for it, yes, and would rather not have to do that again.  So maybe that’s why he won’t do the free-flowing-exchange thing this time around: he’s afraid he’ll say something off the wall.  But his reason for not doing it is nasty and dismissive of the people who show up:

These folks are there about YouTube. That’s why they’re showing up. They want to get a little clip on YouTube in an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car.

How does The Dick know this, who is on YouTube with that 2005 Senate speech, by the way?  He just knows, that’s all.

Trouble is, govt. is not profit-motivated, and what it operates has no independent future. Thus U. of Chi economist Gary Becker:

Supporters of a government-run plan claim that it will be financially self-supporting, and will provide a standard for private plans. To see how this would work out in practice, consider the postal system [italics, coloration mine], a nominally private but basically a very old government-run business. The postal system is also supposed to be self-supporting, but only recently it once again asked Congress for additional [?] subsidies to cover deficits. [It’s subsidized?]

It strains credibility to expect that a large government-run health care option will not run huge deficits. Just as part of the postal deficits are caused by government mandates, such as providing Saturday deliveries at no added cost, so Congress will also impose costly and inefficient mandates on the government health care option, in addition to other inefficiencies of such a government health care organization.

This latter is crucial.  Mandates because what govt. does is wholly service-oriented, which is what makes it appealing to many people.  But do they know what a drain it is and many other services are?  And what happens when the money runs out?

As for the subsidy business, I confess to confusion.  Cutbacks are reported, but not subsidy.  But Becker is a heavyweight in these matters.

Remember in The Graduate, where the Dustin Hoffman character was advised to go into plastics?  Now he would be advised to work for a Congress member:

A month after they voted to punish some corporate executives for taking hefty bonus payouts, members of the House of Representatives quietly gave their own staffers a new potential bonus by making even their top-earning aides eligible for taxpayer dollars to repay their student loans.

Or for that matter, for any boss in the federal government, where things have been booming for quite a while:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.

If you live by the visual aid, here’s your cup of tea:

It didn’t start with Obama, as you can see.  But we don’t think the trend will slow down now, do we?  As matters stand, he may be the last of the big-time spenders.  I’m getting a sandwich board announcing, “The end is near.”

As this fellow said two months ago,

Rising unemployment, stagnant wages, falling housing prices … The US economy has overcome such crises time and again in the past. But President Obama and his allies in Congress are gearing up to wallop families and businesses with an array of new taxes to fund a host of spending plans. These won’t just hit hard at average families — they threaten to derail any economic recovery.

Get ready.

Later: Government is a growth business.  A case in point:

On Aug. 4, 1977, Jimmy Carter declared war on energy dependence and created the U.S. Department of Energy. Every president since has done the same. Today, 31 years later, the Department of Energy’s budget is $26 billion. It employs 16,000 people and 100,000 contract employees.

So what if we’re finally energy-independent?  Huh?

We are no closer to energy independence than we were in 1977.

The whole concept of achieving it with a new department is a flop.  F-L-O-P. 

“And you want the federal government to run health care?” asks Barry Goldwater Jr. in American Spectator.

Bill McGurn in Wall Street Journal considers how Obama can save his presidency, mired now in health care legislation, as Clinton was mired in health care legislation.  Avoid Clinton’s “mistakes,” say Obama-ites.  McGurn calls that “not a winning strategy.”

A far more productive strategy would be to embrace Mr. Clinton’s success, which was freeing himself from his party’s left and returning to the centrist themes he had campaigned on.

But would that not be to surrender the raison d’etre of his political career?  If he has to continue the campaign charade in deed as well as word, what’s the point of it all?

This was above Obama’s pay grade as a candidate, but as president he found a guy for whom it wasn’t:

President Obama’s top science adviser [John P. Holdren] said in a book he co-authored in 1973 that a newborn child “will ultimately develop into a human being” if he or she is properly fed and socialized.

That was his studied opinion.  His co-authors were uber population panic-peddler Paul Ehrlich, of Population Bomb fame, and Anne Ehrlich.

In the 1970s and 1980s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,

Ehrlich wrote, in a prediction that bombed.

As for the newborn,

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.”

He’s Obama’s kind of guy, apparently.

He also

advocated the “de-development” of the United States in books he published in the 1970s.

It would work this way:

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote in [another] 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich.

De-development?

“De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”

Back we would go to our golden age of primitivism, including radical wealth redistribution.

“The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge,” they wrote. “They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided to every human being.”

Fascism, I called it in a Wed. Journal column last October.  How else but by such control of people’s lives can this be achieved?

===========

Later: True, the wild scenario urged on us by the science advisor in 1973 is fascistic.  But from there to say O. is equally fascistic is a stretch, it occurs to me.  One thing at a time, in other words.  At issue here is the kind of adviser O. picks.  He’s at least comfortable with this kind of thinking.  At least.

New Jersey is surpassing Illinois as a citadel of corruption, and this woman knows why:

Sandy McClure, co-author of the book “The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption,” agrees that big government is a big reason behind the state’s corruption problem.

“You have all these little authorities that everyone has to go to for permission,” she says. “Too much government means too many opportunities for officials looking to cash in. And there’s no way that the press can keep track of it all.”  [Italics added]

Every new ordinance means a new chance to bribe and be bribed, does it not?

It’s suspicion-of-profit time at the U.S. government:

The chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Tuesday he believes the agency must “seriously consider” setting “strict” new limits on traders who place bets on energy contracts.

The standard arguments prevail, the same chutzpah:

“The CFTC is in the best position to apply limits across different exchanges, and we are most able to strike a balance between competing interests and the responsibility to protect the American public,” Mr. [Gary] Gensler said.

He’s the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s new commissioner, “pledged to look into setting aggregate limits across commodities of finite supply to make the rules more consistent.”

Now “certain agricultural markets” feel CFTC’s strong, visible hand — “hard limits” — soon oil, currently under such limits only in the last three days of a contract.  Speculation jacked up prices last time around, not heightened demand for shrinking supply, as some old-timers continue to insist on, say these wizards.

No nature-of-the-beast thinking here, no nature of anything, just stuff to be manipulated.

One of the big guys, CME Group, is on board with this stuff. Stands for Chicago Mercantile Exchange, owner of Merc and Board of Trade — among whose directors has been the astute and readable Sun-Times columnist Terry Savage, age 64 (!), since July 2007, for what that’s worth.

Ramifications of what CFTC does exceed the scope of my pay level, as do many other ramifications, but we do spy a, ah, philosophical difference here between standard Republican and standard Democrat approaches to business, do we not?  Not to mention when the Democrat hails from the party’s radical wing.

Gensler has blamed “speculation by index investors” for last year’s price run-up,” in the face of CFTC economists’ holding for “supply and demand  fundamentals, not speculation, [as] to blame.”

Yes.

As for CME support for this, it’s the sort of thing that the big guys have always liked, they being very conservative with their bundles.  (CME trailing only Amex, ING, the NY exchange, and Citigroup.)  At least since FDR, the biggies have lived nicely with controls and regulations — hey, hire a new compliance officer, set up a new department, we can afford it.

While not so big guys moan in the spirit of this fellow, reacting on Market Watch to the July 7 news of these very coming CFTC regulations: “Watch them help Goldman [Sachs] and JPM[organ] steal more.”

He wines and dines, we know that, hopping the nearest jet plane to New York for a night on the town, grinning like that renowned cat.  But did we know he also whines?

“Let’s just lay everything on the table,” [Sen. Charles] Grassley said. “A Democrat congressman last week told me after a conversation with the president that the president had trouble in the House of Representatives, and [Obamacare] wasn’t going to pass if there weren’t some changes made … and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’ “

Illustrations:

Dat’s de cat.

Dat’s de grin.

More on governmental fiscal reliability, albeit as part of a gruesome overall situation.  How many billion?  (At least they are keeping track.)  How many did Enron lose?

The Taxinator may be breathing a sigh of relief over “fixing” California’s budget problems.

But darker clouds loom.

Case in point:

California’s huge government pension fund is expected to report today a whopping annual loss of an estimated $56.8 billion, almost a quarter of its investment portfolio. [Italics added]

That’s from the irreplaceable Michelle Malkin, thanks to link from the irreplaceable Instapundit.  Instant is right.  It’s how the b’sphere works — hand in hand with the main stream, in this case LA Times.  Malkin reads the paper for us, Insta’s Glenn Reynolds reads Malkin, etc., creating an epidemic of information disseminated by trustworthy sources.

Michelle’s closing comment is as scary as a Terminator left hook:

And as California goes, so goes the nation.

Or worse, one of his super-pistol blasts.