Conservative - 1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change. 2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: e.g. a conservative estimate.

Rep. Patrick McHenry

The last time I checked, Representative Patrick T. McHenry (R – N.C.) had an (R), not a (D), which means that he’s part of the GOP, which means that he’s conservative, which means that he applies to the above definition.  So why has he introduced legislation which would change the way our money looks?  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, despite two foreign wars, student protests over public education tuition increases (32% in California!), a crippled economy, and a tsunami scare in Hawaii, Rep. McHenry has found time to draw legislation which, if passed, would replace President Grant’s face with President Reagan’s on the $50 bill.

Why, you may wonder?  Because presidential scholars rank presidents, and the order in which they come out always, Rep. McHenry says, places Reagan higher than Grant.  Do you know who else is usually higher than Grant?  Grover Cleveland.  Grover fucking Cleveland.  He’s on the $1,000 bill, but the U.S. Treasury doesn’t print that one anymore.  John Adams also consistently outranks Ulysses Grant, one of the Founding Fathers, as does James Monroe and John Quincy Adams!  Click here for an entire listing of relevant presidential rankings.

The people who are on our currency in circulation are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benjamin Franklin.  On coin: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, George Washington, John Kennedy, and Sacagawea.  Notice anything?  How about those most responsible for our economic well-being appearing the most frequently?  Thomas Jefferson, appearing both on currency and coin, almost singlehandedly doubled the size of the United States with one of the shrewdest (and most racist!) purchases in all of history.  The economy that those GOP members are so desperately trying to defend was created by Alexander Hamilton, one of the non-presidents on currency.  Abraham Lincoln, while not an economist by any means, made a series of decisions which saved what-would-become the world’s most powerful economy from an incredible schism.  If economic prudence is the merit by which one is immortalized on currency, then we should just put a picture of Social Darwinist Rockefeller with the tagline “everyman for himself” on every bill.  Or pictures of slave-traders.

I remember sophomore year of college when I had to read a book by David Harvey called The New Imperialism. In it, Harvey argued that the United States had created a new empire which was based on unspoken, yet interminably strong economic dominance of foreign countries.  Not only has the “third world” come to rely heavily on the United States, our foreign influence (Pepsi plants, outsourced tailors, and so forth) runs more deeply than the ferocity of those cries of “domestic jobs” and “Americans first.”  I think this is neoliberal policy and I think it was aggrandized by the firebrand Ronald Reagan.  Actually, David Harvey wrote another book called A Brief History of Neoliberalism and I think Reagan was on the cover…

This isn’t new, by the way.  There have been proposals to put Reagan’s face on the dime, the $20 bill, and even the $50 bill five years ago, none of which have been successful because his policies are “still controversial.”  That’s a light way of putting it.  I imagine that those impacted by neoliberal economic policy, such as young Bangladese children, would feel just about the same way that American Indians felt when in 1928 Andrew Jackson’s face was put on the $20 bill.  Wait, didn’t he march thousands of American Indians to their deaths because of congressional pressure?  Didn’t the economy crash the year after his face was put on the $20 bill?

Rep. McHenry has more to worry about in North Carolina than what the $50 bills he carries around are going to look like.  How about the budget shortfalls expected for 2011?  In any case, this is stupidest, more absolutely irrelevant thing to spend time and money on.  I want the guy who led the army that defeated slavery to stay on my $50 bill, not the guy who created economically subjugating policy abroad.

Riddle me this, riddle me that, who’s afraid of a big Fat Cat?

Give up? It’s not the US Congress! I know, I was shocked too. Here’s the thing: while I was waiting for something to set me off this week, Congress, true to form and typical of fashion, decided that the thing which would solve the increasingly expensive health-care burden in this little nation of ours was to spend money.

Lots…and lots…and lots of money.

I may not be a mathematician (2+2 still equals 5, right?), but it seems to me that $829B dollars is quite a bit of money to spend when nobody has figured out a good old-fashioned solution to the problem. Allow me to throw my hat into an otherwise unpopulated ring: reduce some costs (?)

Amerigo Vespucci, Who Had It His Way

This is going to sound crazy: what if, instead of making health-care coverage more affordable, we just tried to make it cheaper?! ‘Gosh Kyle,’ Amerigo Vespucci would say, ‘if you can figure that out, they should name the country after you instead!’

Seriously friends, Italian explorers aside, my little solution is Tort Reform (go on, you can say it, my “new solution” is deregulation, “how Republican!”).   But it goes beyond that because, and let me be as frank as possible, what’s really got me red-under-the-collar is the ridiculous amount of money spent by the government to which I’ve had the privilege to pay taxes.

“Do you smell bacon, Garth?” “Yes, I definitely smell a pork product of some kind.”

There are lists that detail some excesses in government “porkery”, but I won’t bore you to death. The fact of the matter is that my inner deficit-hawk screams bloody murder at $829B. And to be fair, I realize that there are certain thresholds: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” doesn’t come cheap, and it is our (cliché alert!) moral imperative as the only remaining superpower.

Bridge Anyone?

Ready to be terrified? Bill Clinton was right………to want a line-item veto. Are there projects that need to be funded from which some people won’t see an immediate impact?  Sure, but those are projects like maintenance on the Port of Los Angeles…they’re big picture; Defense spending is another one. But really, if you’re on Air Force Two, do you really need gold-leafed playing cards? In fact, let me be perfectly clear: if you’re on Air Force [Insert number here], or a government craft of any sort, you do not need gold-leafed playing cards.

As a parting thought, friends and neighbors, how about one of Disraeli’s “third type of lies”: average pay for US Congressmen (not including bribes)- $174,000 per annum; average pay for public school teachers (not including apples and birthday cupcakes) – $51,000 per annum. What a country…

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for officially invalidating your most prestigious honor twice in the same decade! While I’m sure this is not the first letter of congratulations you have yet received, I should hope that it is the first to recognize your political pandering.

Listen: I was understanding when you handed Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change an award, theirs was at least a cause which merited serious attention and had yet to receive it. But really? Barack Obama? The man has been in office for less than seven months, hasn’t sat down with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, hasn’t made any tangible progress on North Korea, hasn’t actively spoken out against Chinese oppression in Tibet and Taiwan, hasn’t done anything (really) to merit anything more than, “Good Morning, Mr. President, would you like your eggs scrambled or poached today?”

So, in the lifetime of current college seniors, here’s a list of some notable causes/spokesmen who have won your little accolade: the current Dalai Llama, Mikhail Gorbachev (for finally agreeing to end the Cold War), Nelson Mandela, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Jimmy Carter (call this a “lifetime achievement” award), the IAEA (that’s International Atomic Energy Commission, for non-proliferation efforts), and, of course, Al Gore and Manbearpig…err,…the International Panel on Climate Change.

Why the President then? Supposedly “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, but I ask you: What conflict has ceased since BO took his constitutionally required Oath of Office? Go ahead, name one that he’s actually solved. Iraq? Nope, still battling Islamo-Fascists and Extremism there. Afghanistan? Nope, Taliban rebels are flooding in from Pakistan. India-Pakistan, maybe? They’ve been settled down for awhile but that could go at any minute. China-Anything? Nope, the PRC is still treating everyone in the region like their plaything/red-headed-step-child. Pirates, maybe, some guys in dinghy’s with Kalashnikov’s? Nope, they took over a French anti-piracy ship this past weekend.

It seems to me that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded not because of anything BO has actually done, but for who he wasn’t: George Bush. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some bacon-egg-and-cheese-biscuit at McDonald’s on a hangover-belly, but not enough to give someone $1M and a prestigious award. (By the way, he has yet to announce where that money’s going…)

With the most sarcasm I can muster on a Friday,

Kyle C. Lincoln