Bee 150000000

I'm starting to think the only people who sent away for the Red State Little Orphan Annie Magic Decoder Ring Strike Force e-mails are those of us who signed up just make fun of them.

Anyhow now I'm getting their "morning briefing." It's mostly the usual garbage, but one part of it gets to something I find consistently irksome, the trick of finding a "silly" bit of government spending in order to "prove"how ridiculous the government is when it "does things."

Very often when you look more closely into stories like this you'll find that the money isn't being wasted at all, it's just that the idiot telling the story and laughing and snarking doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. Here, from their email:

Senate Democrats Add Absurdities to Obama's Spending Plan

The list is extraordinary and mind numbingly stupid. And how exactly does any of it create new, sustainable jobs?....

$150 million for honey bee insurance (Pg. 102 of Senate Appropriations Committee report: "The Secretary shall use up to $50,000,000 per year, and $150,000,000 in the case of 2009, from the Trust Fund to provide emergency relief to eligible producers of livestock, honey bees, and farm-raised fish to aid in the reduction of losses due to disease, adverse weather, or other conditions, such as blizzards and wildfires, as determined by the Secretary")

Bees! Omigod that's so hilarious spending money on bees how comical they must be dumb.

Right. Bees. How stupid of anyone to want to help keep honeybee keepers in business. How could that ever have an economic impact.

This kind of an insurance scheme is in fact precisely the kind of activity a stimulus bill should be funding; this is even something that would need to be done even aside from a stimulus. That should be obvious even to someone willing to spend about five minutes with the Google learning about the issue.

Pea-brained pig-ignorant wingnut gobshites...