snow's job and cato on drinking

In a fit of something resembling candor, Treasury Secretary Snow admitted that many people are falling behind here in Bush's America. "One of the things we know is that less educated people have seen their incomes and wages grow more slowly. That's what the numbers tell us."

Th de facto administration learns this from numbers, because none of them have any contact with any of the economic have-nots, apart from their maids and chauffeurs, who don't dare gripe for fear of losing their jobs. I'm no socialist and I don't begrudge somebody who hits it rich, but Bush's economic policies only exacerbate economic inequality by subsidizing the wealthy few who don't need it -- and sorry, but the trickle-down effect that is supposed to help the rest of us is pure bullshit.

Occasionally I find myself agreeing with somebody from Cato. This is one such instance. Busting into residences without search warrants based on the suspicion of nothing worse than teenagers drinking is stupid, and as Radley Balko describes, it is purely mean-spirited to then issue traffic tickets when not one teen is found to have had a drink. This is where the less-government libertarian Republicans split from the moralizing, holier-than-thou theocrats, whose collective tush is growing slick from the repeated kisses being planted on them by Bush. Libertarians, why do you stick with the party that tells us who we can and can't marry and uses tax and spend tactics to hand out cash and cushy deals that distort our economy?