This is too funny for me to have made it up. The IRS has ruled that Obama’s stimulus bill subsidizes actual, honest-to-goodness golf carts, under the “high-mileage vehicle” provision. This is causing golf-cart sales to soar. Laments Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, “In a normal world this would be shocking, even scandalous news. Taxpayer money wasted buying carts for golfers. Uncle Sam as reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the needy to enrich well-heeled golfers.” Not in this country.

As you know, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday.

At first, I thought it was some sort of joke. And then I decided it actually was. “Wow. They’re giving them out to everyone now, aren’t they?”

The sentiment is not mine alone. For example, Ana Marie Cox, National Correspondent for Air America radio, wrote on Twitter, “Apparently Nobel Prizes are now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush.”

After much debate, I think we’ve finally zeroed in on why Obama received the prize. It’s for his extraordinary effort, as Jerry Salcido reports at the Campaign for Liberty, “at bringing peace to the anti-war movement.” This has allowed him to further implement the peace-keeping missions created by his predecessor and the predecessor before that.

This should not come as a complete surprise. Nobel Peace Prize laureates over the past decade have included the UN, for their extraordinary efforts to promote endless bickering between national governments; the International Panel on Climate Change, for their extraordinary efforts to build up and disseminate greater myths— er, I mean, “knowledge,” about the global climate; and most importantly, Al Gore (for inventing the Internet).

(Yup. That joke still works.)

Your Own Peace Prize

In the spirit of the Nobel, I’m instituting my own peace prize. I haven’t given it a name yet— but I know that I don’t want my name on it. (Feel free to suggest names along with your contest entries below.)

-TimK

P.S. Ellen is also a member of the “Impeach George W. Bush” group. And she created the “Impeach John McCain” group, just in case he were to have won the presidency.

As you may know, I wrote about fear in my October newsletter (PDF), and our thoughts overlapped.

Watching Jim’s video, however, I began to think about the fear some of my friends have of the new president-elect. They’re convinced that he’s going to bring the country to its destruction. Or even worse (I imagine), that he’ll turn the country into a Garden of Eden.

As I tell my kids, don’t believe a single thing a politician says during the campaign, because–unlike the way things work out here in the real world–you can’t sue a politician for not making good on his promises.

David Boaz, at the Cato Institute’s blog, makes a short list of executive orders Obama could rescind, in order to show that he was actually sincere, and not just pulling BS out of his butt.