Here’s an interesting pickle: What do you do if you’re a Republican governor who hates government, who wants to halt the move toward universal health care, who wants to dismantle public education, who detests mass transit, and this big fat stimulus check arrives in your state’s mailbox. Do you take it? do you reject it?

Actually, you do both, that is, if you’re Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Rick Perry of Texas, Sarah Palin of Alaska, “Butch” Otter of Idaho, Mark Sanford, or Bobby Jindal of Louisiana:

A handful of Republican governors are considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package , a move opponents say puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment.

Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy.

Of course none of them will walk away from the money. They know that when something goes wrong, people tend to blame executives, be they mayors, governors or presidents. As much as they might complain, executives have to take the resources they’re given and make it work. And the ones who don’t do that will be toast.

Updated March 23, 2009: Great. Everytime a volcano erupts, I’m going to think of Bobby Jindal. You’ll remember that in his poorly executed response to Obama’s national address, he derrided “something called volcano monitoring” as just one of the many supposedly wasteful things in the stimulus package.

Here is an example of how government works. Cell phones and cell phone accessories are one of the most ridiculous wastes of money for consumers on the market today. It seems all phones have their own special cord that goes with them, even among the same manufacturer.

That’s by design, because when you buy that $30 charger for your cell phone and that phone breaks down, you’re stuck with a perfectly good but useless $30 charger. That’s the reality of the free market: everyone is out to make money, so every phone manufacturer is in on the scam, and you as a consumer don’t have a choice.

But soon (well, in 2012), thanks to government intervention, this little racket is coming to an end (from Yahoo! Tech):

This morning at the GSMA Mobile World Congress conference taking place in Barcelona, a mammoth pile of cell phone manufacturers have agreed to a universal cell phone charger standard. [...]

Only days ago, the European Union announced it would be pursuing stronger means of forcing cell phone makers to get together on a charging standard that would work across a range of different handsets.

So a uniform standard was not impossible to find, and it was not even that difficult to find. The fact that this was done so quickly tells us that probably these cell phone manufacturers already knew of a standard that they would all be happy with some time ago. But it still took that added step of government intervention to actually get them to adopt something as commonsense as a universal standard.

This will save everyone who buys a cell phone money. And for those who worship the myth of the free market, don’t worry, you can still waste your $30 in plenty of other ways.

Now that Obama is moving to cap CEO salaries for any company receiving bailout funds, lo!

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) — Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis said the lender won’t be nationalized and doesn’t need more capital support from the government.

The idea of nationalizing the bank wasn’t even a “remote possibility,” Lewis said in an interview today on CNBC television. He said “categorically” that the company won’t go back a third time for U.S. aid and that he “has the leeway” to manage the bank independently of the U.S.

Translation: It will be a cold day in hell before I gives up my enormous compensation and golden parachute, health of the company be damned.

I suspect we’ll be hearing this a lot. These financial CEOs have ruined their companies, ruined the economy, and still expect unlimited compensation. Meanwhile, most working people connected to reality are simply grateful to have jobs at this point. 

In a typical Wall Street perversion of logic that I will never understand, Bank of American’s stock was sent soaring on these remarks. Apparently, investors like the sound of a CEO who will see his company go down in flames before having to limit his own salary to a mere $500,000 a year.

Here is one of the many loaded questions from a new Zogby poll, with which respondants are being confronted with:

“President Obama just reversed a federal law that prohibited foreign governments or international agencies from using U.S. funds for abortions. Do you agree or disagree with President Obama’s decision?”

Anyone who has actually read Obama’s memo and understands the so-called Mexico City Policy knows the flaw with this question. This is very clearly explained right in Obama’s memo:

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151b(f)(1)), prohibits nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive Federal funds from using those funds “to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning, or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” 

What you should get from that is that the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits the use fo federal funds for overseas abortions. Period.

The August 1984 announcement by President Reagan of what has become known as the “Mexico City Policy” directed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand this limitation and withhold USAID funds from NGOs that use non-USAID funds to engage in a wide range of activities, including providing advice, counseling, or information regarding abortion, or lobbying a foreign government to legalize or make abortion available.

So Reagan expanded the reach of the law, forbiding any group that even talked about abortions overseas from getting any federal money, even though the 1961 law forbid them from using federal money for those purposes anyway.

In addition, I direct the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID to take the following actions with respect to conditions in voluntary population planning assistance and USAID grants that were imposed pursuant to either the 2001 or 2003 memoranda and that are not required by the Foreign Assistance Act or any other law:  (1) immediately waive such conditions in any current grants, and (2) notify current grantees, as soon as possible, that these conditions have been waived.  I further direct that the Department of State and USAID immediately cease imposing these conditions in any future grants.

What Obama does here is simply returns the law back to its original purpose, which was to merely prohibit federal funds from going toward overseas abortions.

Zogby is hardly the only one getting this wrong. One commenter on this site said that Obama is the most pro-abortion president in history. That’s an empty talking point. Let’s look at the facts, and those are contained in his official actions. By reversing this memo, Obama’s abortion policy is on par with presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, because the same law was in effect during their administrations.

During the Reagan and two Bush administrations, the law was expanded to the point of absurdity.