For some Bermudians the idea of gay tourists gets them all riled up, so I can't imagine how they'd react to the Gazette's headline today that a "Gay cruise ship plans a visit to Bermuda".

A gay cruise ship?

It seems like the reporters over there were having a bit of fun in their opening sentence that the ship was going to 'swing' by the island.

Interesting article in the New Yorker on NY Times Columnist and Economist Paul Krugman.

Consistent with my ongoing assertion that the PLP are Bermudians Republicans (essentially driven by dogma), I liked this quote:

"Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers," he wrote in 1998. "The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren't."

This is how many in Bermuda feel when trying to debate pretty much anything with the PLP, whether it's immigration, the media, debt, overspending, independence or race for example.

Reasonable people who see the nuances of real world issues tire of trying to discuss rationally Bermuda politics with another side who relentlessly repeat canned slogans and engage in endless demagoguery.

It is par for the course that the outgoing Premier is creating legislation for a media council to address complaints about the media while he and his colleagues are subject to absolutely no oversight body to address complaints about their behaviour (including blatant abuse of the broadcast regulations during the 2007 election campaign which the PLP appointed broadcast commission refused to address).

Just this past week we've seen filibustering and refusals to answer Parliamentary Questions not to mention the outgoing Premier himself threatening physical violence against an Opposition member in parliament several years ago.

So a media council is a priority but mention Parliamentary modernisation or standards of conduct for MPs and you're greeted with silence. In conjunction with a media council shoudl be a Parliamentary oversight body as any credible modern democracy hass.

Take the Premier's statement on the media council and insert the political and he sounds quite reasonable for a change:

"This bill was developed to create an independent ethics council which will promote fairness, accuracy, accountability and integrity in the content and presentation of political behaviour.

"This is an unprecedented step for Bermuda and as such, its aims are to establish standards of conduct for elected officials and a mechanism for dealing with complaints of breach of any of those standards; to respect political expression ; and to provide a forum through which elected officials will interact with the community."

Dr. Brown said the community had "suffered too long from the devastating impact of unaccountable elected officials".

If you're a masochist you've been listening to or following the budget debate.

I'm one of those. The outgoing Premier kicked it off in style:

Premier Ewart Brown yesterday launched a vociferous defence of his Government's financial record -- saying it had no choice other than to spend money for the good of the people.

Dr. Brown said the United Bermuda Party Government had left the Island in such a state 12 years ago, cash had to be directed toward fixing social problems such as absentee parents, crumbling infrastructure, ailing Government buildings, antiquated transport system and an out-of-date tourism model.

You see, fixing the low debt budget surplus expanding economy that the PLP inherited involved aggressively funding social programs, for example building a $70M school for $120M and a $35M cruise ship pier for $60M.

That's $75 million that could have been spent on actual social programs, or counter-cyclical spending, not stimulating the pockets of a couple of cronies and calling it social policy.

It takes some real effort and creativity to be this disingenuous with a straight face.

This is George Bushism, create your own reality Republicanism at it's best.

Judging by the PLP's back to form delusional statement on it's website as Vexed points out, the noise machine is back to form.

There's a few criticisms that you can level at Bob Richards as a politician, but being 'long on rhetoric short on substance' when it comes to budget replies isn't one of them. The core criticism of course is that he's too academic, too substantive and not communicating at a layman's level.

Again, classic Republicanism, the kind the Democrats always struggle to respond to in the same way the UBP always struggles to respond to complete and utter fiction.

You take the case being made against you, in this case that the Finance Minister's Budget is long on rhetoric and short on substance, and pin it on your opponent with the volume set at max.

The same way that the Republicans complained about media bias while getting very favourable almost cheerleading coverage heading into a war based on false pretenses, the PLP whines about media bias while their Cabinet Minister's radio station appointed Senator DJ plies their propaganda during the daily morning drive.

So the outgoing Premier can toss his Combined Opposition sloganeering around ad nauseum as has been the case the past few weeks, while his combined government media outlet can wax poetic about 'tilting at windmills' and the politics of fear (gasp - this from the architects of the PLP's election campaign of fear in 2007), but any rational observer who peruses the PLP's website wonders if the PLP actually believes their hype or thinks that the public is absolutely, completely incapable of separating pure unadulterated BS from fact.

Those are your two choices.

Bermuda is facing a serious economic contraction exacerbated by a decade of overspending which outpaced even a rapidly expanding economy and the Government's response is to deny any semblance of reality.

This is really, really worrying. We haven't even seen the slightest acknowledgment that things could have been done differently.

Things are most likely going to get worse before they get better. The party that has missed every revenue and spending projection wants you to believe that the guy who called the overheated economy and imminent recession doesn't know what he's talking about.

If you want to see which way the winds are blowing, have a read of Dale Butler, a PLP MP who sits in the marginal of all marginals and knows that he can't mindlessly spout party line BS, a guy who gets elected based on an image of bucking the party line and acknowledging reality.

So Budget Day arrived, and we got more of the same plus more, which is really quite depressing.

On the positive side, the document wasn't green, but the Finance Minister's outfit certainly was. We'll call it a push.

Otherwise a few things are notable as an early reaction.

Firstly, I was surprised at the lack of detail in the document, although I probably shouldn't be. This was classic Paula Cox: a whole lot of words and verbosity masking a lack of substance and seriousness.

Secondly, it seems that the PLP has become desperately out of touch. To say that Bermuda "cannot have a Reid Street-doing-fine mentality and a North Street that suffers" is true and makes for a nice sound bite.

The reality however is that neither Reid St. nor North St. are 'doing fine'. Retail is dying. Reid St and Front St for that matter are both shadows of their former selves, St. Georges is a ghost town. (It should be apparent that Government intends to starve St. George's until they perform their takeover.)

What was really amazing however was that after all the talk of 'austere' Government cutbacks, by the Government themselves, it was completely insincere as evidenced by a 9% current account increase.

The payroll tax increases will be hard for everyone to swallow, local and international business alike. In a time when international business is moving jobs out of Bermuda due to cost and hostile immigration policies, Government increases payroll tax by 2 percentage points (or a 14% increase) and raises the cap dramatically which will have a much bigger impact on the international business sector.

I'm never a big fan of tax increases, because unlike most things they go up but almost never down and it doesn't require Government to share in the pain.

Thirdly, every time Government justifies their over-spending and resulting borrowing as an investment in infrastructure an angel loses its wings. Stop it. It's cruel.

Unexplainable overspending on just two projects, Berkeley and the cruise ship pier, amount to almost $100M, the amount taxes were increased this year. That's real money now isn't it?

Ethical government spending would be an investment, putting tens of millions of dollars in the pockets of a couple of cronies is stimulative, but not for the general public or economy.

Fourthly, Bob Stewart is correct in today's Letters to the Editor that Government is deploying Enron-esque accounting gimmicks to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. The hospital will be funded through a Public Private Partnership and the Causeway replacement is proposed to follow in that path. In both cases Government has chosen a more expensive method to finance Capital expenditures through off balance sheet tricks in an attempt to hide about half a billion dollars in debt.

This budget suggests that the PLP either lack the ideas or the realism to position Bermuda for a recovery and are simply continuing to defer the pain for future generations. This is deeply deeply irresponsible, the result of which is that instead of punching above our weight as we have prior to the PLP we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back.

The waste and abuse of the public purse of the past decade means that Bermuda is responding to the global recession from a position of weakness. The un-budgeted revenue surpluses of the past decade, fueled by two catastrophic events in the US, are gone, never to be recovered with nothing to show for it.

When Government could be deploying those hundreds of millions of dollars for counter cyclical spending they're reaching their hands into the pockets of every resident and business in Bermuda, further eroding the case for investing in Bermuda.

Someone once told me that a former Premier said in the 90s that "Bermuda can afford 5 years of a PLP Government but not more". That seems very prescient.

Say what you will about the UBP, but they understood the fundamental principle that you have to have a robust and sustainable economy to fund your social policy. The UBP were economic realists.

To call this the 2010 budget "The Road to Recovery" is delusional. "Road to Ruin" is more appropriate. If Bermuda turns this around it will be in spite of the PLP's economic policy, not because of it.