U.S.A.

The porkulus bill is such an amazing over-reach of Federal power, I conclude that with its passage, the US Government will no longer be a legitimate authority. Adherence to US law will descend from being morally proper to being merely pragmatic or convenient. This need not be chaos; our conduct can still be guided by personal honor, social mores, and common-law tradition.

My conclusion has led me to wonder, exactly where is the line between legitimate and illegitimate government? When was, or when will be, that line crossed?

Banking problems are not currently a headline issue. When raised, the tone is almost invariably anti-bank. Barney Frank, Barry, and the chorus of talking heads are upset that banks aren’t making loans. As though these evil, greedy people are padding their fortunes by stuffing cash in their mattresses and somehow vicitmizing the hard-working middle class.

Balderdash.

Barney Frank needs to get one piece of information firmly lodged in his brain - to a bank, deposits are liabilities and loans are assets. It's not that banks don't need and want to lend the money they have. It's that they don't want to lose the money they have, because then they will have to pay it back from their assets that are still good, thus suppressing lending further to good credit risks.

It is essential to recognize a distinction between merely working and working to create wealth. A policy goal to create jobs, to put people to work, is a formalization of the old joke about hiring half the people to dig holes and then hiring the other half to fill the holes. Everyone is working a job, but nobody is better off. No wealth was created through shifting dirt.

Today’s headline: Economy Shed 598,000 Jobs in January

President Tokyo Rose using the data as justification to feed his pet pig spending bill: “And if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis will turn into a catastrophe.”

The prophets of Peak Oil have fallen silent. A price collapse and drop in global demand have allowed other paranoids to push to the headlines. But their voices will rise again. When that happens, remember this:

North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
…

Tom Blumer does a better job making a couple of my recent points:

Before its release, experts predicted that the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) had contracted by an annualized 5%-6% during that period. The actual annualized -3.8% from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) was not nearly that bad.

I don’t have time to develop my thoughts fury about Barry’s persistent anti-hope message about the American people’s economy. Coyote fills the breach:

Barrack Obama, in the Washington Post:

By now, it’s clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression

Sorry, maybe I am just cynical from having politicians call 8 of the last 3 recessions the worst economy since the Great Depression**, but I don’t think this is the worst crisis since the 1930’s.  It’s not even the worst since I was born.  The late 70’s were worse, the early 80’s were worse, and from a financial/banking crisis point of view, the late 80’s were worse.

Obama has turned his righteous huffing about executive pay into a proposed law. As CEO of a taxpayer-funded organization that’s running a projected trillion-dollar annual deficit, Barry looks like a hypocritical fool:

Presidential Compensation

Cash Compensation:
Salary: $400,000
Cash Subtotal: $400,000

Room and Board:
55,000 sq ft mansion, in historic D.C.: @ $100/sqft: $5,500,000/yr
Personal Chef / Kitchen Staff: $300,000 / year
Other Servants / Attendants: $500,000 / year
R&B Subtotal: $6,300,000

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced to the House of Representatives a new bill, H.R. 645, calling for the secretary of homeland security to establish no fewer than six national emergency centers for corralling civilians on military installations.

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.

None of the challenges to Barry’s qualifications to be President have made it past the first hearing by the Supreme Court. A California suit aimed at preventing the certification of that State’s 55 electoral votes is proceeding, but seems somewhat moot now.

But until Barry can definitively prove which doctor in which Hawai’ian hospital delivered him, the opposition will not rest:

Politicians and their hired-gun economists are aiming their stimulus proposal at the wrong target. With sights zeroed by lazy Keynsian theory, they desire to stimulate consumption (aggregate demand). But consumption doesn’t make us richer.

Steve Sailer sees the true target and punches out the 10 ring:

President Obama is reportedly outraged to learn that financial executives were actually paid the bonuses owed them in 2008:

President Obama fired a warning shot at Wall Street on Thursday, branding bankers “shameful” for giving themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses as the economy was spinning out of control and the government was spending billions to bail out many of the nation’s most prominent financial firms.

Creating jobs by breaking windows is not only bad economics, it’s criminal (except when government does it):

The owner of a glass company accused of a $132,000 scheme to smash Scottsdale school bus windows and profit from the repairs has been indicted.

We are not grabbing power here in Washington, we are just relieving [the States] of the burden of governing themselves.

Quoted from: Coyote

A favorite memory of my time walking the 55418 with the Northeast Citizen Patrol is a conversation with a couple of cops. The officers were telling us true stories of dumb criminals. After several laughable tales, one of the cops joked, “We don’t catch ‘em because we’re smart.”

Well, TJIC pointed to the sad truth of that wisecrack:

A standard tactic in politics is to dehumanize the opposition. Those who disagree are painted as extreme abstractions, and it becomes easy to forget that enemies remain persons. Contentious topics, with their increasingly strident debate, frequently devolve into the harshest depersonalizations.

Abortion is such a topic. The rhetoric is pure polarized abstraction. But as Vanderleun shows, abortion is intensely—and essentially—personal:

I finally found the time to read No Enemy, But Peace:

…the true story of Sergeant Marco Martinez, a former gang-banger who found his true calling as a rifleman in the Marines. When his best friend and squad leader is injured during his first firefight, Sgt. Martinez rallies his embattled squad while single-handedly taking down a bunker full of jihadists. Written by Sgt. Richard C. Meyer, who served in the same unit as Sgt. Martinez and was present during the battle, this is the first comic produced by Iraq War veterans about the war itself.

Those of us still paying attention noted last November that the war in Iraq is over. (And the good guys won!) As the current President harrumphs and blusters about withdrawal timetables, we noted that on January 1st, 2009, the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, all Iraqi airspace, and well, all of Iraq reverted to Iraqi control.

The ripples radiating from Barry’s inaugural address have revealed something about another famous address. FDR’s first inaugural offered the powerful rhetoric, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” A fan of speeches but no fan of Roosevelt, I’ve never paid attention to what the rich old cripple actually said:

I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.