Politics

The Barrister posts:

$900,000,000,000 (porkulus plus 1st-year interest cost)
÷    300,000,000 (estimate of US legal population)
=        300,000 (cost of bill per person)


Congress is borrowing an additional $300K per American.

THREE. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. PER. PERSON.

The current President has shown poor judgment in his cabinet picks. He’s taken a hostile tone with Republicans, contrary to his promised bipartisan “change”. He’s taken a series of steps to make the United States appear weaker in the eyes of terrorists. And he’s put his name on an $800 billion addition to the deficit which he didn’t write.

I expect Obama’s supporters are happy with this. Conservatives, and even most Republicans, are irate. There’s a third group, not getting mention in the media or the blogs I follow, who are likely the real victims of voter remorse: Hillary supporters.

Coyote posts evidence that Tokyo Rose Obama’s anti-hope message isn’t change, either:

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.

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

The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.

Quoted from: Jospeh Goebbels

Velociman unleashes a fabulous rant against deserving targets:

This selfsame deceit manifests itself time and again in the Leftist philosophy. Those who cry "Peace!" the loudest are not for peace per se, they are merely the enemies of their own civilization. They cried Peace! when Reagan ousted communist thugs in Grenada, they shouted Peace! against the contras, they shouted Peace! against the Israelis in a stomach-curdling example of relativism.

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.

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

Quoted from: Coyote

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:

The downtown Minneapolis Hennepin County library is attacking patrons again:

The Minneapolis Central Library has closed most of its Nicollet Mall entrance because of icicles forming and falling from the building’s distinctive “wing.”

Many people think the design of the building and wing is to blame, and someone should have foreseen this problem.

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.