"The Bailout" Is Unconstitutional

An expanding majority of Americans are expressing a growing unease with the whole concept of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (herein known as 'The Bailout'). They have good reason to trust their intuition; The Bailout is most likely unconstitutional.

By enacting it, Congress did not, in any meaningful sense, make law. Rather it made hash out of the law making process by making executive branch officials into legislators. Congress, in effect, said to the executive branch: "Here is $700 billion. You say you will use it to buy up banks' 'troubled assets.' But you can use it for something else if you wish -- say subsidizing automobile companies.'

The Washington-based libertarian advocacy organization, Freedom Works, argues that The Bailout violates "the non-delegation doctrine." Although the text of the Constitution does not spell it out, its logic and structure, particularly the separation of powers, implies limits on the size and kind of discretion that Congress may confer on the executive branch.

The Vesting Clause of Article I says, "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in Congress." All. Therefore, none shall be vested elsewhere.

The Supreme Court has said: "That Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the president (executive branch) is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution." And the court has said that properly delegated discretion must come with "an intelligible principle" and must "clearly delineate" a policy that limits the discretion. The Bailout flunks that test.

Author of "Liberty and Tyranny", Mark Levin sums it up nicely, "If the Constitution's meaning can be erased or rewritten, and the Framers' intentions ignored, it ceases to be a constitution but is instead a concoction of political expedients that serve the contemporary agendas of the few who are entrusted with public authority to preserve it."

"Chaotic and Unforgiving Capitalism" Is What We Need

Last week President Teleprompter wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “But I also know that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people.”

That is funny! I did not know we were being offered a choice. When the president’s teleprompter told B. Hussein to declare war on the business community a couple of weeks ago, the only ‘choice’ he left on the table was an oppressive government-run economy. Just how oppressive is still unknown, but oppressive it will be.

And it does not stop here at home. Treasury Secretary (and part-time tax cheat) Timothy Geithner, America’s own Toxic Asset, has called for “global regulation”. Now there is a term that just rolls off the tongue and warms the cockles of the liberal heart!

Says Toxic Timmy, “We can’t allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints. .”

In other words, ‘we will not allow businesses (and soon to be individuals) to manage their own affairs and accumulate wealth unless we tell them they can and then tax it all away.’

You will be forced to let economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barfy Frank (d-Mass) make investment and business decisions for you. How do you like that ‘warm-and-fuzzy’ feeling?

President Teleprompter and Toxic Timmy grow daily ever more hostile to the private sector and ever more comfortable with the notion of micro-managed government-approved capitalism – which, of course, is not capitalism at all. Consider this: it takes extraordinary skill to create and manage a billion-dollar company; there are very few very smart people in the world that can do that. Now look at President Teleprompter and Toxic Timmy, the two currently ‘managing’ (or more accurately ‘mangling’) more money than any individuals in human history – TRILLIONS, not billions! Not very comforting when you realize that Toxic Timmy can’t figure out Turbo Tax and President Teleprompter’s only management experience was running an penny-ante shakedown operation in Chicago as a ‘community agitator’.

In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have vaporized your wealth and your children’s and grand-children’s future. What was an economic problem has been hijacked and used to set up the largest political power-grab in our history. As more than one Obama Administration official has stated, ‘never let a good crises go to waste.”

“Chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” is exactly what we need right now. It is the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most-efficient road to economic stabilization and renewal.

America Close to Freaking Out!

The Obama presidency is a sign we have lost, at least temporarily, our national will.

Signs of our collective weakness emerged after 9/11 when only part of the American populace took seriously the fact that we were (are) at war with an evil and focused enemy determined to destroy our way of life. Since then, al Qaeda has refused to quit despite debilitating losses and a US political class unwittingly assisting them here at home.

Too many Americans no longer want to engage our external threats head-on. On the domestic front, we are confronting the economic crisis of our lifetime with the same irresponsible spending spree that got us into this mess to start with. The Plan: Create more government dependency; reward the incompetent; and print more money. (In other words: Double-down on stupidity!)

The ‘Greatest Generation’ (our parents and grand-parents), which learned the valuable and painful lessons from the Depression and World War II, is not here to guide us through these difficult times. We are a trust-fund nation (picture a DebuTart, just name one) whose BMW has run out of gas in the middle of nowhere after a pointless 115 mile per hour joy ride, credit cards maxed and out of cell phone range, who can’t understand why daddy is not there when she pouts. The narcissistic baby boomers are now firmly in charge, and therein lies the problem. Where are the adults?

What is scaring us – even Obamaites, though many won’t admit it – is that we elected a president, American Idol style, who wants more than anything (even more than Bill Clinton) to be liked. And he can’t even get that right (let me count the ways):

1. His headlong rush to persuade foreign governments – even enemy regimes – to embrace us is rebuffed; ie: Iran’s shrug-off of his YouTube appeasement of the mullahs. (Yes, he actually sent a YouTube message to a foreign government!)


2. His unprecedented appearance, as a sitting Commander-in-Chief, on The Tonight Show without his Teleprompter, resulting in an embarrassing slap to Special Olympics and the disabled. When the going gets tough, the weak go on Leno.

3. The cheesy gift from the leader of the free world to the British prime minister of 25 films on DVD from the White House gift shop – that don’t even work on U.K. players!

4. Floating the idea, albeit briefly, to require injured warriors to pay to have private insurers take care of their war related treatment.

5. Allowing the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to dictate the terms of his budget- and Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd, the symbols of incompetence and hubris – to be the spokesmen for his financial bailout.

And there are more examples everyday!

These are not beginner’s mistakes; these are his core incompetencies.

Folks, America is getting very close to officially freaking out!

The Tax Code As A Weapon

The national outrage ginned up by politicians, and their enablers in the media, over the AIG bonuses has been used to create a very dangerous weapon; The Retro-Active Punitive Tax.

The awarding of the bonuses in this economic environment was a bone-headed move by AIG, but perfectly legal, thanks to the Democrat Congress and the B. Hussein administration. Language allowing this type of bonus was inserted in the 'Stimulus' package by Senator Chris Dodd (d) at the behest of someone in the Obama administration. That someone has yet to be determined with any certainty, but it is clear it was not a Republican since all Republicans were completely shut out of the writing of this legislation. This is a wholly owned mess of the Democrat congress and they have no where to run, and as the facts come out, less places to hide. They are in classic circular firing squad mode and provides this observer great entertainment!

Don't be fooled by the displays of congressional outrage and finger-pointing. This is largely an exercise in theatrics because lawmakers missed the boat the first time around. They knew about the bonuses in December, when AIG gave out $55 million in the first round of "retention" bonuses. AIG did not try to had these legal bonuses, they were even disclosed in their required Securities and Exchange Commission filings in September. But for a Congress who does not read their own legislation, why would they read an SEC filing?

The response to the public outrage to these bonuses resulted in hasty action (punative retro-active taxation) by the US Congress that doesn't make any sense. Experience shows that legislation forged in haste amid the swirl of headlines and theatrical hearings tends to produce bad policy, of which this is a perfect example.

Using the tax code as a weapon to exact revenge on a select few, no matter how badly they've behaved, is a horrible, frightening and dangerous idea. Slapping heavy taxes on the bonuses and on the company that issued them may satisfy the initial rage of taxpayers who see incompetent executives being reward for failure, but it sets a bad precedent. The bill aims at sanctioning supposedly bad people by confiscating their earnings. As such, it flies in the face of something the Constitution expressly forbids -- a bill of attainder, which is a punishment of particular individuals imposed not by a court of law but by a legislative body.

If this legislation is allowed to stand, the precedent is set for a vengeful Congress to willy-nilly decide that anything they do not like, be it action, item or idea, can be retro-actively taxed out of existence. For example: Some future wild-eyed, mouth-foaming Congress (it might well be this one) could decide to slap a retro-active tax of 90%-100% or more on all gun owners on the value of the guns. Or how about a retro-tax on all SUV owners in the name of a 'green' warm-and fuzzy feeling? Hopefully, when this monstrosity reaches the US Senate, cooler heads will prevail, but that may be too much to hope for.

There are better ways to channel taxpayers' anger at incompetence and greed. The place to start is the incompetence and greed of the US Congress, members of both parties! This bunch makes corporate America look like a bunch of pikers in the incompetence and greed department. It is time for action, swift and certain, or we will lose the greatest nation on earth. There is a revolution coming and it is necessary. Our current governance is out of balance and must be restored somewhere between socialism and anarchy.

Socialism seems to hold that the State is everything, the Individual nothing - or at best only a cog in a vast machine, an atom in an indistinguishable blur. Anarchy makes the State nothing, and the Individual everything - each a law unto himself, and chaos at the end. Between the two lies the way of wise government. There are certain things which every man must surrender in behalf of the common good, and other things which it would be a sin to abdicate. Therein lies the balance we are missing today. The balance we should seek is a free and representative republic with competent and moral representatives. Something that is in very short supply in Washington today.

The revolution starts with the 2010 mid-term elections!

Lost In the Tall Grass!

President Teleprompter (aka: Barack Hussein Obama) has lost control of his administration, if he ever had control. He is now officially lost in the tall grass!

Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late-night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

There are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. The shameful political classes who make U.S. laws are on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close; law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

This is not what the American people voted for and more and more Obama-freaks are beginning to admit it. They are now aware, as many of us were two years ago, that B. Hussein Obama is seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything and, as a result, he has made hash of running the country so far. And it can only get worse.

The sum of his ‘experience’ consisted of ‘community agitating’ and Chicago goon-style politics. Through Sunday mornings listening to the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people just as shallow as he.

He is a product of these environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered. His whole idea of where Middle America might be is well left of where the average American thinks it is. On too many occasions, when away from his teleprompter, he as let slip that “Middle America” is something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. The proof that it can be manipulated is that he is president today.

B. Hussein as president is not only incompetent, he is dangerous. The video ‘olive branch’ to Iran is the latest catastrophe. B. Hussein does not understand how this ‘olive branch’ will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, by wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It “reads” – to people who do not share anything like America’s aspirations – as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason.

This directly affects the security of the United States, a president’s overriding responsibility. A responsibility he is willfully abrogating.

Congress Worse Than Useless!

To paraphrase the great American philosopher, Pogo: ‘We have met the enemy and it's the people who represent us.’ The blowhards and buffoons in Congress (America’s only professional criminal class) proved again Wednesday they are worse than useless.

Ronald Reagan's famous line that "government is the problem" kept going through my head as the AIG hearing demonstrated the dangers of Washington's role in the economy. The very people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who can't balance America's budget, now claim the expertise to run banks, insurance companies and automakers. Why do we allow these idiots to vote themselves $175,000 annual salaries, generous pensions and health benefits when the rest of us lose ours due to their incompetence? The US Constitution innumerate so few actual duties of Congress, this job should last two weeks per year.

If we let them continue to ignore the Constitution, we're dumber than they are.

What was supposed to be a legal lynching of AIG boss Edward Liddy over the firm's bonus plan turned into a humiliating defeat for the lynch mob. Liddy came off as a smart straight shooter, a man who gave up retirement for $1 a year to rescue AIG so it wouldn't bring down the financial system.

He also proved himself a cut above those who aimed to make cheap headlines at his expense. I'd pay to see him question Congress on its role in the economic mess. Wouldn’t you just love to see Barney Frank and Chris Dodd sputter and squirm under the klieg-lights and under oath about their incompetence! That would be worth a $165 million (the amount of the AIG bonuses) price of admission.

Most important, he revealed the dirty little secret that much of Washington knew and approved of AIG's promises to pay retention bonuses to members of its financial products unit. That revelation came early in Liddy's testimony and punctured the hot air balloon.

Liddy's matter-of-fact claim directly implicates the Federal Reserve, which he called the "gatekeeper" for the 80% of AIG owned by the taxpayers. He also said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner knew of the bonus plan nearly two weeks before it became public.

And as for you, President Teleprompter:

Much of the government outrage over the bonuses pool of $165 million was, like your feigned, scripted and staged outrage, phony anyway, ginned up for a public now being taught that the private sector is evil and must be punished; textbook socialism. As your Administration has stated on more than one occasion: “Never let a good crises go to waste. The real outrage is that the bonuses represented a fraction of the $180 BILLION of public money pumped into AIG without any real oversight.

Predictably, most of Liddy's tormentors steered clear of that topic, lest they be forced to make a tough call on a complex issue.

Liddy stands guilty of being tone deaf to the public anger on any bonus payouts at a time when people have lost their savings, their homes and their jobs. But as he repeatedly made clear, he came not to defend AIG's past, merely to clean it up.

That puts him head and shoulders above those posturing panderers and pinheads in Washington who follow no star except merciless ambition.

B. Hussein Received AIG 'Bonus' Too

President B. Hussein, back when he was only a lowly money-grubbing Senator in 2008, received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group (AIG). This bonus came in the form of political contributions. The two biggest congressional recipients of AIG bonuses are (then) Senator B. Hussein and Senator Chris Dodd (d). Surprise, surprise!

The AIG Financial products affiliate of AIG gave out $136,928 in political ‘bonuses’, the most of any AIG affiliate, in the 2008 campaign cycle of which B. Hussein received 75%. It is also interesting to note, if only the main-stream-media would, that AIG’s financial products division is the same unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps and “misjudged” the risk causing, in large part, our financial mess today.

The Washington Post bird-cage liner reports a “mob effect” at AIG financial products division:

“A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year.”

You have no doubt heard all the political huffing & puffing about the “outrageous” bonuses that AIG paid out to its executives due to contractual obligations. These very same contractual obligations were protected by specific language inserted into the $787 Billion 'Economic Stimulus' package by none other than, you guessed it, Senator Chris Dodd (d) and the Democrat controlled Senate Finance Committee.

Perhaps all the anger and rage being exhibited by B. Hussein and Company, in light of the ‘bonuses’ they received are nothing more than crocodile tears. Politicians of all ilks have their taxpayer provided undies all in a wad demanding the AIG executives who received bonuses return the money to the idiots who gave it to them. Now one would wonder if they will hold themselves to the same standard? Will B. Hussein and Chris Dodd give back the money they received from AIG? Waiting for this to happen would be like teaching a pig to sing: It would only waste your time and just irritate the pig!

It is very clear that the motto for the Obama Administration, be it taxes or ‘bonuses’ is:

“Do as I say . . . not as I do!”

A "Manchurian Candidate"?

Kevin Hassett (Bloomberg) in a commentary makes a good point. Makes you wonder!

“Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action.

Another diabolical idea would be to significantly increase taxes on whatever firms are still standing. That would require subterfuge, since increasing tax rates would be too obvious. Our Manchurian Candidate would have plenty of sophisticated ideas on changing the rules to get more revenue without increasing rates, such as auctioning off “permits.”

These steps would create near-term distress. If our Manchurian Candidate leader really wanted to knock the country down for good, he would have to provide insurance against any long-run recovery.

There are two steps to accomplish that.

Discourage Innovation

First, one way the economy might finally take off is for some entrepreneur to invent an amazing new product that launches something on the scale of the dot-com boom. If you want to destroy an economy, you have to persuade those innovators not even to try.

Second, you need to initiate entitlement programs that are difficult to change once enacted. These programs should transfer assets away from productive areas of the economy as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the government will have no choice but to increase taxes sharply in the future to pay for new entitlements.

A leader who pulled off all that might be able to finish off the country. “

Ummmmm? Food for thought!

Throw the Bum in Jail!

Congressman Barney Frank (Democrat) from Mass., says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. That is probably the only good idea he has ever had. The first one to be prosecuted should be: Representative Barney Frank (D)-Mass.

Even by the low standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he will seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crisis when he, more than any other person, private or public, is to blame.

It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), that lay behind the crisis.

After regulatory changes made to the Community Reinvestment Act by President Clinton in 1995, Fannie and Freddie went into hyper-drive, channeling literally trillions of dollars into the housing markets, using leverage and implicit taxpayers' guarantees. This continued through the Clinton years with $2.4 trillion in housing aid; the largest expansion ever.

Still, from the early 1990s on, many people both inside and outside Washington were alarmed by what they saw at Fannie and Freddie.

Not Barney Frank: Starting in the early 1990s, he (and other Democrats) blocked any effort by regulators, Congress and the White House to get the runaway housing market under control.

He opposed reform as early as 1992. And, in response to another attempt to bring Fannie-Freddie to heel in 2000, Frank said it wasn't needed because there was "no federal liability there whatsoever." Either he is an idiot or a criminally negligent (probably both).

Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives (Franklin Raines - friend of Obama) had overstated earnings by as much as $10.6 billion in order to boost bonuses, Frank was still running interference.

President Bush warned of the impending problems and introduced reforms that, if they had passed, the housing crises likely would have never boiled over taking down the economy with it. Instead, led by Frank, Democrats stood as a bloc against any changes.

Why did Frank do all this? Hard to say. Maybe it was his close ties to the Neighborhood Assistance Corp., a powerful housing activist group in Boston. Or that he received some $40,100 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008. Or, being the only openly gay Congressman, it was his romance with a one-time executive at Fannie.

Whatever the case, his conflicts are obvious and outrageous, and his repeated blocking of any reform of Fannie and Freddie contributed in large part to today's meltdown. If you are looking for a culprit in the meltdown to prosecute, no one fits the bill better than Frank!

Could All This Be Intentional?

The seeming negligent indifference of the B. Hussein Administration to the catastrophic wealth destruction he has caused since the election should surprise no one. The great masses of the apathetic and/or ignorant have elected a president who has no real business or investment experience. His only notable for-profit venture was selling his book. As a law professor, community organizer, and legislator, he operated in redistributionist worlds where wealth, garnered from contributions or taxes, is received and redistributed. Their philosophy is this: What is theirs is theirs (the government) and what is yours is theirs!

The mentality inherent in "social justice" activism is also revealing. Created by radical leftist, union organizer and Obama mentor, Saul Alinsky, community organizing tends to eschew the hard work of helping individual lives with such boring bourgeois approaches as better education, development of job skills, encouragement of marriage, and the engagement of fathers in their children's lives. Instead, social justice is about co-opting existing institutions and instilling collective grievance and victimhood. Practitioners of "social justice" encourage beliefs as that if the utility bills are too high it's because "the system" is deliberately oppressive, or if there's not more employment of members of the community it's because employers are racist. It is always someone else’s fault.

That's the same mentality that doesn't care "what some derivatives trader" on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange worries about - which was the response of the White House to CNBC's Rick Santelli calling out the unfairness and moral hazard in the Administration's mortgage plain. To the social justice mindset, this is not viewed as fellow American's suffering, but with schadenfreude (gloating at somebody else’s bad luck): traders are part of the system that is to be blamed, and if they suffer, it's due and owing.

There's another Alinsky principle that B. Hussein is following religiously: issues and events are not so much important in and of themselves, but for the way they allow you to grow and strengthen your organization, and advance your agenda.

That is exactly what the Democrat's recent, rushed, massive, partisan, unread, and barely stimulating "stimulus" bill accomplished: they gained more money for their organization, expanded their dependent constituencies, and used the "crisis" to push through proposals that with daylight would have slunk back under the rocks from whence they came.

Continuing that crisis will allow them to do more of the same. It is becoming increasingly clear that B. Hussein and his team of socialists are intentionally destroying the US economy to achieve their goal of a nanny-state society. Yes, the same system that has failed every time it has been tried anywhere in the world.

Here is their method: Make the people feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and accept any solution they are told will work. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

We don't have a credit problem or a liquidity problem - those are only symptoms. We have a severe confidence problem, one which is being exacerbated into a crisis by every move Team Hussein makes.

Those who thought they were electing a savior may soon realize that not only is B. Hussein no messiah for the American economy, but he wouldn't want to be a savior even if he could be. It's time to prepare for a long and ugly ride unless we, the great silent majority, find our collective voices and put and end to this madness!

Bush Tried to Warn Congress . . . but they would not listen!

The next time you look at the stock market indexes or open you 401k or brokerage statements, just remember who is really responsible for the greatest wealth destruction of modern times.

The following news report clearly shows that the Bush administration and Senator John McCain warned about the crises precipitated by the Fannie Mae and Ginny Mac melt-downs and how Democrats such as Barney Barfy Frank and Charles Smarmy Schumer were the cause of the problems we are facing now. They set up the nightmare we are now living through - the Obama Bear Market.

This report was posted on YouTube in the US but the Democrats in Congress do not want you to see it. Therefore, one of their favorite butt-boys, Time-Warner threatened a law suit (some proprietary rights B**S****) if it was not taken off. This copy was routed through Canada.

Please forward this link to all you know and tell them to watch this every time they hear one of the liberal idiots blaming Bush for this economic crises. The fact is that Bush tried to warn Congress as early as 2002.

Watch this and get mad...I mean really mad....and remember that feeling in the elections of 2010 (if we last that long).




GMWinslow
The Tennessee Conservative

The Audacity of Pork

In one of his ever increasing spells of passivity, President Obama let himself be cowed by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and abandoned his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles and allowed Congress to lard up the budget with over 9,000 (as Chucky Schumer would say) porky little earmarks.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

Here are some of the more audacious jewels of 'fiscal responsibility' in his budget:

• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. (The Prune that ate NYC.)

• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex (Uhhh Boy!)

• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa. (Congress, the self-proclaimed smartest people on the planet, must not know the source of pig odor; which is surprising since they themselves are so full of it!)

• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah (Great! Another family planning initiative! Why target only Mormon crickets? Genocide anyone?)

• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama (just another bottom crawling, scum-sucking scavengers – the catfish is only a poor fish!)

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi (You do not want to turn me loose on this one!)

• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas [Are people not losing enough money in the casinos? Guess where Senator Harry Reid (d) is from?]

• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii (more star-gazing is just what we need!)

• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles (Ol' Gabby Hayes would be so proud!)

• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii (I give up!)

• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past (bet the National Endowment of Arts gets their tutu in a knot about this.)

• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia (just what we need…a more efficient blueberry…how about a more efficient Congress!)

“When do we turn off the spigots?” Senator McCain said in his speech on the Senate floor. “Haven’t we learned anything? Bills like this jeopardize our future.” Where was this John McCain during last year’s campaign?

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

B. Hussein reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like socializing the American economy.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.

But that is not Americans are beginning to see as they watch their futures go up in smoke. They see this pork as THIS year’s business and all belongs to B. Hussein & Co.

Yea, Change we can believe in! Methinks all those goo-goo eyed Obama voters are learning the meaning of "caveat emptor"?

Can't Blame Bush Anymore!

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Hussein Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997.

The stark message here is that the President’s policies have become the economy's problem. B. Hussein now owns this mess. He can’t continue to blame everything on Bush!

After five weeks in office, it's become clear that B. Hussein's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year's fourth quarter.

The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they're no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier.

What is new is the unveiling of B. Hussein's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar hash with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama's ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. They blame Bush because they are largely responsible for this mess themselves. Congress demands more bank lending even as it assails lenders and threatens to let judges rewrite mortgage contracts. The powers in Congress -- untouchable by B. Hussein -- are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery. The result has been a capital strike, and the return of the fear from last year that we could face a far deeper downturn. This is no way to nurture a wounded economy back to health.

Listening to B. Hussein and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, on the weekend, one couldn't help but wonder if they appreciate any of this. They seem preoccupied with going to the barricades against Republicans who wield little power, or picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh. This is economic leadership?

I am confident the market will recover in the long run, in the meantime their assault on business and investors is delaying a recovery and ensuring that the expansion will be weaker than it should be when it finally does arrive.

One might wonder if all the wealth destruction is intentional. Frighten and depress people enough, Obama might think they will go along with anything - - - even socialism?