What we get for not listening:

This was published in 1964. Can't say we weren't warned!

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission: which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the rule by brute force."

-Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Government"

Earthquake, V 2.0

I have already commented on the mess in Haiti - now we have a means of comparison between African tribal kleptocrat rule and a more typical western democracy in Chile.

The Chilean earthquake was several hundred times more powerful, yet there are very few fatalities. This is due to 1) a far more honest government's enforcement of building codes appropriate for seismic zones and 2) a functional economy making it possible to construct safe buildings - again courtesy of a more honest government.

Chile's main problem now is fiscal. They won't have to deal with tens of thousands of rotting bodies buried in rubble, or the inevitable epidemics that follow when a third world country has a sanitation disaster of this magnitude. The next problem would be the need to restore power, water and sanitation, but at least they know what those things mean. Also a concern is the fact that the structural integrity of many buildings is compromised beyond repair, and that aftershocks stronger than the main Haiti earthquake are possible. (All in all, though, it's most likely STILL safer to be in a damaged Chilean building that it was to be in a Haitian building during their quake.)

It's important to place the blame where it's due - the tens of thousands of deaths in Haiti are due to a corrupt government that has no respect for human rights. Rights that start with property rights, which are the foundation of gainful work. Gainful work and property rights combine to produce an economy capable of building safe structures in seismic zones.

It's also worth noting that the US government is fully engaged in destroying that equation here at home. Give THAT some thought too!

Channeling Columbine

Yesterday there was another school shooting here in Colorado, just two miles from Columbine High. Oh, the symbolism! The proximity!

The anchors can't stop yammering, and local programming was pre-empted for breathless live coverage. I'll bet none of them slept last night!

I actually watched an interview of someone who merely lived nearby. That's it. Didn't see it happen, but hey - it was a live feed. ("BREAKING NEWS!!!! Just after these messages, we'll go live at the scene for an exclusive interview with someone who lives around the corner and was in the bathroom when it happened!!!! STAY TUNED!!!!!)

It's really a shame the newsies are all seated behind desks. It would be interesting to see how often they really wet themselves. (Might even be an effective ratings gimmick at this late date...)

Interestingly, as with the Columbine shooting, there was a teacher on scene who was a good hand. Again, though, an unarmed teacher against an armed attacker. Again!

The teacher - Dave Benke - stopped the action and lived to tell. Only two kids were hit and both should be fine. It would be wholly appropriate to buy the man a nice steak dinner and a quality drink or three, and I wouldn't even object if they used taxpayer money (so long as 300 administrators didn't tag along).

Good show, Dave!

Despite the obvious implications, the anti-gun crowd will have an orgasm. Further, the shooter is apparently mentally ill (for real) and had sought help but was turned down because he couldn't pay. So, while actually being a better argument for our side on both issues, this episode will likely become fodder for the Health Care/Welfare Quislings as well as the anti-gunners.

Socialized medicine's abysmal track record is well documented, as is the much better track record of private charity. Most charities are populated with people who actually care about the issue at hand, and that real passion produces real results. If we weren't taxed so much in so many ways, there would have been a charity out there that had the means to provide someone like that with real help.

As to the anti-gunners, the Dave Sanders/Dave Benke continuum illustrates why it would be wise to allow teachers to bear arms if they were so inclined. (Works nicely in Israel!) There are clearly some teachers out there who still have a pair, and they should be encouraged.

Come to think of it, society might be better off if we armed the better teachers and disarmed the cops. (Hmmm....)

Bus drivers helped Benke control the shooter. (Finally - an argument for busing!) The assistant principal, one Becky Brown, ran up after the gunman was subdued and actually picked up the rifle. Pretty cool stuff, but in a later interview she reverted to smarmy public school bureaucrat mode and gushed "Those kids are my kids, and it's important, and my teachers, we're like family." (Makes you wonder how she held the gun...)

Yours is the opposite of the genuine passion we find at charities, Becky. You and your fellow educrats may be like family, but that's YOUR village.

Those little souls are OUR kids, they don't live in your village, and real heroes don't talk like that. To an extent we can chalk her comments up to 15 minutes of PR giddiness, but (yet again) the emperor's clothes reveal much self idolatry and little else...

All's well that ends well, though, and this one did. The important thing now is to frame the inevitable debates truthfully, to wit: An armed society is a polite society, and the government really doesn't know you exist (or care) until you fail to file.

Burning Question

The internet argument rages: Did Stack's choice of landing sites in some way eclipse the evil of the agency he targeted?

In my book, NO. That column of smoke is merely good punctuation. At first blush, I thought Stack's desperate choice was a poor one, because I expected it to be ineffective. I was wrong - I didn't grasp the extent of America's foul mood, and his "end of my rope" desperation play was quite powerful.

Of course, that power is derived from the fact that much of our population feels the same way, and is on the way to being just as fed up. (If power wasn't so addictive,this might be a teachable moment. If only our rulers could grasp the error of their ways before this pressure cooker blows...)

Interesting CBS News Poll on Obama's First Year

Not scientific, anyone can participate. What's striking is that there is a fair amount of selection here - not too many conservatives would find the CBS blog relevant, so it stands to reason the vast majority of respondents would be liberal.

With that, here are the scores thus far:

The Economy
A 1.97%
B 3.16%
C 5.06%
D 19.12%
F 70.69%

Foreign Policy
A 3.68%
B 3.22%
C 7.81%
D 23.08%
F 62.21%

Health Care
A 2.12%
B 2.31%
C 3.49%
D 9.87%
F 82.20%

Afghanistan
A 3.38%
B 13.58%
C 27.86%
D 24.16%
F 31.01%

Iraq
A 3.51%
B 9.59%
C 26.42%
D 24.75%
F 35.73%

Threat of Terrorism
A 3.20%
B 3.76%
C 7.99%
D 20.68%
F 64.37%

Energy and the Environment
A 2.77%
B 4.18%
C 12.01%
D 21.46%
F 59.57%

Social Issues
A 3.25%
B 4.17%
C 12.87%
D 21.22%
F 58.49%

Bipartisanship
A 3.10%
B 2.51%
C 4.18%
D 9.35%
F 80.86%

Obama's Overall Job as President
A 2.54%
B 3.26%
C 4.20%
D 26.11%
F 63.89%

(That grade on Afghanistan tells us how few people read Kipling these days!)

And I'll help out, since they forgot the Illinois poll on his first year:
A 113.8%
B 94.9%
C 31.6%
D 2.5%
F 0.4%


Go ahead. Make his day!

Deck Chairs, Titanic

The Boy King is back, and with a health care plan!

Meet the new plan. Same as the old plan.

Word

Build a politician a fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a politician on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

From Your Friends at Citibank...

...comes this great news:



Makes you want to rush out and deposit some money there, doesn't it?

Thought on Obama...

...who has stated that he would rather be an effective one-term president than a mediocre two termer.

People should acknowledge exactly what it is he intends to be effective at. (It's a shame there isn't some kind of Lasik surgery for people's perceptions...)

Serious. Really serious.

How serious do we need to get to retake liberty?

Click.

Global Warming Hoax Explained by Scientist

"futile feel-goodery..." "for ten thousand years it's been cooling"

It's worth watching all four parts of the presentation. You'll laugh at the polar bears. Enjoy!

To be consistent...

...that IRS building had better hurry up and collapse in it's own footprint!

Coming Soon, to a TragiComedy Near YOU

Greece Bans Large Cash Transactions:

Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said "From 1. Jan. 2011, every transaction above 1,500 euros between natural persons and businesses, or between businesses, will not be considered legal if it is done in cash. Transactions will have to be done through debit or credit cards"

"There's tax relief for incomes up to 40,000 (euros)"

"Taxable income based on the new scales will include capital gains from the short-term trading of stocks"

"Deposits in banks outside Greece are exempted from audits of their origin if they are repatriated within six months of the passing of the tax bill and are taxed with a 5 percent rate"

"Wages of board members in unlisted state companies will fall by 50 percent"

And (surprise, surprise) income taxes are going up:

The new tax bill will increase the burden on the rich while easing taxation for those on low incomes. The top income bracket which will be taxed by the maximum 40 percent will be expanded to include incomes of over euro 60,000 a year, from the current euro 75,000 threshold.

(euro 60,000 to 75,000 is RICH???)

Prime Minister George Papandreou told a cabinet meeting that “Our primary duty now is to save the economy and reduce the debt, aiming to do so through the fairest possible solutions that will protect — as far as that is possible — the weaker and middle classes.”

I like that. Having mismanaged and destroyed the economy, they will now protect the "weaker and middle classes" "as far as that is possible". Time for a Sally Field "he likes us, he really likes us" commercial...

Under the new law, all Greeks must collect receipts in order to qualify for the income tax-free amount of euro 12,000 — an attempt to crack down on widespread tax evasion, where vendors under-declare their income by not giving receipts. Cash registers will have to be installed everywhere, including kiosks found on practically every Greek street, and food markets.

(Bummer. If they weren't so broke they could put in cameras to monitor those thieving vendors.)

Olympics Luge Death

Years ago, I was repulsed by the hypocrisy of the International Olympic Committee in allowing state sponsored athletes from various totalitarian hell holes to compete against the real amateurs. Then there was the biased judging, and the worst was the East German "female" swimmers built like Freightliners.

(Pity the East German men - instead of a marriage license, you needed a CDL. No steroids there, just move along...)

I find the Olympic games even less interesting as the "modern" sports such as snowboarding are added to the games, while original sports are watered down into irrelevance. Globalism is further dimming the intrigue - the EUrocollective are already diminished as countries and as competitors. Soon enough we'll be down to Oceania vs. Eurasia vs. Eastasia, and we'll skip the stadium construction and go straight to a few minutes hate. So, who cares? I haven't watched any portion of the 2010 games except the internet video of the luge fatality.

Close friends know of my passion for auto racing. Over the years, the racing community has lost a lot of drivers in terrible accidents. We've learned with each death and over time have made racing far safer. Track design is a major area of progress in the last two decades.

With this as my background, I was horrified to see the poor luge athlete slam into the post. It is sheer idiocy to design a steep, fast luge course and leave steel posts exposed for people to slam into.

Not just exposed steel posts, but perpendicular to the track.

F**k!

This death is the natural product of a chronologically mature bureaucracy at rest. Damn shame they didn't have a pro driver up to look things over before they killed that kid. (I'm far from a pro, and I would have noticed that hazard the first time I walked by. One wonders what hazards remain?) Any one of a number of simple measures would have made that course safe and turned that accident into something he walked away from, and - one which fades from the news by morning.

It probably would have been simplest to build a wall that prevented an out of control driver's body from going above and behind the course wall. (Duh!) Then, you'd just slide back down onto the course and even if you were really flying you could still be stopped by a net at the bottom of the hill. (Or a meat hook if they merely wanted to hurt you but not kill you. Anything beats a steel I-beam.) If someone's precious view was involved, use lexan for the wall.

But, nobody cared.

As to the jackass who said that death was due to driver error, well... He's lucky I wasn't in the room. Then the IOC tries to censor the video on the web. Then, the hypocritical bastards change the course, thereby acknowledging that it was gross negligence to begin with.

The athletes themselves could take a valuable lesson from racers here, too: We've known for decades that if you arrive at a new track and discover that a shithead designed the place, you stand together and refuse to run there.

Every aspect of this stinks.

I know we don't have China's 1.3 billion people, and on top of that ammo is dear these days. Nonetheless, I believe we could afford to take a few people out and shoot them, and the IOC is clearly the perfect place to start.

Change You CAN Believe In

I would hope everyone has made arrangements before now, but if not:



I recommend pre-1965 dimes and quarters as backup currency. A silver dime has been able to purchase a can of soup ever since it was minted in 1964, and it still does today. A quarter should buy a simple meal, as in soup and a sandwich with a glass of water. (People all over the world live on much less.)

The problem with silver ounces, bars and any form of gold is making change. Unless the person you're trading with has a bunch of quarters and dimes of his own, you'll have a hard time getting change for your Krugerrand when you buy groceries.

If you're new to the game, I wouldn't even start on gold until I had hundreds of dollars (face) worth of US Mint 90% silver on hand. If you now have gold but no silver, the ratio is very favorable to trade.

My best advice is to befriend a local independent coin dealer and make regular small purchases as often as you can. It's getting late, so don't worry much about price. Precious metals are a storehouse of wealth, and wealth evaporation is the major problem looking forward from here. Keep at it - slow and steady wins this race.

Hell may never freeze over...

...but two feet of snow and an utter standstill in Washington DC is close enough to pay attention and savor the moment.

Getting an Early Start

So, yeah, I cracked open a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat just now, which of course set me to thinking of this:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom – go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

In my present mood I'd have been far less polite.

More of Me

So, as I said - my thinking is coalescing at a rapid clip. Where I'm ending up is that Liberty (freedom) must be absolute. (If it's less than absolute, we need to come up with a new name for it. This is obvious, of course, but it takes a while to pull one's head far enough out of the Matrix that this becomes clear, and I just arrived!) Private property is the cornerstone of Liberty, so it must be sacrosanct. No mandatory assessment of any kind can be tolerated. None. (Give 'em an inch and you know happens. Remember - these clowns who want "just an inch" run the Good Intentions Paving Company...)

Here's a thought: "The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." F. Bastiat

Damn straight. And yet in every election we vote on our pet version of that exact fiction. It's actually not voting at all, and we should no longer call it that. We're merely bidding at auction for our neighbors property, and we're each bidding to buy the politician who promises us what we want - whether it's cradle to grave health care and 20 weeks of paid vacation or a cop behind every tree and a military that will obliterate Islam once and for all. Doesn't matter, because either vote - any vote - is predicated on the notion that the cost will largely be borne by others.

Yep. I've realized that voting is actually worse than a waste of time. It's ratifying theft (by surrogates) on a societal level. It would be much more honest (and efficient) if we'd merely steal each others cars!

Once we accept that Liberty cannot coexist with sanctioned theft, and when no politically viable candidate stands for Liberty, it's stupid to vote.

(Yes, I know Ron Paul was refreshing, but he was not politically viable. The machine saw to that. A vote for Paul was symbolic, and taking satisfaction from such a vote requires the delusion that someone in power cares about your symbolism. They don't. All I can say is they're pretty smug when, instead of shooting them, you do something completely pointless like voting and then go home feeling good about yourself. It was the likes of George Washington who last made a difference, and he wasn't much for symbolic acts!)

The simple truth is that the act of voting for any of these current scum is morally wrong, no matter how much we like what they promise. It's actually always been morally wrong to hire people to rob our neighbors in the guise of the common good, but it's particularly naive to do so at this late stage - even the village idiot can see that the government is only serving itself.

"The first law of economics is, there isn't enough to do everything. The first law of politics is to repeal the first law of economics." - T. Sowell

Yep. We've pretended we could repeal basic laws of economics, and we've spent so damn much that it's no longer mathematically possible to pay off the debt. We just bought two automakers, a giant insurance company, protection for countless Wall Street thieves & lying politicians and about ten million overpriced homes. True to form, we whipped out the Federal credit card and charged it all to our children, grandchildren, etc., etc., etc.

That's outright theft from the future just to pretend for a few more months that all this is ok and Obama really loves us, which brings me to my last quote:

"TANSTAAFL" (If, for God's sake, you don't know what this stands for, look it up.)

At this point, ANY vote ratifies the continuation of this thoroughly corrupt system. Voting constitutes consent, and our consent needs to be withdrawn in every possible way. NOT voting accomplishes two important things psychologically: 1) it's a personal acknowledgment of the scope of the problem and our complicity in it (to stop doing something bad is a moral act) and 2) it's physically refusing to play along. It may be scary, but you'll feel so much better when you reclaim your honesty...

Government is fake. Nothing about it is what they say it is. It's theatre. It's pretend. Someone needs to be the first to stop pretending, and they sure won't. It's up to us. The good news is - this is like any other bad play in theatrical history - it'll stop running just as soon as we quit buying tickets to the show.

No voting under this regime - this is the first thing.

There'll be more...

ATF Takes Interest In Texas Arson Fires...

...and they're only 6143 days late.

They're also quite likely still lacking the one investigative tool the agency needs most - a full length mirror!

Speaking of Atlas Shrugged:

Our deteriorating circumstances hit me harder and harder every day.

My already jaded views on the legitimacy of our current government are changing at a pace that seems at times to exceed the speed of sound. (Sorry, but that's the best way I can explain the deafening silence I experience daily, as the magnitude of our fall and our complicity in our own serfdom sinks in.)

Legitimacy is the operative word here, because even the parts of our government that are legitimate (or theoretically could be, anyway) no longer perform their legitimate function in society. Take the legal system (please) which now exists almost exclusively to feed itself by forcible extraction. It's obvious that those who most need policing these days are the police themselves. Further examples abound...

John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged sums up our predicament - our government, at all levels, has metastasized into "a nightmare infernal machine".

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his."

Exactly.

Those who continue to sleepwalk into this slavery have no excuse.

None.

After All the Pain He Inflicted on US...

...former POTUS (Philanderer of the United States) Clinton is hospitalized with some chest pains of his very own.

Chuckle. Score one for Karma!

Vocabulary Word of the Day...

"Nomenklatura"

The average Federal Government employee pulls (and I chose that term deliberately) in $70,000 per year. The average private sector employee sweats (another deliberate choice) out $40,000 per year.

"Nomenklatura" - just so you know what they're called.

Atlas Shrugged

Every day I turn on the news and see the latest machinations in Washington.

Naturally, I am reminded of the calamity in Taggart's Tunnel...

I'm pleased that a number of acquaintances have recently taken up reading Rand's seminal work - a real commitment for anyone who isn't a speed reader. In surveys, many readers rank "Shrugged" second only to the bible (I kid you not) as an influence in their daily lives. That is as it should be, for Rand makes the MORAL argument for self interest and shines the purest of light on the poseurs who "serve" us into oblivion while living so well on our backs.

Rand accurately predicted current events in a book written more than a half-century ago. This stands as one of the all-time great feats of observation, critical thinking and reasoning. There is in fact a physics governing human behavior, and in this realm of science "Shrugged" is a predictive thought experiment on par with any of Einstein's work.

I note that in step with the renewed interest in Atlas Shrugged comes a renewed smear campaign against Rand's process of clear thought. I see nothing in the way of honest debate in this line of criticism. Rather, the collectivist eunuchs of both wings are applying their anti-reason in hopes of muddying the waters to the point that nobody will read "Shrugged" for themselves. A (psuedo) intellectual book burning, if you will, by folks who aren't honest enough to use matches.

The moral of "Shrugged" is that collectivism is just the slow-motion gang-rape of the productive and self-reliant - a conclusion that is just about unavoidable for any sentient being on the scene today. The fact that it's a long read just accentuates the slow-motion nature of the crime, and adds considerably to the experience.

Get your copy, and get going...

And Yet They're Buying More...

"Once the state has determined you’re a nail in need of smashing, there’s really no limit to the number of hammers at its disposal."

Our National Anthem

I'm really not one for regulation, but after watching the Super Bowl I find myself reflecting yet again on the matter of just how few people should be singing in public. Sunday afternoon was unpleasant but far from the worst, as the fertile ground of YouTube demonstrates:



And then there's this. (I leave further comments to your imagination...)



If one actually knows what one's about, our national anthem is child's play:

More Thoughts on Gold, Chinese Style...

An interesting essay on recent "curious" behavior on the part of the Chinese government. I know that confiscation always looms, but it certainly challenges stereotypes to think that the (ostensibly communist) Chinese gov't may care a great deal more for the financial well-being of its' people (or at least their own nation) than the monkeys in DC.

Zimbabwe on the Potomac...

The Federal Reserve purchased almost 80 percent of the Treasuries sold last year.

A Glaring Half-Truth

I generally don't comment on any of the Boy King's sound bite utterances - to do so could quickly become three full time jobs and might imperil the available bandwidth. Today is an exception. In a whistle-stop photo-op speech at a small business he managed to strike a nerve.

In his freshly minted populist/outside observer persona, he stated that "there's a limit to what government can do"... That's only half true, and Barry knows it. There's certainly a limit to the good government can do, but there's no apparent limit to the harm they can do.

Keep struttin' around in your new clothes, Mr. Emperor - you do more in five minutes to wake this nation up than I could in a lifetime...

Toyota Trouble

Anyone who's an automotive enthusiast (and who wasn't born last night - me, on both counts!) recalls the ruckus over "unintended acceleration" in Audi cars a while back. Those accusations were eventually discredited and Audi was cleared, but not before the company took a tremendous hit in sales and prestige. The current situation with Toyota Motor Company and the gas pedal recall sounds strikingly similar, and one wonders if it will end up similarly credible...

Toyota has a great reputation, and deservedly so. Their product lines - including the luxury brand Lexus - are well engineered, well made and notably reliable. This has led to industry-leading resale values and tremendous customer loyalty. Toyota has also done well in several forms of auto racing, which is arguably the most severe test of an auto company. As a constructor they finished fifth (just behind Ferrari!) in the Formula One World Championship last year!

This current debacle points out one more reason (as if we needed another!) that the US Government has NO business bailing out private companies - they are now in the position of regulating their own biggest competitor in the auto industry. Talk about a conflict of interest!!! I'm wondering what really motivates the timing and aggressiveness of these recalls and am particularly curious about that little "slip of the tongue" saying people should park their Toyotas until they are repaired.

Toyota recently surpassed GM as the world's highest volume automaker and was doing pretty well despite the economic meltdown. The Camry, Corolla, Prius and Rav4 were solidly entrenched in the top 15 best selling vehicles in America. Since the recall Toyota stock is down nearly 20%. (This would be a great buy if the market itself was at all healthy.) Toyota car and truck sales have likewise fallen off the bottom of the charts.

The timing is curious. All considered, it's difficult to envision any move that would be more beneficial to GM and Chrysler at this moment in history. Just another happy coincidence, I'm sure...

Social Security in the Red This Year!

With such high unemployment, payroll tax receipts will not cover SS expenditures this year. The interest we "pay" on the debt we owe SS is just a bookkeeping entry so no help there. Talk about the chickens coming home to roost...

When SS started under FDR, nobody could foresee the post war baby boom. At that time, they smugly believed it would produce current year revenue for the government in perpetuity. They even said so on the front page of the bill!

Once the baby boom hit (and our boom lasted 2x longer than in any other country that fought WWII) SS was mathematically doomed. Any junior actuary - basically just a math major with a bachelor's - could have told you as much since 1970 if not sooner.

Our baby boom demographics also guarantee that socialized medicine will be an expensive failure. US demographics already guarantee significant rationing of health care in the very near future. The only question is: should we involve government bureaucrats in this or are such difficult decisions best left to doctors and patients?

The downhill slide of America will be hard enough on all of us anyway - who needs more unaccountable government drones mixed into the health care equation???

Taleb Says to Short US Treasuries

From Bloomberg via BusinessWeek.com:

Feb. 4 -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” said “every single human being” should bet U.S. Treasury bonds will decline, citing the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and the Obama administration.

It’s “a no brainer” to sell short Treasuries, Taleb, a principal at Universa Investments LP in Santa Monica, California, said at a conference in Moscow today. “Every single human being should have that trade.”

Taleb said investors should bet on a rise in long-term U.S. Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, as long as Bernanke and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers are in office, without being more specific.

The Fed and U.S. agencies have lent, spent or guaranteed $9.66 trillion to lift the economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. President Barack Obama has increased the U.S. marketable debt to a record $7.27 trillion as he tries to sustain the recovery from last year’s recession. Obama projects the U.S. budget deficit will rise to a record $1.6 trillion in the 2011 fiscal year.

Rejection Letter

Letter from an employer near you...

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your application for the open position we advertised. This is to inform you that this position has been filled by somebody with an unpronounceable name, an immigrant from a foreign country in which 9/11 is not viewed as a great tragedy. We are paying this person just 50% of what we paid the last person (an American) who held this position.

We are truly sorry that you have been unable to find work since being laid off fourteen months ago. Our firm, which received federal funds through the TARP bailout program, appreciates your interest.

Signed,

Corporate America

How Are Banks REALLY Doing?

Here's an interesting site, to say the least. Run by a guy who's worked in the banking industry and compiled from FDIC data, it tells a slightly different story than we hear on the nightly news...

Link

You can also use the "find bank" feature, then click on the holding company name and get a look at any bank's loan portfolio.