Some guy named Karl Denninger:

Let's be clear: These banksters have robbed well over $100 billion dollars from taxpayers and citizens via various schemes in the last decade. These scams have included securitizing loans that they either knew or should have known were laced with fraud, in some cases shorting them while selling them on to other people. It includes outrageously-complex and intentionally-obfuscated securities "packages" for municipalities which have resulted in huge losses for the town (and huge fees and profits for the bank.) It has included marketing "auction rate" securities which were claimed to be as liquid and safe as cash, when in fact nothing of the sort was true. The schemes and scams run the gamut but at their core was the intentional obfuscation of the true nature of the risk embedded in these instruments so that the dupe (that would be you, your town, your state) would wind up losing money all for their benefit: you would enter into a complex swap transaction you didn't understand, you'd buy a bubble house with an OptionARM after being told you "definitely" could refinance before payments would go up, your kid was sold an expensive educational loan package without being told that it was unable to be discharged in bankruptcy, you were given a credit card with 27 pages of fine print, and buried somewhere in there was vague language letting the company jack your interest rate to anything it wanted - including the 36% it did jack it to - if you missed an electric bill by three days.

Then, when the game of musical chairs ended and all this debt that could not possibly be paid off started to default these very same banksters went to Congress through Paulson and Bernanke, the chiefs of the bankster scam parade, and in my opinion literally committed economic terrorism: hand over $2 trillion dollars hiding all but $700 billion, or we detonate the entirety of the economy and everyone literally starves.

How does this differ from an old-fashioned Al-Quaida terrorist who calls in a nuclear bomb threat? "Hand over $2 trillion dollars or New York City will be vaporized."

Hmmmmm... sounds kinda like the same thing to me!

Now let's juxtapose this with the fact that every Congressperson took an oath to defend The Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.

So riddle me this my fellow Americans: How is it that Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner, and both Presidents Bush and Obama are still free men instead of being housed at GITMO? How is it that on that fateful night in September of 2008 when Bernanke and Paulson "briefed" Congress and demanded $700 billion in ransom and a blank check to back-door an unlimited amount in "guarantees" and "pass-throughs" to their banking buddies the Sargeant At Arms was not immediately called to place these goons under arrest pending indictment and prosecution?

The next question is equally obvious and leads one down some pretty disturbing paths: If there is NOT ONE man or woman Congress who will discharge THEIR oath of office, is there anyone left in this country who took an identical oath that will?

The worst part is that it didn't end with payment of the ransom. No, the banks didn't come clean, they didn't clear their balance sheets, they didn't take their losses using the backstop they had managed to secure through threat of imminent economic doom.

On the contrary: They lied some more! They in fact lobbied Congress and had them bring pressure on FASB, threatening to legislate legalization of accounting fraud, and twisted FASB's arm into issuing what amounted to an executive order making legal any and all lies about asset valuation! We now know this happened because in point of fact the amount of loss that has been seen in the form of write-downs when banks fail has roughly doubled from last year to this, and these are not small numbers: we're talking about going from roughly 15% to roughly 35!

We need to rise up, march on Washington and clean out the stables, I think.

From xkcd

Yes, indeed, this really is how we do it, everyone. Trust me, I built a pretty good career out of doing this much of the time. OK, I also had the rare ability to actually read and comprehend technical manuals, but still, this is how we REALLY do it.

Also via Coyote Blog.

It seems like we're lectured on a daily basis how one industry or another is making "obscene profits."

Well?

From the Cato Institute

This is AVERAGE compensation, folks, including both salary and benefits. Remind me again who's making obscene profits?

I think the Government has plenty of money, don't you?

Hat tip: Coyote Blog.

The health care debate, summed up in a single statement:

"You know, what we're doing doesn't work. So, we should do MORE of it."

Go read this Atlantic article (which I previously posted on here. Hell, don't just read it. Memorize it.

Update: I'm promoting this to a "featured" article, so it will show up at the top of the articles for a while.

Update:A Modest Proposal from a physician:

Since we are moving toward socialism with ObamaCare, the time has come to do the same with other professions—especially lawyers. Physician committees can decide whether lawyers are necessary in any given situation.

There's an old saying: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Regarding Obama's bizarre swerve into muddling church and state (by the way, it's remarkable, isn't it how all of the sudden it's a religious imperative to enact a political agenda?), here's a few more passages from a book considered by many to be holy:

Proverbs 16:18 Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

Proverbs 11:2 When pride comes, then comes dishonor, But with the humble is wisdom.

Proverbs 18:12 Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, But humility goes before honor.

Jeremiah 49:16 "As for the terror of you, The arrogance of your heart has deceived you, O you who live in the clefts of the rock, Who occupy the height of the hill. Though you make your nest as high as an eagle's, I will bring you down from there," declares the LORD.

Obadiah 1:3 "The arrogance of your heart has deceived you, You who live in the clefts of the rock, In the loftiness of your dwelling place, Who say in your heart, 'Who will bring me down to earth?

Inspired by an Andrew Klavan post, where he says, in part:

Obama told the rebs (rabbis), “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

In response to this statement I would like to make a subtle theological point: No, we’re not. For those of you who aren’t versed in the finer points of theology, let me try to simplify that for you: No. We’re not. Or to put it even more simply: No. We. Are. Not.

It is not Obama's opponents who are risking the heights of pride and hubris. Most of us just want to be left alone, really. We're certainly not going around elevating ourselves to a point where we think we're God's partners. My vague recollection of Sunday School is that there's only one man who sits at the right hand of God, and it isn't Barack Hussein Obama.

You, too can check facts just like the AP does. Now, since you can't post an article from the AP or even, as far as I know, link to one without the AP wanting you to pay a bajillion dollars, you'll have to look for yourself for what Ace at Ace of Spades HQ says about it:

Here's what the AP's "fact check" would have looked like in the summer of 1974, if they were this in-the-bag for Richard Nixon:

POLLL: 70% of the public believes the President participated in, or was aware of, or even ordered the cover up of the Watergate burglary.

FACT: President Nixon says "I am not a crook." Next.

Uh, okay. Really jerked that one out of the park there, buddy.

It's crazy, but there is an unexpressed assumption (redundant, I know) lurking under the surface of the AP's "fact check."

That assumption: Obama, being our Savior, is of course incapable of lying. Like Superman.*

They really seem to believe this. Or seem to believe, at least, that you should believe it. I don't know how else to explain their apparent belief that Obama's unsupported, and often utterly contradicted, claims are to be taken as wholly authoritative on all issues of contention.

* Can't lie? Okay, he can lie, he just doesn't. Or at least not very often.

Denver Post has this thrilling story of a simian near-escape:

"He certainly wasn't any trouble," (a zoo spokeswoman) said. "He did exactly what we would have hoped he would do."

Charlie, a 12-year-old, was outside his pen only about three minutes, she said, and was never at risk of escaping or confronting visitors.

Those wacky free-marketeers down in Auburn, Alabama. But first, enjoy this little image accompaning the third story:

Now, to the articles. First up, What Libertarianism Is (notable in part for the use of the rather amusing word grundnorm):

. . . libertarians maintain that the only way to violate rights is by initiating force — that is, by committing aggression. (Libertarianism also holds that, while the initiation of force against another person's body is impermissible, force used in response to aggression — such as defensive, restitutive, or retaliatory/punitive force — is justified.)

Without property rights, there is always the possibility of conflict over contestable (scarce) resources. By assigning an owner to each resource, legal systems make possible conflict-free use of resources, by establishing visible boundaries that nonowners can avoid. Libertarianism does not endorse just any property assignment rule, however. It favors self-ownership over other-ownership (slavery).

Thus, the libertarian position on property rights is that, in order to permit conflict-free, productive use of scarce resources, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. As noted above, however, the title assignment must not be random, arbitrary, or particularistic; instead, it has to be assigned based on "the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner" and the resource claimed. As can be seen from the considerations presented above, the link is the physical transformation or embordering of the original homesteader, or a chain of title traceable by contract back to him.

Thus, if civilized man is he who seeks justification for the use of violence, the libertarian is he who is serious about this endeavor. He has a deep, principled, innate opposition to violence, and an equally deep commitment to peace and cooperation.

Next, The Republic becomes the Empire:

How much does the younger half of this generation reflect upon the fact that in its own time a complete revolution has taken place in the relations between government and people? It may be doubted that one college student in a thousand could even state it clearly. The first article of our inherited tradition, implicit in American thought from the beginning until a few years ago, was this: Government is the responsibility of a self-governing people. That doctrine has been swept away; only the elders remember it.

Now, in the name of democracy, it is accepted as a political fact that people are the responsibility of government. The forms of republican government survive; the character of the state has changed. Formerly the people supported government and set limits to it and minded their own lives.

Now they pay for unlimited government, whether they want it or not, and the government minds their lives — looking to how they are fed and clothed and housed; how they provide for their old age; how the national income, which is the product of their own labor, shall be divided among them; how they shall buy and sell; how long and how hard and under what conditions they shall work, and how equity shall be maintained between the buyers of food who dwell in the cities and the producers of food who live on the soil. For the last named purpose it resorts to a system of subsidies, penalties and compulsions, and assumes with medieval wisdom to fix the just price.

This is the Welfare State. It rose suddenly within the form. It is legal because the Supreme Court says it is. The Supreme Court once said no and then changed its mind and said yes, because meanwhile the President who was the architect of the Welfare State had appointed to the Supreme Court bench men who believed in it.

Emphasis in original.

Third, What Soviet medicine teaches us:

Being a People's Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save "precious" X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl's parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl's grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin's socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the "gray masses" and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

That should feed your deep-thought needs for the day.

Los Angeles Times mistakenly listed MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" with the name of the MTV show "Jackass."

Freudian slip, I think.

Are you still stupid enough to believe the wee-weed-up snake-oil salesman named Obama? Obama obviously thinks you are.

Don't get mad. Read Lowry's article.