Two charts, showing the debt of the Federal Reserve:

Borrowings (debt) of the Federal Reserve, to 2007

Borrowings (debt) of the Federal Reserve, to 2008

Notice that the spike on the 2007 chart doesn't even register on the 2008 chart. This Is Not Good.

The phrase "mouth writing checks the bank account can't cover" comes to mind. This is the Obama plan: spend the nation into bankruptcy, and then buy up the bargains, with government, of course, as the holder of all of the strings.

Welcome to the Socialist Workers Paradise. We know from bitter historical experience how well that works out. If you need a refresher, schedule a trip to Cuba.

We won't recover from Obama's Presidency for at least a century. If we're lucky.

How's that for Hope and Change? You Hoped for the better. You got Change for the worse. I hope you morons who voted for Obama are happy. (My actual opinion of Obama voters is much worse than "moron," by the way.)

(Not that McCain was much better, but he--I think--knew better than to drive the economy completely off of the cliff it was clinging onto.)

Hat tip: Directorblue

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has now lost 12% since Obama took office on January 21st. The S&P 500 is down 8% in the same time period. From Election day, November 4, both the Dow and the S&P are down 26%. So, at what point does this become the Obama Recession/Depression? I seem to recall that previous Republican Presidents became responsible for the economy as soon as they took power, if not before. Shouldn't what was good for the goose be good for the gander, too? The country has been on the wrong track for a long, long time. It seems to me that all Obama's doing is putting his foot down on the accelerator. He's not moving the steering wheel at all, and that cliff edge is getting closer and closer. (Enough metaphors for you?) Freedom and especially personal responsibility will fix the economy. Phony stimulus, political spoils, class warfare, social engineering, fearmongering and Marxist-level income redistribution will make the problems we have worse, not better.

Sometimes, we read that "nobody saw it coming" regarding the current economic mess, driven largely by the residential real estate bubble which was in turn driven by government policies that pushed banks to lend money to people who couldn't afford them--the "sub-prime" mortgages which are now so notorious.

That particular Ponzi scheme collapsed last fall, just in time to elect hard-core leftists to power in the United States. Gary North of the Mises Institute effectively demolishes the "nobody saw it coming" line.

Ever since September of 2008, we have seen the fruits of the fiat money roots that Mises warned against almost a century ago. But modern free-market economists are as hostile to Mises's theory of the business cycle as they were hostile to Mises's theory of the economic irrationalism of socialism … until the Soviet Union fell. Then, they got religion, but they still never mention Mises. It was as if he had never lived.

Mises? Who is Mises? Yes, the Soviet Union went bankrupt. We didn't think it would in 1986. Except for that lucky guesser Judy Shelton, nobody predicted that it would. We told people that the Soviet Union had remarkable economic growth. Yes, it turned out that the Soviet Union was nothing but Bangladesh with missiles, just as journalist Richard Grenier said in the 1980s. We did not see this at the time. Still, we will take credit for its collapse anyway: the new capitalism defeated it. We will continue to praise the regulated fascist economy that the United States has been over the last hundred years, and call for more of the same. We love economic efficiency, because efficiency lets the state get larger. When people get richer, they can pay more taxes.

This is why academic economists are demanding even more federal spending to bail out the banks and the other institutions associated with high finance. Almost to a man, they are saying that the bailouts are necessary. Why? Because they have been great proponents of the mixed economy ever since John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory in 1936 — even before this, since the real mentor of American fascist banking, Irving Fisher, back in 1911.

Here's a post I made right here on Medary.com on January 17th, 2008--nine months before the bubble burst:

How long can we afford to pay the bill for other people's irresponsibility? At what point do we start demanding that our fellow citizens get their snouts out of the public till, put their heads down, get to work, and SUCK IT UP?

It's hard to be "heartless." It's much easier to be an enabler--"oh, you poor thing, here, let me allow you to continue to wallow in self-destructive behavior while fooling yourself that all of your problems are caused by somebody else. Poor baby."

You know what? If you took out one of these sub-prime mortgages to buy a house you couldn't afford, you're an idiot. If you were the ones holding out sub-prime loans to people who couldn't afford them, you're a scoundrel.

Scoundrels need idiots almost but not quite as much as idiots need scoundrels.

Suck it up, everyone. You made your own hole. Dig yourself out of it. Quit borrowing money, start living on, as Dave Ramsey says, "beans and rice, rice and beans." Take control of your own life, unless you really, really, really want somebody else to control it for you.

Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like a large segment of the American public wants exactly that. To which I can only say: be very careful what you wish for.

There were people who saw this coming. Hell, even George W. Bush, no brilliant economic mind, saw it coming, and belatedly tried to reform Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac just before they completely drove over the cliff, taking the rest of the world with them.

So now people in Washington are seriously talking about nationalizing banks, and forcing the responsible people (those who didn't participate in the mortgage/housing bubble) to give money at the point of the IRS gun to the irresponsible people, those who made those disastrous loans, and those who were duped into taking them.

This is necessary in order for the idiots and the scoundrels to learn the proper lesson: that it's OK if you do stupid things, because there will always be enough non-stupid people around who the government can steal money from to bail out the stupid people.

I guess I need to re-evaluate who's really been stupid all along, and modify my behavior accordingly.

Among the many unread goodies in the Law of the Land which was formerly known as the "Stimulus Bill" is the authority for the President to shut down the activities of the Inspector Generals of the various Federal agencies. Via Wizbang, from Byron York:

In the name of accountability and transparency, Congress has given the RAT Board the authority to ask "that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting an audit or investigation." If the inspector general doesn't want to follow the wishes of the RAT Board, he'll have to write a report explaining his decision to the board, as well as to the head of his agency (from whom he is supposedly independent) and to Congress. In the end, a determined inspector general can probably get his way, but only after jumping through bureaucratic hoops that will inevitably make him hesitate to go forward.

The RAT Board appears to be well-named. What do the Democrats and Obama plan to hide from the potentially inconvenient eyes of an Inspector General?

I HOPE that this particular law will be CHANGED. For the children.

I'm in.

All this is due to CNBC reporter Rick Santelli (at least he was a CNBC reporter this morning . . .) who, as reported on Rush Limbaugh's radio show as well as many points on the Internet, morphed from reporter to rabble-rouser, the rabble in this case being the traders on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. He says we need a Chicago Tea Party this July.

The video is here (about five minutes of reporter-ranty goodness).

I'm there. As Thomas Jefferson said, "A little revolution now and then is a good thing; the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

And yeah, taxation IS tyranny. Always has been.

Who else is in? A partial list, courtesy the technosocialists at Google:

American Princess
The Market Ticker
The National Conversation (Raw)
Neo-Neocon
Backyard Conservative, who says he's hearing it will be Tax Day, April 15th. I say, why limit it to only one Tea Party?
The Hedgehog Report
Take a TECKnews
Batman's Manifestoes(sic)
Roger L. Simon (a founder of Pajamas Media)
From the Foothills
The Rational Capitalist
Axis of Right
EppsNet
Temple of Mut
Southern Belle Politics
Ned Grace
Geldpress
980 At Night (Oh good lord, 980 KMBZ snuck a brand-new local program in on me . . . midnight to 2 am Saturday nights. Why doesn't anyone tell me these things!
Liberally Conservative
Storm'n Norm'n (probably not General Schwartzkopf)

That's just a few of the 100,000+ blog mentions currently on Google.

And, finally, credit where due, the image leading off this article is from The Market Ticker. It needs to be angrier, IMHO, with pitchforks and the like. But still . . .

See you in Chicago!

As a lady in Stamford, Connecticut discovered:

Stamford police shot the chimp multiple times when he ripped off a side mirror and tried to enter a police cruiser, Conklin said. Travis (the chimpanzee) returned to the house and died inside.

British, French nuclear subs collide in Atlantic

Confirming media reports of the incident involving Britain's HMS Vanguard and France's Le Triomphant, Britain's First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathon Band said the submarines "were conducting routine ... patrols in the Atlantic Ocean.

"The submarines came into contact at very low speed... No injuries occurred," he said in a brief statement to reporters.

The headline is good enough for me to post: Rote memorization of historical facts adds to collective cluelessness:

Brenda M. Trofanenko, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, says that teaching history by rote – that is, by having students memorize historical dates and then testing them on how well they can regurgitate that data on a test – is a pedagogical method guaranteed to get students to tune out and add to our collective civic and historical cluelessness.

Via Instapundit, this brochure at Mises.org . . . brought to you by . . . General Motors! (Originally published in Look magazine, back in the day, when the U.S. was opposed to that sort of thing.)

You Obama voters really just don't see this coming, do you? It's still all changey-hopeyness and flowers and sunshine and unicorns and stuff.

Well, don't say you weren't warned. "People get the government that they deserve."

Forwarded to my by a friend, seen in South Dakota's state capital city as the State Legislature was coming to town:

I'm told that the BS in question refers to a local car dealer's annual "blizzard sale," although I'm not completely convinced of that.