The AIG bonus “outrage” of the last week is a complete joke, put forth by the same people who voted to give these people our tax money in the first place.  For excellent commentary, please refer to the following articles:

Minority View, from Powerlineblog.  A good sum up of the facts behind the whole thing.

Dodd Changes His Story, from Powerlineblog.

Bill Of Attainder, from Wikipedia.  The 90% tax bill passed by the House is completely unconstitutional.  Not that they care about that sort of thing.  Apparently even the Obama Administration is starting to think so.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) told a crowed at a church in San Francisco that it was un-American to enforce our immigration laws.  She wishes to stop raids and deportations because she sees enforcing those laws as un-American?  Then why should I have to follow laws I don’t like?  We have already learned from several of President Obama’s cabinet picks that we may not have to pay taxes either.  What kind of system is this?  Is this the new era of responsibility that Obama and the Democrats talked about?  Ignore laws you don’t like?

I guess this was an important enough issue that Speaker Pelosi felt compelled to speak on.  You know, ensuring that people that have come into our country illegally have a way of getting jobs and using our tax-funded institutions such as health services and education while legal Americans are struggling to get jobs or hold onto them and trying to pay for healthcare.  Welcome to the Democrats’ America–where you may be better off if you’re here illegally.

For some reason, Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net, an ISP based in Northern California - @dane - enjoys slipping in occasional, and sometimes nonsensical, jabs at Christians, pro-lifers, and the Religious Right in his Twitter feed.

Why he thinks this is a good idea is for anyone to guess. He must either

1. presume that no one listening to him is a Christian, nor is anyone offended by the ridiculing thereof; or
2. think it’s good business to make fun of an entire culture in a way completely unrelated to his industry; or
3. think that Christians do not deserve the same respect as other cultures.

Is this a trend? A marketing strategy?

Most likely he assumes that any person in California intelligent enough to read his posts shares his views.

This is not the case, Mr. Jasper. Perhaps you could tone it down.

Here’s the best commentary that I’ve read on the current economic situation:

The story so far: some capitalists behaved very badly. While this was going on, the socialists didn’t ask questions because they were too busy spending the receipts that flowed from that behaviour. Now, the socialists - who were happy to look the other way during the good times or even to delude themselves into thinking that they were responsible for them - want to use the ignominy of the capitalists to seize the kind of power they thought they had lost forever. …

In Gordon Brown’s fantasy, this is an “opportunity” to exercise control over the whole world. Not just stricter regulation by national governments of their own economic institutions, but a wondrous new level of international regulation by supranational functionaries - to be appointed by whom? A World Government agency accountable to no electorate and with no democratic mandate from the populations over whom it will wield such power? …

Meanwhile, Mr Obama - who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom - talks of an “opportunity” to “reorganise our priorities”. He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America’s failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming (”we made the wrong choices”), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country’s economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? …

What neither the Prime Minister nor the President can admit is what is becoming more obvious every day (and which has been admitted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key): there is precious little that any politician can do to resolve the present economic problems. The values of assets and property are simply going to have to fall from the grossly inflated points they reached under the debt bubble to what are generally accepted to be realistic levels. Then people will start to do business again - as eventually they must - and confidence will gradually return.

… I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

As Charles Krauthammer said:  Obama’s efforts to use the economic crisis to transform education, healthcare and energy “is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.”

From Powerline.

In the last 24 hours or so I have seen this story in various places, and honestly, I don’t get it.  I’ve been confused all week, from Obama’s big “not a State Of The Union,” State Of The Union address, to his $3.5 trillion budget, which comes with a pretty blue cover and the words “The era of responsibility” stamped on the front.  I really can’t say it better than how Powerline put it in response to Obma’s claim to be ready to fight lobbyists, when they said yesterday, “As Obama well knows, lobbyists all over Washington are lighting cigars with $50 bills at the prospect of having $3.7 trillion worth of spoils to divvy up. Obama must think the American people–his supporters, anyway–are complete idiots.”

In the context of the Tuesday’s speech and the budget, I really can’t decide how he actually views the American people.  I described the speech to a few friends as “a bunch of statements that sound inspiring and plausible to everyone except those who get their news from somewhere other than MTV.”  He keeps throwing this “era of responsibility” tag around, and yet in reality it’s more accurate to describe it as “the era of insurmountable deficits.”  (just look at the graph here) How is that responsible?  And as often as he can Obama throws in the “I inherited this deficit from Bush” line.  Right.  So the best response is to make it 10 times worse?  And don’t forget, he actually said in his speech that he was not a fan of big government.  With a straight face, no less.

Additionally, we are now on the cusp of subsidizing mortgages.  Just think about that one- some of our neighbors aren’t able to make adequate payments on their houses, and rather than letting them deal with the ramifications of making unwise decisions, we are going to take money out of people’s pockets who were responsible, in order to help those that aren’t.  Any citizen in the country would agree that stealing and slavery are morally wrong, but a high percentage are apparently willing to look the other way when it benefits themselves.

So I ask, how does Obama see the American people?  He clearly knows that talking about responsibility is something the public wants to hear.  And he apparently knows that the majority of Americans will turn a blind eye to the fact that his actions are not coming even close to lining up with his rhetoric, pre and post campaign.  So does he think we are, as Powerline sarcastically put it, idiots?  Does he know, as J. Norman and I often say to each other, that he is the MTV President for the MTV Generation?  Has he rightly identified that the vast majority of the public is completely ignorant of basic economics and history, and is then exploiting it?

He can’t have it both ways.  He can’t talk about responsibility and do the polar opposite, all while self proclaiming his own moral authority.  If he really believes what he is saying, his actions would at least be on the same planet as his words, which they’re not.  Is a little change from business as usual too much to ask?  Apparently so this time around.