John Hall adds his name to the list of Democratic Congressmembers who wanted to provide for socialist bailouts to failed banks.

Of course, the story goes deeper than that as well: the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of those Democrats who permitted the CRA and took a slice of the fat pie that Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac had to offer up.

Men like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who helped themselves to that fat pie on the backs of unqualified borrowers and ultimately taxpayers.

Shame on you, Mr. Hall… and for your failure to look after the best interests of the taxpayers and citizens of New York’s 19th Congressional District, you have ensured that I will support your opponent, Mr. Kieran Michael Lalor, with my time, financial resources, and most certainly my vote.

By the grace of God, Mr. Hall, and with the blessing and votes of my fellow citizens in NY-19th… come November 4th, you just might find that your services are no longer required.

Mr Lalor offers his view and his support for the hardworking taxpayers and business owners of New York’s Hudson Valley here:

http://kieran2008.blogspot.com/2008/09/lalor-commends-bipartisan-defeat-of.html

Clearly Mr. Lalor *is* a maverick - the right kind of maverick who will take us away from the failed policies of the 110th Democratic-lead Congresss, and away from some of the more questionable economic policies supported by President Bush.

…but you kind of expected something like this.

Hat tip to Dan Riehl, who fights back against the Democratic Smear Machine™ with this bit of Truth to (fire)Power™:

Given a (forgive the pun) bulletproof Democratic supermajority Congress and (in his own mind) Great Leader Obama in the White House, along with some SCOTUS and lower court packing, the effective disarming of the American citizen - the last bastion against an unchecked freefall into dictatorship and tyranny of a sort our forefathers never knew — could easily become a matter of fact rather quickly.

It’s Official!

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog/?p=582#more-582

Boy, I’ll say that Bob Barr probably regrets not only dissing Dr. Paul’s Conference of the Third Parties at the National Press Club, but also adding insult to the injury by needling Dr. Paul over his previous neutrality.

Axiom: The Government that governs best, governs least.

Corollary: An absence of law most often results in the presence of chaos.

Biblical Principal:

A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight. (Proverbs 11:1, KJV)

Taking into consideration the recent “Perfect Storm” of fear, distress, and simply put, very bad economic planning (or extremely wicked, deliberately planned devastation to our economy, choose your poison), one can clearly see that some things were (and still are) completely out of balance.

And, as another Bible verse states:

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” (Proverbs 29:2 , KJV).

And groan we shall, for wicked men - supposedly “conservatives” have been at rule, through our collective electoral apathy: with the Federal Reserve Bank (money suppliers) and the Treasury (money printers) conspire along with our politicians (mostly the Democrats) to allow, or even force banks to extend credit to people very well ill-suited and ill-prepared to handle it - the system falls apart when the Piper comes to collect his due.

That Piper, is accompanied by twin goons known by the names “Inflation” and “Unsustainable Consumer Debt” who also must collect their skim of the taxpayer’s earnings - for we are become surety for strangers (breaking yet another Biblical principle) by our (as in We, the People) malfeasance in holding Congress to a short account.

The break in responsibility and accountability becomes quite tenuous after Congress, for they do not have direct control over the doings of the Federal Reserve (hereinafter, the “Fed”), which is in actuality a private corporation. Much like Federal Express is also a non-governmental entity.

This is a direct result of the de-regulation of the banking system during the Reagan years, and while this would be something that would ordinarily be greeted with great big open arms by conservatives, this has turned into a tragedy.

Government is constituted primarily to provide services that one man or a group of men cannot ordinarily provide for themselves on a larger scale in the community interest. There are police who (are supposed to) protect the public peace; firemen who prevent and put out fires; post offices which ensure that letters make it from point A to point B; the military to repel invasions and suppress unlawful* insurrections; and interstate commerce regulation to insure that the transit of goods between states is not inhibited… and so on, and so forth.

Conservatives do believe that a government should be limited to a specific public mandate, that it should be held to a short and frequent accounting, and that the scope of its power be quickly reigned in and prevented from creeping beyond that public mandate which called it to duty. Each and every time a new power is sought, or some expansion of taxation, or some other mission sought, the public should look upon it with extreme suspicion and seek to impede such expansion, unless the costs and inconvenience to the public be demonstrably be such that the result of not impeding the expansion of governmental powers be gravely injurious to the public good: and that or those new powers should be limited to a time only necessary to resolve the problem at hand, unless it is clear that such an external threat of injury to the Republic is not likely to be undone or removed.

Herein is our dilemma: should we get past this current economic crisis - one very much of our own doing, whether by ignorance, or by greed, or by unwillingness to hold ourselves and our government to such an account… will we have the courage to admit that at least in the arena of banking deregulation, that we were wrong?

This is not to say that we should embrace the “liberal” view that all government interference is good or even desirable; an overabundance of regulation would only serve to squelch growth, and given the liberal’s love of taxation and “wealth redistribution” (which, in the socialist code they like to deal in, means taking from me and you, the middle class, and using it to furtively pad their own bank accounts: at least the GOP is pretty up front and open with its avarice)

Rather, that we should look to God’s Word which proves that a just balance is indeed delightful, and that by allowing banks and traders to run riot with the economy and prey upon the imprudent with impiety and utter avarice, that they may become the dog of Aesop’s fable that threw itself into the river to get the second illusory bone, only to come up a drowned dog.

Instead, prudent and conservative regulation to set up a fence on that bridge, and a short leash on traders, investment banks, and mortgage bundlers is in order to restore the just balance.

But for that to happen, we will need to elect righteous men, conservative men - men who obey the principles in God’s Word - men like Dr. Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party to public office.

The net loss of over 7% (812 points) of the Dow Jones over three days (wiping out all gains made since the second week of November, 2005) is an effect of the US government takeovers - nationalisation - of no less than three financial entities.

The first two, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were originally quasi-government owned (managed), so while it might be easy to overlook that, the takeover of AIG (American Insurance Group) to the tune of an $85 BILLION line of credit in exchange for the “taxpayers” taking over 79.9% of AIG’s assets is not so easily overlooked.

And with Dow Jones well within sight of crashing through the 10,000 floor … we may be looking at only the beginning of an economic bloodletting that could finally tip us over into the Great Depression II, which writers like Soejima Takahiko and other doomers have been gleefully awaiting to vindicate their theories.

Are we looking at a whole new era of federal nationalisations of any business that appears to be failing (providing of course, it passes the size and interest tests)…?

Looking at the Bank of America acquisition of Merrill-Lynch, and Washington Mutual (WaMu) shopping for buyers… these short-suspense cannibalisations seem to be based upon the premise that if they become “too big to fail”, then Uncle Sam will step in with loans drawn upon the taxpayer’s back, and their children’s futures.

This cannot bode well for the free markets, and if this is going on during the “green tree” of an ostensibly free-market “Republican” administration, what shall happen during the “dry tree”… if the socialism-loving, nationalisation-trigger-happy Democrats take over on January 2009?

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D, NY-22) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D, CA-35) have made it perfectly plain that if given their druthers, they’d nationalise the oil industry in a heartbeat. Between this and these “emergency taxpayer buyouts”, a.k.a. nationalisation of private banks and insurers, these are acts undertaken only in a wartime command-style economy.

These are unprecedented actions in peacetime; even at the height of Democratic Party’s ultra liberal single-party lock on the Presidency and both houses of Congress in the 1960s, this sort of socialism was unthinkable.

The question remains, what sort of socialism are we stumbling into at a madman’s breakneck pace?

Is it the fascism or national socialism that privatises the gains of the corporate fatcats who may just have made the right donations to the right people’s campaign funds, and socialises the losses of these same fatcats when they prove to be incompetent?

Or will it be the outright socialism from the left that utterly crushes the free market, never even allowing any entrepreneurs and capitalist from having the chance to make mistakes - by preventing them from ever having a market share?

The right thing to have done would have been a laissez-faire policy that allows badly structured and irresponsible corporations to fail, and outstanding corporations that produce value for its investors and great products and services for its customers to excel.

Socialism - whether from the left or from the right - be it fascism or Marxism - is plain wrong.

I absolutely love lamb chops, and my wife won’t touch them with a barge-pole.

Specifically, roast lamb chops with mint sauce (or more easy to come by here in the USA, mint jelly).

With Mrs. Seeker off to see her folks with Seeker Jr. for a short holiday, that has left me to my own culinary devices, which I shall say, are relatively few.

The flip side to this, is that it allows me free reign to experiment, and experiment I did:

I did up some lamb chops in a “best-guess” recipe that hopefully, kills two birds with one stone - namely, to tone down the “gamey” taste of lamb and avoid using that obnoxiously green mint jelly (which I rather like, but I’ve long been on the run from artificial food colours - especially ones that give a most unnatural pallor to the foods in question).

To wit, most derivatives of mint - in its natural state - runs from clear to a pale gold colour.

I’ll touch on that again in a bit.

Here’s what you’ll need for the lamb chops:

1½ — 2 pounds of lamb chops
1 cup of mint leaves, finely minced/crushed *OR* 1 — 1½ cups of highly concentrated (pepper)mint tea
¼ cup of white vinegar
1 sprig of parsley
2 cloves of garlic, shredded
1 pinch of dried chives
½ teaspoon of sugar
a dash of ground pepper

About the peppermint tea: I had on hand a large quantity of peppermint tea concentrate which I had prepared the other day (peppermint tea is very refreshing on a hot summer’s day, and I make it in bulk) - at least a gallon’s worth of concentrate with which I can make about 4 or 5 gallons of tea with. To make a gallon of this concentrate, I use a little more than a gallon of filtered water (allowing for some water loss to boiling) and four or five large teabags full of peppermint tea, boiled for about 10 minutes and steeped for about an two hours to produce a concentrate about the colour of cola.

If all that tea is not your bag (heh)… you can also simply get about a cup of mint leaves at the grocer’s and crush it up in a food processor, or mince it up with a good kitchen knife.

Take your minced/crushed mint (or peppermint concentrate) and add to it the vinegar, the sugar, chives, and shredded cloves of garlic, and a dash of ground pepper.

Take your lamb cutlets/chops and stab them vigorously with a fork, and then place it into the bowl with the (pepper)mint marinade, for about thirty minutes to an hour. It seems that the longer the lamb marinades, the less “gamey” the lamb is likely to taste.

Now off with you to make the mashed potatoes (or steak potatoes go just as nicely) and your vegetable of choice (I used string beans in the meal pictured above, for the lack of fuss-factor).

1) Preheat your oven to 350°F with a Pyrex/glass pan or suitable substitute (I find that the Pyrex pas clean up easier than most other pans, although if your REALLY like to “cheat”, you could slap down a layer of aluminium foil on top of the pan)
2) Oil up a skillet and warm over high heat
3) Sear both sides for about 1min. each side of each cutlet/chop
4) Bake the seared chops/cutlets for about 30min for each inch of thickness (for about 1½ pounds of cutlets at about 1-inch thickness, this should result in a medium to medium-well finish for approx. 3 servings)
5) Serve with the ’smashed taters and veggies, garnish with parsley…

Your mileage may vary with this depending upon the cuts and thickness of the chops you get - this recipe seems to have turned out quite well with the cuts you see pictured above.

And the beauty is I did not need to buy any of that scary-leprechaun green mint jelly: there was a definite subtle mint flavour sealed in with the lamb, and though not as “lamb-gamey” as I normally like it, it means it will likely pass muster with Mrs. Seeker when she gets back from her holiday trip.

Dan Riehl over at Riehl World View has a compilation of his 9-11 memorial posts.

It’s hard to believe how fast time has flown by since that fateful day, when most if not all Americans were either slumbering or barely awoke - blissfully unaware of the horror that was to unfold that day.

The question for us now is: What is the great lesson that we should have learned from this tragic event?

“I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

GOP Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, RNC speech.

Even more noteworthy is how she gave the better part of that speech without a teleprompter - where Obama (a.k.a. “Zero”) faltered and sputtered quite badly when forced to function without such a device.