Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA27) has this to say:

Reaction on Wall Street turned increasingly negative after the vote. The S&P 500 – which rose as much as 3.6 per cent ahead of the decision – fell 1.4 per cent, closing below its level on Monday after the House voted against the bill. It was the worst week for US stocks since markets re-opened after the September 11 2001 terrorists attacks.

Source: Daniel Dombey, James Politi, Krishna Guha, et al. for the Financial Times, 3 October 2008

 

The sun has truly set on the American Republic, and nightfall shall come to the American Empire as well.

We had a good run for 230+ years, may history remember the Republic and not repeat her mistakes at the fourth quarter of her existence.

May a pox be on the Representatives in the House that voted to pass this bill, and a rash of itchy, festering boils be on the bottoms of those Senators who pushed this unconscionable, $700,000,000,000+ tanker-ship load pork upon the taxpayers.

May they pass from this earth in due course marked with the infamy and ignominy of their treasonous votes.

Update: The list of filthy rats and those who stood up to them …

(As taken from http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2008-681 … )

Couldn’t resist photoshopping this up a bit more.

Most if not all of this artwork was very much propagandist by design — anything from the classic “Loose Lips Sink Ships”, or the “Keep’em coming, We’ll keep on shooting”, and appeals to buy war bonds… as well as the scarier ones like “This is the Enemy”, showing the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese in all their (pointedly) savage glory.

With this in mind, I’ve taken liberties with one such poster, and commandeered it to the purpose of keeping Barack Hussein Obama from winning this election.

On that note, to my deep chagrin, Dr. Chuck Baldwin will not be on the ballot here in New York State, and with a very scant ground game here (there are actually two Constitution Party organizations here) and for reasons well beyond the scope of this post, they tend to work against each other.

I’m not particularly impressed with Bob Barr, even though he will be on the ballot, so barring some sort of miracle that gets Dr. Baldwin’s name on the ballot or even available as an authorized write in candidate, I’ll be voting McCain.

Not because I like McCain: I deeply, deeply dislike him and most of what he stands for.

But I detest Obama very, very much more than I dislike McCain.

Oh, and here are the posters: please enjoy.

(A perhaps tired meme, but still worth it to get under the liberals’ skin: Obama the Muslim).

Obama’s general dislike for gun-owners and Christians (I need to do one up on him grabbing guns sometime…)

And I have to wonder why the media seems to completely ignore Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers…?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.