Why not bailout Wall Street?  It's America--EVERYONE gets a bailout:  

Despite the vote by the House of Representatives yesterday, the fact remains that America desperately needs a bailout - a massive rescue plan for an institution vital to our nation and its economy.

America is experiencing a collapse of the ethics market. Belief in the notion that people should be responsible for their own actions, or pay their own bills or keep their promises has plummeted. It’s time to pump moral and ethical capital into the idea of individual responsibility.

Is it any wonder that Wall Street is waiting for a bailout? After all, we’ve become a bailout society.

Earlier this summer - before the financial meltdown - we passed Barney Frank’s $300 billion bailout of individual homeowners who had bought homes they couldn’t afford. Last week, Congress voted a $25 billion bailout of the auto industry because they’ve made cars nobody wants to drive.

And now we’re bailing out banks because they made loans to people who feel no duty to repay them. This failure of personal responsibility has led to the potential failure of our financial markets.

Read the rest of my column in today's Boston Herald.

Gov. Deval Patrick hiked the cost of heating and cooling our homes by about $100 million to fight "global warming." The reason our likely next president, Barack Obama, supports $5/gallon gasoline is "global warming," too. Joe Biden opposes "clean coal" technology for the same reason, and Al Gore is encouraging young people to break the law attacking coal plants to save the planet.

But what happens if we spend these billions of dollars and cripple our economy fighting "warming," and it turns out the Earth is actually getting cooler?

On the same day Gore spoke, scientists involved in NASA's Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun's solar wind was at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age — one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet.

The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.

The results of the Ulysses spacecraft's mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that "we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated."

The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.

It may already be happening. The four major agencies tracking Earth's temperature, including NASA's Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

What kind of idiots want to put a long-term, multi-trillion dollar program in place to cool a planet that might be headed for a new Ice Age?

For the answer to that question, see the list of names above.

This video had been pulled from YouTube for reasons unknown, but it's back.  It really is a must-watch for understanding how Barney Frank and Chris Dodd created the conditions that led to this crisis.

You can read the bailout plan for yourself here, and then post your comments below.

Good idea, bad but necessary, or a total taxpayer disaster?

Find out from Barney Frank, Maxine Waters and members of the Congressional Black Caucus in their own words.

You can't say we weren't warned about this Wall Street meltdown. But you can say that Congressional Democrats wouldn't let us stop it.

Quite a few Obama supporters are upset that Sen. McCain repeatedly claimed that Sen. Obama was clueless about various issues ("Sen. Obama doesn't seem to understand...")  Sen. Obama, for his part, repeatedly pointed out during the debate that Sen. McCain was right about various issues.

Interesting strategy.

But simple-minded American that I am, I'm more interested in whether or not Sen. McCain's observation about Barack is accurate. Did Sen. Obama show a lack of knowledge and understanding about the issues last night?  Let's go to the transcript:

HENRY LOVES BARACK?  Sen. Obama repeately claimed last night that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supported the Obama plan for presidential, face-to-face meetings with kooks like Castro and Iran's AhmedWhack-I-Job "without preconditions."  As Sen. Obama put it:

Senator McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, who's one of his advisers, who, along with five recent secretaries of state, just said that we should meet with Iran -- guess what -- without precondition. This is one of your own advisers....When we talk about preconditions -- and Henry Kissinger did say we should have contacts without preconditions -- the idea is that we do not expect to solve every problem before we initiate talks.

Well, here's what Kissinger himself had to say immediately after last night's debate: 

"Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality."

Strike one, Obama.

MCCAIN'S "TAX BREAKS FOR BIG OIL?"  Sen. Obama repeated on stage twice what his ads say on TV  every day:

John, you want to give oil companies another $4 billion...And if we want to talk about oil company profits, under your tax plan, John -- this is undeniable -- oil companies would get an additional $4 billion in tax breaks.

So, does Sen. McCain really want to give special tax breaks to Big Oil? Uh....no.  Sen. McCain's plan is to cut taxes on ALL businesses (we currently have the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world).  So, yes, given that oil companies pay hundreds of billions in taxes right now--they paid more in taxes than they earned in profits last year--if every business pays a lower tax rate, that would include people in the oil business.  It also includes people in the office supply, online porn and ox-breeding industries, too.  Why isn't Sen. Obama pointing out McCain's plan to "give breaks to Big Ox?"

Now, it is true that Congress recently voted on an energy bill with tax cuts specifically cutting taxes for oil companies.  And, as Sen. McCain pointed out last night, he voted against it.  Sen. Obama voted for it.

Strike two. 

OBAMA'S "95% SOLUTION": Sen. Obama said again last night that he's got a tax cut on the way for almost every American alive:'

So my attitude is, we've got to grow the economy from the bottom up. What I've called for is a tax cut for 95 percent of working families, 95 percent.

Sounds great, right?  Only one problem: a lot of those "working families" don't pay federal income taxes.  How are you going to cut taxes they don't pay?  According to the National Taxpayer's Union, the top half of American taxpayers pay 97% of all federal income taxes, leaving the other half to pay a combined 3%.  Most of those familes pay no federal income taxes at all.  Sen. Obama isn't proposing a tax cut--tax rates on the vast majority of Americans will either remain the same or go up under Sen. Obama's plan.  Instead, he's planning on sending those non-payers an income tax "rebate" check--despite the fact that they never "bated" any income taxes in the first place.

That's not a tax cut. That's welfare. 

Strike three, Sen. Obama, and we're not even close to being out.  More fact errors from Sen. Obama coming soon...

I sure wouldn't.  It was the politics of Frank and Dodd, plus the "compassionate conservatism" economic policy of GWB that got us in this mess.

And now these same people are selling us panic, demanding that we just sign a $700 billion note and give it to the same politicians who created this mess...or else.

Thanks to GOP House members and John McCain, that plan is on hold...and just in time.

Here's what the Panic Party (Dems and establishment Republicans in DC) don't want you to know: We do have options.

Just today, in just one newspaper (the Wall Street Journal), three different plans were presented, offered by economists from different ideological backgrounds.

Read them for yourself here.  This is the one I find most interesting, though this one makes good points, too.

My point is: Don't Panic.

...you're in trouble. These are, after all, the "journalists" who brought us the fake-but-accuate standard when "60 Minutes" got caught passing forged documents about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard.

But apparently Obama's lying is so blatant even the Grey Lady can't choke it down.  In a front-page story today, the Times acknowledges that:

In all, Mr. Obama has released at least five commercials that have been criticized as misleading or untruthful against Mr. McCain’s positions in the past two weeks. Mr. Obama drew complaints from many of the independent fact-checking groups and editorial writers who just two weeks ago were criticizing Mr. McCain for producing a large share of this year’s untruthful spots (“Pants on Fire,” the fact-checking Web site PolitiFact.com wrote of Mr. Obama’s advertisement invoking Mr. Limbaugh; “False!” FactCheck.org said of his commercial on Social Security.)

Now if only the Times would take the next step and admit that the "lies" Obama's campaign alleges John McCain has told are no such thing.  Sen. Obama did vote to extend HIV-related sex education to kindergarten; he did vote against requiring doctors in Illinois to end the practice of allowing infants to die after surviving abortions; he did consult with Franklin Raines--disgraced former head of Fannie Mae--regarding mortgage and economic policy.

McCain was telling the truth.  Obama is lying shamelessly, and then lying about his own record when McCain calls him on the facts.

I assumed the MainStream Media Partisan Press was going to get Sen. Obama's back on this no matter how ridiculous Obama's claims became.  Apparently, even the NYTimes has its limits.

From FOX News:

Some Democratic leaders said as much publicly, laying the blame partly on McCain, whom they accused of destabilizing the talks by calling for the candidates to enter the economic negotiations.

"The next thing we know, he's in a position frankly where he's making it harder to get things done, rather than help us negotiate differences," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said.

OK, so maybe Rep. Frank didn't mean it as an endorsement, but I can't imagine higher praise for a presidential candidate than "We were about to rape the American taxpayers for $1 trillion until MCCAIN showed up."

High praise, indeed.

UPDATE:  More proof that the current financial mess really is Barney Frank's Bailout.