Snippets from the Patriot Post

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --French economist, statesman and author Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer." --Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt." --American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

"Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget." --Independent Institute senior fellow Dr. Robert Higgs
"Americans have long ago abandoned respect for the constitutional limitations placed on the federal government. Our elected representatives represent that disrespect." --economist Walter E. Williams

"[W]hat could possibly be more reckless than spending a trillion dollars you don't have on a plan that you have no evidence will work? What could be more irresponsible than doubling the generational debt for your partisan pet projects in a time of crisis? And what could be more selfish than stifling debate by deploying fear to induce voters into supporting it all?" --columnist David Harsanyi

"A tell-tale sign in politics is when people get angry. It means they are losing the argument. Obama is angry." --The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti

"I think this is the introduction to a disaster. We're going to face a big inflation. Everybody talks about how much we need to do now. But no one talks about how we're going to unwind what we're doing now. Keynesian theory is wrong. It doesn't work." --economist Allen Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University

"[Sens.] Specter, Collins and Snowe sold out their 38 GOP colleagues and every Republican member of the House by cutting a deal and giving Harry Reid the 60 votes he needed for this 'trillion dollar turkey' to go through. In doing so, they not only assured the socialist-Democrats now running the country a huge and expensive political and legislative victory, but they stopped dead in its tracks the momentum Republicans had been successfully building with the American people against this proposal. Why, oh why, did we ever stop the practice of tar-and-feathering?" --columnist Chuck Muth

"President Obama has started to play the 'catastrophe' card to sell his economic stimulus plan, using [last week's] terrible January jobs report to predict doom unless Congress acts. ...[T]he tragedy of this first great effort of the Obama Presidency is what a lost opportunity it is. ... The stage was ... set for the popular President to forge a bipartisan consensus that combined ideas from both parties. A major cut in the corporate tax favored by Republicans could have been added to Democratic public works spending for a quick political triumph that might have done at least some economic good. Instead, Mr. Obama chose to let House Democrats write the bill, and they did what comes naturally: They cleaned out their intellectual cupboards and wrote a bill that is 90% social policy, and 10% economic policy. ... So there it is: Mr. Obama is now endorsing a sort of reductionist Keynesianism that argues that any government spending is an economic stimulus." --The Wall Street Journal

The BIG Lie: "I know that there are a lot of folks out there who've been saying, 'Oh, this is pork, and this is money that's going to be wasted,' and et cetera, et cetera. Understand, this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size. ... There aren't individual pork projects that members of Congress are putting into this bill." --Barack Obama

"I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings -- one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California -- and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone's hammering that mom -- she's divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks' worth of debt, and she's already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn't that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to $850 billion of bailout they couldn't afford and didn't have enough time to keep an eye on, and now, four months later, they're going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it's the taxpayers who'll get stuck with the diapers." --columnist Mark Steyn

Jay Leno:
In Hawaii, a billion-dollar Navy warship has run aground, and they can't get it unstuck. Its name? The USS Economy.

The economy is so bad right now Barack Obama's new slogan is "Spare Change You Can Believe In."

The jobless rate has jumped to 7.6 percent, the worst since 1974, and economists are now worried this could lead to a resurgence of disco.

It looks like more than 13,000 people were caught up in that Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. You know what a Ponzi scheme is? That's where you throw good money after bad, or as the government calls it, a stimulus package.

It came out today that the House Democratic Caucus spent $500,000 of taxpayer money for retreats at luxury resorts and spas -- though Democrats say that the time was used for "strategic planning for the country." Really? Then what's the Capitol building for?

President Obama, getting very tough now, has imposed a $500,000 salary cap for executives getting federal bailout money. And, listen to this: Now on weekends, they can only play miniature golf.

See, the whole theory behind this salary cap is if you're not performing well, and you're taking taxpayer money, then that should be reflected in lower wages. Of course, under that criteria, everybody in Congress should get like, what, two bucks an hour?