It's been too long since I'd enjoyed a Whittle fix. Nice to hear your voice again (c:

Nice to SEE you Bill.

What makes that bill so large and hard to understand? A combination of leadership by committee - where every player has to get their 2 cents in; institutional decay of both the House and the Senate side of the US Congress into a self serving paracitic mass - where every player has to get their $2 in; and last but not least, leadership by lawyers, not just any lawyers but that distinct group of lawyers who want to be politicians and win elections - where strait to the point talk the average citizen could understand would prevent the most devious of those players from slipping in the $2000 in redistribution\redirection of income (per household) to implement their grand society saving plan.

Vote quickly before anyone can identify the actual ingrediants or how they might interact, bake at 450% for 10 years, and maybe, if you failed to get just one initial condition incorrect or failed to account for rebel ants either acting in their own self interest or not being HONEST - as unlikely as that sounds - and this Congress too can create its very own 7,000,000,000,000 crisis for the next generation.

Unquiet

I get an error message (no such file) using both Firefox and IE, so do my co-workers. I'll try from home.

Two pieces of content from Bill on the same day? I think that's one of the seven signs. Let me check outside for a rain of frogs.

Very effective. Shockingly grapic imagery, but not gratutiously used, so I'll still share this with my teenagers. Thanks.

Bill,

I understand the Secret Agent because I am one of those unfortunate Americans who lives & toils here in America under similar conditions.

Where to speak of your beliefs in God, that illegal immigration must be stopped or even to not agree that the Bush family is geneticly damaged is to risk my job (never mind about advancement).

It must be nice to be a cowboy, can I find employment on the range?

Undercover in NYC

That was awesome, Bill... my player was buffering when you had that monstrosity halfway up, but I just *knew* it would hit the table with a THUD!

Better bring a forklift to discuss the final version; I wouldn't want you to hurt your back.

It pains me to say this. It makes me to be a foul-mouthed heathen...and I love the Lord. After this bi-party raping of America that just passed the "insiders" club? All I want to say is G*DDAMN THEM TO HELL & BACK - THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS!!! They have pissed on the blood of every patriot that shed for this country. Evil & greedy maggots...puppets of the Federal Reserve. May they die a slow and painful death.

535 new "members" please.

wow.
I just found you via Rachel Lucas and I am in love with your mind, your blog, your love for our constitution. I will be back for more of the Whittle.

Damn! It's always just the mind...

After watching your video I think investing in the paper industry may be the wisest move a person could make during this present economic state.

In decreasing order of substance...

1. Preach it, brother!

2. Hey, I have that same little book sitting next to my desk? Did you get it subscribing to NRO, too?

3. Wow. I cannot believe you're not an aged and gouty Winston-Churchill look-alike. Really, v. suprised...

Yes! Deano, PLEASE invest in the paper industry. :D

Bill, it's good to *see* you, finally.

You got it exactly right on one of the underlying reasons we're in the fix we're in right now. Warren Buffet says he never invests in a company that he doesn't understand, to include the product(s), company financial profile, apparent integrity of the executives, and how it plans to make money. Simple, and he became a billionaire following this strategy. Unfortunately, the Fanny/Freddie "securities" were so complex that nobody, including those who underwrote them, really knew how to value them or how they'd behave in an unstable market. That's a recipe for disaster, as has been demonstrated, and now we're stuck with the bill.

WOW.. just.. umm.. wow!

I've read your site and all of your essays and always awaited each patiently, Bill.

Seeing you on video delivering with such style was fantastic.

Your prose stirs the pride I've always held in our country, and I thank you for that.

Brevity, and all that. Well done. Chilling to see such an abuse of power. Time to buy me some ammo and whiskey.

Dahlink, you LOOOK mah-veluss! Srsly, you look and sound great. I could get used to this PJTV thing.

When I spoke to the young intern in my Congresscritters regional office, he actually told me we needed the additional verbiage in order to accommodate the legal language all bills require. Yeah. I came within a micron of reminding him about the Constitution, etc. But, I restrained myself. Why is it we can't train our Congress to do the same? Why? Is it some special strain of humanoid that is wired to pursue Congresshood but who who can fake American?

Unquiet is in possession of the mind eye clarificon. In the words of The Eagles song, "Get Over It":
"Ol' Billy was right
Let's kill all the lawyers
Kill 'em tonight"
No offense to our otherwise sound members who just happen to be lawyers.

Steve Fossett's family has the closing chapter now writ. He died as he likely would have preferred, though the timing was all wrong.

I'm in catch up mode. As usual, your writing is elixir.

Oh, I forgot to add:

A. The bailout bill was completely unnecessary,
and
B. the rescue bill was completely unnecessary.

With a name reminiscent of members of earlier Congresses, one Rep. Thaddeaus McCotter (R-MI) said it right:

"The fundamentally unfair core of the Paulsen proposal remains and that is to have government compel taxpayers to buy toxic assets, which private investors will not purchase. This is fundamentally unfair to the American people and they know it."
--Oct 2, 2008

We was robbed dear friends, again.

While you're at the dollar store, pick up some toy wooden arrows for me, will 'ya? I need to shove one through my head.

Bill, very elegantly done. Before this turkey passes, they'll need a truck scale to weigh the legislation. I can only believe that a 750 billion dollar redistribution of our wealth is drawing thieves from coast-to-coast, and probably from beyond our borders as well. The audacity of our elected officials is breathtaking. Ayn Rand's description of looters comes to mind, and perhaps the soon to be released adaption of Atlas Shrugged is timely.

Enter now the era of crony-capitalism. Essentially, America is now a plutocracy where weath is accumulated through legislative theft. There will be dark days ahead. Where property rights are no longer ensured by government, people stop producing. Why bother working if the fruit of your labor is going to be taken from you? Ask a kulak if you can find one. On the flip side, I guess we're all soon to be millionaires . . . as soon as the government gives the order to turn on the printing presses.

America goes to the polls in four weeks. I can only hope that the collective wisdom of the American people has the insight to turn our elected officials out of office en masse. It's our last hope. Our professional political class has failed us. The only thing that can save us is an electoral bloodbath. Turn the bastards out!

"...Enter now the era of crony-capitalism. Essentially, America is now a plutocracy where weath is accumulated through legislative theft..."

I live in one of those places where crony capitalism has been a way of life for decades. The locals are trying to get away from that and have honest public servants and businessmen not dependent upon politicians for largess, but, like quicksand, crony capitalism is a helluva lot easier to get into than out of. Unfortunately, I fear you may be right about the U.S.

You know, the saddest part of all this is that the new bailout bill is still better than the old one...

I thought your video was very funny. I've enjoyed your writing for some time and look forward to each new entry. I too agree that the biggest problem with government is its complexity.

However, something needs to be pointed out about your analogy in this video.

Please understand, this is not a vote in favor of this plan. I was happy to allow the markets to work the problem out on its own.

The House rejected the smaller bill and that sent a shock wave around the world that sent financial markets crashing everywhere. To amend it for approval, the House would have to start over from scratch and write up a whole new bill. The bill contains revenue issues, so the Senate is constitutionally not allowed to originate a replacement. Meanwhile, the house can't get another bill on the floor, pass it, and send it to the Senate as fast as the Senate can fix the failed House bill and send it back to the House. Except the Senate can't originate the bill. Remember, time is of the essence. Enter a shrewd procedural trick.

The Senate amends an existing unrelated bill already poised to go back to the House (it already passed the House) by attaching the revised bailout bill to it. Now the senate can vote on the bailout as an amendment to something else and send it to the House immediately, faster than the House can get a new bill on the floor. Normally a House bill altered by the Senate would go through committees to resolve the differences as amended in the Senate. In this case, the House WANTS the differences, so they limit debate, skip over the resolution committee processes, and vote on the bail out as it is actually a portion of something else they had passed days or months ago.

So here we have a rare example of how attachments to bills benefit everyone. If it had not gone this way the financial markets would be reeling over the weekend as the House starts from scratch to get something of any form to the Senate.

Furthermore, the fact is the original emergency measure being 3 pages was the worst thing on earth. It was a blank check for one man to spend $700 billion of taxpayer money without any oversight, without any judicial review and without any guild lines except his own personal opinion.

Second, the 400 pages are double spaced, highly indented, and full of notations and cross references to existing law for the purpose of clarity and restrictions on how the taxpayers money will be used.

This link contains the full text, 442 pages of legal notation in PDF form: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:h1424eas.txt.pdf

This link is a table of contexts with another link to the full text in concise form: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.1424.eas

If you copy the bill into a word processor, the whole thing is only 182 pages.

But wait, there's more!! That 182 pages includes the original energy and tax bills that the emergency legislation was attached to. The actual text pertaining to the bail out is only 47 pages!

Considering the Central Bank wanted to give one man power to bail out the whole world's financial market without any oversight or restriction, 47 pages is a whole let better idea.

IMHO

Alexa Kim, I agree. McCotter is right. Any asset will sell if it's cheap enough. They're saying that distressed mortgages are selling for 25% of their face value. I don't doubt it. There's a house across the street from me that the owners are walking away from. Face value of the house is about $500k right now. The owners had refied it to $950. It needs about $75k in work including a whole new roof and foundation work.

If I buy it out of foreclosure, I'm not going to pay full street price. I won't pay $950k for the mortgage. I'll be happy to pay $250. Our Government, using our money, shouldn't pay $950k either.

Bill, so good to hear from you again! You are prominently, PROMINENTLY, placed several times over at the Queendom. Totally off topic, but I so deeply appreciated your comments about the pharmaceutical industry and your kidney stone pain. As a dedicated BigEvilPharma rep, I constantly bite my tongue when I want to shout at people that NO ONE owes them pain relief, heart attack prevention, depression relief or anything else. THANK YOU. You made my day with that post over at NRO.

www.whenwearequeen.com

just to show you how big bill whittle is, i have a copy of that same pamphlet bill is holding, and its 8 1/2 by 11 1/2 inches ---so you do the math!

Impressive and concise as usual. I like your style Bill.

One should do what one does best. For you, this is it!

Ejecta? Forget it. It was a lost cause anyway. If freedom is going to be won again, its going to be done ONE individual at a time.

Groups cannot be free. Only individuals can be free.

I guess that's the Army Of One deal, huh. The Individual, vanquishing one Horde at a time. Wonder how that works for like maybe George Washington.

Lionell, you are correct that groups cannot be free, because "free" is an attribute of individual humans. There can be groups of free men, but there cannot be free groups. To many, this distinction is rhetorical if not nit-picky. But it is an important distinction, precisely because our enemies seize upon poorly-defined terms to twist meaning and win word games.

However, when free people choose to work together and organize their efforts, their voluntarily-associated groups can produce more than can uncoordinated individual efforts.

So many people, observing this fact, jump to the conclusion that groups are even more effective if membership in them is assigned by the state. This is why we have to be careful to avoid setting up false dichotomies, such as the "deregulation vs. more regulation" we keep hearing in regard to the current financial mess.

Those of us who love liberty (including the free market) do not want anarchy. Under anarchy, any thug can take the product of another's labor, and the only protection is to join a rival gang. We want government to implement laws to punish those who violate the life, liberty, or property of others via force or fraud, and whenever possible make the perpetrator compensate the victim. Regulations that do other things (like force banks to make loans to people who are bad credit risks) are counter-productive, and are at the heart of the crisis.

Just laws, limiting themselves to defending human rights, make clear where one man's rights end and another's begin. They must be understandable to those who must comply with them. I doubt that any of the 535 members of Congress who voted on this law, nor the President who signed it, has even read the whole thing, much less truly understands what it says.

One should do what one does best.

Just a quick note to suggest a friendly amendment. While I agree that the size of the current legislation is large, I take Bill's point to be less about length than about clarity and focus. The ideal legislation to justify a $700 billion bailout should NOT be three pages of 8.5" x 11", but it SHOULD be readable by the average American. Think carefully about this friends, your mortgage paperwork (heck, maybe even your rental contract) was longer than this.

Bill:
Congratulations on your "new" career as a political pundit / syndicated columnist!
Besides buying more copies of your wonderful book, "Silent America," what else can your faithful readers do to ensure your success?

The Monster,

Thanks.

You gave "the rest of the story."

Monday Night Perspective:

Lionell takes the snap and drops back to pass... no, it's a draw to Monster.

Monster picks his way past the line, cuts inside, then outside, bounces off a block but goes down.

No! Monster's not done yet, he spins (physicaly not politicly), he breaks into open field.

He could... go ... all ... the way!

Touchdown Monster!!!

Closing shot in the end zone: Lionell high fives a calm Monster - wondering what everybody is so excited about; it was all so obvious to anybody with 4.2 sec \ 100 yd logic and a photographic memory of all events past and present.

And in the stands: Unquiet points tacky foam finger in the air. The crowd ROARS!!! Monster! Monster! Monster! ;-)

Monster looks up and walks off the field looking down and shaking head with trailing baloon caption: "What's the big deal?" Turns to Lionell: "Nice pass."

Welcome back, Bill! Missed you, !

Posted by: Unquiet | October 6, 2008 7:37 PM --

ROTFLMAO !!!

However, every word a deserved tribute to an exceptional thinker, commenter, citizen.

There is a reason he is known simply as, The Monster.

Was it just me, or does Bill have the look and swagger of the great Bruce Campbell? I was half expecting him to pull out a "Boomstick" during that video to emphasize his point.

Excellent analysis Bill. As always, I couldn't possibly agree more.

In case anyone is interested, I'm posting a link to an article by Tom Szabo entitled _The Fed is Bankrupt_:

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Szabo/oct082008.html

With several hundred billion dollars in debt maturing before 2009, this thickens the pea-soup obsidian fog that clouds our road into the future.

I have that same version of the Constitution and Deceleration of Independence. My parents gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago. Can't say I wasn't raised right.

You look like Tony Snow.

Just sayin'. That might be a future for you.

Bill:
Preaching to the choir is frustrating how do we get this information into the hands of voters before tuesday and some people out there just won't read it they won't believe it they just keep spouting OH we need a change. They are under the Blama Spell. I am afraid Americans have shrunk to European style baby nanny state no fight left, I have a friend who is voting for Blama and he won't listen to these articles he says its right wing propaganda and is a registered Republican. This is beyond scary: A Freedom loving war hero who fought against communism is now going to lose to a communist with the help of the people he was fighting on behalf of all those years ago. Maybe the change to communism started with Korea ad then Vietnam, who better to use then the angry black and they love this marxism more then the south americans right now. Too bad for us. I guess its the white mans fault.

What's wrong with redistribution of wealth? It works for the ultra rich.