Oh, I see. Huge deficits are okay into the forseeable future if we have some kind of national emergency going? Too bad Bush didn't have any sort of emergency during his term to explain away his economic problems.

And that's granting your premise, of course, that massive spending, huge deficits, tax increases, and attacking the private sector are the proper way to improve a struggling economy.

By the way, the interest the government is taking in these companies belongs to you as a citizen. The power is still in your hands through elected representation. It's how a republic works.

In this post, I list the current "Auto Task Force." How many did you vote for? How many had you even heard of? If you don't like some of them, what alternative do you have over the next four years? When elected officials were limited in power, this wasn't that important. When we started giving government limitless power, it is.

We vote for somebody, and on the off chance that they actually win, we hope to God that the entire restructuring they're going to do somehow matches what we want. I live in California. In my district, my national vote has been meaningless since I moved here. It wouldn't be so bad if the worldviews of the politicians weren't so radically different. Democratic leaders used to be like Hubert Humphrey, not Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank.