Saga continues with Somali pirates . American captain attempted to escape but was recaptured.

Wells Fargo is looking good. Stock rises on positive profit news. Not all is dire.

Happy Weekend.

Via Mark Thoma , a good article on bubbles and depressions.

Central Italy rocked by 6.3 earthquake . over 92 dead and priceless medieval buildings fall in ruin.

NY Gov. hits new low in approval rating.

Have at it.

No, not that one. This one : Fascism.

I know, I know... It's a bad, bad word to throw out there in serious discussion and a word that will surly get taken to mean something other than intended when talking about it in an economic context.
 

Obama gets quite active in the Auto Industry:

Some frustrated U.S. taxpayers cheered President Barack Obama's tough steps to shore up the reeling auto industry on Monday but critics called his decision to fire General Motors' chief a heavy-handed power grab.

Obama signs Omnibus Public Lands Management Act into law. (more below the fold)

That phrase was coined by Frederic Bastiat back in the mid 1800s. The wisdom and relevance of that phrase was echoed 100 years later as the heart of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson .

Obama celebrates the Iranian New Year . See link for a clip of what was seen on TV in Iran this morning.

These are precisely the moments I'm glad he's the President and not McCain.

Obama on Leno . See transcript through the link. He doesn't support taxing the bonuses at 90%. I agree.

Hat tip to The Liberty Papers .

For a plethora of reasons, I'm generally sympathetic to and for the arguments of legalizing and/or decriminalizing drugs...especially marijuana. It's well covered territory on both sides of the argument but, in the end, the anti-legalization arguments fail to convince me that it's a better way to handle this issue. To me, it's not an issue of whether people can or will have access to these drugs because they do. So, "illegal" clearly does not mean "no access" or "diminished access" or "keeping us all drug free". Likewise, "legal" does not mean the opposite.

With regard to the Cramer vs. Stewart affair, Will Wilkinson offers some commentary based on this great piece by Glenn Greenwald .

Greenwald's main point:

...there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps. The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does --

...

...only he doesn't seem like a real conservative in common usage of the term. (He seems more like the L word ;))

The governor from South Carolina has credentials...at least on a cursory level...to get me to finally vote GOP for President for the first time in my life.

Reason's Matt Welch has the story about new expose' on Sanford at the American Conservative magazine.

Highlights that caught my eye:

How to judge economic phenomena is often in the eye of the beholder. One man's problem is often another man's comfort. One country's helpful subsidies to a particular sector can be a bane to that same sector in another country.

While I'm not one to dwell on presidents, I found this by Jeff Hummel a little interesting...thought you all might too. I'm sure we've all seen rankings of the presidents. The usual suspects are always near the top: Lincoln, FDR, Washington, Wilson and maybe JFK. They say it takes crises to make a great president. Uneventful times, by this logic, tend to hurt a President's stature in the eyes of historians and political scientists who look to assess a value on the men who served in the White House. The times make the man in this sense.

That's what I take from a couple of articles written by social democrats that I've read over the weekend. The pronounced and unmistakable willingness of some to justify having less as long as long as the better off have EVEN less in relation to the worse off is indeed troubling to me. The mental gymnastics that I see these people put themselves through with the full knowledge and implications of their wishes known to them is indeed cause for pause.

Excellent video about what happened on the local level in an LA High School. Well done, Drew Carey.

10 minutes well spent.

The New York Times has an article now about what's happening with the $25 Billion that were set aside for loans through the Energy Department for automobile companies and start-ups to hasten the arrival next-generation auto technology using batteries.

As of right now, the amount of money dispersed has been: $0.00.

But it's not for lack interest in companies looking for the loan money:

Yet another example of Paul Krugman's transition from economist to partisan hack

I absolutely hate them. Few things get my free market juices flowing like disgusting cartels propped up by slovenly favoritism and privilege from government.

Brink Lindsey has a new paper out called Nostalgianomics . Love that picture!

Many will recall by entries on his recent book The Conscience of a Liberal. See here and here for a follow-up to the first.

I'd been lightly following this Clive Crook story from afar without reading the actual article. Then I saw, via Will Wilkinson , that it's still growing and that Clive's original article even got responses from the two high profile macroeconomists mentioned in the article: Barro and Krugman.