I often times wonder what the Presidential election would have been like had the "financial crisis" happened anywhere from 6 months to 1 year before it did.  Imagine how much different the debates would have been, especially with Ron Paul still in the mix.  To give you an idea of what it would have been like, here is Ron Paul from 1983 (his line about cigarettes being more valuable than paper money is hillarious):

And here is Ron Paul now:

Both videos come courtesy of Ideas from Free Minds.  Remember all this when you read news that the according to some people's accounting, the United States is actually bankrupt.  Although to be fair, there are others who are saying those numbers are wrong, and we just have a huge mortgage to pay (about half our value):

making the correct comparison of total US assets per person versus total US obligations per person, and it was about $300K assets vs $160K obligations, or over the whole population, about $90 trillion versus $48 trillion.  Most of that wealth is real stuff - land, houses, factories, etc - and hasn’t gone away in the last year.

The point is, we’re not bankrupt - we're more like a homeowner with a mortgage.  We have to keep working to make the payments.

And while the Federal government is devaluing our currency, and mortgaging our future into near bankruptcy, they are attacking companies in the same position for having outragous salaries.  Of course, at the same time, Congress will receive a nice pay raise as a reward for its fiscal prowess:

Members of Congress are slated to receive a $4,700 pay raise beginning in January, increasing their annual salaries to $174,000. The increase for 535 House and Senate members would cost taxpayers more than $2.5 million.

But they deserve it... you know... for having the lowest approval rating in memory.  To top it all off, we have a President who openly says he will break the law, and act like a King if Congress doesn't do what he wants:

Even Americans whose knowledge of the legislative process is limited to the "I'm Just a Bill" episode of Schoolhouse Rock know about the veto: If Congress approves legislation the president doesn't like, he can refuse to sign it, in which case the law can be enacted only by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. President Bush's plan to aid the auto industry relies on a more obscure maneuver: If Congress rejects a bill the president likes, he can act as if the vote went the other way.

This maneuver, unlike the veto, is illegal by definition, not to mention unconstitutional, violating the separation of powers and the rule of law. But it is business as usual for Bush, who has shown no compunction about ignoring the law when it prohibits him from doing what he considers necessary in response to what he considers an emergency.

Why?  Because we have to sacrafice the free market to save it of course!

US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from "collapse."

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision "to make sure the economy doesn't collapse."

Words escape me.