The handbasket is nearing its destination

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged to provide up to $5.7 trillion more if needed. The total already tapped has decreased about 1 percent since November, mostly because foreign central banks are using fewer dollars in currency-exchange agreements called swaps. The Senate is to vote early this week on a stimulus package totaling at least $780 billion that President Barack Obama says is needed to avert a deeper recession. That measure would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

If you've ever been curious about why I don't blog nearly as much as I used to just read the story excerpted above.

It takes a psychic toll to comment upon news which is so relentlessly grim. Imagine that someone you love dearly were dying a slow and painful death from cancer. Would you be eager to describe their symptoms and catalog their suffering in a daily blog?

The nation has already come so far down the road to socialism that it would be difficult to avoid completing the journey under the best of circumstances. The fear and despair caused by another Great Depression would, I fear, be the catalyst the left needs to take America beyond the "soft socialism" of Western Europe and into the kind of totalitarian socialism seen in the Cuba of the Castro brothers or that which is taking shape in the Venezuela under Chavez.

If the Administration and the congressional Democrats keep to their present course we are headed for the absolute collapse of the American economic system, hyperinflation and an unemployment rate which will reach, or even exceed, 20 percent.

Such wreckage would be the perfect opportunity for the left to declare the idea of free minds and free markets upon which the American experiment in Republican self government is based a failure and institute a planned and directed economy for a planned and directed population.

The tools which the tyrant will use have already been forged and embedded within our law and custom. Our legislature no longer allows the unconstitutionality of a bill to act as any obstacle to its passage, nor the executive to its signing. Large segments of the judiciary feel free to simply invent law out of thin air, using if necessary foreign law as a framework for its rulings.

The groundwork for disarming the population has already been laid in the network of gun control laws which infest our nation at the federal, state and local level. And the government is now promising to take up the issue of censorship of the one media in which a voice of opposition can still reach a mass audience, broadcast radio (fear not bloggers, they'll come for the Internet next).

And the nation's law enforcers have already given ample evidence that they will not stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws by their past refusal to stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Unless I was asleep the day that every uniformed officer on the NYPD called in sick and said that he wouldn't feel well enough to come back to work until the Sullivan Act was repealed.

The only wild card is the US military and I strongly suspect that the most they will do in resistance to the new order will be to quietly let it be known to the regime that it would be "counterproductive" to attempt to use military personnel in preforming gun confiscation sweeps or to track down and destroy underground radio transmitters (and those who are transmitting on them).

I do not believe that the nation must go down this path, but I do think that there is a good chance that it will.

The handbasket is nearing its destination