So Obvious, Even The New York Times Notices

Hattip to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.  The New York Times reports that Wall Street is alarmed at the matterhorn of debt the Obama administration is piling up.   The Times notes that 10 year Treasury Notes briefly rose to a yield of 3.17% last week, and the federal deficit is currently running at one-seventh of gross domestic product.  There is no mystery here.  Investors are looking at this debt and beginning to understand two simple facts:  it is never going to be repaid and it is doubtful if long-term politically the US can continue to pay the interest on this debt if it dominates an ever-growing portion of tax receipts.  I have discussed the issue of national debt a few times on this blog, here , here, here, here and  here.  We are pursuing lunatic economic policies and we are heading for economic catastrophe. 

Update: The People’s Republic of China,  i.e. Communist China, sharply curtailed  their US bond purchases in January and February before resuming purchases in March.  I never thought I would live to see the day when “Red” China would be rightfully concerned with the stability of the US economy and the wisdom of purchasing US debt instruments.

Law, Free Will, Choice and… Guns

In my mis-spent youth, I used to listen to NPR’s Morning Edition every morning while doing my math (yes, that’s the kind of thing we wacky homeschoolers get away with). One morning (this was probably around ’93) they were covering a “guns for toys” program, where people were being encouraged to bring real or toy guns down to their local police station and pick up stuffed animals in exchange.

How warm and fuzzy can you get? (And seriously, how many hardened criminals did the people staging this imagine would repent and come get a teddy in return for their gat?) They interviewed a few kids who dutifully said that they knew it was better to play with animals than with their toy guys they’d turned in. Then they interviewed an eighty-year-old woman who’d just turned in the police revolver that her grandfather used to carry in the 1870s and 1880s. “I’ve never shot it,” she said. “But I’d kept it all these years as a piece of family history. But you know, things aren’t the same anymore. I heard about this exchange and I thought: It’s not the wild west anymore. I’d better go turn this in to the police where it belongs. I think we’d all be a lot safer without so many guns around.”

Maybe in some abstract sense we would — but I’m not sure we got any safer when that old lady turned in her piece of family history.

However as I was thinking the other day about the enthusiasm for gun control (or just outright banning guns) on the left, this clicked into place as half of the puzzle. Here’s the other half:

Outside Agitators

Hattip to the ever reticent lads and lasses at The Lair of the Catholic Cavemen.  According to the Online Journal, a leftist internet news source, federal authorities are worried about “right-wing” Catholics opposed to the Obama visit stirring things up while Obama is at Notre Dame: