— Governors of five states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country's 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure, as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

— Pete Sepp, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, said the polar bear exhibit and many of the other proposals in the report are just plain pork. "To the people supporting them, these proposals aren't a joke, but to the taxpayers funding them, yes -- this will be a joke ...

— Texas is currently the envy of the nation with an $11 billion budget surplus. How did the state do it? For starters, the Texas Constitution gives the state Comptroller of Public Accounts (a chief fiscal officer, of sorts) the responsibility to certify the state's budget and send back any spending ...

— How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country screws its citizens we should retaliate by screwing our citizens?

— The original American idea has been virtually wiped out, ignored as if it had never existed. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents—rights which require no earning, no ...

— In the end, what fiscal conservatives wanted didn't turn out to matter much. As the Wall Street vapors scrambled every aspect of the 2008 presidential campaign and of George W. Bush's final days in office, no one was as angry as D.C.'s dwindling number of libertarians.

— The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.

— In response to concerns expressed by some that allowing even one of the big automakers to fail would be too much of an economic hit for the nation, Inhofe said reality must be accepted. "If we keep on nursing a broken system, then we can't expect to have a different ...

— Saving a shrinking union is the worst reason to bail out Detroit with taxpayer money. Unfortunately, it may be one of the strongest, politically. That's why the public needs to be enormously skeptical when it hears that bankruptcy for the Big Three would be a catastrophe for much of the ...

— Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

— What I ask of you my friends on the left is to not only continue to work with us to oppose this or any similar bailout, but to consider carefully whether you really want to entrust the same entity who is the predominant cause of this crisis with the power ...

— With any luck, conservatives will turn back to their libertarian roots in the coming months and years and realize the real culture war isn’t about religious values vs. the secularists. It’s about the individualists who believe in markets against the collectivists who believe in the unlimited power of politics.

— "...But they are fools in thinking that business somehow is getting a special break. Who pays the business tax anyway? We do! You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes. And if they can’t be passed on to the customer in the price of the product as a cost of operation, business goes ...

— And a president certainly cannot control the economy. We, all of us, run the country. "Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good," Williams says. The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.

— The myth that laissez faire exists in the present-day United States and is responsible for our current economic crisis is promulgated by people who know practically nothing whatever of sound, rational economic theory or the actual nature of laissez-faire capitalism. They espouse it despite, or rather because of, their education ...