Consider Gillibrand Carefully

It seems that the new Senator Gillibrand of New York is not entirely appreciated within her own party in her own state. That may be a good thing.

She's catching flak for her opposition to illegal immigration, for which she has earned the term "xenophobe." Note that senators are sworn to uphold the laws of the country.

I'm not going to defend her extreme enthusiasm for personal weaponry, but it's a fair statement that few of America's crime problems are due to people with properly licensed guns. Some deranged people have gunned down people on campuses, but I'm not aware of any of them who had a concealed weapons permit. Statistically, it would make more sense to require everyone attending classes to pass the test of earning such a permit.

But I digress. More important is Ms Gillibrand's opposition to the bailout last fall. Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) also opposed it, and he's fairly well established in the progressive wing of his party. We're used to Peter being an heir to the maverick Oregonian tradition, a much longer established theme than that of Arizona or Alaska. New York should be able to tolerate some dissent, even with their dependence on the financial industry that was bailed out. After all, Gillibrand and DeFazio lost and the bailout passed.

And interestingly, the consequences that it was supposed to prevent just seem to keep on coming down the pike. The taxpayers have forked over hundreds of billions, hundreds of billions are to follow, and yet bank lending is tight, bank solvency is questionable, the stock market has dropped to the area that people were fretting about, and generally everything stinks.

I'll be interested to hear her position on the stimulus, a much more benign word than "bailout." I'm getting very skeptical myself. It all seems like a Ponzi scheme, where we keep borrowing money to pay interest on what we borrowed before while distributing bread and circuses to the mob.

Rather than being a formula for recovery, it looks a lot more like a guarantee that there will never be one. Because we're only able to sell all this federal paper because people are so loath to invest in anything else. But if things once start to go back up, there's going to want their money back in order to invest in alternatives, and the treasury won't be able to handle it.

Some day we're going to have a run on the people we've designated to prevent runs on banks. I have no idea what happens next.