This news falls into the category of ‘you get who you vote for’. Of course I didn’t vote for him, but a number of my friends did.

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money.

Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. …But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with “adverse” consequences if its chairman persists. That’s politics talking, not economics.

Read more about Obama’s politicization of the economy here at the WSJ

All of this was expected by those of us who recognized Obama as the Chicago style fascist that he is. And this isn’t the end of it. Given a taste for this this kind of power he will not be able to stop. Look for him to move into healthcare and oil. I see prices at the pump are climbing towards $3 again. I expect to see the administration begin its smear campaign against the oil industry any day now.

for gun bloggers. When I went through the broken links on gunbloggers.com last week I found that a number of them that had converted their blogs to static pages because of problems finding a decent blog hosting company. Others were just gone. It looks to me like there is a need for a stable host for like-minded gun blogs.

Among other things I am an experienced system administrator (at one time adminstering over 100 servers), I have my own webserver here in my basement and bandwidth to spare. So here is the deal — If you are a gun blogger or other conservative blogger I will host a WordPress site for you. I will maintain the blog software, managing upgrades and backing up the database. You can have this for free as long as you run my google adwords ads on your pages.

Or for $10/mo I will do the same, but you don’t need to put up my ads.
Domains can be XXXX.gunbloggers.com, or if you register your own domain you can point it here for no charge.

These accounts include ssh access to your user account, nightly SQL dumps of your blog database and optional delivery of the backups to a remote server if you wish.

See www.gunbloggers.com/hosting for more details. If you want to sign up, email me at the address on that page and I’ll get you going.

I’ve just updated the LibertyNews Store to include new Molon Labe stickers and shirts using a Greek font.

From Wikipedia

The Greek phrase Molōn labe! (Μολὼν λάβε; approximate Classical Greek pronunciation [molɔ̀ːn labé], Modern Greek [moˈlon laˈve]), meaning “Come and take them!”, is a classical expression of defiance reported by Plutarch in response to the Persian Army’s demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons. It corresponds roughly to the modern equivalent English phrase “over my dead body” or “bring it on”. It is an exemplary use of a laconic phrase.

Firehand over at Irons in the Fire was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t find another white on black Molon Labe sticker. I’d had the greek version of it saved away for a while now so I whipped up a couple of images with Pixelmator and expanded the store’s offerings.

I also like the maternity shirt, it would be appropriate for a gun owner carrying twins.

This morning I re-discovered The Ayn Rand Institute. In an article from yesterday Amit Ghate makes some excellent points about the current financial ‘crisis’:

Overlooked here is that in a free market business failures are not just normal, they’re crucial for the best products and ideas to emerge. Most restaurants fail in their first three years because customers have other preferences. Many mom-and-pop grocers go out of business because Walmart offers better selection and lower prices. Even whole industries–think typewriters, 8-tracks and horses and buggies–vanish because new inventions and competitors arise.

None of these failures are a problem, nor do they threaten the system. On the contrary, they are an inherent part of the progress which only capitalism makes possible.

So why would failures in the financial industry be any different?