Democracy and Power 112: Fidelity to Leadership To be a powerful legislative force, a politician must be an obedient member of a party – Democrat or Republican. Obedient means absolute loyalty to their caucus’s dictates.

This week, a global warming climate change alarmist group decided it would be great fun to petition the World Meteorological Organization to start naming violent storms after prominent deniers of their theory, despite a complete lack of evidence that violent storms are any more numerous today than in other years: "[W]e propose a new naming system, one that names extreme storms caused by climate change, after the po

Last week, Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) introduced a bipartisan bill that would end the federal online gambling ban.  The Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2011 has nine original cosponsors from both sides of the aisle, including Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) and Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), who have advocated for similar legislation in the past.

Check out this letter in which members of Congress threaten Glenworth Financial's president William Frey likely over his opposition to the strangely named "Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009."  An article by Frey in the Washington Times on the act can be found here.   

In Atlas Shrugged, one of the main villains is Wesley Mouch, who is described in the Wikipedia entry on the book’s characters as “Initially Wesley Mouch is the least powerful and least significant of the Looters - the other members of this group feel they can look down upon him with impunity. Eventually he becomes the most powerful Looter, and the country’s economic dictator, thereby illustrating Rand’s belief that a government-run economy places too much power in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats who would never have positions of similar influence in a private sector business.”

The media and political furor of the week is the employee bonuses paid by AIG under contracts that existed prior to the government’s effective takeover of the company. And while the President as well as politicians of both parties are fulminating about the payouts, voter anger should be directed more at those very politicians than at AIG.