Jim Grant writes in the WSJ - Why No Outrage? Good question.

Huey Long, who rhetorically picked up where Lease left off, once compared John D. Rockefeller to the fat guy who ruins a good barbecue by taking too much. Wall Street habitually takes too much. It would not be so bad if the inevitable bout of indigestion were its alone to bear. The trouble is that, in a world so heavily leveraged as this one, we all get a stomach ache. Not that anyone seems to be complaining this election season.

In an interesting side note, the SEC has issued an exemption to the naked shorting prohibition it recently promulgated. Who, you might ask, is exempted? Well, just the boyz whose stock everybody else is prohibited from shorting. The SEC once more fulfills its role of protecting the industry’s compensation at the expense of the investing public.

Jim Grant asks, why no outrage? Well, there is a plentiful supply right here. And elsewhere. But so long as the “two-party” oligarchy runs the country, outrage is futile. Vote Libertarian. Vote for real change, not just rearranging the office allocation on Capitol Hill amongst a mostly hereditary clique of permanent professional politicians.

Speaking of outrage, how about the spending on the President’s personal helicopter fleet, “Marine One” ? Mostly just 10-minute shuttle flights to and from Andrews AFB. The price tag, for 28 helicopters, get this - $11.2 billion. Talk about the imperial presidency, even Caligula or Commodus would blush at this kind of expenditure. That’s roughly $100 per U.S. household, to say nothing of personnel and operating costs. Just for occasional personal transportation.

A couple of good pieces for Sunday evening reading or viewing. CBS’ 60 Minutes show offers a segment on the mortgage mess, featuring Jim Grant. It also includes the “just walk away” thought process that appears to be taking hold like a California wildfire.

They say they can afford the higher payments, but see no point in making them.”The house keeps going down, payments keep going up. Where’s the logic in that? And how can we fix it? I mean, that’s what this whole thing’s about for us is how can we fix this? And if we can’t fix it, then what do we do?” Matt Valdez asks.

“Why pay a $3,200 payment on a 1200-square-foot home? It makes no sense,” Stephanie Valdez adds.

“That’s what you agreed to do when you bought the house,” Kroft points out.

“Fine. If the value is going up. But we’re not going anywhere. The price or the value is going down. It makes no sense because we will never be able to refinance and get a lower payment. There’s no way,” Stephanie Valdez replies.

“You’re saying, essentially, that you’re going to stop making payments on it? You’re just gonna let it go into foreclosure?” Kroft asks.

“You know, that’s the only advice we’ve gotten so far is walk away from the home. We don’t want to do that to our credit. Why can’t our mortgage company work with us?” she says.

In other words, we only bought this puppy because we thought we could resell it for a profit. We now want to have our cake and eat it, essentially void the contract we signed and reprice the house at market without damaging our credit, or we’ll walk away. Sharp practice, indeed. They must be corporate employees, used to getting their stock options repriced down every time the corporation’s stock declined, to come up with this feeling of entitlement.

And another of John Hussman’s exceptionally thoughtful pieces. Certainly one of his top ten. It covers markets, the stimulus package, politicians and Keynesian economics with so much good stuff that I won’t excerpt from it.