We might have let it go, but we have taken an oath: whenever we see a bubble we must pop it. And there is a bubble in Kennedy worship so big it threatens to blot out the sun. Today, we approach with a needle.

No writer has failed to mention that Mr. Kennedy was not the first of the clan die. The press cannot resist hero worship - especially when its heroes die young.

The Kennedy brothers could have lived comfortably all their lives on their father's liquor money. Instead, they took up the banner of 'public service' and wrapped themselves in it so tightly it suffocated them all. The oldest of the band was killed in WWII. Ted Kennedy's grave lies only 100 feet from his brother, Robert, killed in 1968 while running for president. And only another 100 feet from another brother who was shot down five years earlier. With that kind of curse on a family, you'd think the younger bro would have gone back into the liquor business. Instead, the younger held his head up...headed for glory...and drove off a bridge. The bridge probably saved him. Had he made it beyond the primaries, some nutcase would have certainly taken a shot at him.

The bridge incident would have sunk a lesser man - that is, one who lacked the name, family connections, lawyers, and money of Ted Kennedy. It probably would have sunk a more reflective, more sensitive man too. A man with a sharper conscience might have seen the girl's face in his dreams and have been driven to drink...eventually drowning himself in his own guilt, like a character from a Russian novel. But Kennedy had the ability to rise above shame and put scandal behind him, with some helpful amnesia from the press. Chappaquiddick is reported in today's press as though it were a personal triumph. A lesser man would have gone to jail for manslaughter; Kennedy went on to become the 'lion of the Senate.' He merely gave up his presidential aspirations and buckled down to the life of a Senate hack. The eulogies tell us that driving off the bridge, drunk, made him what he was: "the greatest legislator of all time," as the President put it.

No, we never shared the conservatives' loathing for the man. We never met him. Had we known him personally, we probably would have found him as agreeable a drinking companion as anyone else. But we come neither to bury Ted Kennedy, nor to praise him...we merely poke fun at the world that idolizes him.

The fact that the Kennedys committed themselves to 'public service' seemed to make them part of the furniture of public life. Everywhere you looked, there they were. The newspapers loved them. Everyone knew what they looked like. Hairdressers knew their private lives. Taxi drivers suffered their personal tragedies as if they were one of the family.

But the Kennedys were more than just furniture. First, because they were not particularly useful...you couldn't sit on them or dine on them. More importantly, when it came to decorating the republic, they were the ones who wanted to arrange the furniture.

All the obituaries hammered this point as if they were hardening steel: "He devote his life to public causes..." says one. "He fought for the poor and the downtrodden..." says another.

He said so himself. In a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, Kennedy seemed to write his own obituary. He allowed as how he had "done his best to champion the rights of the poor and to open doors of economic opportunity. I've worked to welcome the immigrant, fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education..."

USA Today provides a typical illustration of the Senator's magnanimity and generosity.

A woman with an autistic son asked the government for help. "The Haitian immigrant wrote to her senator, 'the only one who can understand what it takes to raise a child with disabilities.'" (Kennedy's son lost a leg and his sister, Rosemary, was mentally disabled. This, according to USA Today, gave him "a connection with the public's private pain.")

"Within three weeks," the news item continues, "they secured vocational and life skills training [for the son]...that allowed his mother to finally earn a college degree last year at age 58.

"I have my life back and my son is no longer under by my care 24 hours a day..."

No...now he's under someone else's care! Kennedy redecorated. He moved the cost of caring for the poor fellow on to someone else.

And what does the mother do with her free time? She's now a "community organizer." You can bet she's organizing more transfers...of money from the people who earned it to the people who didn't.

"He was always reaching out," said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. Yes, he was always re-arranging the furniture. And USA Today told us that he inspired a whole race of redecorators - people infected by a desire for 'public service.'

"Hundreds of lesser-known former Kennedy staffers and campaign volunteers...followed him into public service...The alumni of his office pepper the government..."

But what is the consequence of all this meddling? Is the nation better off for it? None of the obituaries we saw even raised the question. How do you know if something is genuinely a public service? Is it a public service when you take money from one person and give it to another? The press seems to think so. Is it a public service when you load up the nation with hundreds of billions worth of programs and pet projects?

Kennedy was a prolific proposer...a serial legislator...a Tom Friedman with a Senate seat. Surely some conservative think tank has totted up the cost of all his legislation. And surely it is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Where did the money come from? It had to come from somewhere. It has to come from people who had ideas and plans of their own...people who had put the couch under the window and the TV in front of the easy chair, just the way they wanted it. Were they really any better off when Kennedy moved things around? Was the republic stronger, healthier, more prosperous and more honest after the Kennedy brothers got through with it?

We leave you with the question.

As for Ted Kennedy, the man was a scalawag. But he was God's scalawag; and all His creatures deserve our respect. And now that he's in the dirt, God will do with him as He chooses. RIP.

Until tomorrow,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Forgetful Bill
• The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor
• American Public are Becoming a Much Poorer Society
• President Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt Are Becoming Akin
• Illegal Gold Mining

And speaking of colossally stupid government programs, you may have seen the news that the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate change bill on Saturday by a narrow vote of 219-212. The cap-and-trade bill, otherwise known as Waxman-Markey (for the nominal writers of the bill) mandates that U.S. manufacturers and utilities reduce carbon emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.

Under the sausage making process that is the American Congress, the bill was filled with compromises. Congressmen from coal-producing states or states with lots of manufacturing jobs had to be bribed into supporting it through various means. It must now go the Senate, which must pass its own version of the bill.

If the Senate bill is different than the House bill (and it almost always is, given the different agendas in both bodies and the need for more bribes), the two bills go to "reconciliation." That's where a committee made of members from both houses settles on a final compromise version of the two bills and sends them back to their respective bodies to be voted on. Then it gets sent to the President to become the law of the land.

By the way you may have missed an amendment to the bill that's stirred a bit of controversy. It was inserted the night before among the bill's 1,200 pages, which you can be sure none of America's elected officials actually read. The amendment placates Congressmen from Rust Belt states who worry about losing even more manufacturing jobs to the developing world (China). It requires the U.S. President to make a "border adjustment" on goods from countries that do not cap or reduce carbon emissions by 2020. It's a tariff.

Already President Obama has backed off that particular amendment. He says, "At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we've seen a significant drop in global trade, I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there." Very careful, sure. But you already did send the signal didn't you?

For what it's worth, we think this was all an exercise in political window dressing to get some version of a bill passed. If the Senate and the House actually agree on a climate change bill that puts a high tax on carbon, then the apotheosis of Obama will be complete.

We will take The One at his word, though. Besides, as everyone knows, the real purpose of the bill is not to start a trade war (although it may do so). The purpose is to make conventional energy more expensive AND-in an era of declining government tax receipts and rising liabilities-to create a huge new source of government revenues by taxing carbon. It's a revenue and power grab by an institution (the Nation state) that finds itself increasingly off-balance.

It's also a massive project in socioeconomic engineering that ignores the reality (and physics) of energy generation in an industrial society. It's true the world could benefit from cleaner and cheaper energy. But cleaner and more expensive energy is a recipe for economic suicide. It's something Western nations seem particularly keen on committing, although we can't really figure out why. It could be that the global Left simply finds modern life aesthetically ugly and consumerism (with all that pesky individual choice) a vulgarity that should be destroyed via legislation.

But speaking strictly in economic terms, unless a region or a country has ample hydroelectric or geothermal resources, it's impossible to meet base load electricity needs reliably with renewable energy. Advocates envision a world full of ultra-long life batteries, windmills, and solar farms. But it's just a fantasy. If the climate bills become law in Australia and America, it will accelerate the deindustrialising of Western economies and mean the transfer of even more manufacturing jobs to the developing world.

Of course maybe that's just what the architects of these laws want. Who knows? We know they want to tax productive enterprise and make the bulk of the population dependent on government handouts. That makes people compliant and easily controllable. That is big government Utopia. Advancing the fears of climate change is the easiest way to get more control.

Politics aside, there is an investment angle to this, which we've been developing at Diggers and Drillers and which Kris Sayce has been profiting from at the Australian Small Cap Investigator. It's natural gas and liquid natural gas (LNG).

In short, we'd expect to see the construction of a lot more natural gas fired power plants in the coming years in the West (although they are more expensive than coal-fired plants). All those re-chargeable plug-in hybrids have to get their electrons from somewhere. If it's not going to be coal (which will be taxed out of existence), it's probably going to be cleaner-burning natural gas power plants, powered by both conventional and unconventional gas.

Right now, global LNG capacity is rising and stockpiles are fairly high. But if you keep your eye on the big picture and we see a transition of the world's power plant fleet from coal to natural gas, it obviously favours gas producers and explorers. Australia is moving ahead by leaps and bounds in this area with conventional off-shore production in the North West Shelf and Timor Sea and more unconventional production (hopefully) from coal-seam-gas in Queensland.

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• The Energy Resources Are Out There
• Messages from Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
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Then along came the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. For complicated reasons, you have to keep temperatures very low in a particle accelerator. Just above absolute zero, in fact. The temperature in the LHC is -271 Celsius (-456 Fahrenheit).

There are only two degrees Celsius between the temperature the LHC operates and Absolute Zero. We reckon the credit markets must be in the middle, right about -272 degrees. It's pretty frigid out there people.

Bloomberg reports that, "The market for commercial paper, short-term borrowing by businesses, suffered the biggest one-week drop on record...The amount of commercial paper outstanding fell by $94.9 billion, or 5.6 percent, during the week ended Oct. 1. " What does that kind of deep freeze look like? Take a peek...

Source: Federal Reserve

Global share markets don't look very convinced the U.S. Senate's passage of a bailout bill will purge the financial sector of the bad debts which are killing it. Perhaps it's because the Senate bill was such a joke.

If you haven't had a chance to go through the bailout bill the Senate passed, don't cheat yourself. You can find it here.

Those with advanced knowledge of American government will know that the spending bills cannot originate in the Senate. Article 1, Section Seven of that useless piece of paper (the U.S. Constitution) says: "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills."

This is why the Senate lobotomized a bill already passed by the House. The Senate took a spending bill which had already cleared the House, gutted it as clean as you'd like, and stuffed it full of new spending and tax provisions which the house will vote on tomorrow.

One of the funnier provisions of the Senate bailout bill is Section 503, an "Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children."

Hooray! Everyone gets the shaft! And it's tax free!

According to Bloomberg, "Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children..The provision...will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year."

And we're supposed to take the Congress seriously? These are the people in charge of America? They're the same people who also just lifted the Statutory Debt limit to US$11.3 trillion.

The Law as a concept is worthy of respect. But when bad lawmakers make bad laws, they undermine the whole institution of the Law. That's what Congress and the President are doing.

It would be funny if it weren't so serious. The plan, or FrankenTARP as we are now calling it includes restriction on judicial review, a suspension of the normal rules for drafting and debating legislation in front of Congress, and allows for the President and Treasury Secretary to come back as many times as they'd like to get up to US$700 billion "at any one time."

It's effectively a down payment on the recapitalisation of the banking system. Once you've committed nearly a trillion dollars to a project, it's a little hard to walk away from isn't it? And with the other provisions about increasing deposit insurance, renegotiating mortgages, and providing relief to renters, you can see many version of this plan being resubmitted to Congress by President Obama and passing (without debate).

So what do you say? Are you ready for some massive, State-sponsored inflation? It will be very different from what Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover in 1931. Mellon told Hoover:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people

The response of the Paulson Treasury Department on the Bernanke Fed is not "liquidate" but "monetize." They won't say that of, course. The expansion in Fed credit and the Treasury plan are supposed to be "loans." We'll see how that goes. Meanwhile, take a look at the Fed's latest statistical release.

Source: Federal Reserve

Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Every Member of Congress Gets a Copy of I.O.U.S.A.
• A Bailout Bill for the Fed Should be Interesting
• U.S. House of Representatives Passes Climate Change Bill
• Congress Urged to Approve Bailout By George Bush and Warren Buffett
• Ghost of the Great Depression

"I'm sure you've all had a chance to go through the bill the Senate passed last night 74-25. You can find it here.

"Of course, a spending Bill cannot originate in the Senate because as we know, Article 1, Section Seven of that useless piece of paper (the Constitution) says: 'All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.'

"So the Senate lobotomized a Bill already passed by the House, which included, among other ridiculous spending provisions, Section 503 (EXEMPTION FROM EXCISE TAX FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROWS DESIGNED FOR USE BY CHILDREN.)

"According to Bloomberg : 'Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion bank rescue that is likely to pass tonight. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.'

"Funny.

"But...there are some other portions of the Bill that look surprisingly bold, perhaps even illegal. I wonder.

"First, the totally legal but absurd increase in the statutory limit on the public debt, from Section 122: Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting '$11,315,000,000,000'.

"Seriously.

"Thank god for statutory law. If you don't like it, you can just change it.

"Other sections you might want to have a gander at include section 115, detailing the Secretary's 'Graduated Authority to Purchase.' Passage of the bill gives him $250b to play with. Then, if the President requests it and Congress approves, he can request as much as $350b. After that, it's $700bn, again subject to a request by the President and approval by the Congress.

"Please note, however, that $700bn is not the ceiling on the Plan. The language says $700bn is the most the President and the Secretary can request...at any one time.

"So this is bailout by installments. But $700bn is not the end. It is just the beginning, provided Congress signs off.

"And the rest of the section makes it hard for them to not sign off by severely limiting debate on the requests submitted by the President. You don't often see Congress agree on rules for floor behaviour in the House and the Senate in a Bill. The rules committee does that in the House and the Senate sort of makes it up as it goes along.

"But this bill specifies the entire process by which a request from the President (Bush or Obama) MUST be handled by the House and the Senate. No motions to reconsider. No debate.

"And Congress is even trying to cut out judicial review. That's in Section 119.

"It starts out promisingly enough by saying that 'Actions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act shall be subject to chapter 7 of title 5, United States Code, including chapter 7 of title 5, United States Code, that such final actions shall be held unlawful and set aside if found to be arbitrary, capricious, an abuse aside if found to be arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or not in accordance with law.of discretion, or not in accordance with law.'

"But what is law anyway?

"Either way, Congress is severely limiting the circumstances under which the Treasury can be challenged. Is that legal? Just asking...not that it matters anymore."

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Bailout Bill Leaves Markets in Deep Freeze
• Politics and Investment Intertwined
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• Dodge Taxes Legally… Become Treasury Secretary
• The Battle Against a Bailout is a Lost Cause