Today's Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily.

The current financial crisis has already cost more than World War II, writes financial blogger Barry Ritholtz, and that’s after adjusting for inflation. It’s hard to conceptualize $4.6165 trillion (Bloomberg reports it as $7.76 trillion), so try this: government bailouts, including the recent addition of Citigroup, amount to more than the cost of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the race to the moon, the savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and NASA combined.

But CEO’s with fat salaries are just a distraction. If every oil company executive worked for free, writes Thomas Sowell at National Review, it wouldn’t lower the price of a gallon of gas by a dime or the cost of a car by even one percent. It’s an age-old story in which politicians give us someone to hate and blame in order to grab more power for themselves. Example: pols pressure banks into lending to people that normally wouldn’t qualify and when the economy turns sour, they blame deregulation and call for greater government control. He’s not having it.

A Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should worry conservatives, argues Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. Many conservatives espouse America’s rights to resist international pressures and to protect its own self-government, and they are willing to project American power to do so. While Obama’s picks for national security so far have shown no great desire to shake things up, he still inclines toward moving America into the international mainstream, Mirengoff writes, and Clinton has shown no indication she’ll act as a counterweight to that.

The Holy Land Foundation is going down, and CAIR should go with it, argues Scott Johnson. HLF, a Muslim charity, was found to have given financial support to Hamas, which the U.S. lists as a terrorist organization. In two separate posts, one at Power Line and one at National Review, Johnson lays out why it is one of the government’s most significant cases against terrorist conspirators in the U.S. since 9/11, and applauds the government’s outing of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the case.

At this rate, the Minnesota recount could drag on for months. Power Line blogger Scott Johnson has been following the recount, including state Senate hopeful Al Franken’s efforts to get some previously rejected absentee ballots back in the count. And he seems to be calling former Washington Democratic Party Chair Paul Berendt’s involvement in the process a “nightmare scenario.”

No need to discuss Barack Obama’s citizenship any more. Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins writes that he still receives e-mails asking why he has decided to stop writing about Obama’s legitimacy. Pointing to his post of a month earlier, he reminds those clinging to the belief that Obama is not really a citizen that the state of Hawaii has acknowledged they have a copy of his live birth certificate and that a newspaper clipping from 1961 proves he’s American. Discussion over.

Barack Obama won through media spinning and voter ignorance, or so seems to be the lesson of a popular video circulating on Youtube.