What Every Dragon Knows:

Get yourself a pile of gold, as big as possible, any way possible, and sit on it.

Congress has donated billions to the banking industry, with the goal of stimulating the economy by saving the financial system. So what are the banks doing with those hundreds of billions of dollars? Sitting on the piles.

The banks aren't loaning the money because the economy is in a funk, and the economy won't extricate itself from its funk until money begins to flow again.

In the meantime, the banks are sitting on the money they managed to extricate from the taxpayer, using it as an insurance policy against even worse times. The taxpayer is making sure that the banks remain solvent even if it means that they, the taxpayer, ends up jobless, homeless, dying of pneumonia in the street.

The dragon's loyalty is to itself, and its pile of gold. (Read Mike McIntire's "Bailout Is a Windfall to Banks, if Not to Borrowers" in today's New York Times.)

Dumbest Prez in History To Form Think Tank:

Soon to be former president, GW plans to return to Texas "to build a library, museum and public-policy center in Dallas" (Dan Eggen, "Bush's Post-Presidency to Include More Than a Library):

"The president's vision is for it to become an incubator of ideas, discussion and debate about the issues that were front and center during his presidency, including the controversy," said Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to Bush who is acting as a spokesman for the project. "The idea here is to have a place where that debate can continue." -- if McIntire)

McIntire's story provides us with some revealing stats: Bush is leaving office with approval ratings equal to those of Nixon when he was chased out of office. Almost 60 percent of those poled blame Bush for the country's economic woes. And five times as many people people believe that he was a below average president as those who thought the same about his father. As you recall, his dad was considered a "wimp."

Test time:

Your choice for worst president in U. S. history:

A) Buchanan: Took no action to head off Civil War, bloodiest in American history;

B) Harding: three years of poker, prostitutes and an oil scandal that set the tone for energy policy in America;

C) Hoover: During the country's worst economic depression, with one-in-five adult males unemployed and mounting homelessness and millions of citizens facing starvation, chose to do nothing;

D) Nixon: Mislead the country about ending the Vietnam War in order to become elected, intensified spying on American citizens, infiltrated opposition groups in order to lead them to commit illegal, subverted and undermined the U. S. Constitution in order to be re-elected, only president to resign office in disgrace;

E) George W Bush: Lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to mislead the government into an illegal war for the purpose of enriching friends and political supporters, costing thousands of American lives, pushed country into deregulation and reduced tax revenues that helped to bring about the seconds worst economic crisis (perhaps to become the worst) in American history, purposely weakened the government so that its response to natural catastrophes, like Katrina, would be inadequate in order to follow an ideology.

Note: That's five choices out of 43 possibilities; when you throw in the mediocre presidents the country has had, it doesn't say much for the country's ability to select leaders adequate to the job. The saving grace, one is left to suppose, is that no other country has a much better track record.