Thomas Jefferson

Libtalker Thom Hartmann sees "billionaire" as synonymous with "criminal" and would prohibit any person in America from owning more than $1 billion in wealth.

Hartmann uncorked his fanciful wish on his radio show Thursday while citing a letter by Thomas Jefferson to justify his views. (audio clips after page break)

Last week, I summarized how President Barack Obama has not lived up to his campaign promises to lower the national deficit and debt and get our nation's fiscal house in order. So now I'm calling on him to heed the economic advice of our nation's first eight presidents.

Before I highlight some of the Founding Fathers' wisdom on federal debt and spending, let me remind readers how Crossroads GPS recently summarized Obama's relation to national debt:

Liberal pundits, journalists, and yes, the president of the United States seem to be in a full-blown panic about the prospects of ObamaCare going down in flames when the Supreme Court rules on HHS v. Florida in two months. Doing so would be the sort of judicial activism that conservatives decry, President Obama complained ludicrously earlier this week.

But have no fear, liberals, for law professor and Daily Beast/Newsweek contributor David R. Dow -- who previously wrote a book defending judicial activism -- has your solution. The Yale-educated lawyer suggests that President Obama's congressional defenders could try something last attempted in 1805: the politically-motivated impeachment of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Here's how Dow opened his April 3 Daily Beast post:

Seeing how Rachel Maddow once insisted the Constitution has no preamble -- this from a woman with a doctorate in political science from Oxford -- it hardly comes as a shock when she misquotes Thomas Jefferson to her liking.

In her new book, "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power," Maddow attributes the following quotation to Jefferson, according the description of the book at Amazon --

Fact: The man who wrote so eloquently about basic human liberty in the Declaration of Independence was himself a slave owner. Unproven theory: That man had a sexual relationship with one of those slaves and fathered at least one of her children.

If you’re a liberal journalist, the fact makes you inclined to believe the theory, and ideology and political necessity take you the rest of the way. At least, that has been the case in reporting on the Jefferson-Hemings historical controversy over the last decade and more.

It will be interesting to see if a new book that goes a long way toward exonerating Thomas Jefferson receives the same kind of breathless coverage as evidence the media cited to condemn him. Or if CBS produces a miniseries to correct the one it made exploiting that evidence.

The White House's wish almost came true last week. It was hoping most of us and even the mainstream media would miss the release of the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary report on the 2010 federal fiscal year. And most did.

The Wall Street Journal, however, exposed why the White House was being so secretive about its results: The CBO concluded that federal government spending has skyrocketed 21.4 percent in just the past two years since President Barack Obama took office!

The White House's actions remind me of President Ronald Reagan's words: "We could say they spend money like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors. It would be unfair because the sailors are spending their own money."

It's no new revelation that Washington has lost its way from our Founders' vision and fiscal frugality. But in the past two years, it has become a financial runaway train. And it is only we the people who can save it from completely derailing our country and all of us on board.