Republican Senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire wrote the TARP Act and says that the Act stipulates that the returned TARP money “shall” be used to reduce the debt – and that using $30B for a lending program for small community banks is not part of the Act. He also says the 2011 budget proposal puts the U.S. on the path to fiscal insolvency. He believes it is a “huge deficit machine” that will lower the quality of life for our children.

On Jan 29, 2010 Lech Walesa, the former President of Poland, came to Chicago to support Republican Adam Adrzejewski for Illinois for governor in the primary election because he agrees with the candidate’s platform of exposing corruption. He believes the U.S. no longer leads the world morally or politically. When asked, he also stated that the U.S. is moving towards socialism.

Neil Barofsky, the Treasury Department’s Special Investigator for TARP says TARP funds have made the “too big to fail” bank problem worse and have increased the moral hazards of bad decisions. He says the incentives for bad behavior that existed before the TARP funds have just been made worse by the TARP program.

Dr. Rand Paul, first time candidate and the son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, is already ahead 10 points in the polls for the GOP primary after only one month and is drawing large cheering Tea Party crowds, much to the surprise of establishment Republicans.

Former Mass Governor and GOP presidential candidate tells George Stephanopoulos that Obama has lost a year by focusing on health care and not jobs. He says there have been no net new jobs and unemployment has grown to 10% because Obama has scared the private sector into hiding which has made it harder to create jobs.

GOP Rep. Ron Paul tells CNN that government should stop wasting money. We don’t need more debt. Let people make the decisions. We need to go back to free markets.

Scholars from the conservative Cato Institute comment after edited sections of the 2010 State of the Union Address. Their comments point out how the speech contained little government programs that will become big government programs, special interest tax breaks, fake language about fiscal responsibility, a spending freeze that is a farce and loads of programs that will increase costs to taxpayers…

As a participant on a FoxNews roundtable discussion, columnist Charles Krauthammer states the reasons why he thinks Obama’s options are more than being a “really good” 1-term president or a 2-term mediocre president – Krauthammer thinks Obama also has a good chance to become a mediocre 1-term presidency.

Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen Roach says that high levels of employment, the recent election results and political risk are resulting in bank bashing being the “sport of the day.”

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute recaps what the last stimulus did, and did not do, for America. His charts show the negative impact of the first stimulus and project the effects of a second stimulus.