Act in haste, repent at leisure.

Back in October, when Congress was stampeded into approving a commitment of up to $700 billion to bail out banks who invested in mortgage-backed securities, we were told the money would be used to make a market for these now toxic financial instruments.

After Congress approved the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed strategy.  Rather than use the first $350 billion to buy up subprime mortgages, the government invested it in the banks themselves.

The Associated Press contacted 21 of the 116 banks that received federal money and asked them what they've done with it.  None were willing to say. Their reticence was understandable.

China is almost half a million square miles bigger than the continental US (the contiguous 48 states without Alaska/Hawaii) - and it is amazing how much of it is desert or high mountain plateaus where hardly anybody lives. And I mean no one, as in empty. I'd estimate that more than half, upwards of two-thirds of China is virtually uninhabited.

That means cramming 1.3 billion people into an area less than one-third of the continental US. People who have made a deal with their Chicom leaders: you get to keep political control and we get to prosper in a growing economy. The deal breaks down if the economy falters - and it is faltering fast.

The engine of China's economy - her exports that we buy - is in steep decline, foreign direct investment is down 36% for 2008, scores of millions of peasants who had found work in cities are now unemployed and headed back to their bleak villages.

China is in trouble - and when dictatorships get in trouble, history shows the option they most often choose to try and save themselves is war. Will China - or will it opt for the alternative that geopolitics is now providing, to take America's place as protector and peacemaker?