Administration officials seem to be at odds over the state of the current recession. One says it's over, another laughingly disagrees. Perhaps more stimulus would do the trick? Would just a little more federal money at last begin to create more jobs and bring this recession officially to an end?

A report on Fox News Monday evening explained that three universities in Iowa found a creative way to put stimulus money to use in the area of jobs. Not in creating jobs, but in ending them. $43 million of stimulus money was used to buy instructors out of their contracts and move them into the ranks of the unemployed.

So is the recession over for them? Talking yesterday with Chris Jones about this, he mused that "we can never overestimate the creative imagination of sin." Nice ring, that. The creative imaginations of Washington lawmakers are certainly soaring in unprecedented ways these days. And if the Iowa situation is any barometer of the clever ways Americans can discover to take advantage of government idiocy, well, we may not see the end of the recession any time soon. But the end of the republic?

That seems rather more likely to me.