Cowboy Confessional

“Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.”

Doug Adams might have well spoken of Obama in this passage from The Long Dark Team-time of the Soul. For all Thor’s thundering, he was only large quantities of booming sound and flashing lights, and little else aside from random and misguided destruction.

Reminds me of any given Obama speech.

Many gods are portrayed as spoiled brats with super powers. Odin and Zeus appear to be first cousins if not bastard siblings. Osama bin Laden portrays Allah in less flattering light though his murderous intentions are more narrowly focused. Even the Old Testament Yahweh was a bumpkin with a bad attitude and a desire to micro manage the universe.

Reminds me of Obama policies.

America’s neuvo presidente proffered his first budget proposal which made even veteran Washington watchers blink in disbelief. More of a manifesto than budget blueprint, Obama called for an explosive $3.6 trillion in spending that rivals any Karl Marx wet dream. Nearly half of the budget will be run on borrowed money and government’s grip on GDP will go beyond pre-war averages of 19% to an astounding 26%.

Only one agency of the federal government will have its budget reduced, that being the Department of Homeland Security, which is an odd agency to pare during time of war. All other agencies increase, and some astronomically. When combined with committed spending in his stimulus bill (which only stimulates selected K Street denizens) we see:

Education: 98% increase
Energy: 90% increase
EPA: 73%

This is reflective of an odd habit Washington has, namely to spend to excess when in debt. America had a balanced budget until September 11, 2001. Grudgingly both Republicans and Democrats had managed to spend within the means of revenues and resist jacking taxes. When the World Trade Center towers lay in smoldering scrap heaps, an Afghan invasion was inevitable and paying for that justifiable incursion required deficit spending.

The instant red ink flowed a little, it started flowing a lot. Every barrel of pork fermenting in one or another congressional office was pried open pronto. Since speed was of the essence in executing a new war, there was little resistance to these overt cash grabs. Indeed, the process of buying congressional votes has rarely been clearer. Thus an emergency was used by shiftless and morally bankrupt politicians to recklessly spend money the government did not posses.

Reminds me of Obama’s budget.

Obama’s proposed but not yet enacted federal budget is the new out-of-remission instance of the same disease. Masquerading as economic medicine, Obama and his henchmen and women (Reid and Pelosi by name) bums-rushed through a spending bill labeled as economic stimulus, though it was one shade shy of being a fundamental revision of the American political contract. His proposed budget is two shades over that same line and has cemented a growing movement of discontent, which if it models after the original will result in open violence against people in government.

Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing. Arrogant people (politicians) often learn restraint only after application of tar and feathers.

Tea Parties, an American protest tradition dating back to 1773, erupted in points across the country even before Obama’s budget was birthed. Enraged by the orchestrated theft of corporate bailouts, and infuriated further by Obama’s alleged “stimulus” spending bill, people have literally taken to the streets to provide politicians the obligatory warning shot. If rhetorical bullets speeding past their ears are insufficient for congress to tap break peddle on spending, they best be on guard when visiting their home districts less real slugs start flying.

Obama is not tone deaf to the growing clamor, but is now too clever by half. Steaming full speed for his socialist horizon, Obama has tried to redirect public anger by placing blame where it does not exist. Lobbyist make good targets since not even their mothers are found of them. Seeking to deflect citizen wrath, Obama pulled from his dusty mental attic the most convenient of straw man by saying:

“These steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business. I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this: So am I.”

He is right about the fight. He merely wants a different opponent in the ring because voters can and will deliver electoral body blows. In his canard Obama has committed an amateur’s error by amplifying the angst of his opponents. People are currently protesting in pouring rain because they feel their government ignores and steals from them. Obama’s reply was “I’m going to fight you … er … the lobbyist.” Instead of providing an open ear and acknowledging the growing discontent of those who will chose a new Congress next year, Obama told people already protesting that he is their opponent.

Obama is succumbing to the Hitler Trap. Emboldened by early success, he rushes to acquire as much political territory as possible, knowing it is easier to grow an empire when you own and leverage ill gotten lands. Like Hitler though, he risks reaching too far, too fast and thus incurring a backlash. Obama may have inherited an economic mess but he also inherited a public resentment of government whelped by bank bailouts and automaker assistance. Instead of heeding the growing clamor, Obama sits atop his temporary Olympus and surveys what is not be his but that he covets.

“Yes, it was an act of God. But which God?”

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It has been said that upon entering San Francisco one has the feeling they have left the United States. This sentiment is true in both its positive appreciation of San Francisco and its cynical caricature of the same.

Most amusing is the way San Francisco unconsciously exposes its differences and indifference to the rest of the nation. Though secession is not on San Francisco’s agenda, cultural and political collusion with the rest of the country is frowned upon if not actually illegal (the later is impossible to determine as The City’s statutes appear to be written by lower primates, by whom I mean Chris Daly). Even the thinning local newspaper of record has the fortunate habit of inadvertently advertising the disparity San Francisco has with America at large.

Sunday editions of the San Francisco Chronicle contain a book section which is for the most part a joy to peruse, aside from the angst it causes people who measure their unread book collections by the yard, by whom I mean me. The reviews are mostly lucid, often entertaining, and outside of election season not aggravating to conservatives and libertarians (the same cannot be said for the editorial page which is outsourced to the remnants of Pravda).

The back of Sunday’s book section contains a table of interest to writers. It lists the top selling books in several categories, but splits the table between Bay Area best sellers and what the rest of the country is reading. The contrast is stark as black ink on white newsprint. The non-fiction section – dominated by political missives in our modern era – has rare covariance, with today’s top ten sharing only one book betwixt (Malcolm Gladwell’s observations on Outliers, those annoyingly productive people that make average folk reevaluate their drinking and late sleeping habits … at least until cocktail hour or nap time).

Today’s #4 slots displayed a divide slightly wider than the Wyoming sky.

Across the nation people are rapidly reading Bernard Goldberg analysis of the media’s relationship with the new president, appropriately titled A Slobbering Love Affair. Bernie was a reporter with CBS News for more years than he is comfortable admitting and thus has seen media sausage making from the pigs vantage point. When he opines on the failings and fawnings of the media, he provides insights few other people can. The American public, largely suspicious of the media in general, has been gobbling up Goldberg’s book.

San Francisco readers lifted into their #4 slot The Inaugural Address 2009, a dump of Barack Obama’s opening salvo as the new, temporary chief executive officer of U.S.A. Corp.

To say San Francisco has also indulged in a slobbering love affair with Obama is akin to saying the Taliban is a little harsh. During the last election cycle I met the one San Francisco resident who put a McCain bumper sticker on a car. I’m not sure it was his car. He was reluctant to admit anything specific and later declined to emerge from his underground bunker until after the election for fear that his otherwise atheistic neighbors would revive the lost art of crucifixion.

Contemplate for a moment the generalized divergence. The wide swarth of America is investigating the relationship of an allegedly complicit media with the DNC’s messiah. San Francisco is consumed with the messiah himself and uninterested in analyzing if the media wears knee pads during presidential press conferences.

Does this say more about San Francisco or about the average American? The latter.

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Click this link and rate it a ‘5′ and send me to Australia for six months.

http://www.islandreefjob.com/#/applicants/watch/F8dDZvzguiQ

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Economics is an ecosystem, and all humans are different species with money being their common food source. Like other ecosystems, the economy adjusts as pressures arise and species adapt to the changing environment.

This is why drugs are cheap and drug profits remain higher than drug users.

The United Kingdom’s Home Office (and organization with a name more pleasant that it’s collective personality) recently concluded that a line of Peruvian Marching Powder costs less than a pint of beer. Buzz heads can dust their noses for less money than a soccer hooligan’s breakfast.

This is one of many side effects of unregulated markets. Despite enormous gauntlets imposed by governments, dope demand rages onward. Volume-focused profit potential has streamlined and optimized the cocaine trade. Like corporations with heavy firepower, the drug lords have tweaked their internal operations to the point where they deliver product at barging basement prices and get rich by shipping the stuff by the metric ton.

Maybe their couriers snort the stuff first … gives them the energy to drag crates of Charlie across the border.

Seem people south of the border have had enough of the game and want to back out of the criminalization business. Growing international consensus based on data like £1 lines has called for de-escalation of dope interdiction. Three former heads of state (not to be confused with non-state heads) recently concluded “The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war.”

You think?

At £1 a smack and with import volumes reaching Everest heights, there is no other conclusion. America’s “War on Drugs” is now in its forth decade and has sump-pumped the U.S. Treasury a few billion each year in direct interdiction costs (border patrol, Coast Guard, aid to states, etc.) with a few billion more in financing some shady South American governments in their coca field eradication efforts. Add the cost of warehousing petty possessors in prisons and America’s War on Dope is certifiably a war by dopes, by which I mean Congress.

Yet legalization scares soccer mom’s straight, and is thus decriminalization is doomed.

What many overly protective moms don’t realize is that their kids have an easier time buying heroin at their high school than buying a bottle of Yukon Jack at the corner liquor store. Where as illegal drugs by default are a deregulated industry, and booze is a regulated one, the path from producer to consumer and the means for optimizing production are completely different. Cocaine for kids is created by hut squatters in jungles while Jack is distilled by educated workers in government inspected facilities. Bolivian Blow is transported by a chain of underpaid human mules while whiskey is hauled for profit by trucking companies with union labor, annually inspected vehicles, licensed drivers and tax funded roads. The dealer who sold you child a little crank isn’t afraid of the law but the owner of the corner market fears losing his business license for selling a bottle of brandy to your baby.

We don’t need no stinking license!

Despite all, nothing will change. Drug ideology in America is pervasive to the point that every mom and dad who still toke a jay while the kids are out of the house absolutely want the current interdiction model. They would change their minds if they could be their kid for a day and were given the assignment to score some snort after science class and some schnapps after school.

The contrast would kill them, and then kill the war on drugs.

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People committing crimes do not like to be photographed in the act.

This includes cops.

I grew up with law enforcement officers (LEOs). My childhood friend was the son of the local police chief and I was riding shotgun in squad cars before I was old enough to drive. I discovered that the best part of being a cop is the perpetual amusement of odd occurrences, which might explain why I live in San Francisco these days for it is perpetually odd and amusing.

One night we pulled up behind a poorly concealed tiny Toyota. After the patrol officer (the first female officer on that squad who nicknamed herself ‘Patty Pig’) circled the bouncing vehicle twice, a man who easily cleared 6′4″ unfolded himself from the backseat, attempting to pull up his pants while crawling behind the wheel to make a sanctioned getaway.

Most criminal activity is more serious that backseat coitus. One tool LEOs like to cuff criminals with are cameras. The U.K. is positively mad for them, littering every street corner with snappers. There is even a proposal to put cameras in pubs. Subjects are videotaped in case their presence near a crime scene later becomes of interest to the constabulary. Though the efficacy of such evidence remains in debate, there is little to dissuade the U.K. police from fully utilizing cameras to catch miscreants committing crimes.

Unless bobbies are doing the dirty work.

Under the thin guise of anti-terrorism, it is now criminal to snap a member of Her Majesty’s forces, a member of any of the intelligence services or a constable. The prohibition is based on the corner case that a terrorist group might compile a photographic inventory of peace officers, a theory ignoring the fact that terrorist strive to induce terror in the citizenry and not armed guardians.

Blanket prohibitions are tools of oppression. Fungible laws can be applied brutally against inconveniently honest folks and the loyal opposition alike. Universal injunctions are routinely abused because few if any reasonable exceptions are included. Prohibitive laws need to be specific, not general, which is not what the U.K. now endures.

Restricting surveillance of LEOs in public has a horrific downside. It discourages and perhaps prevents applying justice to law enforcement officer who break the law. It elevates above the law people vested with power, and thus facilitates the abuse of that power.

Which brings us to the late Oscar Grant who is now a household name in the San Francisco bay area. Oscar was shot by a LEO after ringing in the New Year. The event took place on an Oakland subway platform while the train on which he had ridden waited to be released. Sensing that the LEOs on duty were being a bit too belligerent, a number of fellow riders whipped out their cell phones and began gathering grainy videos.

They are a YouTube sensation for self-evident reasons.

I wasn’t there. I’m not a witness. I cannot pronounce guilt or innocence. But at first blush the videos appear not to show a police action but an assassination. The former LEO has proffered explanations that a jury will some day consume, but they will dine up several home videos as well. It will be a wholly indigestible spread.

The videos will be a significant influence … unless the government somehow suppresses them as evidence.

The good folks at the Witness Project have long understood this. In locales less civilized than Oakland – a rapidly shrinking list – the Witness Project supplies video cameras so locals can document governmental abuses. Relief may not come from the regional legal system, but it may come from millions of YouTube watchers and the governments that those citizens command.

Which no longer includes the United Kingdom. They long ago revoked the right of self-defense and now the ability to keep bull bluecoats in line. Little wonder that England and Wales have turned violent – the laws favor the lawless … including lawless LEOs.

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