Cowboy Confessional

I’ll confess to feeling little grief over an oil soaked Arab nation being in financial straights.

Join the party Achmed.

News comes today that a state run/financed/manipulated company in the United Arab Emirates (literally, a cabal of chieftains) is in fiscal fuss. Dubai World is a company that invests UAE petrodollars, and has done both the spectacular and the spectacularly bizarre. Sensing that their oil reserves would one day run dry, the UAE set out on a grand scheme for making their country the financial and recreational hub of the Middle East, a place where oil tycoons and drug addled pop stars could come to collapse.

In conspicuous consumption that made Donald Trump blink, Dubai World engineered real estate and buildings in ways that would have caused Walt Disney to wet himself. They crafted islands in the shape of palm trees, sought to erect the tallest building on the earth, and created an indoor ski resort in the Arabian desert.

Such chutzpah!

Similar to American house flippers who traded homes like baseball cards during the subprime bubble, Dubai World bet too big. In racing to erect a crude oil carnival, Dubai World management over extended themselves. When the Great Recession arose, when over inflated oil prices fell to more-or-less rational levels, and when people of wealth decided to ski on real mountains again, Dubai experienced a deceleration akin to driving a speeding SUV into the side of an oil tanker.

The situation may be serious for Dubai but not tragic for the rest of the world, though panic stock selling seems to be betting otherwise. If the UAE and its GDP disappeared tomorrow, it would be a mosquito bite on the world economic body. The UAE created approximately $206 billion in gross domestic product last year. For perspective sake, UAE’s GDP is about one fourth of new debt Obama added to Uncle Sam’s balance sheet last year alone and less that 2% of America’s GDP. Even if the UAE collapsed, global short-term effects would be at worst inconvenient. The long-term effects would be miniscule.

However, the impact on the UAE could be devastating.

Dubai World is about $60 billion in debt, which is approximately 30% of the UAEs GDP. It is as if the U.K. hocked Wales (and having been treated wonderfully by a pub full of regulars in Holyhead, I wish Wales the good fortune of a future separation). The UAE might be able to survive a default on one third its annual wealth, but nobody would bet another nickel on Dubai aside from pumping the last drop of crude from under its sand. Dubai World wants to delay repayments for a full half year, indicating that their cash flow is seriously constipated, well beyond what a crude oil enema would cure. Odds are no foreign investor will rescue Dubai, and with oil prices falling, the amalgamated emirates are unable to extricate the budgetary blockage.

In other words, odds are Dubai World will bomb. So long customized islands. Toodle-oo TechnoPark. Arivaderchi Atlantis. No more investors, very few visitors, and no love lost.

Odds are the Great Recession will be doubly dangerous in Dubai. In their manic molding of a modern Mesopotamia, Dubai imported a lot of human helpers. The UAE had the highest net migration rate, and 78% of all residents work in services – building islands and shoveling man made snow at the indoor ski resort. All this work may grind to a near halt and many people will need to be repatriated. Given that workers migrated from places worse than The Emirates – a country co-governed by sharia law – expats might resist being the UAE’s next export commodity.

If a near collapse of Dubai World is coming, they will have to release holdings that do not significantly contribute to the national bottom line. One arm of Dubai World is Dubai Ports World, the third largest operator of shipping ports on the planet. Many nations (the United States included) threw ethnocentric hissy fits when Dubai Ports World began grabbing major shipping docks. These will become collateral when Dubai World defaults.

The other casualty may be the UAE’s Free Trade Zones. A major magnet for investors abroad, the zones offered 100% foreign ownership and zero taxes. Even emirates are not immune to taxation temptation and changing the rules. To bulk-up their books, the UAE may renege on their no-tax policy, which in turn will cause investors to stop coming and perhaps start leaving. Any hint of foreign investment taxes will take the UAE back to an oil-only economy.

Which brings us to Harry Reid and other oily critters.

The Senate health insurance hijack bill is an amazing piece of corruption. Within a couple of thousand pages are hundreds or major manipulations of the masses and a pack of pork to particular politicians. Like the new Dubai economy, the current U.S. health insurance system is a rigged game. Modern Dubai was built on a small amount of over leveraged phantom wealth. Once a ripple washed across the façade of their economic island, Dubai sank. The rigged game of American health insurance (rigged because federal law prohibits competition and fails to tame litigation abuses) is more stable than Dubai World, though not by much. Reid’s rules would redefine actuarial tables, raise insurance rates for young people (who are already disinclined to buy insurance), and institute new taxes to suck the life out of a limping economy.

Reid’s bill is the Democrat Dubai World, and likely to create the same outcome.

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A military tribunal asserts jurisdiction over persons held in military custody and stand accused of being enemies who have violated a law of war.

Incompetency can be a collective trait as well as an individual affliction.

Take the case of Eric Holder, the temporary attorney general in the temporary Obama administration. In the world of constitutional law, central principles and obvious conclusions are common. The nation’s lead lawyer needs to be competent, which means understanding The Law. Yet before taking the Justice Department helm, Holder signed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court Heller handgun ban case, arguing that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” was not a right, nor of the people.

All nine of the Supremes concluded the opposite (though four robed bandits argued that the right could be modified by legislation).

Little is plainer in American law than our list of enumerated prerogatives, quaintly called the Bill of Rights. So solid was the assumption that the Second Amendment, like the others nine, conferred an individual right, that this interpretation was called the standard model. Yet Holder’s incompetency led him to humiliation by publicly arguing the inane opposite.

Which in turn led him to be nominated by Obama to take the top job at the Justice Department.

Like birds with similar plumage, incompetents tend to cluster but congregate around the most maladroit member. And as another failed politician noted “The fish rots from the head down.” In recent weeks we have seen serial incompetency from the Obama Bunch, including but certainly not limited to:

• Scaring women from coast to coast with new and mixed messages about breast cancer
• Ram-rodding a health insurance bill that the 85% of people with coverage oppose
• Bowing to an Emperor though it is not part of American presidential protocol
• A “stimulus” job creation tracking web site that listed non-existent jobs in non-existent congressional districts

But the best of the worst, the cream of the crap if you will, was Holder’s decision to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York for trial. Ignore if you can that Khalid confessed to the war crime that was 9/11, that the military tribunal is the normal venue for trying such case, that Khalid was already “in process” under a military tribunal and that he asked for a conviction and execution. Ignore too – if possible – the inevitable terrorist activities that will be planned and probably executed once Khalid and his co-conspirators are in the Big Apple. Ignore again that the procedures in civil trials allow Khalid’s lawyer to obtain sensitive intelligence information. Ignore that never before has an enemy combatant caught on the battlefield has been tried in civilian court, but Holder was unaware of this and responded to questioning saying that he would “have to look at that.” The combined loss of opportunity (discontinuing a military tribunal which would have most likely resulted in a conviction) and the increased danger to civilians (very few of those at Guantanamo) makes Holder’s decision incompetent beyond even Obama’s standards.

Naiveté creates one brand of incompetence.

When grilled by Senators about his demented decision, Holder made a series of statements that displayed his denseness (as if it were in doubt). Most instructive of his inanities was his assumption that in getting a conviction “failure is not an option”, like the failure he encountered convincing the Supreme Court to ignore a standard model and the right of the people. In simple civil trials, there is always the possibility of procedural errors that let criminals escape on a technicality. Hung juries can lead to acquittals. Terrorists blowing up a court house can nullify a conviction.

Failure may not be an ‘option’ but it can be an outcome, the probability of which is increased if an incompetent is in charge of prosecution and if another is his boss.

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It bears repeating: Barack Obama is not the brightest bulb on the homo sapiens marquee.

Listening to local liberals one would think Obama was equal parts Einstein and da Vinci and that the next epoch of enlightenment will soon radiate from any of his immaculate orifices. Fact is Obama’s depth of policy knowledge is slightly shallower than the substance of his stump speeches, which is measured in negative increments.

(I will admit to experiencing fiendish joy in telling my left-of-center friends that Obama is an oaf. Confronted by the flipside of their religious beliefs, they are slammed into momentary silence, which in the San Francisco region creates transient political bliss.)

One need not look far or ponder deeply before Obama’s aurora is shown to be passing light and not passing for enlightenment.

Economics: In the opening months Obama confidently proclaimed his political payback slush fund (a.k.a. “stimulus bill”) would cause unemployment to peak at 8.5%, though it now stands 10.2%.

Foreign policy: He claimed open engagement with hostile nations and NGO warriors would stabilize the world, yet Iran is inches away from detonating their first atomic bomb and Obama’s March of 2009 Grand Strategy for Afghanistan is now in shambles, being presently rethought and dithered.

Deficit: Obama claimed all bills he signed would be deficit neutral, yet the public debt has risen nearly a trillion dollars during his brief tenure and his anti-constitutional hijacking of health insurance promises another trillion.

When confronted with these demonstrable facts, Bay Area lefties retort that Obama is certainly smarter than George Bush, to which I reply “Setting the bar kinda low, ain’t ya?”

In most news cycles I conclude Obama could not present himself in a more ignorant light if he tried, and I am continuously proven wrong. But this week, in one decision, he made George Bush appear a genius by comparison. That’s one hell-of-a feat. Obama is wining a race to the bottom, making Bush the cream of the crap.

In his nonsensical zeal to close the prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Obama decided to bring the second most notorious (living) terrorist to the scene of the crime, downtown New York. Though perhaps poetic in appeal, the logistical non-necessity and potential for disaster are huge.

I fear blood will drip from Obama’s fingertips.

Anyone who has not been smoking crack for the last two decades (ala Eric Holder) recalls there were two attacks on the World Trade Center, the second of which succeeded in gruesome fashion. The prior pursuit involved detonating rental trucks in the underground garage, and though terrifying, did relatively little damage. The jihadists (who incidentally were slightly brighter than Obama, despite trying to get their deposit back on a truck blow into a billion bits) were to be sentenced in a New York court on 9/12/2001, a day before the second attack.

Few people think the timing was coincidental.

Keeping in mind that the 1993 twin tower trouble players were pawns, you can imagine what mischief Osama bin Laden is planning when his lead co-conspirator is sentenced in the same city. Terrorists thrive on spectacle, and not the Hollywood musical variety (though the thought of bin Laden performing a tap dance in a sequined bodice is an amusing visual, surpassed in entertainment value only by the visual of his forehead intercepting a .45 caliber slug from my pistol). They deal in dead bodies and high population regions like downtown New York are what military strategists call “target rich environments.”

What al Qaeda is already cooking-up will make 9-11 look blissful.

Ignore for a moment that hundreds of years of military court history provides the legal means and methods for conducting afar fair trails and summary executions if required/desired (we might prefer to keep Khalid kicking for our amusement). This issue is about location, location, location. Gitmo provides interesting advantages, not the least of which is that the only two ways for rescue terrorists to enter the island is through U.S. Navy machine guns fire or a communist dictatorship. To reach New York they merely need Canadian passports or Mexican coyotes. Big cities are the easiest in which to hide. Try being of stranger of Middle Eastern descent in Shallow Water, Kansas instead. Odds are you’ll be noticed.

In short, the imbecilic illuminati decided to make security impossible and New Yorkers targets.

Assuming there is some strategic advantage to holding civil instead military trails (which there is not), Obama’s questionable location is a jaw dropper. The Federal Courts are flexible and the crimes in question are not location specific – the crime was part of a declared act of war against the United States, not the city of New York. A special and temporary Federal Court could be created in Shallow Water for this trial alone (and no doubt my former friends in Shallow Water are now using my name only in conjunction with four letter expletives).

With two very viable options – military court in Cuba or civil court in Shallow Water – Obama obviously made his decision on some other criteria. He is reaching for symbolism but grasping suicide.

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It is good to have low friends in high places, and high friends in low places. I doubt Chris Muir ever gets high, and his humor is never low, thus he cannot be pigeon holed … kinda like former cowboys living in San Francisco. Common classification schemes just don’t work.

Grateful I am though for Muir’s musings about my book Afterlife. Or perhaps I should say his character’s musings. Being a mainly political cartoon, I was impressed (again) by Chris’ ability to merge life, fiction, humor and political opinion into a seamless unit. More impressed I am that a hot redhead in a bubble bath was reviewing my book (my only fear therein is the any male readers of Muir’s strip might overlook the book plug).

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2009/11/08/

Click on the link or the toon for the full scale version.

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One reason to read Charles Krauthammer is that the man rapidly gets to the point while providing previously obscure perspective.  He writes about Obama’s election:

2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

This is what the Democrats should fear most – that their hope for change was hung on a weak hook.

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