Like any consumer, taxpayers have a right to demand a refund if a product is defective.  Eric Holder is proving himself to have many mental design defects and as such is a completely inoperable device.  He is the Yugo of the American legal system.

Ignoring his leadership, participation in or apologies for previously demonstrated intellectual incapacity, his recent suit against Arizona ranks among the most feeble of legal constitutional law actions.  In twenty five pages of disorganized discourse, Holder managed to give lawyers a bad worse name.  Those of serious con law scholarship – which apparently excludes Obama and Holder – are struggling to regain respiration after reading Holder’s brief.

For those who fleeting moments of sanity have forced to ignore the evening news, Arizona recently enacted a law which will cause illegal aliens to be incarcerated.  AZ decided to do so because the federal government won’t.  In crafting the law, the Deep Ditch State studiously avoided redefining the definition of immigration or legal entry into the U.S.  In other words, they did not want to violate the federal governments defined role as the body that defines immigration law and policy.

Which Holder claims Arizona did.

Our legal system has the notion of preemption, which in simplified forms means if a higher level of government (and by higher I mean more elevated, not more stoned) is granted authority in one aspect of law, any decision they make overrides decisions made by lower and allegedly more sober governing bodies.  Holder rightly cites that the Constitution grants both this preemptive power and that the feds have the authority to define naturalization and immigration law.  Then again kids riding the short bus could make such a simple observation.

This is where Holder leaves the intellectual highway and tumbles into the ditch of dementia.  In his briefs he continually harps on preemption in an apparent attempt to convince somebody that Arizona law is preempting federal law (which, as noted above, is not the case).  He veers into irrelevancies like Congress allegedly having other objectives in immigration policy aside from making unauthorized immigration a crime.  Not seeing the irony, Holder notes that the “President of the United States [has] the authority to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”  {Note to Eric:  He has the duty, not the authority}  If Holder is pitching this perspective to Supreme Court justices, then he runs the risk of one or all nine of them applying a gavel to his skull.  I doubt Eric is so errant as to file suit simply to convince voters of some righteous element of his bosses administration – filing frivolous law suits is for small time criminals, like John Edwards, a level so low that even Eric cannot sink to it.

This, sadly, leaves imbecility as the remaining explanation for his actions.  Eric is not lucid.  Holder is half-baked.  His faculties are deficient, his dendra defunct.  In short, Eric is unsuited and unsuitable for the job that Barack Obama gave him.  As with any useless appliance, he needs to be taken back, the money invested in him refunded, and his parts salvaged for spares.

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Predicting economic doom is best done by Malthusians and other enfeebled individuals, so I hesitate to step in their pile of intellectual effluvium.  Yet it is difficult to look at Greek government excess and Grecian socialist selfishness and not predict that the land that whelped Plato and his Republic is about to go bust.  As always a little perspective is painful and necessary.

Anyone who dislikes math, economics or politics can instead tune into E! … or MSNBC.  Their depth is the same.

Greece cranks about 2% of the European Union’s GDP, which for an island nation is an unexpected feat.  However, they are well up the list of countries in the world in terms of debt as a percent of their GDP, owing 108% of what they produce in a year.  The only nations more insolvent than the Greeks are places like Jamaica, Lebanon and Zimbabwe (actually, you have to add Japan, Singapore and Italy, but those countries crank out more wealth per head).   The wastrel United States is about half as indebted as Greece (though that is 2009 data and does not include Obama’s spending spree, which the IMF estimates pushes the US up to 96%), which shows how the Greeks are going to Hellas in a hand basket.

The first point where this analysis gets interesting is the imperfect European Union.  In a mash-up of nations with only geography as a common denominator, they managed to cobble together rules of engagement that could confuse a lawyer.  Their constitution weighs in at over 65,000 words, and that excludes protocols and annexes (the United States Constitution is a parsimonious 7,600 words, including 222 years of amendments). In a vain attempt to make the EU lord, master and micromanager of every aspect of life, and in trading competing national interest against one another, the EU created an unworkable mess.  This is not why Greece is heading down the economic drainpipe, but it shows one of the reasons why the EU will fail in rescuing Greece – the situation is too slippery (really, I am sorry for the puns – I blame society).

In order for Greece to not fail requires two events, one likely and the other not.  The first is that they require a short-term bailout.  Already Germany and the IMF (a.k.a. the United States taxpayer) are ready to bail-out Greece and keep their bonds from achieving the same valuation as the Zimbabwean $100,000,000 note (which at its terminus wouldn’t buy a Starbucks coffee, but then again neither can the average American paycheck).  Other EU members, some very reluctantly, will agree to making Greece temporarily solvent.  The immediate future favors Greece.

Greece’s long term outlook is slightly less optimistic than Oedipus’ eyesight (though their mutual hindsight will be very good).

The bailout stabilizes the patient.  However, it does not cure the disease.  Greece has agreed to enact a series of steps designed to bring their spending slightly closer to their income, weak medicine for a highly infected body politic.  This includes:

* Freezing government pay, which is comical because public paychecks have risen 30% in the last four years (and if this sounds familiar to Californians, then know you are next in government bankruptcy court).

* Annual bonuses equaling two extra months of pay will be scrapped for some government workers.

* Private companies can now lay off more than 2% of their personnel (yep, the Greek government mandates the maximum flexibility a corporation has in managing their payrolls) to a whopping 4%.

* Taxes will rise, with VAT climbing to 23% along with some direct taxes on booze and cigarettes.

* There are also a collection of promises that will never be kept, including cracking down on tax evaders, changing retirement age and privatizing government operations.  Being a socialist nation, the odds of any of these events occurring is as remote as Crete is to Compton.

Already evidence has erupted that Greeks won’t accept even minor adjustments.  Riots resulting in death have vented like Santorini with more being planned by pestilent pinheads.  Like children with billy clubs, it has proven unwise to yank the lollypop from their gobs.  Though politicians will talk tough and lecture the Greek masses on austerity, they will soften the scheme as soon as any sign of EU watchfulness eases or economic revival is evident.

The whole cycle will start anew.

What makes this a long-term looser is the effect on the EU.  I predict that Greece will be escorted out the Union once Greek fiscal efficacy evaporates.  Proportionately speaking, this would be like the United States telling Maryland adios (and given the influx of Latin Americans into the United States, adios may become a permanent part of the American vocabulary).  If the EU’s investment in Greece is lost, they have only two options:  to keep pumping money into a member country that cannot manage its affairs, or cut them loose like a reprobate child who can’t keep a job.

Germans are unlikely to nurture malcontented miscreants.

So, what happens when Greece is cast adrift like Danae and Perseus?  Nothing instantly.  But succession has never boded well for a union – ask any man served with divorce papers.  Selective unions are merely friendships whereas committed unions are marriages.  A good spouse will do everything in their power to keep their mates happy and the marriage intact.  Money, comfort, spare kidneys – nothing is beyond question.  But this commitment dies when the marriage does, and most marital unions die from infidelity.

Likewise with the EU and the fiscally philandering Greeks.

Once Greece betrays the trust of other EU members by failing to enforce austerity and by demanding more EU lucre, trust ceases to exist and the EU will jettison Greece to an economic Hades.  Germany, ill content to be the financial backstop, may contemplate leaving themselves, learning from America that generosity more often than not buys ingratitude.  This or more bankruptcies will break the Euro currency.  Other EU countries may accelerate the process by attempting to stay in the union while reverting back to their own currency, following Brittan’s example.

In short, the Euro will likely become a historical footnote and the belabored EU constitution shipped to an impoverished Greece for toilet paper purposes.

Yes, this is all very speculative and is flexible due to far-future fancy.  But the tell is that Greeks now riot over accepting responsibility for their own mismanagement.  Like children tossing tantrums for the milk they spilt, the Greeks are setting their own towns ablaze protesting that government largess will be trimmed ever so slightly.  This mentality last as long as the food does, and in a bankrupt country, that does not last long.

UPDATE: Hours after posting this the EU created $1T (pretty much out of thin air) to buy-up bad debt, namely Greek bonds and other waste paper.  No word on how they intend to unroll this bigger debt bomb, which is 1/16th of the entire EU GDP. But this does not bode well for the EU over a longer-term.

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Sorry Sergey, Lawrence. You know as well as I that your manta of “don’t be evil” is transparent, and that like any powerful entity – be it corporate or government – it succumbs to sins of opportunity and convenience.

How has Google gone evil? Let me compute the ways.

First and foremost are multiple modes of censorship. A recent spate of reports showed Google playing religious games by censoring insults to Islam (note to Brin and Page – that is actually an insult to your customers). When one typed into Google’s search engine a phrase such as “Christianity is” or “Judaism is”, Google most helpfully filled in the top suggestions from its vast database, most of which were derogatory. Yet when the search phrase began “Islam is”, Google was oddly silent.

Some PR flack at Google suggested it is was programming bug, which this former hacker knows is not. Data queries operate on four simple models, and no others can exist. A search dumps nothing, dumps everything (obviously not the case here), allows a defined subset of information out (the general Google operation based on keywords) or dumps everything but disallows certain data to escape.

That last mode is the system that filtered insults to Islam but not to any other religion. This is not caused by a bug, it is caused by a configuration decision. Ipso facto, someone in Google took specific and premeditated action to avoid displaying what people think about Islam, yet leaving uncensored what people think of other faiths. I have my suspicions that Google was prostrating itself before yet another brutal government.

Evil.

It should not surprise us then that Sergey and Lawrence unevenly endorse censorship and other forms of evil. Google’s relationship with one of the most evil entities in the known world – the tank rolling, protestor squashing, summary executing, labor camping and (yes) censoring government of mainland China. With better than a billion head and a growing middle class, China is an obvious place for advertising companies (like Google) to make a dime. Thus, Google bent over forwards for their PRC puppeteers, willfully excluding information for consumption by the average Chinese netitizen. Searching for “tiananmen square massacre” in google.cn produces a highly redacted set of responses than for google.com.

Evil.

Yet Brin and Page threw a harmonized hissy fit when the same source of evil (the Chinese government, not Google, though it is increasing difficult to decide which is more ruthless) hacked into Google’s systems to troll for dissident data – emails to and from human rights activists. Google stomped its corporate feet and threatened to exit the Chinese market, where unlike the rest of the world, Google is not the market leader.

To summarize, it is OK for Google to unilaterally (Islam) and collaboratively (China) perform evil acts on the world at large, but it is not OK for evil to be committed against Google.

But Google won’t leave China. Instead, Google is ‘discussing’ with tyrants what can be done to accommodate freedom, which is nothing. As evidence, China issued a most interesting quote about the incident, saying “Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security.” In the end Google will accept their 35% share of 1.3 billion people because that’s real money, something more important to Silicon Valley than right and wrong.

Evil.

Google’s grotesqueness is greater than just its major non-movements. They have taken lessons from other organization and engineered recurring forms of minor mass thievery. After all, most of Google’s wealth comes from advertisers, and numerically most of their advertisers are small operations. The past year brought light to a tiny Google scam where by Sergey and Lawrence recruited new advertisers with a teaser of 100 free pay-per-click dollars. Readily available coupons allow new account owners to start running Google ads everywhere. Just give Google your credit card number (in case you go over your $100) and everything is set in motion.

The problem is that the usage and click rates are initially not shown in the new user’s account, leaving them to think that their ads ineffective. Newbies continue to tweak their ads, and many stop tracking performance daily. They are delighted somewhat later when click-through begin to appear. Nuevo advertisers are equally undelighted when they get a hefty bill from Google. The oddly silent initial ineffectualness of Google’s ads cause new users to believe that subsequent clicks are billed against the free $100. In fact, that gift has been spent on the unreported clicks, and the surge of activity seen by Google’s new users is billed to their credit cards. Since the initial $100 basically costs Google nothing, it is an elaborate scam to suck money from otherwise attentive people who previously had no interest in advertising via Google.

Evil.

I myself encountered an odd issue with Google advertising. Having decided to pimp my book AFTERLIFE in multiple ways, I ran some Google display ads. The campaign’s end occurred at the start of the Christmas holiday travel season, and I disabled all campaigns before boarding the whisperjet. Naturally I was somewhat surprised to receive a bill from Google for advertising that ran during the holidays, and to discover that one of my campaigns had been reactivated without my permission.

Evil.

I can suffer this minor economic rear-ender. What cannot be suffered is a witch in corporate clothing. Google’s transgressions – petty theft, mass censorships of the masses – are sins against the common man. Powerful as Brin and Page may be, they cannot abuse governments because governments have the off switch for data routers. But the caustic indifference to Google shown by governments is the same indifference Google shows to people, the ones that directly and indirectly made Sergey and Lawrence wealthy and powerful. Until they quit being evil, it is up to the people to quit aiding said evil. Maybe we need to ping Bing.

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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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Take the Chinese government. Perennially apoplectic about controlling the masses, the People’s Republic of China central government routinely censors content of all forms – books, television, movies, speech, idle chatter, romantic whispers (”Your eyes are like fluttering posters of Mao”). It would shock nobody to discover that they regulate what a person can say in their sleep.

They heavily censor the web. No doubt this page will never appear behind the Great Firewall of China. If you have doubts of their voracity for information sterilization, search the phrase “Tiananmen Square massacre” on any Chinese controlled search engine and see how few mention the June 4th body count (upwards of 2,600 according to the Chinese Red Cross).

Being short on redheads the Chinese government had to rely on irony for my entertainment. Seems that the Communist Cadre are cackling about Google temporarily blocking access to the Chinese web site People.com.cn, which is managed by the People’s Daily, which is owned by the Chinese government, which makes this all completely absurd.

In short, the Chinese government is complaining that somebody censored them.

Ironic barely begins to describe both the Chinese government’s attitude and the power over it held by the wide open Internet. Sure, it is fairly easy to raise the ire of the collected pointed heads within Great Hall of the People. After all, tiny brains are easily manipulated. But to provoke in such a way as to cause them to utter openly and obviously self-contradictory concepts takes talent and smarts, which describes Google.

And it appears Google did absolutely nothing, which double the irony index.

As a service to all people, Google masks results to sites that have been infected with malware. This policing action keeps less sophisticated web riders from harming themselves and their computer by inadvertently downloading malicious code. Since China is second only to Russia as sources for malware distribution (mainly used to create spam generating zombie computers), it is natural that servers inside of China are routinely infected.

Including many owned by the government.

Odds are The People’s computers were infected, at least for a time, and Google’s robotic systems did what they did for any infected source – they automagically blocked it. Yet the People’s Retards assumed someone had censored them. I wish Google had done it on purpose as the alleged leaders in the PRC need to know they are not really in control any more.

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Despite my occasionally poking a finger in their editorial eye – an unwise affliction for a writer who pens op/eds – the San Francisco Chronicle is a decent paper. This may be faint praise given the current state of American journalism. As Bagdikian observed, “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele.” Yet the Chronic strives to at least be a fine rendition of Tip Toe Through the Tulips.

But some days the Bay Fish Wrapper is accidentally comical.

Today’s Insight section – a few pages devoted to opinion and occasional puddle-deep analysis – carried an editorial demanding the U.S. Senate enact President Obama’s green house gas cap-and-canard (even my green friends admit it is a tax and nothing more). The paper’s impassioned piece implored “It’s time to take the undeniable problem of global warming seriously …”

A few pages earlier their columnist Debra Saunders cited an Environmental Protection Agency analysis showing global cooling over the last eleven years, a period in which the industrial ascendancy of China and India have ejected more carbon into the sky than every before.

Page six scientifically states things are cooling while page 10 claims the sky is boiling. The former was based on analysis and the latter on too many mushrooms at the last Rat Dog concert.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s fevered favoritism in all things ecological reminded me of the passion shown for their present paramour Obama. I have it from a reliable (unnamed) source within the Chronicle news division that during Obama’s campaign interview in the Baghdad by the Bay, Chronicle reporters were issued knee pads, though the option of which side of Obama to osculate was left to the individual journalist.

San Francisco Chronicle reporting of the new administration said nothing remotely negative of the green (as in new) administration. Today was no exception though the Chronic did relate that during last week’s whistle-stop in Africa, Obama said:

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

Quite a stern lecture, from a man who during the presidential campaign assured:

“We’re not going to get countries to embrace our values simply by lecturing … “

Shame that the Chronicle did not mention this most recent Obama contradiction. That many major mirrors in one editorial page would have given the Sunday paper two comic sections.

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Still available within our individual memories is the uprising in Burma, one of too many corrupt junta hells that pockmark the planet. Though rumbles of resistance there were reported in the foreign journals, the American media did not take notice of Burmese battle lines until red robed marching monks passively resisted.

And were shot.
And then we heard nothing more.

I’ll acknowledge that journalism from within oppressive regimes is difficult on good days. Not withstanding, we should be amazed by several elements. First, we should hold in wonder that American media will devote almost the entirety of a news cycle to a newly dead pop singer and almost nothing to people dying in streets fighting for basic freedoms. Second, we should remain in awe that people fighting for their freedom will risk everything.

A movie soon opens in San Francisco that shows the resolve of people denied basic liberty and the savagery of those who do the denying. Cobbled together from cell phone and digicam recordings made by average people, Burma VJ is one of those rare documentaries that teaches something about the true nature of the world and not the artificiality of opiated opinion (eg, Anything produced by Michael Moore. Perhaps we can send Moore to Burma – the soldiers there could use a broad sided barn).

The power of video is always compelling, even if it involves Charlie Gibson monotonically intoning over video remnants of a deceased song and dance man. Cheap video cameras combined with the Internet’s agility have made citizen journalists the new, true power in global affairs. Last week they showed us a woman dying in the streets of Tehran and the cruelty of cabals. This week Uighurs were wasted and their neighbors showed their fate world wide on YouTube. The most either event earned with American media was the likes of Brain Williams bothering to show five second scenes followed by a lengthy report on gingivitis.

What makes Burma VJ worth seeing is that the story of human resistance and inhuman repression is told with clarity. People, no different than you, but pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, protest oppression, resist, die and risk worse in order to continue filming and smuggling footage out of country and onto the ether. Ponder this while complaining that your health insurance is pricy and ask yourself what you are willing to risk.

And also ask yourself why Katie Couric can’t be bothered.

The film opens on July 17th at the Lumiere in San Francisco and at the Shattuck in Berkeley.

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This is not a reference to old men in the park engaging in fisticuffs over misplaces pawns. This is about Iran, Israel and an intervention that would change the scope of geopolitics forever.

In the last twelve hours, three separate news reports – if at all are true – spell doom for Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps its theocracy. The question is if Mad Mullahs will molder under the stress of a seemingly inevitable and tolerated Israeli attack, or if instead they will stand their ground and be evaporated.

The news of the hour is that America and Saudi Arabia apparently will decline to intervene against Israel, and that more clerics are openly opposing the continued presidency of Mad Mahmoud. Trouble on the inside, trouble on the outside, and Iran’s enemies and allies alike are making room for the fight.

Discounting for a moment that Obama’s Vice Presidential proxy is coherent and coherently relating Obama’s foreign policy, his statement that “Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else” lacks ambiguity. We should recall that Obama selected Biden to shore up the formers foreign policy credentials. On such matters Biden often slides into idiocy, as he did during the campaign when proposing to partition Iraq by religion.

We know how well that has worked for Pakistan and India.

But his utterances cannot be dismissed due to his previous simplicity. His were blunt statements of stance about a current and well analyzed foreign policy moment. It is doubtful that even a man with perpetual hoof-in-mouth disease would wing it. Nope, this is Obama policy and a naked green lighting for an Israeli strike.

Saudi participation is a different matter. America has long defended Israel, right or wrong. Stepping aside while Israel attacks is expected even from Obama, a man who seems intent on holding talks with every radical on the globe. The Saudis however have been the epicenter of Arab outrage against Israel. Though less directly involved than Iran in instigating proxy wars in the Holy Land, they have traditionally been more ideologically aligned with their Persian neighbors than their Jewish bogymen.

But the Saudis supposedly lack nukes. A better armed Iran poses perpetual threats not only to Israel, but to the Saudi royal family as well. It is in Saudi Arabia’s interest to neuter Iran’s military might while not actually lifting a sword. This explains why a Mossad man who maintains a dialogue with the House of Saud claims that the King will ignore Israeli jets flying over his Kingdom if bombing runs are required.

For Arab instigators to suddenly cooperate with the Hebrew nation is one of those jaw dropping instances in history where you wonder if the world has gone terribly sane.

This has not gone unnoticed among Iran’s ruling Mullahs. Though the internal issue remains the lack of legitimacy of the recent Iranian election, some dissenting clerics openly questioning Iran’s Guardian Council is almost as atypical as Saudis and Hassidics sharing c-rations. Often in times of turmoil people seek survival by assassinating their own leaders, be it with AK-47s or calling their right to rule into question before seething mobs.

The cleric’s call-out is a confrontation against the same establishment that Israel wishes to obliterate and an elaborate form of self preservation. A velvet revolution beats being bombed any day.

If you need a big grin, put yourself in the Mullahs’ turban. A nation that your anointed president has repeatedly called to be wiped off the map suddenly goes quiet, a certain prelude to action. A representative of their chief ally is in-country and claiming they won’t stop any attack. Your primarily ideological ally reportedly will turn blind eyes to the proposed strike. And if that were not stressful enough, your own religious institutions are questioning your very legitimacy – chiseling away your foundation while a fist is streaking toward your nose.

Being a theocrat is only fun when people are not betraying or killing you.

These incidents alone are unconcerning. The fact that they are occurring in the same news cycle is. It smells as if a decision to strike has been made and the players opposed to Iran’s ruling regime are being moved into or out of position. The real question appears not to be if Israel will strike, but when and what ordnance they will use. The time to tour Tehran is past … it is time to bug-out.

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The Taliban, Al Qaeda’s intellectual kin, are busily assassinating their own. Ayman “The Hymen” al-Zawahri once commanded to his disgruntled troops to attach Tripoli. Now the Taliban are offing Taliban. Take the unfortunate Qari Zainuddin’s, whose career was cut short by acute lead poisoning – seems he involuntarily consumed a several rounds of AK-47 ammo. Zainuddin had the utter lack of grace to lead about 3,000 fundamentalist in an ongoing crusade against anyone remotely out of step with sharia. But he also displayed bad form in criticizing his superiors for being more brutal than himself.

Never a good idea to antagonize your boss, especially when the boss is armed.

Capping compatriots is a sign of organizational dysfunction. When Al Qaeda in Iraq started collapsing, Osama’s central command called for jihad on jihadists. Threatening your team mates has a peculiar demotivating effect. Killing them even more so. Above all other calamities that can befall a movement, interdepartmental homicide seems to be an early indicator of demise. It doesn’t matter how good a terrorist organization’s dental plan is if member’s are at least six feet away from an in-network provider.

In Iran we see a weirder set of similar symptoms. The Ruling Mullahs (which is not the name of a punk rock band) are fracturing slightly slower than the Taliban, though one has to wonder if their kindred spiritualism will produce the same final outcome. While revolutionaries were being shot in the streets for the sin of supporting a patriarch of Iran’s original Islamic revolution, the maniacal mullahs were arresting children of yet another. For reasons only apparent to syphilitic minds, Iran’s clap clerics decided to indirectly harass Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and the chair of the Assembly of Experts, a group of gurus responsible for electing, monitoring and in untested cases dismissing the Supreme Leader of Iran.

You could say Rafsanjani is an ‘insider.’

There is apparently little love lost between Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Iran’s Lunatic in Chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Perhaps the head goons in Iran’s caliph clique – the ones who tossed the Iranian election to Mahmoud – simply fired a warning shot over Rafsanjani’s administrative bow. Yet metaphoric shots fired as real bullets fly is an omen. The same fissures that divided Al Qaeda in Iraq divided the Taliban once Pakistan kicked their butts back down the Swat valley.

Now familiar fractures are in Iran’s façade.

I suspect the mullahs are feeling a tiny bit threatened. Iran’s recent and thoroughly rigged election was thrown so ungracefully, it appears to have been a panicked reaction. The Persian democratic groundswell was in no small part encouraged by an outbreak of the stuff in the region. To the west is Iraq, a rapidly stabilizing democracy and one that Tehran’s madmen failed to topple during the insurgency. To the east is Afghanistan where both Osama and the Taliban have spiraled into organizational cannibalism as a wobbly democracy grows. Iran’s mullahs know they are next and in an attempt to prevent democracy have initiated their own self-destruct sequence.

None too soon, or at least that is what some lower caste subjects in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Syria and other domino states may be thinking. If Iran swings toward freedom as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have done in eight short years, other depots for despots might succumb to the momentum. The face of the Middle East has already changed faster and more thoroughly than anyone could have dared wish a decade ago.

The whole joint may be unrecognizable in another.

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