Cowboy Confessional

Who should you trust the least, a politician, a used car salesman or Satan?

(yes, I know, the differences are vague on the surface, but as always I’ll go deeper into a philosophical subject than you are otherwise prepared)

Of the three Satan is most trust worthy.  Aside from a brief cameo in Eden, Satan is what he is.  Like any garden variety redneck, you pretty much know what you are getting with Scratch.  Used car scammers are trustworthy in as much as you know where they work, and fear of baseball bat retribution keeps them more-or-less honest.

Politicians?  You can trust them as far a you can throw a used Buick.

Trust is tricky.  The odds of anyone being both honest and reliable can buckle under the superior force of human frailty.  Selfish interests get the better of everyone eventually, though most folks outgrow it.  Perpetual children (a.k.a. politicians) practice deceit to get what they cannot get honestly, and thus no trust of politicos can exist.  One or another statesman might well be honest, but why risk reliance when badgering, belittling and abuse are better tools for keeping them as close to conscientious as can be managed.

Of course, we can trust them not to be trustworthy.

The essence of trust revolves around the paired concepts of reliability and integrity, the latter word encompassing our mutual visions of virtue.  Not only must the object of trust be relied upon to do something, his/her/its actions must be within the scope of what we consider to be honorable, just and decent.  You can rely on Satan’s actions to be consistent, but his chewing on your bones while butt-bumping your mama likely is not within your definition of ethical behavior.

A politician would commit the same heinous acts, but would first promise not to.

Over the last four and a half million years of human evolution, people have devised various ways of enforcing trust.  In civilized societies and San Francisco, the process is normally left to the tort courts, where people debate which person lacked either integrity or reliability in modes of contract.  This occurs between former business partners and former spouses, though the latter source provides more scandalous amusement (“Your honor, she asked me to do her sister.  Honestly!”)  It occasionally occurs between citizens and their government though appealing to the government (i.e., the courts) with claims of violation of trust by the government (i.e., legislative or executive branches) is a stacked deck.

Bazookas work better, though tar and feather are not completely out of vogue.

People also enforce trust without the benefit of intermediaries like courts.  Despite being illegal, dueling is not unheard of in the modern South, though gentlemanly demands for satisfaction have largely fallen to more common protocols.  Nationally, wives have been known to bobbit unfaithful husbands, lawyers are occasionally used for target practice, and discourtesies often enough encourage corrective reaction from flying fists.  For most people civil discourse or social outcasting is sufficient.  Every breech of trust can be corrected in small and large ways (such as changing a former boyfriend’s online dating profile password to ‘dumbass’).

Politicians and judges are another matter.  Having been granted temporary power, they have means for justifying their deceptions.  Combined they can eradicate the most fundamental form of trust between the people and their government: The Constitution.  Such great power requires those elected and appointed to be trustworthy, to have and maintain reliability and integrity.  This is reflected through adherence to the express written will of the people in their constitution.  Yet over the decades of American existence, judges redefined The People’s will and politicians found ways of further violating public trust.

Hell, we’d be better off with Satan sitting on the Supreme Court than Sotomayor.

This brings us to the disquieting direction in which America is heading.  When people can compromise, or at worst have an allegedly disinterested third party mediate, then trust can be enforced without assault or onslaught.  If you can talk-down a drunken bully, the two of you might well knock back a beer once mutual tension subsides.  Trying to settle with Satan just means you are his next penile piñata.  Such is the nature of man and government.  When government behaves with integrity – when it obeys – then trust reigns, or at least the judicial branch will enforce the trust.  When Uncle Sam becomes Uncle Satan and abandons integrity and reliability, then few other corrective actions are open aside from blunt trauma.

A scorned wife will never again trust a philandering husband, but frying pan therapy might keep him from doing it again.  The People are one government indiscretion away from pummeling politicians and jack-hammering judges.  I don’t advocate savagery to extract satisfaction, but I can’t say I wouldn’t crack a smile if it occurred to my congressman.  People maintain the ultimate power and direct correction would be an obvious outcome for the current state of the untrustworthy state.

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Democrats are cows.

Now I’m not accusing women in Democrat party leadership of being free range bovine, though Hillary is looking more the part as her rump roast ripens.  Nor am I saying men in the party leadership are a bunch mindless heifer humping bulls, despite that description fitting Bill rather well.  Nor do I imply that Democrat voters share a herd mentality, though my Republican friends constantly argue that the proposition is validated by evidence.

Once the Republicans have stable political philosophy, I’ll take their opinions seriously.

What I am saying is that in matters of economics, Democrat party chieftains have the cranial density of your average angus and the stubbornness of a Texas longhorn.  With either species (bovine or Democrat politician), whacking them in the forehead with a two by four produces no meaningful response (however, the good people of Nevada seem ready to apply that process to Harry Reid).  Preaching blindly simple matters of macroeconomics to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama would be like orating to oxen:  neither audience is bright enough to grasp the concepts.

Outside of conscripted societies, economics is based on people creating things of value.  Exxon puts gas in your car, allowing you to get to your job where you create things of value for other people who buy them from your company, generating your paycheck so you can rent an internet connection to read this blog, click on the advertising and put money in my pocket, which I’ll use to buy some gasoline as well.

Government produces nothing.  The only product of value it can create is keeping one person from harming another, and even that government tends to do poorly.  Only a Keynesian or otherwise enfeebled person perceives that government spending increases economic prosperity, for they fail to see the direct and highly individualized essence of value (I value a good steak while my vegetarian pal values tofu – guess which of us voted for Obama).

Democrats utter lack of insight into the basics of economics has caused the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to warn about next year’s double dip into recession.  Abbreviating their economic discourse, the San Francisco Fed basically said the odds are good and getting better that we will slide into phase two of the Great Recession (“the macroeconomic outlook is likely to deteriorate progressively starting sometime next summer.”)  This has instigated Fed infighting concerning deficit spending stimulus and other unicorn concepts.  Despite spending at a rate that has launched America toward an inescapable economic collapse, some bovine roaming the White House war room insist that more spending will generate economic growth in the same way that their first round didn’t (can you hear Rahm Emanuel mooing?)  Politicos in the Fed – and, yes, Fed officials have personal and political motives for their decisions – are debating if rampant spending, and artificially keeping interest rates at zero percent, is wise. It ain’t.

The only upside to the looming second dive into the economic sewer is that it will most likely occur as Obama faces reelection, assuring his one term status.

Sadly, Obama has assistance.  His Herford helpers in congress are doing everything possible to prevent economic growth by slowing economics.  The two glaring weaknesses in the economy today are zero job growth and banks not lending.  In such an environment only crackpots and cattle would pass legislation that slowed both even further.  Yet, congress has managed both in one bill by taxing banks an extra 6.7% (based on Wells Fargo’s estimate of the new regulatory and tax burden and their 2009 earnings).

With that heavy new yoke Wells is unlikely to hire anybody or lend businesses money with which to do so.

The essence of economics is people creating value.  The essence of government is preventing such.  The essence of America when barn yard animals (donkeys and cows) run Washington is killing the American dream.

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Tom Lehrer, one of the funniest men to ever croak out a tune, allegedly gave up the parody songwriting business because reality became goofier than anything he could author.  Had something to do with Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  Tom is still with us, and must be cross-eyed over Barack Obama winning the same piece of costume jewelry.

Some people don’t understand parody because they can’t see irony, even when it is about to kick them in their political crotch.  Such is the case of the new One Nation consortium of organizations with stated goals of transferring U.S. land to Mexico, extending tenure to all government employees, and a former civil rights group (NAACP by name, and lest you believe they still stand for civil right, just look at their amicus briefs in the Heller gun rights case).

My buddy Chris Muir – the brain behind Day by Day Cartoon and the first man since Robert Heinlein to consistently celebrate strong women in his art – demonstrated today one irony the left simply didn’t get, namely that their chosen name opposes what they stand for, not to mention it may be in copyright violation of a Muslim American organization (which if Gawd is in a good sense of humor will ignite a jihad against the upstart One Nation squad).  Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer is becoming the slogan for the American political left.

By the way, drop by Day by Day and drop a few quid on Chris during his fundraising week.  Keep his assaults on The Man coming (yep, Obama is officially The Man).

The genius of America was egalitarianism (with the exception of that nasty slavery habit we had once had).  Everyone from your bartender down to the President was an equal.  As such, we tended to work together reasonably well.  It wasn’t until the federal government institutionalized organized theft that groups initiated open combat.  After all, when your neighbor has his hand in your pocket you have to counterattack (unless you live here in San Francisco, in which case it may be more of an invitation than a taking).

Each group in the One Nation cabal is, by mission statement or action, divisive.  The Center for Community Change is arguably racist and pushes for socialized healthcare.  The United States Student Association demands your money for their tuition.  I already covered the Nation Association for Aging Communist Puppets.  And anyone who doesn’t understand the self(ish) interest and pocket picking expertise of either the Service Employees International Union or AFL-CIO probably only survives due to Union Shop law.  The positions of these organization are not those that unite a nation, and thus can never lead to forming One Nation (irony).  It is arguable that these groups are primarily responsible for the divisions we face daily – ones created by the favoritism that only federal legislation can create.

They don’t get the irony of their own existence, which explains why they seem to have no sense of humor.  Little is funnier than irony.  Well, Nancy Pelosi goose-stepping in a brown blouse past her Führer will be a bit more amusing until corrective action is taken in November.

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Maybe we should quit celebrating the 4^th of July and start celebrating the 28^th of June.

Today has been a complex and interesting day at the intersection of America and Freedom.  We witnessed another fundamental right incorporated against the states, an enemy of freedom die, and another enemy of freedom approach the same court that confirmed the fundamental right that weaves its way through these varied news items.

Thank Gawd for Jack Daniels, the all purpose tool for celebrations and relieving dull headaches from dumpster diving into constitutional law, politics and other unsavory pursuits.

Foremost is the Supreme’s decision in the case of old man McDonald of Chicago, who lives in a crime infested neighborhood in a crime infested city replete with a crime infested government.  Chicago would not let this kindly codger own a pistol for fear he might shoot a criminal, or even someone who didn’t hold office.  Two years ago (Heller case) the Supreme Court ruled that the right to keep and bear arms, oddly enough, protected a right to keep and bear arms.  Only imbeciles (and by this I mean Justice Breyer) failed to grasp English and concluded otherwise.

But that decision did not address if the stated right applied to anything but federal territories – the folks in Guam were elated, and people in Chicago were rightly jealous. Old man McDonald argued that like the rights to speech, religion, assembly, press, due process, self-incrimination, public trial, council, trail by jury, reasonable bail and not being beaten up by cops, the right to own a heater could also not be denied by whatever Al Capone descendents were running the local patronage parlor.  McDonald’s argument presented a bit of a conundrum to liberal political activists (Ginsberg, Stevens, Breyer, Sotomayor and their intellectual equals Larry, Curly and Moe):  The court had previously prevented unlisted rights, such as the right to privacy, from being infringed upon by lower levels of government.  Ruling that a clearly stated, enumerated right was not equally protected meant that most of the social liberal enactments of the last 100 years could evaporate in a puff of illogic.

Which is what they tried anyway, launching a thousand mocks.

Court Jester Stevens went into a rambling discourse of irrelevancy that departed jurisprudence and entered the realm of science fiction.  In a rare instance of judicial bitch slapping, Justice Scalia rhetorically mugged Stevens for the latter’s flagrant display of senile dementia.  In words and tone that were openly derogatory – which is relatively unknown in the decorum of the court – Scalia excoriated Stevens and thus gave the old codger a swift kick in his retiring tokus.  Scalia wrote about Stevens’ dissent “The notion that the absence of a coherent theory of the Due Process Clause will somehow curtail judicial caprice is at war with reason.”

This is one judge’s way of saying to another “Your mama!”

Odder than Stevens (a notion that is nearly incomprehensible) was Breyer (who is always incomprehensible).  Breyer squanders his script rearguing the Heller case of two years before, establishing nothing new and picking a fight with the prevailing majority of the court.  This I find amusing for in all confirmation hearings it is the liberal bank of the Senate who grill potential justices on stare decisis, the doctrine that existing decisions should stand lest the judicial activism of the last century vanish due to constitutional fidelity.  If stare decisis is indeed a desirable mandate, why then is a liberal judge trying to unilaterally invalidate a recent court ruling?  Doing so seems to indicate that stare decisis is about as healthy and robust as Ted Kennedy (oh, too soon?)

Buried in this muddle of con law mastication is the corner case of how to keep states from telling old black men they cannot shoot Crips gang members breaking into their homes.  The 14^th Amendment was written to assure that a federal freedom was also a state freedom, and was done so because after the civil war a lot of disgruntled Democrats were routinely robbing free black men of the freedoms they had just received, typically first by disarming them, and then by stretching their necks.  For reasons too laborious to delineate, the better of two clauses in the 14^th Amendment was invalidated by the courts as the means for keeping disgruntled Democrats from re-enslaving black folk (“privileges and immunities” clause and the Slaughterhouse Cases for people with autodidactic masochistic streaks).  Despite the wrongheaded reasoning in the Slaughterhouse Cases, stare decisis (there’s that dirty word again) required that the court ignore pleas made by McDonald to keep Chicago politicians out of private gun safes.  Justice Thomas, an old black man whose parents were not lynched, took it upon himself to write a concurring opinion to educate the court that their previous ruling about the privileges and immunities clause was as coherent as Justice Stevens, which is not at all.  Since the 14^th Amendment and the privileges and immunities clause were written specifically to keep Justice Thomas’ ancestors from being becoming strange fruit, he may well have had very personal reasons for suggesting that stare decisis be a little less rigid and that Supreme Stupidity be subject to review.  It might just keep the Ku Klux Klan from getting uppity.

Of course, that will be more difficult with its reduced membership.

While freedom was being expanded by the Supremes, a supremacist stopped breathing.  Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (where the state flower is the satellite dish) was the oldest living and longest serving senator and Klan member.  Through the latter half of his career – when being a racist was out of vogue – he made feeble excuses for having joined the Klan.  Byrd enjoyed expanding the power of the federal government and recklessly spending money, which made him a liberal and got him a seat at the leftist table next to Barbara Lee (there is a dinner conversation I would have enjoyed overhearing). This put the liberal establishment in the odd position of apologizing for and praising Byrd while campaigning in black neighborhoods.

We cannot whittle a fine enough point with which to poke Byrd’s corpse.  It is not like the Ku Klux Klan has an obscure brand – when you join you pretty much know the group’s policy and you agree with it.  Claiming, as Byrd did, that joining the Klan was a youthful mistake is like joining the local cannabis club and later being horrified that the members there actually smoke the stuff.  Byrd was a racist – period – and those who make excuses for him are as well.

Amusingly odd then is that on a day when a free black man in a black robe is vigorously defending a constitutional clause designed to promote the liberties of free blacks, that a man who openly sought to keep minorities in servitude goes to God to argue his own case.  This explains why the temperature got a little warmer this morning.  Hell has one more log on the fire.

The last leg of today’s con law carnival is the opening hearings on Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s latest insult to America.  Now Kagan may be a nice human, but like Obama, she is a proponent of judges redefining the express written will of the American people (a.k.a. The Constitution).  Like his last nominee – who today voted against the right of blacks to own guns – Kagan has no desire to obey The People.  Along with Sotomayor, she has openly said that she is unsympathetic to the notion that there is an individual right in the Second Amendment (you know, the one that says ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms …’).  She was also an instrumental actor in Bill Clinton’s campaign to increase gun control.

I bet she even believes in stare decisis … when it suits her.

The key to disallowing Kagan onto the court is that The People have the right and privilege of knowing with reasonable certainty how a justice will rule, and this requires some judicial history of which Kagan, an academic, has none.  Without such insights, elevating anyone to the Supremes is a crap shoot and you end-up with people holding the judicial stability of Justice Stevens (and he had the benefit of being a lower court judge).  Such judges, like the four who wanted to keep an old black man in Chicago disarmed, subject people to the same dangers that Dixicrats always inflict.

Hmmmm.  Does Kagan’s robe come with a matching hood?

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Adam Smith (no relation) was a clever Scotsman, a constantly recurring phrase.

One book worth reading is P.J. O’Rourke’s review of Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  O’Rourke read the entire multi-volume set so “you wouldn’t have to,”  for which I owe P.J. an eternal debt.  I suspect ingesting a few thousand pages of 18^th century Scottish text on moral, economic and political theory is closest one can come to a lobotomy without the aid of surgical instruments or Jägermeister.

Most interesting is exactly how little has changed since Adam Smith opined.  Certain elements of man, government and the irreconcilable differences between them remain.  Select passages from Wealth of Nations and the companion Moral Sentiments explain any number of 21^st century catastrophes.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and subprime mortgages: “the man who borrows in order to spend will soon be ruined, and he who lends to him will generally have occasion to repent of his folly.”

Exporting jobs to China: “It was, not the wisdom and policy, but the disorder and injustice of the European governments, which peopled and cultivated America.”

Correcting public employee unions: “the persons who have the administration of government [are] generally disposed to reward both themselves and their immediate dependents rather more than enough … The emoluments of officers, therefore, can in most cases very well bear to be taxed” (in other words, place a surcharge on salaries and pension plans to recoup cash)

Poli-sci 101 and socialism: “It is unjust that the whole society should contribute towards an expense of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.”

Healthcare reform legislation: “In the progress of despotism the authority of the executive power gradually absorbs that of every other power in the state, and assumes to itself the management of every branch of revenue.”

Obama: “They have little modesty; are often assuming, arrogant, and presumptuous; great admirers of themselves, and great contemner of other people … Their excessive presumption, founded upon their own excessive self-admiration, dazzles the multitude … The frequent, and often wonderful, success of the most ignorant quacks and imposters … sufficiently demonstrate how easily the multitude are imposed upon by the most extravagant and groundless pretensions.”

Perhaps Wealth of Nations should be required reading in public school, but I fear the leap from Lady Gaga to Adam Smith is too broad, though by the former a lobotomy has already been performed on America’s youth.

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