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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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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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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Before today I had no opinion about Chomsky.  My conservative friends tend to despise him and my liberal friends suddenly look nervous when his name is mentioned.  Swirling rumors about what he wrote and its relationship to propaganda theory and practice kept landing like drunken MIT co-eds in my mind (and there is nothing quite as amusingly amorous than a liquored-up geek girl).

I’m peddling a book to publishers on the very topic of agitprop.  Having invested a decade in exploding gun control myths I have encountered most every manifestation of misinformation.  Since gun control myths are a subset of propaganda proper, and since Noam wrote on the subject, all these rumors about Chomsky’s insights and how they might be currently leveraged by the left demanded I read into his work.

Can’t say I’m impressed.

I have to give Noam some windage here.  His Manufacturing Consent was penned before every teenager had their own blog and before newspapers began evaporating faster than the last wisp of rum from aforementioned co-ed’s breath (though I will confess that Myers taste better when slurped from her bellybutton).  Thus a fair amount of Noam’s noodling is non sequitur.

Some of it was plain wrong when written.

A primary premise in Manufacturing Consent was that the advertisers led the media by their financial noses.  Noam was metaphorically looking down the wrong end of the barrel (it would be a wonderful event if the barrel analogy were literal).  The media is a matchmaker, with the audience as client.  Any media outlet that creates content disagreeable with the consumer goes out of business.  The primary financial incentive is to give the public what they want, regardless of how bland, sleazy or repugnant it may be.  Without content consumers, the media ceases to exist and no amount of advertising money will enact resurrection.

This is why the main stream media is moribund.  In the 80’s and 90’s a few university journalism schools, paired with statisticians, measured media bias and quantified that the American media was slightly to the left of Fidel.  Given that the polled public perceived itself slightly right of center, there existed a daily disconnect between the media and the public.  What Ma and Pa witnessed day-in-and-out disagreed with what the media marketed.  Fox News has high ratings simply because their content provided something that an otherwise homogeneous media did not.

Chomsky contends that the media was subservient to the advertiser.  Having worked in marketing I know this to be less than half the story.  Advertisers want to reach people, and the editorial leanings of the media are nearly irrelevant.  If a television channel reaches millions of males between 18 and 32, and if the advertiser sells Girl’s Gone Goofy videos, they would not care if the media was a nexus for necrophilia (which may be the next NBS reality show).  Based on ratings and demographics the vendor could predict their sales volume and would buy ad space.  Indeed, the only thing that would stop an advertiser would be if the anti-necra lobby threatened to boycott stations that aired drunken co-ed videos.

Hence, the left-leaning nature of the old media.  In the absence of competing outlets (pre talk radio, internet and Fox) they had insufficient backlash from the consumers. Thus, advertisers were content with the available advertising venues.  Without corrective action from either end of the financial relationship, we see two realities:  First, Noam didn’t know what he was talking about.  Second, the bulk of news was thus controlled by the media and the government, not advertisers.

Forget the military-industrial complex.  The media-politician complex was and is the real threat.

I know enough reporters to confirm that they live for two things:  telling a good story and exercising power.  The former is only of interest to other writers, and we get it.  The later is understandable only in the context that some small and sinister part of the populace always wants to control other people.  Reporters, producers and media moguls are no exception.  Controlling information was a great way to push the public toward some journalists’ political ends.  ‘Was’ is the operative word.  Today everybody is the media – there are millions of board and bathrobed fact checkers armed with an online sea of information that would make an Alexandrian librarian faint.

The media is no longer in control of the conversation, something they have yet to realize.

Noam got the financial aspects of the media backwards.  He also undersold the motivations of the media itself, which have been both malignant and manic.  Too many times we have witnessed major media outlets sell what remained of their souls in order to assassinate a person, company, industry or cause.  NBC faked exploding pick-up trucks.  CNN used machineguns to misinform the public about the power of sporting rifles.  ABC staged impossible self-defense scenarios.  CBS bought or co-produced fake documents during an election.  And MSNBC can’t emit an electron without it being accompanied by misinformation.

Yet Chomsky does not see this as a major source for the manufacture of “consent”.  Willful blindness or purposeful obfuscation?  Don’t know, but either way it says volumes about the quality of his analytical abilities.  He possesses all the functioning cognitive capacity of a drunk co-ed, but with none of the giggling charm.

Chomsky also felt that reporters, as a subspecies, trusted governmental information sources more than private.  Here Noam was nearly correct.  Like humans in general, reporters believe what they want and many seek information that bolsters their pre-existing biases.  If a corporation, advocacy group or man on the street helps assault whomever a reprobate reporter wishes to journalistically bludgeon, that is who will appear on the evening news.  Since reporters have been measured to be more liberal and Democrat than the public at large, they will more often accept government’s guile than General Motors’ (not that there is a difference between those two entities any more).  Yet when the government or a particular politician is the target of a reporters wrath, then non-government sources of deception work just as well.

Ask Dan Rather, providing his meds are allowing him to talk coherently this week.

Noam’s neglectfulness centers mainly on the assumption that “the media” (a rapidly evolving complex organism) is a mindless machine that is easily manipulated.  He ignores the media’s motivations and members therein who are merely activists with press passes.  Therein was the true source of propaganda – an unchecked media with no competition on the sources and distribution of information.  In the bad old days, your world view came from three very similar network news programs and one or two local newspapers.  Now with 500 television channels, several 24×7 news networks and the entirety of the Internet, the old threat of media manufactured consent is mitigated if not eliminated.

Noam Chomsky may have influenced a few, but his depth of analysis betrays a shallow intellectual pond.  Now that everybody is the media, Noam can be ignored … again.

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Though believable, this Rham report has not occurred, though I have few doubts that the resident White House weasel enjoys groping old ladies (as well as young boys and small farm animals).  But your grandma, grandpa, son, daughter, wife, neighbor and you owe $42,000 thanks to many Congresses who mismanaged your money.  And odds are Uncle Sugar will collect in the coming years because the American fiscal house of cards is ready to collapse.

That is what thirteen trillion dollars of accumulated debt will get you.

It is no secret that trusting congress with money is like trusting Al Qaeda with nukes – little good can come of it.  Over the years politicians have financed everything from submarines to farm subsidies with borrowed bucks.  In quainter times Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly quipped about the mounting federal debt “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”  Those billions added up and the Fedz started talking trillions.

Then came Bush and Obama, two peas in the spendthrift pod, and all semblances of fiscal sanity vanished without a trace.

Between Bush’s utterly unconstitutional bank bail-out and Obama’s trillion dollar slush fund (known to his acolytes as stimulus), your shared debt rose about two trillion dollars (a 15% bump) in less than a year’s time.  All this excludes for the moment an even larger annual deficit from Barack’s scheduled subsidized healthcare system, which will make current deficits appear miserly by comparison.  All in all, the defined federal budget has you in hock up to your nostrils.

That’s the “good” news.

Lost in mind-numbing numbers – so large that they defy comprehension – are temporarily solvent programs soon to go bust.  For a few decades Congress feared voter wrath over unbalanced budgets.  They covered deficits by borrowing from the Social Security cash horde.  This maneuver made it appear that the budget was balanced (it was not).  About six years from now, the last of the cash in Al Gore’s fabled lock box will be spent.  After that the only way grandma will get her monthly remuneration will be for the Social Security administration to collect on the IOUs congress wrote – the same congress that racked-up thirteen trillion in debt and blessed the Bush/Obama spending sprees.

That’s the “good” news.

Medicare is in worse shape.  Even after Obamacare adjustments, the system has $38 trillion in unfunded obligations, or roughly three times the current debt.  Your accumulated Medicare payroll taxes will be depleted within a decade and the only way to buy grandma a new hip will be either out of your own pocket, or for the federal government to go even further into debt.  No amount of economic growth and associated tax revenues can counter the growing Social Security and Medicare outflow.

That’s the “good” news.

Without cutting benefits and budgets, the interest on the debt is scheduled to equal annual Social Security and Medicare outlays in less than two decades (to put painful perspective on that, if you have a baby this year, the interest on the federal debt will be as large as either unfunded Social Security outlays or unfunded Medicare outlays by the time your baby exits college).  That’s the bad news.  Since Medicare and Social Security are functionally insolvent, they will likely add to the budget deficit in the coming years since no congressman has the spine to take money away from old ladies and opt for deeper indebtedness.

They remember cat food.

In the Carter years, inflation was growing faster than kudzu.  Old folk on fixed incomes were known to eat Tender Vittles because that was preferable to going hungry.  Politicians rapidly enacted Social Security cost of living increases tied to inflation, which had the unappetizing effect of draining Social Security funds faster.  Some protested and suggested reigning in entitlement spending.  The lesson learned by a few former congress critters was that threatening to reduce support for old people was a fast path to the unemployment line.  The odds of future congresses cutting grandma’s monthly stipend are somewhere south of zero.

In short order Congress will either have to massively cut spending, hike taxes to stratospheric levels, or go even deeper in debt.  More debt is not an option.  Recent events in Greece show that there is a limit to sovereign debt, and once America’s credit rating slides, the cost of borrowing will rise and adding debt will be both difficult and expensive, leading the United States into the same debt death spiral the Greeks endured.  Raising taxes causes economies to grind to a halt as less money remains for investing in business, employment and consumption.  That leaves eviscerating the federal government itself, which I would endorse even if the budget were perpetually balanced.  But as always, those who suckle the federal teat will bite hard to keep the milk flowing.  Like calves that refuse to wean, you have to drag them from the utter and isolate them in a holding pen.

Congress may eventually slash budgetary perks to save grandma, their jobs, and avoid Zimbabwean sized inflation.  So farewell welfare.  Adieu unemployment.  Hasta la vista health and human services.  Adios agriculture department.  Nice to know ya NASA.  Toodle-oo Department of Transportation.  Later labor.  Ciao foreign aid … Hmmmm.  Maybe I should become an Obama backer.  His extravagances may force scraping of most of the federal government.

That’s the good news.

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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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This is a disturbing notion.  In reaction to the Tea Party movement (which we have already seen is composed of a peaceful, multi-racial, pan-sexual, multi-generational Americans) some players planned on crashing the Tea Party events.  Their tactic was to dress and act in ways similar to how they incorrectly stereotype Tea Party members.  They planned on carrying racist banners, act like trailer trash, talk in threatening manners, all with the intent of getting the media to misreport the essence of the Tea Party itself.

So would they bomb a building?

We have already confirmed that people who dislike the Tea Party (and by proxy dislike freedom) will lie, disrupt and discredit.  They have openly demonstrated willingness to violate codes of honor, civil discourse, and fundamental honesty in order to silence opposition.  Their stated goal was to make the rest of America fear and loath the Tea Party.

The question on the table:  Where is their limit?  To what disreputable extents will they go in order to achieve their goals?

To answer this question, we have to investigate the moral equation in the collective heads of any group.  People who are center-right tend to be law-and-order, God worshiping orientation (and hence biblical-law obeying) and in-your-face honest.  Alternately, people with socialists/communist fetishes (which do not include the vaguely center-left masses) have a long and well documented history of believing that the ends justify all means.  It ranges from the comparatively innocent Tea Party crashers to Pol Pot’s mass murder.  The sentiment is the same – ignore moral imperatives, just get the job done.

Kinda like the way they passed Obamacare.

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It is a bit surreal to see Bill “The Zipper” Clinton in action as I wrap-up edits on my next book, Catalog of Canards, that exposes how political lies are created and spread.  Though we accept that all politicians lie, few have proven to be as artful as the man from Hot Springs (which is his home town, not a nickname for his mattress).  Clinton possesses a rare combination of skills:  the ability to think strategically and blow smoke up skirts.

That’s when he is not inserting cigars there.

Over the weekend Clinton has made several statements wherein he attempts, rather elegantly, to associate the Tea Party movement with deranged mass murders.  His chain reaction of irrational reasoning is that if a Tea Party participant says something unkind about the government, it will cause the next Timothy McVeigh to head straight for the Ryder rental center.

This is, of course, patently insane and shows that Bill Clinton understands nothing about the minds of madmen (though given the number of ladies he has jilted, he may know a thing or two about mad women).  Every day, in every city of every country, people get into heated discussion and shouting matches that go no further than a spittle exchange.  You, your parents, your siblings, your boss, your neighbors do this often enough.  Yet rarely does anyone take action stronger than completing their tantrum.  Being ticked off at an abstraction such as government is even less dangerous.

Thus, the Timothy McVeigh’s of the world are by definition mad.  A rational patriot would not assassinate 168 people guilty of nothing aside from arriving at work on time, much less 19 kids younger than six.  The logical gulf between a group of concerned citizens attending a rally and a lone mass murder is as wide as Monica’s … well, let’s not go there.  We’ll leave it to say that cigars should not be inserted horizontally.

Stipulating that Clinton is no moron, we have to ask ourselves what is his motivation in making plainly inane comparisons.  Since fear is the primary tool of the politicians’ trade, Clinton sought to make people not familiar with the Tea Party fearful of them.  By shellacking Tea Party people and Tim McVeigh with the same brush, Clinton attempted to generate fear of the Tea Party itself.

Nice try Bubba, but no cigar.

People – not politicians or the media – are now in control of the conversation, as documented by Brian Patrick in Rise of the Anti-Media.  Clinton might cause a few skittish souls to shriek, but the average citizen, who likely knows one or more Tea Party members, is sadly amused at Bill’s buncombe and will say as much to his Facebook friends, on message boards, and via his own media outlets, be they blogs, YouTube videos or podcasts.  Whereas Clinton frets about citizens demonizing “the government or … its elected officials,” he stokes the process by being a visible symbol and advocate of elected officials and the government while demeaning The People.  By inappropriately and cynically associating Tea Party activists with lunatic bombers, he generates the distrust that he claims will motivate madmen.

“I want you to listen to me,” Clinton began.  “I’m going to say this again.  I did not have sexual relations with that woman … these allegations are false!”

Just keep that hysterical and historical moment in mind as Billy opines on the opposition.

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What a bunch of racist homophobes.

I decided to inspect a Tea Party today.  Not being a member of any movement, I have watched this one since it was inspired in the latter days of the Bush Botch-up.  I wanted to see if the Tea Partiers had changed much in the subsequent year.  When they initially erupted, it was obvious from the event I attended that members of the nascent mobilization were from every corner of the American political map minus socialists, communists and other lower life forms.  Reacting to taxpayer bail-outs of failed and possibly criminal corporations, conservatives, independents, libertarians and even some classical liberals came out to protest a government that had zero regard for the express written will of the American people (a.k.a. the constitution).

The movement is even more so today.

I chatted with a candidate named Adnan Shahab, which is about as un-Anglo Saxon as one can get without immigrating from another planet.  I overheard a woman who carried a sign reading “I’m an angry Democrat” speak of betrayal by her representative.  One young lady wore tea bags on her hoop earrings while signing-up at an NRA recruiting table (which, I’ll note was doing a brisk business).  All ages, all races, all income levels, and all sexual orientations.  A more mixed demographic cross-section cannot be found outside of … well, it just can’t be found.

Being color blind, egalitarian and “a friend of the family” according to a gay acquaintance, I found none of this unusual from a human perspective, and in some ways from a political one.  But it did raise to the top of my alleged consciousness a question:  What is the common denominator?  Why have such different people banded together and taken to the streets?

Freedom.

Nobody with honest intent can examine bank bailouts or insane and equally unpopular insurance legislation without concluding that our federal government has jumped the rails.  No misreading of the Constitution can cause one to conscientiously conclude that either is permitted by The People.  Even those originally enamored by the current and temporary president are fearful of what may come next.  When theft and conscripted commerce occur, there is in theory no limit on what the federal government could do to individuals.

Freedom is an individual thing.

It is not surprising that the young black fellow in the wheelchair attended the Tea Party, for the concept of slavery is doubly real for him.  The Hispanic woman who struggled to escape from under a dictator’s thumb and come to America now fears the freedoms she longed for will be taken.  The lesbian couple protested because any government that forces them to buy health insurance could force them into re-education camps (for their own good and the good of society of course).

The teenagers see tens of thousands of dollars in federal debt, for which they already are liable, and prefer the freedom of a future.

The People forgive a fair amount of federal skullduggery and ineptitude.  Even the occasional lapse of constitutional commitment from elected servants is considered tolerable if the courts correct it.  But in under two years the wholesale assassination of constitutional government has caused people of every attitude to recognize that Washington no longer considers liberty an imperative.  The social pact between the state and those who created it has been broken.  The government is declining to heel, and its masters are about to jerk government’s dog collar.

It is a people thing.  It is a freedom imperative.  It is an American movement.

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Not that Ron Paul looks like a T-Rex mind you, but he might be one.

Every political party is composed of factions.  After one faction has been down long enough and lets the other factions screw up enough, they gather the will and momentum to take over.  Democrat factions range from Blue Dogs who are indistinguishable from blue collar Republicans, the Malleable Moderates who ruled the party under Bill Clinton, and the Communist branch (guess who is their current monarch).

The Republicans have three basic branches.  There are the Social Conservatives who, despite media misinterpretation, are basically the noisy minority who must be recruited to get election day turn-out.  Then there is the Manifest Destiny branch, of which George Bush was the latest figurehead.  Finally is the Libertarian faction, who are descended from Lincoln and Goldwater, and mainly want government to keep its nose out of The People’s business.

Which makes Ron Paul’s near win this weekend newsworthy.

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) is in most ways everything it sounds like:  Southern Republicans who comb, groom, vet, anoint and slay leaders within their ranks.  However, since southern Republicans were abolitionists and most emancipated southern black became Republicans out of gratitude (and fear, since Southern Democrats enjoyed hanging them), the SRLC has a stubborn preference for freedom.  This is a Good Thing, though here in San Francisco you could never convince local liberals whose world perspective stops at Oakland.

That’s unfair.  Some have gone as far as Lodi.

Mass media (which now includes you and me) have shamed Social Conservative Republicans into near silence.  Sure, they get their dander up about abortion, but on all other matters they are pleasantly quiet these days, perhaps knowing that other dinosaurs passed into history.  Bush the Younger has destroyed, perhaps for ever, the Manifest Destiny faction.  Then again the Manifests are prone to this outcome since big dreams require big money and bigger government, which goes against the small-government mindset of the other two factions of the Republican party and 99% of the public.

Seriously, you have to be a cretin from Chicago or Crawford to want more of the stuff.

With the other two Republican factions in silence or shambles, the Libertarian faction’s rise is expected.  But the rapidity of the rise is enhanced by the fact that Americans of all affiliations have had quite enough of recent federal robbery.  Bush’s bailout, Obama’s slush fund handsomely disguised as ‘stimulus’, and unconstitutional hijacking of health insurance have gotten the “leave us alone” crowd in low, middling and high dungeons.  They are ready to back anyone with a plan to dismantle any part of the federal government, preferably at the wholesale level.

a.k.a. Ron Paul.

That the SRLC failed to anoint the elderly and irascible Paul by one vote is an indicator of Republican introspection.  Contrast fundamental Paulinista sentiments with the Tea Party pack who, despite irrational slander by everyone working for MSNBC, are mainly small government and strict constitution advocates.  You can’t have a conversation with Ron Paul without him citing constructional clauses and asking what harm would come from returning taxes, budgeting and authority to the states.  Paul Pushers, SRLC members and Tea Partiers come from the same mindset and have overlapping memberships.

If I were a Republican (which I am not) I wouldn’t be a Paulinista, mainly because I have a foreign policy.  But I understand why the Republicans are hurtling his direction.  He may not get the presidential nod, but he will drag the pack away from the Schlafly and Bush branches and toward a freer light.

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