Showing posts from June, 2012

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There Ain't No More Middle-Ground

"There is no more neutrality in the world," said Black Panther leader, civil rights activist and fun-loving rapist; Eldridge Cleaver. "You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem-- there ain't no more middle ground." We live in Eldridge Cleaver's world now, a world with no more middle ground. Where not doing anything does not mean you will be left alone. This is no longer a nation founded on the curious premise that the government should leave people alone unless they are causing problems. That peculiar idea was held by a nation of farmers and merchants who fled religious persecution, and whose great contribution to human history was the notion that governments shouldn't be all-powerful and that everyone should mind their own business when it comes to other people's affairs. Our present-day rulers revile them as racist slave owners who only cared about money, but they also happen to be racist slave

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Steal their Thunder

LIBERAL CORPORATE TAXATION Liberals whine incessantly about Citizens United and corporate personhood-- yet the signature achievement of their first administration in almost a decade, was to force everyone to pay taxes to corporations. What's worse exactly? Corporate Personhood or Corporate Taxation? When liberals whine about corporate control of politics, remind them that it was their party that created a tax to be collected directly by corporations for the profit of corporations. No Republican president ever authorized corporations to collect taxes and use those taxes for their own profits, their own bonuses and their own golden parachutes. It took a Democrat to do that. Forget corporate control of politics. Obama outsourced the functions of the IRS to his corporate donors. Call it the real Warren Buffet Tax. Truly a signature achievement. APPRECIATION This week Rush Limbaugh dedicated about a half hour of his show to reading and discussing my article, "

The Ball is in Our Court

As the day of judgment approaches, half the country sits waiting for a small group of men and women to decide how many of our civil rights we get to keep. After two flawed decisions that draw not from the Constitution, but from policy and opinion, we wait hopefully for a third opinion that will set us free. Today the Supreme Court is slightly tilted in our favor, which is to say that it has a few members who believe that the Constitution is more than blotting paper for their opinions, and that individuals and states have rights, rather than just being troublesome cogs in the mighty machine of the national policy apparatus bent on tackling one growing crisis or another. How long will that tenuous state of affairs endure? Who knows. In the meantime we are caught between an omnipotent executive who believes that he is above the law, an unelected court which includes two of his appointees, one of them his lawyer, and a Congress which does little except spend gargantuan amounts of mon

It's Hard Out There for an Outsider

Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren told the Boston Globe last week that she wants to win the Senate race so that she can "bring an outsider’s perspective to solving the nation’s problems". And who better to bring an outsider's perspective than a Harvard professor, a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel. If a law professor who spent 15 years on and off government and quasi-government commissions and whose prescriptions have become policy, and who could raise 7 million dollars in a few months is an outsider, then who exactly is an insider? When Warren's Cherokee claims became a little too embarrassing, The New Yorker ran an article asking, "Who is a Native American?" as if the question of who the hell were you parents were some imponderable paradox like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" or "How much debt can government amass before Washi

Why The Newsroom is Good News for Republicans

The last time Aaron Sorkin had a high-profile political television show, liberals used it to cope with the decline and fall of the Clinton Presidency and the long winter of the Bush Years. The West Wing was a coping mechanism for the death of a liberal dream, and so is The Newsroom . Both are an escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with the harsh reality. On an episode of Seinfeld , George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it. The Newsroom , set in the past, and jumping in right before the political balance tilted toward the Republicans in the mid-term elections, is the same thing. The Newsroom is Sorkin's sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn't think of two years ago. It's the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology cre

The Cult of Obama

The Corporate Cult evolved in the United States as a hybrid of the sales force of the corporation and the religious devotion of the cult. This type of entity might be a cult like Scientology, which used the aggressive and organized sales tactics and marketing campaigns of a corporation, or it could be a corporation like Apple, whose employees earn little, but feel a sense of satisfaction at being part of a meaningful entity. The Obama Campaign is a fantastic marketing machine. It is constantly discovering new ways to sell things to people. But the problem is that it has no actual product. A company that goes corporate cult uses some of the tactics of a cult to inflate the value of its product. But a cult has no product except the sense of satisfaction that comes from being in the cult. The only things it sells are images of its leader, emblazoned everywhere, his books, speeches and photos, and these are used as tokens of membership in the cult. In retrospect, the Cult of Obama ha

A Lawless Society

A lawless society is a depressing place to live because it's a place completely without law. And while going lawless might be appealing, we aren't talking about an end to laws requiring you to wear bicycle helmets or drink small sodas. Not even laws ordering you to pay recycle, pay taxes and join up during a war. These are laws, but they're also ordinances, commands and compulsions. They are not really any different from your parents telling you to wash behind your ears or a mugger ordering you to give him your money. They might be right or wrong, but they aren't law. Law exists apart from what a group of people at any given time want you to do. That is why the aged nature of the United States Constitution is a strength. The farther away we travel from 1788, the less that the foibles and frailties of the Framers affect us. The transitory human things fall away leaving only the essence of law. A Bill of Rights drafted today would look very different than it did b