Hey, I said sober up!

Alright, alright, perhaps I was not clear enough the last time (that's a first) when I said to sober up. I've posted before that the Republicans should not get any office or election victory unless they espouse their traditional, "Declaration of Independence" platform of values. In the 1850's, when the Republican Party wrote up its foundational beliefs, it was two pages long. I love brevity (though you'll never get it with me). Constitution - 6 pages, original Republican platform - 2 pages. Sure, they wrote free hand in small lettering back then, but even if typed out they fall well short of the 2,000 page monsters that the Congress is so fond of these days.

They drew their entire meaning of existence from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers figure heavily in there as well. They were to safeguard the rights and duties outlined in those documents.

I have read article after article, stat after stat showing Republicans in double digit leads over their Democrat opponents, incumbent or otherwise. The only reason why the Republicans are getting this kind of attention is because they are not Democrats. That is the WORST reason to vote for them. I am seeing WAY too much of this, "we're entitled" rhetoric on the part of the GOP. Stop it and look to your fundamentals.

Scott Brown won because he adhered to solid Conservative principles. Whether he actually believes in them or can hold to those principles over time (I'm looking square at you, Newt) remains to be seen. We just don't know if he is going to be another McCain, or, god help us, a Snowe or Graham.

I see things coming in steps. Right now we are seeing the Democrat party implode due to internal conflicts between the Progressives and traditional Democrats. The Blue Dogs really should be thought of as more Traditional-minded, classical Democrats; though even that may be stretching it. The bluest-Blue Dog is still more Liberal than a Truman. I heard a speech from BHO the other day where he indicated his desire for the Progressives and the Republicans to work together. Helloooo, did you mean Democrats or do you mean an unmasked Progressive Party, Mr. Obama?

So, in this first phase, the Democrats will finally collapse and re-emerge as the Progressive Party (by the end of this). Those Democrats who are part of the Progressive Caucus already hold a large majority of Chairmanships in Congress. Just take the mask off, folks.

Then, the Democrats get eviscerated in November by very frustrated voters. Republicans of all types will be part of this intake. From Conservative Republicans (who lean Libertarian) all the way over to the Flaming RINOs (your Grahams and Snowes).

The Tea Party movement and the 9/12 folks will be vetting these people; watching them and nudging them. These are the awoken majority in this country, the ones that have been silent for so long. Those who are Proud Americans first, Conservatives second, and Republicans a distant third. They will bark and growl when they see a Republican wander off the path. In 2012, the party will harden. Those Democrats that did not get voted out, may get ousted here as well, since I don't see Obama backing off, even in the face of a Republican House and/or Senate. The Democrats will still be around, perhaps even in large numbers, but they will be cowed and fearful of angering the majority, now that they are awake and have found their voices (Liberals have NEVER been the majority in this country).

Those Republicans that have proven themselves to be RINOs or sympathetic RINOs will find themselves ousted in Primaries by their more Conservative ilk. If the right candidate runs for President, (no Romney, I don't think this is your "turn") then we could see the mirror image of what we see today. I am really starting to warm up to the Pence fellow in Indiana.

The first step is, of course, to rip out the guts of the Democrats. Oppose them on everything, including the time of day. Polite is as polite does. Be civil, but relentless of purpose. When they act stupid, treat that accordingly. When they raise up straw men, knock them down. Bush refused to do this and it dragged him down. For every straw man knocked down, you discredit one Liberal operative. Don't relent and don't have pity on them. They never showed an ounce (or should I say gram) for conservatives. They must never be allowed to get away with anything, main stream media control or not.

The majority may fall asleep again in the years to come and things will drift again, but I can only hope that the template of a self-correcting mechanism have been created for use in the future.

Health care is not dead either, people. Like the undead, it keeps coming back. Worse for wear, of course, with the beating it has taken, but even more dangerous. More dangerous because the Progressives will simply twist it and refine it and shape it so that something will pass. That something will be a very thin wedge that will be hammered at for the next few years or decades. It is what Progressives are good at. They have been thrashed before. The 1880's, the 1920's, the 1940's, and the 1980's; they keep coming back. The vehicle is different (Prohibition, Women's Rights, the Alphabet soup of FDR, Abortion, Climate Change) but the message is the same. They know better; they are smarter and we are all idiots. It is all for our own good and we really must back off and let them do this.

Reconciliation, Senate Rules (removing filibuster), forced vote with defections (Snowe) or end runs will get this bill across the goal line. I have heard all four in the last three days. The trial balloons are going up all over. Dems have been all over the RINOs, working to get them to flip. Pelosi floated two balloons in a single day. She discussed Reconciliation and End Runs. An End Run is when you take out the objectionable material, split it up into single bills, and then attach them throughout the legislative agenda on things like defence spending or stimulus spending. That is how we got the roots of the Death Panels planted already (in the $787 Billion Porkulus bill). She will get all that other stuff passed out of sight, hidden in other bills. They will be sockets already set up, waiting for the other end to be created by the passage of "Health Care Reform". The bill itself will look reasonable, perhaps even acceptable, but when passed, it will mix with stuff already created (Porkulus was one such socket) and the genie will be out of the bottle. Game over.

Don't rest and don't relax your vigilance. I know they won't.

Tyrants and Opiates

If you have not seen Glenn Beck's January 22, 2010 show on the roots of Progressivism, Communism, Marxism, and their effects on the 20th Century then I suggest that you watch them from the links below before reading on:

Part 1 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHJcG4kjQ68
Part 2 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkRHCzd_5rA
Part 3 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3zxPSC69ng
Part 4 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLRgaQ7FCig
Part 5 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqAKbwoY500
Part 6 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odS6veXcnWM
Part 7 of 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pe3hDFQ0Mw

I have always said, and continue to drill into my children and foreign-born wife that you must understand, absolutely, where you came from to best determine where you are going.

I must admit, though, that my wife gets a bit of a pass on that one. I'm going to digress a bit here, but it does have bearing on the bulk of this posting. My wife has lived much of this and she is so very disturbed by it all (the changes underway in America). She works hard every day to avoid the research that I put into this blog and she pointedly leaves the room whenever the kids ask me history or political questions (bless them their interest and curiosity). She grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain and knows what it is like to see empty shelves and long lines for toilet paper, the lack of food and the meatless weeks (much of it going to the Soviet Union). She knows first hand about bribing and back room deals to get the most basic of medical care. She understands Obama and his Marxist revolutionaries on a visceral level. No amount of spin can camouflage those people from her eyes. The revulsion that emanates from her is palpable. She gets angry at times when she hears me speaking about what Obama is doing with the casualness of a college professor. She tells me that this is not just a theoretical discussion in his policies and their effects on the American people. This is serious. Deadly serious and she is sick of people looking at this, and him, as just another politician that needs to be restrained (Bill Clinton after 1994) and/or voted out of office (Carter in 1980). This man is a Marxist revolutionary that will stop at nothing to bring about redistributive change and totalitarian rule. I need to "get my mind right" on this and stop treating it as a cerebral exercise.

Point taken.

Watch what Beck and his crew have created. A documentary far more useful than any of the drivel that Michael Moore has created. It is chilling and it is accurate. As a history junkie I was impressed with the way he pulled the various roots of Progressivism together and bundled them up in a cohesive and easy to understand way. Too often historians make the act of storytelling tedious and boring. Not to mention they have to pitch in gratuitous Latin or other 'deep' concepts that they assume everyone knows about. Much like Jazz, everyone just nods as if they 'get it'.

Everyone looks to the 20th Century as the time when the modern world really came into being. The automobile was a 19th century invention that was perfected in the 20th. Lighter than air flight was invented in the 18th but perfected in the 20th with the Zeppelin and the airplane. Science had undergone explosive growth in the 19th century and only continued to accelerate in the 20th. The world was shrinking rapidly. One could go around the world in under 3 months in the 19th century, by the 20th that time was measured in hours. We were progressing on all fronts.

Many of the intellectuals in Europe and the United States felt that our social development needed to under go an evolution as well. The Fabian Society in England was created to bring about the slow, progressive evolution of the cultural condition. Socialism and Communism were born in the 19th century and then given full expression in the 20th. The Worlds Fairs of the 19th Century looked ahead to a Art Deco world of progress and plenty.

The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of recorded civilization. As destructive as the US Civil War was, running almost 4 years to the day, approximately 700,000 people died of active war and disease. At the Battle of Verdun, fought over a period of about 10 months it resulted in nearly 1,000,000 combined casualties of which almost 300,000 were KIA or MIA. 40 million artillery shells were fired and at least 100,000 soldiers were ground up in no-man-land to the point where bones are still found to this day. And that was just one battle of WWI. Between WWI and WWII, there must have been at least 130 million war deaths. In Korea the US military must have inflicted 1-3 million casualties on the North Koreans and at least that many casualties on the Chinese. Millions died of disease and exposure. Interestingly, the wars of the past were fought over territory, resources, and power.

The wars of the 20th century were primarily those of ideology. Such a simple word. Even the Crusades were fought more for power and prestige than for religion. The first quarter of the century saw the great empires of the previous 1,000 years break up. Often times violently. Communist and Socialists were in play the entire time. The Progressives had already taken root in the United States and came up with absolutely wonderful theories. Social Darwinism (borrowed by the Nazis), Eugenics (again, borrowed from America for use by the Nazis), and the idea of Corporatism (look it up, it is not quite as it sounds). Mussolini created the first stable Fascist government in Italy long before Hitler came to power in Germany. The trains ran on time and there was order, even in the 1930's when the rest of the world was in recession (the US being in a depression). The marriage of government, people, and corporations seemed the way to go and there were many, many admirers of that form of government here in the US.

However, this is where Beck really hits the nail on the head. Marxism, progressivism, communism; all of it leads down the same road. The more the government involves itself in one's life, the more it must control it. Prohibition was a Progressive idea. Alcohol is bad and we can't seem to get you to stop drinking of your own volition, so we are going to make a Constitutional Amendment banning the production, sale, import and export of alcohol (not to mention drinking it).

Prohibition gave us organized crime (not to mention the Kennedy dynasty) and years of speak-easys. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of the most powerful laws in the Universe. It failed miserably. The Progressives never gave up, not one bit. After regrouping, they hijacked the 60's counter-culture revolution. They used that movement to first pull down the existing, moralistic order and replaced it with an anything goes world view. To remove the obstacle of the Constitution they had to pull down the education system. So now we have purple markers and open class rooms. Now, few people seem to really understand where we came from. For the last 40 years our culture has been torn down to be replaced with...what? A Marxist utopia?

Prior to the mid-1960's, America was a deeply religious nation. Much of the Western world was Catholic or one of the many flavors of Protestantism. Religion provides a culture with a foundation of morals and rules that allow large groups of people to live among each other with a minimum of friction. Religion can be such a big part of people's lives that everything they look at is through that lens (such leads to intolerance). Lenin called religion the "Opiate of the masses". He was saying that it is a useful distraction to occupy their time with. He was also saying that as long as people believe in God then there will always be competition with the State. So, you get rid of God.

Well, organized religion has now been largely discredited in the Western world. Everything is about you, and me, and the State. I have total liberty, I can do what I want, even at the financial expense of another...I'm owed; I'm a victim. In that mind-set, religion becomes a quaint hobby. What to replace it with? Well, judging by how much attention people pay to Angelia Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Jennifer Aniston, I'd have to say that Pop Culture is the new Opiate of the Masses. More people voted in American Idol in 2006 than voted for John McCain in the 2008 Presidential elections. Helllllooooo people! A useful distraction indeed.

Beck is also very good at illustrating this cultural degradation with the popular support of thugs and murderers like Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Che (not to mention this twisted fascination with criminals in general). You have people in the White House putting Mao decorations on the Christmas tree and idiot Hollywood stars from Depp to Masterson wearing Che t-shirts. Black rappers are even extolling the virtues of Che (who would have had them all shot since he hated music and blacks). Yet these people feel no shame at all wearing those shirts. Blissfully ignorant of the realities of this world. The Useful Idiots that the Marxist movement is always looking to use. How about at t-shirt with Hitler on it? Same Marxist belief system, same thoughts on civil control, redistributive wealth and centralized governmental planning. I really don't see a difference in them other than one did some of his own killing and the other killed through the government apparatus.

So much more. The lessons of the Stoa will continue later.

--Zavost

America's Narrowing Options Part 2 *Updated*

Please be sure to read part one thoroughly before reading this posting.

America, at this point in our history has made many choices to get us to where we are. At the end of the Spanish American War in 1898, we found ourselves on the world stage for the first time. Under Theodore Roosevelt we found ourselves embroiled in wars from the Philippines to Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. We then decided, as a people, that this flirtation with Imperialism and Colonialism was not in keeping with our Founder's teaching. We drew up plans to educate and then spin off those countries as they matured, accepting that we probably should not have taken them in the first place, we knew we could not just cut them loose. We pulled down their old way of life, so we taught them how to live a different one. Thank you Europe for simply abandoning Africa, that worked out soooo well.

I digress.


We decided that we were not going to be a colonial power. The people chose to pull back from the world stage and follow the wisdom of Washington who warned us about overseas involvement. World War One raged for four years before we finally got into it. For a time, there were those that wondered on who's side would we fight!


After we came late and knocked out an exhausted Germany, we once again pulled back to our own shores. Wilson railed and fought so hard to get us into the League of Nations that it literally gave him a stroke. What a nice little Progressive he was, but that is another blog.


The people of this country as expressed through the will of the Congress, kept us out of the League and out of the world spotlight for another twenty years. Over that time we had a booming economy and then a Great Depression (made Great by the polices of FDR, but that is another blog). We spun up and began letting our territories taken from Spain in 1898 to make their own choices. Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines and others began to chart their course. World War Two had been ripping Europe apart for about four years before we were finally pulled into it.


Once again, we made the differnce and fought back the darkness that threatened to consume the world. FDR failed to ever realize the danger that the Soviet Union posed, probably because he secretly admired their ruling classes ability to maintain control...


The people decided that it was time to create the United Nations and base it in New York. Some people felt that had we been more active participants on the world stage, then the evil of the 1930's and 40's may never have come to pass. Was this hubris on our part?


We were of mixed feelings at the time, though. Truman slashed the military to nothing even as the Soviets and their puppets continued production on a war footing. We may now be involved with the UN, but we were an equal nation among nations. We were not to be its police man.


North Korea put paid to that thought in a hurry in June of 1950. To his credit, he did not flinch and fought the communists back into the North and did not quit, even when the Chinese involved themselves.


However, back then, we still resisted Communism. Today, we embrace it.


The Korean War sputtered and cost the lives of thousands of young Americans as the nation no longer had the heart for "Total War". Truman fired MacArthur and fought for hills to "straighten" some line on a map. The people were more interested in the rising affluence at home.


The veterans of WW2, the GI generation, used that affluence to build the great institutions that are crumbling today.

They chose to shelter their children from the harshness of their upbringing. They did not want their children to feel the sting of hunger or the pang of wont. They gave them comfortable homes, cookie cutter neighborhoods and a conformist, well-ordered society.


Their children chose to rebel and ignite the culture wars of the 1960's and 70's. The Progressives, who never went away, decided that it was not fair that old people did not have better access to healthcare, so in 1965 Medicare was created. They decided that it was not fair people could not find affordable homes, hello Freddie Mac. Questions were asked and debates raged in the Arena of Ideas. Great speeches by Reagan, warning us of our condition today can be found on YouTube. In the end, Populism won out. Eventually, the Progressives co-opted the energy of the Boomer Generation. Today it is hard to tell the difference between a Progressive, a Socialist, a Communist, or a Marxist.


Once the thin wedge was rammed in, the crack could be widened. The State was going to help returning soldiers with the GI Bill. Very well intentioned. It gave us the University grads we needed as our nation expanded into its new role as the World's Superpower. However, it was not "fair" that only soldier got this benefit, so now student loans would be offered to help those who could not afford a college education. One of my favorite lines in the movie "Caddyshack" is from the Judge to a young University wanna-be student, "The world needs ditch diggers too, you know". Look at the cost of education today.


Social Security was expanded, Medicare and Medicaid expanded. The percentage of government growth as it related to the private sector would have made FDR proud.


The proto-Nanny State had truly come with the 1960's.



Look at the above chart. It demonstrates the government sector in relation to the private sector for the last several decades. Basically, you want the red line to always be higher than the blue line. The government pays its employees through tax collections. If your tax base is smaller than your payout population, then you are going to have problems. We can not all work for the government, someone must actually produce something other than large reports and expensive legislation. Note that this rather horrible trend (divorce from the blue line) began under Clinton, was reversed somewhat under Bush, who then reversed himself and began the nosedive in 2006 and 2007. Obama has simply decided that everyone should work for the government and is currently seeing if the crumpled paper that was this chart can reach the trash can in one shot from across the room.


America has also chosen to become a nation of consumers. Our manufacturing base is in shambles because the choices of taxation, corporate and private have driven that manufacturing to other countries. We also are more highly automated and efficient. Sitting at your computer desk, try to find something made in America? The very wood that makes up your floor likely comes from Canada (mine does). If we are not producing, we are consuming. Is it any wonder the "Trade Imbalance" has not been in positive numbers since before I can even remember? Our treasure has been draining overseas for decades, enriching other nations, as the laws of Capitalism dictate.

Look at the above chart. This shows how bad off the States really are in terms of tax collections. The tax base is shrinking. What have we decided to chose as a nation to do, via our elected representatives? Spend our way out of debt (what?). Money comes from a combination of three sources. You tax it from the economy, you borrow it, or you print it. There is no fairy that just makes it for you.

This chart shows you where they are getting it from:

The government has been borrowing and printing at levels that no nation has ever done before and remained an ongoing concern. Whatever does not get bought at the latest Treasury sale simply gets printed by the Federal Reserve, "bought" by the Federal Reserve and then sent to the Federal Government. Madoff is not in jail, he is running our Federal Reserve.

We chose the Federal Reserve system. We chose BHO to lead our nation. We elected the Congress. We get what is coming to us.

What is coming?

Continued job losses and a flat recovery if we are lucky. A repeat of the Weimar Republic if the laws of economics are applied.

The above chart shows the percentage of jobs lost in a variety of prior recessions. As you can see, we have not even hit bottom yet.

That we are printing as much money as we are is mind-boggling, unbelieveable really. Look below:

In what reality is this a good thing?

Our choices narrow every day. Perhaps we don't have many choices left. As I see it, we have the following choices:

1. Stop printing money. Pull back everything that has gone into reserve holdings.

2. Raise interest rates to pull the money supply back farther.

3. Stop spending on anything other than essential services for 10 years, minimum.

Without making your eyes glaze over, I'll jump ahead. We have been funding much of our prosperity over the last 40 years by inflating our currency. Productivity has caused the cost of goods and services to drop. This would make our money less valuable over time and make the cost of those good relative (think paying farmers not to farm their land in order to keep the price of corn up). The value of the dollar has been dropping since the 1960's. What do you think my parents paid for a Dodge van in 1977? What would they pay for the same van in 2010? About 68% more dollars would be needed for the same purchase. We just feel wealthy, but we aren't. We have inflated the currency once too often.

Going off the gold standard and promising to the world that we would not print (inflate the currency) dollars was a bad idea as well (suckers).

Look at the chart below and try not to choke:

President Carter inflated the monetary supply by 21% in 1978 and it resulted in Stagflation. It took until about 1983 for Reagan to break us out of it. He did it by raising interest rates and lower taxes (grew out of the hole). Compare that time frame with the charts above. Think back to how bad times were back then.

Bush began to inflate our monetary supply after 9/11 and then began to pull it back (11% interest rate), but then the various bubbles began popping and the only way to keep value in our goods was to inflate the supply. President Obama has rocketed our monetary supply by over 180%!! Remember, Carter raised it by 21% and look what it did.

There is no escaping the pain of what is coming. There will be another depression and it will be worse and longer than the Great Depression. I hope that someone will come along and shorten the severity and the duration, but I'm not very hopeful.

Those who are in their 30's, 40's and 50's right now are at the height of their earning power in their lives. This recession has hit us, mostly Gen X'ers, younger Boomers and older Milennials, at the worst time.

Even as Pelosi and Reid fund their retirement and health care; provide for everyone over 65 (or earlier if they can expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover everyone) while leaving us to pay the bills. We will be cleaning up after them long after they are gone.

Understand that. Those alive now, those who have yet to enter the workforce and those that have not yet been born will have to pay for what the elected representative are doing to us right now. I will never be wealthy. My children will not be wealthy because of this. Just look at the debt clock at http://usdebtclock.org/ to see what I'm talking about.

If we pull all that money back soon enough we can avoid a Weimar Republic. The bankers have thus far kept most of that money from circulation. They must see their children at night for dinner and realize what will happen if all that money begins moving around the world. So far, that money is just numbers in a reserve account. If we raise interest rates to pull the money supply back in, then we will lock up the credit markets and cause a depression worse than what we are in now. Either way, the path is bleak. There are other options, such as getting rid of the dollar and creating a new currency based on gold, or another currency based on our national resources, a basket currency not our own, or even a world currency. World shaking decisions, though, since so much of the world relies on the dollar. We could just default, but much of that money is owed to ourselves and China.

Choices, choices. Which will we choose. Either way, I know that we will get through it; however I just can't help but imagine what things will look like for my children.

--Zavost

Staying Sober

OK, everyone, just ease up out there. Get some coffee and slow down. So Brown won. So he won "The Ted Kennedy" seat. Yes, he sounded the Conservative bell and said many of the right things (well, up until he offered up his daughter). He has not passed my RINO test yet. Once the one trick pony has done his trick (and vote against the health bill) we'll see just what kind of Republican we are dealing with. A Reganite or a disciple of McCain?

This victory has dealt the Progressives a bad blow and likely has delayed, yes, I'm saying delayed, their onslaught, but they will be back. They have spent the last year, frantically stomping on everything in their way, whether it was a legally binding contract, a State constitution, tradition, custom, or common sense to get every piece of their Marxist agenda through the house and past the more moderate (that's a very relative term) members of the Democrat Party.

The Progressives did not spend that amount of time and energy just to fail now. They got the ball up to the one yard line and spent 4 downs trying to get it across the goal. They are not done. Over the last year they shed any of the few vestiges of decency and democracy they may have once possessed. With the mask gone, they can never go back. They have no choice now but charge through the fire. That is also the advice of the dead hand of Saul Alinsky. Double down and all that.

Several Democrats have said that Health Care must be re-evaluated and perhaps we have not been listening as closely to the people as we should. The President blamed Bush, again. Other Progressives are saying that perhaps they moved too slow on their agenda (really?) and the people elected Brown as a warning to them to hurry up and get their agenda done. Talk about dense. Put the book back on the shelf; I ain't buying it.

They are cornered and without a mask any longer. They are simply regrouping right now. If they have to over turn the 60 vote rule in the Senate, they will do it. If they have to pass a very thin wedge of a health bill (as proposed by BHO last night) and then hammer later, they will do just that. Not over by a long shot.

Another ray of sun shine came out from behind the Marxist cloud today. The Supreme Court finally got something right for a change. They essentially gutted McCain/Finegold, doing away with the preferential treatment that Unions and the uber-wealth got with political campaign contributions.

I'll admit, at first I did not grasp the significance of this, distracted as I was with other things. I frowned when I saw that Justice Kennedy wrote the assenting paper (liberal that he is). Hours later, I then decided to see how the other justices ruled and raised an eyebrow when I saw all the uber-liberals in the dissent. I then put a few tasks at work on hold and read through the entire ruling, noting that this was a repudiation of the McCain/Feingold bill. Awesome.

This breaks the strangle hold on free speech that the Democrats have enjoyed for years. Big business will be less likely (a little) to get into bed with a President and his/her administration to curry favor. They will be able to work to get their candidate elected, just as I can. I have no problem with corporations donating money, as long as it is all out in the open.

For years the 527's have been the chess pieces of the Left. George Soros and his demon-pack of 527's have terrorized Democrats and Republicans to the point that the mere announcement that Moveon.org is targeting them for removal has caused them to change their policy. Not good. The Right was never really able to muster much of a response to this because they are out doing what they do; live life, earn a living, and mind their own business. That is a noticeable difference to contrast with the Liberal and/or Democrat. Democrats live for politics and organize as such, Republicans are public service oriented. They are individualistic, not collective. There is strength in numbers and collective action. The battlefield naturally favors the Liberal and the Democrat.

I am cautiously optimistic of the future. America has been grievously wounded with poor fiscal and foreign policy over the last year. Damage that will take decades to repair, irrespective of the incoming administrations. The national debt must be addressed, faith in our currency must be restored, and faith in the word and handshake of the U.S. must be reestablished (I'm thinking of Poland and the Czech Republic). Who knows what seeds have been planted around the world with Obama's ineptitude? A Theocratic Iran was born of Carter, Totalitarian North Korea is the child of Truman and Eisenhower, Venezuela that of Bush 43; and the list can go on. Who knows what fruit will be born of the seeds planted this last year.

Rejoice that a Republican has been elected. Enjoy the euphoria and the hope that comes with it. Please do.I'll stand sentry and keep a clear eye fixed on the shadows that surround us.

--Zavost

What...what, what?

"What...what, what?" --Bender Bending Rodriguez, 3001 a.d., from the Heartland of America, Guadalajara.

Those words sum up what I've been thinking the last few days. Those words were uttered because Fry was attempting to tell Bender things that were mutually exclusive, i.e. Cognitive Dissonance. To Fry, what he was trying to say made perfect sense. To Benders binary logic: gibberish.

What I keep hearing from politicians these days translates into, at best, static; at its most basic, filthy, intentional lies. This entry is likely going to be as choppy and as contradictory as what I'm hearing, so reading this one may take some effort (as if there is anyone actually reading these since I don't have half dressed women or comedic breaks in this blog...yet).

Where to start, where to start. How about this, on bailouts and banking.

Frank, Dodd, ACORN, Fan/Fred, and the FED decide that every American should have their own house (any place can be called a home), regardless of whether you can actually afford one. So regulations are crafted, also known as "The Rules", and the lending agencies act accordingly (please refer back to my prior post about good, evil and its relationship to morals). Then the bubble pops and things melt down, so the administration forms a panel under the leadership of Dodd to get to the bottom of things. That is sort of like asking Senator Palpatine to figure out who is undermining the Republic in Star Wars I (yes, I can be a geek that watches way too many movies).

So the government bails out the big banks, the ones that were too big to fail and all that. Plus a heap of banks that felt they did not need bailing out but were forced to in order to avoid additional government scrutiny. Trillions of dollars are taxed out of the economy, borrowed, or simply printed up and are shoved into the Reserve system. Over time, the banks come to resent that virtual take over of their institutions and then scrambles to pay off the 'loans' with interest as quickly as possible. So quickly that the government did everything it could to force them to stay under their thumb. I heard one story that stated that a banking CEO basically had to leave the check on a desk and walk away in order to get the official to take the pay back, "Here, take it!"

The banks could do this because they began to raise the bar on loans. Far from being easier, they made it harder to get a mortgage. If only they had been smarter sooner....

I can just see Obama thinking to himself: the economy is crashing, so I'll tax, borrow, and print whatever number of dollars I need, then I'll pump it into the economy (control and centrally plan as much of it as I can in the process), and then tax as much back out of the economy as I can (and then some) and THEN, pump it back into the economy while slushing billions to my supporters while withholding funds from my detractors. Oh, and tax it again and again every opportunity I get. Yep, I like that.

So, the government begins to put pressure on them (the banks) to make loans easier to get...again -is that not what got us into this mess?

Then, Dear Leader comes out, full of fury and indignation about the banks' profits. He reminds the country (class warfare, anyone) that it was risk taking by the banks that made this mess. He is going to tax the banks, now, based on the amount of risk they are assuming. By the way, the administration is still putting pressure on banks to loan to people who are insane credit risks. What...what, what?

Why couldn't the Dear Leader be this emotional after the Ft. Hood terrorist attack?

Putting that aside, lets look at the taxes the administration hopes to get from this. Lets also set aside for a moment that the Executive Branch can not impose a tax of any kind on any thing. Only Congress can do this. The Administration expects to pull $117 billion from the banking system to recoup the TARP losses.

All of the major banks with the exception of CitiBank (essentially as government owned as GM) have paid back all their TARP loans...WITH INTEREST. This can not be a tax to recoup TARP losses when the banking industry gave them a net profit? Why say you are going to punish them when what you are really trying to do is shake them down? By the way, GM and Chrysler, along with CitiBank are specifically exempted from this tax. Sweet.

So, the banks were given (some forced) bail outs so that they would not fail, so that they could loan money to people to buy a house (and keep corporate script flowing). Given money so they would not fail. So then when they get a pulse, you hammer them with a $117 billion tax that will simply be passed into my ATM fees. Really smart, Obama.

Next item. In 2006, 2007, and early 2008, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd repeat over and over that Fan and Fred are doing just fine. No losses there, even as the corporate Boards are used as a landing pad for failed Progressives. Buy offs and slush funds. Big playground for the corrupt. Huge bonuses, each and every year, even as they were inflating the bubble that doomed us all. In those years, they rave about how healthy those two nominally independent corporations were, despite the Bush Administration calling for reform more than a dozen times since 2001.

August of 2008, they collapse and trigger the depression we are in. We had already been in a recession, but that bubble popping made it all very real, very quick. First, hundreds of millions are needed, then billions, then tens upon tens of billions are needed to make good on the loans they under wrote.

In late 2009, the ceiling for losses is not expected to reach $400 billion, then overnight, they rip that lid off and just hand them a blank check book. Expecting a few more losses, there? Those two companies are now entirely staffed and owned by the taxpayer. The pretense otherwise has simply been dropped.

On to Health Care. This abomination of a health care reform bill is being passed around to the Democrat members of both houses with a blank sheet of paper on it saying, "what do you want for your 'yes' vote?". The Republicans are absolutely irrelevant. This passes in both chambers with or without them. Nebraska gets a Medicare exemption on abortions. None of their money will go towards paying for abortions in Nebraska, in return, they get to pay for them in the other 49 states and territories. Nice. Then, Nebraska gets their Medicare payments guaranteed for LIFE. This whole thing gives me flashbacks to the movie, Johnny Dangerously where the District Attorney gets to see what he can get if he just, "Plays Ball". This is being played again and again in various states. I just use Nebraska as an example.

Finally, the bill rams straight into one of those Cognitive Dissonance moments. The Unions OWN Obama. I believe they even have the receipt and the title to prove it. The unions have promised way more then they can deliver or afford so they have been working hard to off-load those debt obligations onto the taxpayer. However, they don't want the government to reduce the luxurious benefit package they get, nor do they want the government to tax it. Impasse.

The union leaders spent two hours at the White House reminding Obama that they own him. He obliged and ordered Pelosi and Reid to create a "carve out" for the unions in Health Care. They will not be taxed on their "Cadillac" plans until something like 2018. More than enough time to make those exemptions permanent.

What that means is that everyone who is not in a union will be subsidizing those who are. Not only will their benefits be much, much better (on par with the Federal package), but the rest of us will be paying that much more into the system so they can have that plan. What...what, what? Here is a great cartoon to illustrate this:

The bald arrogance of the elected officials in government today. They are not even trying to hide it any longer. Its all right there for those who can actually see it. Have they no shame?

To make that real, we are talking about an increase to our taxes of $60 billion! That is real money people. My head hurts.

--Zavost

And now for something different...

Every so often I come across something that reminds me of the bigger picture. If I can get this to link properly...

This is one of my top 5 all time favorite film clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZKkxAQYxyE

The movie Bladerunner is always described with the word Dystopic. The opposite of Utopia. Generally a bleak and cheerless view of the future. I beg to disagree with this. I feel that movie could very well likely be a possible future for us. Huge, crowded cities, hives of humanity that are shady, seedy, and indifferent. That can describe any big city today, especially the port cities of China and India. At the end of the film, you can clearly see that nature still exists, with the main character driving along a wonderfully forested highway.

Genetically engineered humans doing our grunt work? Yes. Genetically enhanced soldiers? Yes. I see that in our future very clearly. Much of the technology in that movie exists today, except that we do not yet posses interstellar travel or posses off-planet colonies. I feel that will come too, eventually.

Humanity will work it out. There will eventually be one world government and one world currency. We will speak with one voice. I feel that we have so very much to learn before that can happen. Issues that need to be settled. Marxism and Capitalism can not coexist very comfortably, just look closely at China, a perfect model of this. Islam and, well, anything else can not coexist peacefully, so that will have to be settled as well.

Dystopia is a matter of perspective. Even in the Great Depression there were movies being made (and people with the money to go to them). Heck, some of the best films Hollywood put out were from that time (the Golden Age). The Empire State building went up as a proud monument for New York. The world is never all bad or all good. A Roman Citizen, living around 200 a.d. in Southern France had a pretty good life. There had not been a civil war in years, the Empire was at peace, literally the Pax Romana. There were dark times, too. The merchant that invested everything he had in an expedition to Britannia to mine tin and other metals and then lost the ship to a storm; the Christian priest trying to help the poor in Antioch while avoiding the Roman authorities; the frustrated Roman house wife who just had to let some of the servants go because her husband lost his monthly salary playing dice, they all had their tough times. The list goes on. We all have our bills to pay and we all have our challenges in life, no matter the stage of life or the time frame in our history. They have always been there. Some of us have had it worse than others, but some have had it better. We may not be in control of the big things in life, but we do have the ability to improve our chances of weathering the consequences of those "big things".

As a species we have changed very little since the last Homo Sapien saw off the last Neanderthal in Spain. Clean them up and give them a shave and you have a Wall Street Lawyer (but with more morals). The same needs, wants and desires. The wish for a better home and a better future. The only thing that changes is our culture and our technology (redundant there?).

We must never stop looking over that next hill or past the horizon of the ocean. We must not stop reaching for the moon and Mars, nor stop striving to reach the stars. Robots are great but until there is a boot print on the soil of Mars, we can not really say that we have arrived.

Bladerunner gives me hope. As bad as the screen writer tried to get across the dismal hopelessness of society at that time, the writer also intimated that we had gone not just to the moon and Mars, but had already begun the great Terran Diaspora, lead by the Replicants. They did the hard fighting, the hard work, and endured the dangerous conditions making things safer for human colonists to come after them. That world had its issues to settle; issues of freedom and slavery. Then again, so do we.

--Zavost

Informative Sites

Here are some good sites to look through that will give you a good over view of what is going on today and how it all came about.

Perhaps we will learn, as a culture and a country from all of this and spare later generations. You would think that if you have done something once, watched others do it repeatedly, you would figure out not to try it again?

http://pc.blogspot.com/2008/09/borrowed-time-anatomy-of-recession.html

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm

Enjoy.

--Zavost

America's Narrowing Options Part 1

A Zen philosopher might argue that there is neither good nor evil, merely choices and their consequences. A Stoic would be more focused by saying that it is the morals of an individual that will make a good or evil choice, with Good and Evil being relative to the amount of good or evil inflicted upon another.

I have always believed that there are choices. I have always believed that we are the ultimate masters of our destiny. We always have a choice, even if that choice is to remove ourselves from the game of life by jumping off a cliff. Many Stoics chose to end their lives on their own terms rather than face their situation (Cicero comes to mind). I think it is cowardly, but to a Stoic, it is all about choice. Unless one is no longer in charge of their mental faculties, one must always be held accountable for their own choices. As you might guess, you would not want me to be a sitting judge in my county, or anywhere.

If you were to read the complete works of Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", you may get the feeling that nations have a life cycle just like any of God's creations. After reading the work, you would feel, from 1,500 years after the fall of the Western Empire and over 500 years since the fall of the Eastern half of the Empire, that its fall was inevitable. I strongly disagree with this. The evidence stares us in the face.

It all comes down to choices; choices equal options in this work. In 100 BC (I also don't go into that CE or Common Era crapola) The Roman Empire was actually the Roman Republic. It had survived huge challenges to its existence, first by freeing themselves from the Etruscans, then barely holding off the Celts and Gauls of Europe. Then, after some time to mature, it fought off another rising power, the Carthaginians (truly, a world war in its day). The Republic was full of energetic and intelligent individuals. The government evolved to meet the needs of is people. It changed the way its military was raised and borrowed from those they defeated. The Republic matured, as it must, as it's land area grew and the number of people (not citizens) it was responsible for grew as well. Consuls, proconsuls and the like evolved. Dictators were created in special emergencies, given the full power of the Senate to bring the emergency to a swift conclusion. Those individuals served their people, not the State, and they layed down that power and returned to their farms as common citizens (just like George Washington at the end of the revolutionary war).

As is always the case, powerful families and dynasties had formed in Rome during the preceding 400 years. Those families could trace there ancestry back to the very founding and independence of the city from the Etruscans. Power became more important to them than the people they were supposed to represent. The Republic was at risk of becoming an Oligarchy, ruled by the Senate.

The Republic was saved, for a time, by individuals such as Marius, who reformed and modernized the Roman military, giving it it's classical apperance and organization; and by Sulla and the Graccus brothers. Some call the latter three Tyrants, and they truly were, but they also strenthend the customs of the Tribunes, who had the power to veto the Senate if the will of the people demanded it (think Initiatives and Referendum process in the U.S.--look it up if you need to).

Eventually, the ruling families learned how to "game" the system and began to push rising members of their family through the political machine. Ticket punching became the road to power and influence in the late Roman Republic. Every son of potential had to serve as a Tribune or Legate, they all had to serve in various public service roles (think self-funded NGO's) and then finally the military. Glory on the battlefield translated into influence in Rome (and votes). Pompeii the Great or Magnus rose to power and influence a half-generation before Caesar. He was a Populist in every way. He had the ear and love of the people, dirt in and on the Senate, and a military career second to none, up to that time (he brought most of Spain into the Republic). Caesar was from a lesser family, a family that fell from power and influence. He was a singular genius on the battlefield and a genius at "spin". He carefully crafted his actions to give the best possible light on himself with the full intent of being the sole master of Rome (only he could do it right, you see). Pompeii met an awful end in Egypt, Antony as well. Caesar as we all know fell under the knives of angry Senators. His illegitimate son, Brutus, met his end in Greece, by his own hand.

Caesar's adopted son, Octavius, saw the anger of the people at his death and felt that he could take over the levers power himself (long story). He knew that the Republic was dead. He saw that it would simply spawn more individuals like himself. The rule of law was broken and the Constitution of Rome was meaningless, except as a custom. The first thing he did was forbade anyone from pronouncing him "Dictator". He was the First Citizen or the First Consul. He was elected to the position essentially for life and started a new dynasty that did its best to serve for the interests of its people.

We all know how that went, though. The mechanism for good governance was there, but if you have bad people at the helm, then all you will do is get bad stuff done very fast and efficiently (helllooooo B.H. Obama).

At various times in the Republic, things could have changed. Most people don't know but there were two major political parties at the time of Caesar. The Populists and the Optimates. Essentially, those that claimed to represent the people and those that favored a conservative, traditional method of governing (you know, the one that worked well for over 400 years). As we know, the Populists won because they were able to use class warfare and envy as weapons against the more conservative elements of the government (sound familiar?).

The saying, "If you rob Peter to pay Paul then Paul will vote for you every time" comes to mind. The common citizen liked the idea that they could be on the public dole at the expense of the rich. Cicero even had a great speech about how they must kick everyone off the government rolls, stop sending money to other countries, and reform the government (45 BC, I think). He ended up getting the choice, kill yourself of face Caesar.

The people chose the Populists over the Optimates. They gave them the Empire. The Empire was, up until that time, the greatest civilizing force in the world. It brought roads and advanced building practices from England to Iraq and spurred medical science and civil engineering to levels that were not seen again until over 1,000 years after its fall. However, a lot of things lead to its fall. It became so big that governing it was cumbersome. Tax collection was irregular and many public projects were funded by the local politicians themselves. Diocletian split the Empire up and created several types of co-emperors to diffuse power and reduce the likelihood of civil war. Ultimately, it bred war. The money was debased over and over and the Empire was brought to the brink several times.

Each time the Empire was saved by an individual of historical talent. Marcus Aureleus, Diocletian, Constantine, Hadrian and others. They made the right choices. By the time of Constantine, however, the wear and tear on the Empire was evident. The talent for statue making was poor by this time. Statues of Constantine look more like cartoons then the traditional Greek inspired statues. Learning and education were becoming concentrated around proto-universities; farming had lumped together into the Latifundia system (economies of scale at work there). It had become too expensive to run a farm on your own any longer due to progressive taxation and regulation (think the huge Agri firms of today). Those displaced farmers fled to the cities where they bred discontent. Choices upon choices.

The birth rate fell and the plague began to make itself felt. The Eastern Empire, formalized under Constantine, and administered from Constantinople, drifted away from Rome (the capital being moved from Rome to Ravenna) and began to rely on barbarian conscripts to round out the military. The economy slumped, birth rates dropped, the money was devalued again, and the barter system began to come back. Barbarians, schooled in the military arts by the Empire itself began to wield influence over the tottering houses of the Senate and weak Emperors. Breads and Circuses could only distract the people for so long.

The Empire in the West ended when a barbarian commander in the Roman military chose to do away with the charade that had gone on for too long.

Choices. The West chose to allow the Republic to fail. They chose to allow populists run their lives, just as those populists decided to take power and rule as Emperors. The people decided that it was better to have the State control everything from the price of bread to the admission cost at the Coliseum. The Romans even had their equivalent of the State newspaper, mail system, and Pentagon; along with the bloated expenses to keep them going. They chose to ignore their immigration laws and allow barbarians to settle within the frontiers, BEHIND the defensive fortifications. First as a source of recruiting material and then given responsibility to man those fortifications. When the mass invasions came, there was precious little to stop or slow the likes of Attila the Hun.

One poor choice after another, generally made to try to fix the last poor choice. When the end came, it came not with Apocalypse, but with a whimper.

The East held out for another 1,000 years. It made different choices during the 400's A.D. It survived where the other did not. That begs the previous analysis, does it not?

Nations do not rise and fall with the predictability of a living being. They fall because they rot from within and get kicked over from without.

America has made a lot of poor choices for the last 100 years. Problems on top of problems. Populists coming to power and then collecting the spoils for their coat tails and benefactors. Reagan was our Constantine. He held off the coming night and showed us the path back to where our Founding Fathers wanted us to be. However, with Bush 41, Clinton, and then Bush 43, we got Progressive presidents who made one poor choice after another and has let us to the point where our options are growing slim. Death by inflation or death by depression...

I will continue this in Part 2.

--Zavost

When Comedy becomes Reality

Over the Christmas holidays I was introduced to a move that came out a few years ago. I'm sure many of you have seen it, but I don't watch a lot of TV these days that is not a documentary or a Sci Fi show that I follow. My wife stayed up one night to watch it and then parked me down in front of the TV to watch it the next night.

"An American Carol". There were parts of it that made me cringe and then wonder when I became such a prude (oh, yeah, when I had kids of my own). Other parts of it were, in my opinion, profound. It had a real "Airplane" feel to it (like because it was produced by some of the same people), but was sober and truthful when it placed a spot light on the logical inconsistencies inherent in the (and I use this very, very loosely) Liberal/Progressive thought process.

The part of the movie that was meant as comedy but will soon be reality is the portion where you see people trying to get cleared to get on an airplane. They are literally stripped naked to make sure that they are not bringing on explosives or explosive components. At one station, a fellow bends over and has a cavity search performed on him. In all honesty, even that will not stop a determined bomber.

If you are determined to die on your mission then anything is possible. An airliner is just a pressurised aluminum tube, essentially a big Thermos with engines. It does not take much to punch a hole in one, thus a guy with a bomb stitched into his Haynes. If you are willing to die bringing down an airplane over Detroit (why Detroit, it could fall into downtown and not hurt more than the people on the plane?) then you are willing to have your teeth removed and replaced with hollowed out capsules filled with acids or explosive components. I'm not talking a hollowed out tooth, but a capsule in a socket disguised as a tooth. How about a false eye? You can put a lot of fluid in one of those. Is a jihadist willing to have an eye plucked out and replaced with a hollow fake? If they are willing to die at 30,000 feet, then yes, I do suppose they would do this. How about a hollowed out Mastoid Air Cell (you'll just have to look it up)? Lot of space there. A cavity search would not find this, nor would the airport scanners. Not even a sniffing dog would find them if the chemical was sealed weeks earlier.

If they are determined enough to die with the plane then we will lose planes. The best way to get out of a full nelson, a fighting instructor taught in boot camp, is not to get into one. The best way to keep a jihadist from bringing down a plane is not to let one get on. If they are on a no fly list, you do not get on. I know, if you don't have a passport you can not get on. That's a good one.

However, the best part of the film, by far encapsulating the disassociation of reality that liberals suffer from is the scene with Voight as President Washington. The Moore analog is sputtering about the reasons for 9/11 being entirely America's fault. He sites bases over seas, American commercialism, American consumption, and on and on and on. Washington simply asks, "Is that what you are going to say when you stand before St. Peter?" A moment later he simply states, "That will not do." Or to that effect. Makes me shiver just trying to remember it.

I have always felt that the most powerful truths are those that can be uttered without complexity and without description. "That will not do," sums that up perfectly. There is no room for excuses; it is what it is. The Moore analog could talk for hours but it will all be undone with a simple phrase, banishing the illusion of lies that people build for themselves (their personal/shared bubble).

Truth will always be the truth. It can not be anything else. You can erect scaffolds of lies and 'spin' around anything, but in the end, with the passage of time and the passing of those with a dog in the fight, the truth will always come out and be recognized as such. We now know almost everything that Stalin has done in his life, yet hundreds of millions in the Soviet occupied territories hadn't a clue. We now know that FDR really died of cancer that had metastasized to his brain. Is this important today? Only to those historians interested in getting history right, I'm sure.

Will America ever come to know what a mistake it made with the election of BHO in 2008? The mistake it made developing Progressivism in the early 20th Century (Woodrow Wilson and T. Roosevelt).

It may be hundreds of years later and the territory now comprising the United States may have a different name and a different government, but I'm sure that some school kid somewhere will be having a discussion with an instructor in Ancient American history and how the Republic rotted from within and was finally brought down by a Populist Demagogue, just like Republican Rome was brought down by the Populist Caesar.

--Zavost.

What Transparency?

The One stated again and again during the campaign cycle that his would be the most transparent administration in history. So how transparent is this administration? Let's see, it took months of pestering with the Freedom of Information Act and a threat of Sopena to get a chance to guess at the guest log-in book at the White House. They did not release the names, they merely allowed the media and others to submit names to them and they would tell you if they had visited the White House and how many times. That is certainly not transparent to me.

The mac daddy of transparency should be reflected in the Health Care process grinding its way through our Congress right now. However, it is just an indication of just how corrupt and single-minded the Democrats are. They are NOT going to go to committee to reconcile the two versions of the Health Care bill. The two versions have some major differences in them that can not be reconciled without major concessions from both sides. When I say both sides, I mean the Democrats in each wing of Congress. Republicans are as important to this process as the afternoon cleaning lady. No, they know that if this is done in the light of day, under the close watch of those who religiously follow C-SPAN, then their members will have to wage a war, or at the very least, fight for their positions in the bill so that their base and their respective districts can see that they are fighting for their interests. No, this has to be done using a rarely used method that pulls this process behind closed doors, out of the healthy warmth of the Sun.

Behind that door, they can speak frankly with each other and the President's representatives. This bill will be crafted at the White House with BHO's czars and the leaders of the Senate and the House. Behind those doors, they will decide on a minimum set of items that they can agree upon and still call it a Health Care Reform bill. No fuss no muss. They will split up the spoils and lay out the road map for the next step. This will take less than a week, heck, it could take a day or two to complete. Without grandstanding, posturing, and acting for the crowd, they will hammer this abomination out in short order and get a clean bill to the President before this final version is even printed off for anyone to read (posted on the Internet, really?).

Here is my prediction and go ahead and look it up later. This private conference at the White House will result in the essential framework of the bill getting agreed upon. In the next drawer over will be all the things that everyone else wanted, but was unable to get in the first run. Once the "Reform" bill is passed, a second bill will be submitted within a few months that includes all of these other items. Once Health Care has been cemented into law as a "Right" and not a commodity, then this second bill will be seen as absolutely necessary to repair the "short comings" in the first bill. That bill will then get passed before the November elections with provisions in it making its future repeal almost impossible.

There is a precedent for this. A very important one at that. The Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights (the first one, not the Second one that the Dems are pulling together now, you know, the old FDR version that has been updated for today). When the Constitution was being drafted, the Framers wanted to include all these rights in the primary document. The problem was that the New England states wanted to have specific provisions about slavery and abolition included and the South wanted property rights to be respected as well as greater limits on Federal power. It was argued that this was a document for the Ages and that these items were topical and relevant to their time. The Constitution needed to be flexible enough to allow for growth but tight enough to set philosophical rules that will stand the test of time. So, a list was drawn up of items that were objectionable to one State or another, one region or another and were set aside for future discussion. Those items would eventually become the Bill of Rights, passed after the Constitution came into full effect.

Keep in mind that during this entire time, the Federalist papers were being written and distributed all around the country. The people were aware of what was being discussed and had an outlet for letting their delegates know how they felt.

Today, voicemail boxes are allowed to fill and shut down, emails are ignored, receptionists are snarky and dismissive. The minds are made and the people have been determined to be obstacles.

Our Founders have once again become Revolutionaries. Our country has become a place that our Founders would have abhorred. Jefferson and Madison; Hamilton and Adams; all would scream at our current leaders and our people and demand that this be torn down and rebuilt. They would point out all the areas where we wandered off course and squandered the legacy of blood and toil that they invested in us. We are found wanting.

I have suggestions and I will list them in my next post. Its easy to complain about what is wrong, so I'll show you where I feel things have gone wrong and I will list their cures as well.

Stay tuned.

--Zavost