Running out of other people’s money …

Markets worldwide are tanking today because of the financial crisis in Greece. 

In very short, extremely simplified strokes, Greece is out of money. Because it’s in the Eurozone and has the Euro as its currency, it can’t just print more Euros. It’s already borrowed billions of Euros from the central banks, has no way to pay that back, and wants more bailouts. 

Stronger economies in the Eurozone – like Germany – wanted concessions from Greece before they coughed up the first round of relief. Those concessions included austerity measures such as fixing a corrupt and largely ignored tax system, reducing government spending, pension reform, and privatizing some government assets. In return for those concessions, Greek debt holders took a serious haircut of more than 53%, and Greece ultimately got almost €250 billion in bailouts. 

However, the Greek people rebelled. Accustomed to generous early retirement entitlements, a corrupt and laughably ineffective tax collection system where almost 25% of the GDP is off-the-books, and massive government spending on public works projects to boost employment, they decided they weren’t willing to give up anything. 

In a snap parliamentary election, they elected a government that flat refused to honor the prior agreements made to secure all the bailouts. That government’s leaders said they would make those agreements subject to a popular referendum, and that wouldn’t happen until well after a deadline set by the European Central Bank (ECB).

In essence, the new Greek leaders were going to ask the Greek people if they wanted to cut their own standard of living, pay higher taxes, and take smaller pensions.

Yeah, that's not likely to happen. The ECB – so far – is deciding to keep its purse strings closed.

And world markets are tanking.

So why am I even bringing all this up? 

Because this is our future.  For everyone here who sees Europe as the shining example of what the US should aspire to be, they should take another hard look. Greece, Spain and Portugal are all in the same situation, and for pretty much the same reasons. 

To paraphrase Maggie Thatcher, socialism and government-driven economies are great until they run out of other people’s money. Greece is running out of other people’s money.  We as a nation are also running out of other people’s money.

We cannot afford to fund a socialist utopia where everyone is cared for by the government from cradle to grave, with free healthcare, free college education, subsidized food and energy prices, early retirement with generous government pensions, and protection from job loss.  We can’t keep giving away the store with tax breaks and tax credits to just about everyone. We can’t afford welfare programs that spawn generations of dependence. And we can’t use massive government spending on public works projects as a substitute for real economic growth.

At some point we will run out of other people’s money, as Greece has.

We are well on our way.  Our voting public is electing leaders who promise to keep the gravy train rolling, no matter what, whether that’s through pork projects at the state and local level, increasing public sector employment, awarding overly generous benefits and pensions to government workers, sweeping new entitlements, or ever-expanding tax breaks and credits. 

It makes no difference which party is in power, the result is always the same: higher government spending and fewer people and businesses paying taxes.

Our politicians are no different from those Greek politicians who mortgaged their country’s future for short-term political gains. The result of their actions will be similar as well. 

The only difference between the US and Greece today is that our government is papering over the widening gap between revenues and expenditures by printing more money and selling more of our debt to the Chinese. Our Federal Reserve and most international central banks keep downplaying our financial house of cards, probably because if they conceded that our debt is out of control it would set off a worldwide depression. So mums the word.    

For now.    

Greece gave the world the concept of democracy.  It’s now giving the world yet another example of what happens when democratically elected politicians sell out their country’s future to appease an electorate that votes exclusively for its own self interests.       

Sound familiar? 

The camel’s nose …

There’s an old story about an Arab camped in the desert on a cold night.  Readying for sleep he sees his camel’s nose under the tent flap. The camel says: “Master, it is so cold out.  Might I just put my nose into the warmth of your tent?” The Arab agrees. A little later the camel says: “Might I just also warm my forelegs in your tent?” Again, the Arab agrees. Finally, incremental step by step, the camel has inched his whole body into the tent, stands up, refuses to budge, and displaces the Arab entirely who is now forced to sleep outside in the cold.

Why do I tell you this story? Because it’s the playbook of today’s progressives.

They establish a beachhead by whatever means necessary – including lies and deception if required.  Once established they keep expanding that beachhead until challenged.  If that happens, their defense is what they’re doing now is just logically fulfilling the original “intent,” if not the actual wording, of what everyone once agreed to. 

Nothing to see here.  Just move along.

That strategy has been playing out, successfully, for years. The soft and fuzzy “intent” provides a lot of wiggle room for all kinds of legislative and regulatory sleight of hand.

It's how assistance to help poor families feed their children expanded exponentially into bloated programs that now provide payments to as many as 47 million people – few of them actually “poor” – today. And it’s how that same idea spawned school lunch programs, that grew into school breakfast and lunch programs, school breakfast, lunch and dinner programs, and now also school meal programs for kids when school is closed for weekends, holidays and summer vacation.

Now many of those programs serve as gateways to a wide range of other seemingly unrelated giveaways – like free phones and phone service; if you qualify for one, you automatically qualify for them all.   

The argument is, well, you intended to help poor people, right?  This is just another way of fulfilling your intentions.  And it just keeps going and going. 

Now, unfortunately, it’s also permeated the Supreme Court – the one branch of government citizens once could rely on to be impartial and by the book. After all, the Supreme Court was designed to be the ultimate, final authority on laws, and whose members were granted lifetime tenure to insulate them from the whims of politicians and public opinion. 

There are two ideological camps in today’s Supreme Court. One side relies on what is actually written in the Constitution and laws passed by Congress; the other prefers to divine the “intent” of what was written in much broader, more philosophical terms, despite the actual wording,

The latter is a subterfuge to make up rights and affirm badly written laws based on philosophy rather than the actual text.  And right now the Court is increasingly doing that, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer in issuing rulings that are simply not justified within a strict interpretation of the rule of law or even on the facts presented. 

We had a perfect example of this the other day. In a 6-3 opinion, the Court affirmed the actions of the IRS and the Obama Administration in extending subsidies to millions of recipients in states that did not set up their own exchanges. 

This is despite specific wording in the ACA that subsidies were only to be given to those who signed up through exchanges “established by the state” as opposed to Federal exchanges. This is also despite knowledge and documentation that Congressional Democrats clearly intended to pressure states to set up their own exchanges rather than rely on the Federal exchange.

The subsidies were the carrot – if states set up their own exchanges, their enrollees got subsidies. If they didn’t set those up, their enrollees didn’t get the subsidies – the stick.   

This should have been a slam dunk. But magically, a majority of the Court somehow found a different meaning of not only those specific words, but also the definition of “the state” in the ACA itself – a meaning that ignored Congressional Democrats’ original intent and replaced it with a much broader intent fashioned out of whole cloth and based on nothing tangible. 

It’s much the same way the individual mandate penalties of the ACA were upheld by the Robert’s Court.  The Administration argued passionately and repeatedly before the Court that the mandate penalties were not a  tax. Yet to save the ACA, Roberts himself, out of left field and despite the Administration’s arguments, determined that these were a tax, and as such permissible.  

Even liberals were stunned by Roberts’ jump through hoops to get this outcome. 

Why he did it is unknown. Perhaps he wanted to polish up his legacy or merely bend to perceived public opinion.  Regardless, his decision on the mandates made no legal sense. 

And perhaps now that the camel’s nose was already in the tent from that decision, it helps explain the latest decision.  After all, now that the ACA has been somewhat legitimized, it’s only logical to keep letting it get more and more entrenched.

That’s the strategy. And it’s working. Millions of people already get subsidies they shouldn’t, but since they already do, it is next to impossible to claw those back.

So here’s what’s coming next.  I predict that when the millions of people getting heavily subsidized insurance try to use it, they’ll discover that having insurance can differ greatly from having good coverage.

When they find their doctor won’t accept their insurance, when they find their hospital isn’t covered, when their procedure isn’t covered, and when they learn that they have to spend thousands of their own money before their coverage kicks in, they’ll be pissed. Then they’ll want the rest of us to pick up the tab for their deductibles, and better coverage for them. 

Their argument will be simple:  since the ACA’s already on the books as settled law,  what’s the problem with making some tweaks to make it better?     

Shouldn’t we just subsidize more of the deductibles for low-income families, and cover more doctors, hospitals, procedures and drugs? 

Then, since we have the mechanism in place already, shouldn’t we just tweak it to expand the ACA to cover even more people?  Haven’t we established that cheap yet high-quality healthcare is a “right” for everyone?  Let’s help the middle-class, too. 

Soon thereafter just about everyone – but “the rich” of course – will have subsidies to offset ever-increasing plan costs, whether though the exchanges or private insurers, as what gets covered continues to grow to placate providers of everything from aromatherapy to yoga, and surgical procedures from hair plugs to gender reassignment.

As costs soar, people and businesses will abandon their plans, making them subject to ever-increasing mandate penalties. However, under pressure from voters and the business community, the mandate penalties ultimately will be waived because so many can't afford the plans even with subsidies, or the penalties.

That’s when progressives and liberal Democrats step in and set up single payer. 

The ACA is just the camel’s nose. The recent Court rulings are simply letting more of the camel into the tent until there's no room for anything else. 

It's the proven pattern for gaining just about anything progressives have ever desired. 

Because it works, they'll use it again and again. So don't be surprised.     

Cultural barbarians …

The Confederate flag will likely be coming down soon on the Capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. Governor Nikki Haley has introduced legislation she hopes will make removing the flag there a reality. The South Carolina legislature is expected by many to pass the measure. 

Whether you agree or disagree with Haley’s decision is irrelevant. She is moving properly through their legislative system to remove the flag from state grounds, following the rule of law. She has no authority to outlaw displays of the Confederate flag by individuals on their own property, and made a point of that when she announced her decision about the flag on state grounds. 

Meanwhile, others in her state and around the country have decided they have no use for laws, common decency, or respect for history to get their way.

So there have been numerous reports of vandals spray painting memorials to the Confederate dead, statues of Confederate generals, as well as elected Southern officials from that time. There have also been calls to removed paintings and statures in the US Capitol of anyone now deemed – more than 150 years later – a racist or supporter of slavery. 

In one very recent incident, somebody spray painted “Black Lives Mater” (yes, mater) on a monument memorializing the Confederate defenders of Charleston harbor. In another, “Calhoun, racist” was spray painted on a Charleston monument to John C. Calhoun, who, while a defender of slave holders’ rights in the 1850s, was also former Vice President under Andrew Jackson, as well as a former US Secretary of State, US Secretary of War and US Senator.

In North Carolina, someone spray painted “Black Lives Matter” on a monument to Zebulon Vance, who was a Confederate officer in the war, but after the war served as governor of North Carolina and US Senator. It’s also happened to a monument in Baltimore.   

I believe in dissent. I believe in making your voice heard through protests. Those are essential American rights which should never be abridged, especially when others may find what you say offensive. Those rights are enshrined in our Constitution because the founders recognized that if we ever start limiting opposition voices we are doomed as a free society.

But those rights apply to every American. So it’s a double-edged sword: you have the right to say what you want, but so do others.  When someone abridges the rights of others, or physically attacks their beliefs and symbols of their beliefs, that’s simply unacceptable.  

And when someone goes even further and tries to erase history because it offends them, or doesn’t comport with what they think history should have been, that’s the sign of a barbarian. They’re no better than the Taliban demolishing the statues of Buddha, or ISIS destroying temples and historic artifacts from other civilizations.

Imagine if someone defaced the Lincoln Memorial by writing “nigger lover” in foot-high letters on it?   Or the Martin Luther King Memorial by painting over the “I have a dream” quote, and replacing it with “white lives matter” instead?   What if someone spray-painted “faggot” on gay-rights’ landmarks like Stonewall Inn?  Or painted “murderers” and “child killers” on the iconic Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington Cemetery? 

There would be an outcry heard throughout the country. There would be calls to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice for barbarous hate crimes.

For some reason, when modern day barbarians defaced monuments to the Confederate war dead, or long-dead politicians now on the wrong side of history, there’s barely a peep. 

Except online.  There I was stunned by the vitriol spewed by people who openly cheered these acts of vandalism as “about-time” events. 

Some went so far as to claim people should paint “traitors!” and “losers” on the same monuments.  Others unleashed their hatred for all things Southern – the people, their faith, their region, their politics, whatever. They equated the South with bigotry, racism, white supremacists, and intolerance of anyone who isn’t male, white and heterosexual.  A few said the South engaged in armed aggression against the United States and for that alone should never be forgiven.      

Defacing monuments was the least of what most of them seemed to want.  I think they’d be happy for the US to go to war with the South again and this time totally destroy it. (Which is essentially what a lot in the Union tried with Reconstruction.) 

The South I grew up in moved on long ago. Slavery is part of its past, regrettably, but it’s in the past, and has been for more than 150 years. When Southerners honor those who fought and died for the Confederacy, they aren’t honoring slavery; they are paying tribute to their ancestors who fought bravely in a losing cause against overwhelming odds.

When America loses a war, it still honors its soldiers; the South has done the same. How that somehow translates into a continuing support for slavery and racism escapes me.     

Now, let me be completely clear about this: I am not an apologist for slavery or those who supported it.  Slavery is as abhorrent to me as it is to the overwhelming majority of Americans today. I don’t buy the use of Biblical passages to justify slavery back then, just as I don’t accept ISIS’ use of passages in the Koran to justify slavery today. Slavery in any form is reprehensible and rightfully condemned by modern nations and people everywhere.

Nor am I in denial that slavery was a backbone of the South’s cotton-dependent economy in the 1800s after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. Plantations in the South were almost entirely dependent on ample, cheap labor provided by African slaves. Slaves were valuable property to plantation owners, and as such were bought, sold and traded as property.

I also won’t white-wash the South’s plantation owners’ desire to preserve slavery as the main reason for acts of secession that in turn triggered the Civil War. Certainly there were other issues, and lingering distrust and antipathy between the North and South, but these paled in comparison. 

Almost none of us today can understand how otherwise decent, God-fearing people could accept that owning other people and treating them like livestock to be bought, bred and sold would be just business as usual. But it was. And that’s sadly an undeniable part of the South’s history.       

The North had slaves as well. However, use of African slaves simply didn’t make as much sense in the more industrialized North. Getting higher skilled labor from indentured European workers – still slaves by any other name, and largely English or Irish, made more economic sense.    

Slavery, whether of Africans or Europeans or Chinese or whatever, is an unfortunate and shameful part of American history. But it happened; attempting now to erase anyone or anything associated with it just because it still offends someone can’t turn back the clock and right wrongs that took place more than 150 years ago.  

But such is our culture today. Cultural barbarians shout down anyone with whom they disagree. They bully and try to intimidate anyone with a different viewpoint. They seek to rewrite history by erasing it, either with spray paint, or political correctness ordinances and laws. They think they can get away with anything with a mob of like-minded barbarians at their back.

They’ve now managed to get Sears, Walmart, Amazon and other large retailers to stop selling anything with a Confederate flag on it – something they consider a victory. The barbarians should be careful in celebrating too much. 

Will that stop people from wanting to display that flag?  Some, perhaps.  Yet others will want that flag now more than ever.  Not because it symbolizes racism and bigotry – for God’s sake no – but what it has symbolized for millions of Southerners long after the Civil War.

Pride in who you are, where you're from, and what you believe.  

And standing your ground, even against overwhelming odds. 

      

About that flag …

There’s been a concerted effort for years to eliminate displays of the Confederate flag.

Now in the wake of the shootings in South Carolina there’s a new push to take down that flag flying above a monument to Confederate war dead on the state capitol grounds in Columbia. 

Activists also want to strike the use of Confederate flag elements that grace many state flags in the South, such as in the state flags of Florida and Mississippi.  They see the Confederate flag – or any resemblance to that flag – as emblems of slavery and racism. 

Recently one liberal commentator on TV said that there is a “toxic cocktail” in the South that led to the shootings in South Carolina. The continuing display of the Confederate flag is part of that toxic cocktail, according to him, that symbolizes the latent racism by Southern whites toward anyone who isn’t white and also encourages attacks on blacks. 

What a complete asshole. But as a Southerner by birth, graduate of a Southern university, and someone who grew up surrounded by Southerners, it’s what we from the South expect. 

Especially from arrogant, liberal jerks from the North. 

To those pontificating pricks the South is a wasteland of redneck cracker bastards and right-wing religious fanatics who long for the days of whupping slaves and selling cotton, and keeping women barefoot and pregnant. When Southerners aren’t burning crosses and lynching blacks, they must be keeping blacks from voting, fighting against women’s rights, and trying to turn back the clock to the 1950s at best, but 1850 if they can. 

In the view of Northern liberals most of the South is an ignorant backwater – the exclusions being its golf courses and beaches. They can’t understand why workers in the South continue to reject unions. They can’t fathom why Republicans and conservative Democrats keep winning elections there.  It’s a mystery to them why so many in the South still cling to their guns and Bibles, when so many in the North want to ban guns and dismiss religion and faith as affronts to people who don’t have either. 

In short, what really offends liberals from the North is that people in the South don’t automatically think the way they think.   

No, to them the South is a poorly drawn cartoon – Lil’ Abner and the Beverly Hillbillies come to life – full of hicks and hayseeds, racists and haters, goobers and gun nuts, and a cultural abyss.  Why else would Southerners so jealously guard a way of life that time and “real” culture have passed by?

Why would the South still tolerate such an offensive symbol as the Confederate flag, for example, when enlightened people everywhere see it as a symbol of hatred and oppression?

Here’s the point Northern liberals miss. 

Being a Southerner has less to do with geography and more to do with what you believe in, how you treat others, and your values. I may live in the North now, but I will always be a Southerner and proud of it. My sister and I grew up in the same places, but she attended a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, never left that area, and will always be a Northerner.

She identifies with the liberal North; I identify with the more conservative South. To her, the South is a place; to me it’s a state of mind that transcends geography.    

Millions of Northerners have fled the high taxes, bad weather, and eroding quality of life in the North to start over in the South.  Most will never become Southerners, and have merely turned parts of the South they’ve invaded into a warmer version of the old North.  In doing so, they’ve brought all their bad habits and annoying ways with them.

A perfect example is Boca Raton, now full of pretentious, obnoxious former Northerners and part-time residents who bitch and moan constantly about the heat, the traffic, how slow and stupid waiters and waitresses are, and how difficult it is to find good help.

They don’t consider where they live the South, and in truth they’ve mutated the area into something alien to most Southerners.  But if they got off their lazy pasty white asses and drove their Mercedes and Beamers as little as 20 miles outside Boca they’d find themselves in another world. And some of them might even grow to love what they find, and may become Southerners. 

They might discover what native and also adopted Southerners think is important. Honesty.  Dignity of work.  Courtesy.  Personal accountability.  Service to others.  Belief in something more important than yourself.  And family.  All that transcends race, ethnicity, religion and geography. 

I think most of them would be very surprised to learn that simple courtesy – something they haven’t seen in the North for decades – lives on in the South. 

But what about the Southern racists the Northern media is always pointing out? 

Are there racists in the South?  Sure.  But no more than there are racists in the North. One of the largest Klan rallies in US history took place in Northeastern New Jersey, attracting an estimated 40,000 participants.  When Boston schools were forced to integrate, outraged Bostonians pelted the buses carrying black kids with rocks and set some on fire. When block-busting in the North started, white flight left whole neighborhoods in shambles. Today it’s not unusual to learn that someone spray-painted racial slurs on houses in certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia where blacks have moved in

If you want to start defining areas of racism, then Northerners need look no further than their own backyards. As a kid in the 60s, I went to integrated schools.  In the South. We didn’t think much about it.  Nor did our parents.   

How many liberals in the North can say the same?  How many liberals in the North have moved just to get into a mostly white school district?  How many even today send their kids to mostly white schools to avoid potential “problems” for their precious little snowflakes?

My liberal sister and probably many of her liberal Northern friends did just that.

But let’s get back to that flag.  The Confederate flag.  True, in the 1960s it was hijacked by white supremacists and segregationists; unfortunately, crackpots like them will always be with us.

However, just because some nutjobs adopt a symbol doesn’t mean that’s what the symbol stands for.  For example, the Klan burned crosses – but that doesn’t mean the cross is a sign of racial animus. Far from it.

Nor are displays of the Confederate flag flying above monuments in the South honoring those soldiers who died on the losing side – some 260,000 – during the Civil War, meant to honor slavery. They are there to honor a heritage, not a specific issue.   

In a day and age when we put up monuments to honor people killed by mass murderers, it seems to me that monuments honoring the thousands of Confederate war dead should not be a big deal. Flying the flag they fought under over those monuments shouldn’t be either.    

Those Confederate soldiers were not evil monsters but someone’s husband, son, father, brother or friend fighting to defend their land, their families, and their freedom to live their lives the way they wanted.  Their motivations weren’t much different from the troops under Washington during the Revolutionary War, which wasn’t that far removed in time. Protecting the right to own slaves was pretty much irrelevant to them; only a very tiny fraction had anything to do with slavery. 

Now, as far as the Confederate flag being a symbol of Southern slavery and oppression, please remember that it was New England slave merchants – some of the leading aristocratic families in the North – who got rich bringing slaves to America. 

So if you want a flag that symbolizes slavery, you might consider the American flag as well.

Maybe that’s why I feel so aggrieved when talking heads, pundits, and race baiters in New York and Washington start talking about the backward, racist South they believe still remains. 

Do you want to know what the true South is about?  All you need to do is look at the aftermath in South Carolina after the shootings – not the non-stop crap about how racist the shooter was – but how the community in Charleston and South Carolina in general responded. 

Did you see any riots?  Did you see looting and burning of neighborhoods? Did you see whites accosted by blacks, or blacks accosted by whites?   

No. Of course not. Instead of pandemonium, you sensed real embarrassment on the local level that something so heinous could happen in their community and their state.   

What you saw was Southerners – defined more by culture and shared beliefs, not race or religion – joining together in respectful mourning, and a call for forgiveness for the shooter. Then you saw over 3,000 people join hands across a bridge in Charleston to symbolize their solidarity against violence and racism.

Or maybe you didn’t, because most news outlets this morning didn’t cover that. But they did write extensively on the Confederate flag and how so many people were offended by it.   

Honestly, I don’t care one way or the other whether South Carolina takes down the Confederate flag.  But I’d rather that decision be made by the people who actually live there, instead of outsiders imposing their will on the locals. 

Enough about that flag.  

If it bleeds it leads …

Anyone who ever took a journalism course knows this. The same as they know that dog-bites-man is a non-starter, but man-bites-dog – hey, that’s worth covering.

The shooting of the black parishioners in a church in South Carolina by a white nutjob is terrible, no doubt. But he’s been caught. And he’s just some crazy lone-wolf bastard, not representative of the people of South Carolina, gun owners, Southerners, white people, or anybody else but himself. He’s not part of some nascent movement by whites to murder blacks, either.   

However, that didn’t stop multiple jerks – including Obama – from making what happened about race relations and gun control. As someone online said: “why is it always a white guy with a gun?” whenever a massacre happens like this, and with Columbine, Aurora, and in Sandy Hook.

I’ve said this before and I will again: “black lives matter” only when they are taken by non-blacks or police; if blacks kill other blacks, it’s not newsworthy. 

That’s not to diminish at all the horror of what happened in South Carolina. What makes this even more reprehensible is that the murderer joined a bible study group in progress, and then, when he started shooting, he intentionally spared one member specifically to leave a witness to tell others what he had done and why.   

He is a monster. Deranged, racist – sure.  Representative of anything else – no.

Now starts the ghoulish news cycle. The media will keep this story alive as long as possible with endless interviews, opinion pieces, and recitation of the events.  I even saw a news flash this morning that friends of this kid said he was a racist.

Well, duh. By his own words he claimed blacks were taking over the country and “raping our women.”  Is there some other interpretation of that which would imply he wasn’t a racist?   

While the media wallows in telling this tragic tale over and over, and cynical politicians and race baiters like Sharpton selfishly and thoughtlessly use this to advance their causes, they are keeping this asshole in the spotlight.

Which is what he – and all the other perpetrators of the aforementioned massacres – always wanted.  Fame.  Publicity.  Notoriety.  That’s why they committed these crimes in the first place. They wanted to be on the front page, above the fold, in print and online. 

And the media has been happy to oblige, every time. 

Then they have the audacity to ask “why” these things happen – what motivates these people to slaughter innocents?  

That’s disingenuous when the media knows exactly "why" already.  All they have to do is look in the mirror; the answer is staring right back at them. 

I’m not suggesting events like this shouldn’t be covered.  These events are “news” after all. But once the perpetrator has been identified and captured, it’s time to back off. Otherwise we’re making stars of monsters and giving them exactly what they seek.

 

And possibly inspiring the next monster to go after their moment of fame and glory the same sick and twisted way.      

Caitlyn Jenner …

I don’t care. 

Between the reality TV freak-show parade of hillbillies, dumbasses, and assorted losers, and the breathless gushing of the media over whatever the Kardashians and Kanye West and their ilk are up to, Bruce Jenner’s transformation is just another blip. 

Good for him.  Or her.  Or whatever. 

This is part of an orchestrated campaign that’s been running for about a year now. For some reason, the media got fixated on transgender people a while back like they’re something new. 

You’ve seen a steady stream of articles in local and national newspapers and online about the difficulties transgender people face in our society.  There was the story of a politician whose child was transgendered. There was the ruckus in some school districts about whether transgender kids should be allowed to shower with and use the same bathrooms as the sex they identified with, rather than the sex they were born with. 

Some districts decided that their bathrooms should all be unisex; I don’t know what they decided about showering.  

The plight of the transgendered then fed into the media’s obsession – and I do believe that is the right word – with bullying. Kids who are different in any way often get bullied by other kids.  Again, for some strange reason, the media perceives this as something new.   

Please do not misunderstand me on the problems transgender people face. Or about bullying for that matter.  There are very real issues the people who feel transgendered face every day and my heart goes out to them. There have always been those – regardless of whether their sexual orientation is straight,  gay, or bi – who  felt emotionally and intellectually more like women than men, and more like men than women, in spite  of the genitalia they were born with.  They’ve had to put up with a lot of knuckleheads and prejudice from both sexes.  I don’t envy them at all.    

From what I’ve read, transgender has less to do with genitalia than mindset.  It also apparently has little to do with sexual orientation. 

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner has made a big deal of this, claiming that he – or now she, as she prefers – is not gay by any means.  She remains sexually attracted to women, not men.  So while she’s had a lot of work done to convert her appearance into the woman she feels she’s always been deep inside, I don’t think she’s made the big leap to surgical gender reassignment.   

Confused?  Why of course you are. That’s the point the media is driving at. 

Well, after wallowing in the shock factor they hoped to have by presenting a former All-American Male Olympic Hero who decided to become a woman, at least in appearance.

Don’t be deceived by the media’s faked compassion about the bravery of Jenner to appear on Vogue’s cover as a woman.  As one media critic said, Jenner did break new ground with Vogue – it was the first time in anybody’s memory, perhaps ever, that Vogue put a woman over 60 on its cover.    

Vogue put Jenner on the cover to sell magazines, plain and simple. It sold a helluva a lot of magazines.  They weren’t making a statement or promoting what Jenner did, or even trying to engender sympathy for transgender people.  It was just business.

Now I am sure Jenner feels like she made a statement. I’m sure she feels relief that it’s all out in the open now, but, in truth, the pending transformation hasn’t been a big secret. The media has been dragging this story around for so long not because it’s something that’s never happened before, or particularly important, but it’s the weird intersection of the train wreck of the Kardashians and the shock factor of seeing Bruce Jenner as a woman.   

Reality TV meets the bearded lady in the circus sideshow, in other words.

So excuse me if I don’t care. 

Look, the plight of the transgendered is very real.  I’m sure it’s extraordinarily difficult to deal with … and I have enormous sympathy for the folks who have to live their lives in what they truly believe is the wrong body. I can’t imagine the Hell it must be like at times. Especially when they are children trying to figure a lot of other stuff out at the same time.        

But let’s also be realistic.  Only about 0.3% of U.S. adults are considered transgendered.  That’s three-tenths of one-percent of adults.  Assuming the 0.3% number is valid, in a group of 100,000 American adults there could be 300 people who might think they are transgendered.

I’m happy Jenner is happy. I’m happy Vogue made a lot of money on Jenner’s transformation. But to think this is somehow a turning point in history is ridiculous. It wouldn’t even be talked about if it were someone much less famous than Jenner.   

And to make a big deal about Jenner’s “bravery”  is as superficial as the hair, clothes and makeup that helped make Jenner appear 30 years younger than she is. 

Jenner was already a publicity whore by virtue of being a part of the Kardashian freak show. This just steps it up a notch. She’s probably negotiating a swimsuit issue as we speak, or maybe she’ll follow Kim’s example and leak a sex video.

I won’t be interested in seeing either. 

Let’s all move on.  

The Agenda …

I’m not a conspiracy buff. 

Probably not for the reasons you might imagine, however.  I think most conspiracy theories are too simplistic; they offer pat answers to what are more likely fairly complicated events. 

That’s why conspiracy buffs like them – it’s easier to believe someone or some group is pulling all the strings behind the scenes.  Especially when the actual facts are uncomfortable to face, or the true reason why something happened is way too complex to easily grasp. 

I was in the oil industry during the 70s. If you are old enough, you probably remember waiting in long lines for gas, odd and even days to buy gas, and soaring energy prices. 

And I bet you – like so many others – blamed the greedy oil companies. 

The real reasons for the crises and dramatic price increases were convoluted and short-sighted U.S. energy policy decisions made in the past, international politics and Mideast wars, and overreaction by our own politicians and regulators who made it all worse than need be.  Plus, while wholesale prices were rising, greedy state politicians also took the opportunity to jack up their gas taxes, driving prices even higher. 

That’s what really happened.  I was there.  But a popular conspiracy theory at the time was this was all just a ploy by U.S. oil companies who refused to pump oil from their domestic wells until the price went up.  I suppose that’s much easier to understand than why for many years our government put price controls on domestic oil production, yet encouraged oil imports by making it more profitable for oil companies to drill overseas than here. 

Or why our government helped set up OPEC in the first place. It did. Look it up.   

So I don’t buy into the premise that Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Davos crowd or some combination of those and other rumored cabals are secretly engineering a New World Order. That’s as nutty as the white supremacists’ and KKK-types’ beliefs that blacks, Jews, and illegal aliens are somehow in league to take over the country.    

However, I will concede that there is an agenda in this country – not pursued in a conscious, coordinated way, but headed in a common direction. It’s not a conspiracy per se, because it’s a range of independent, uncoordinated actions from a variety of disparate groups, but it’s pretty clear cut what the end result is.  

What is that agenda?  In simplest terms, as follows:

There’s no absolute right or wrong anymore, or legal or illegal.  Whether something is right or wrong, or legal or illegal, should depend entirely on context and public opinion. 

That means, whether they realize it or not, they want a nation based on opinions – the rule of man – rather than the rule of law. Unless, of course, they are in favor of that particular law. 

In fairness, it’s not as if there’s a unified force trying to push this agenda.  Some of these groups despise each other and would never think to join forces.  Instead, it’s more a relentless chipping away in thousands of minor hits coming from a variety of directions.

In Pennsylvania we have an Attorney General who openly declines to enforce certain laws, not claiming the right under Prosecutorial Discretion, but simply because she doesn’t agree with those laws. She has also decided which laws and rules of conduct she herself will obey. 

Not long ago she orchestrated a leak of Grand Jury testimony – clearly against the rules – to embarrass an adversary. First she lied about it; then, when caught, she threw her own staff under the bus.  When they turned on her, she hired Lanny Davis to try to escape on a technicality. 

But she’s a woman, in favor of gay marriage, and pro-choice, which is all that matters to some folks.  So she still has ardent supporters despite her obvious lack of ethics.   

The same thing is happening in many other states, too.  What laws are on the books and which laws get enforced may be vastly different, depending on who is calling the shots.  More importantly, officials aren’t trying to change what may be bad laws – they are just ignoring enforcing or complying with laws they don’t like. 

At the same time, state legislatures are bending to popular sentiment by passing new laws to rein in provisions in the Bill of Rights they don’t like – such as protection of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms, for example.  Other state legislatures are passing laws creating new rights for the sole purpose of appeasing special interest groups. 

For example, possession and sale of marijuana is a Federal offense, punishable by up to 5 years in prison and as much as $250,000 in fines.  But public opinion in a lot of places is in favor of legalizing use of marijuana by adults.  So some states have done so and openly allow licensed, and now taxed, marijuana growers and retailers to prosper and users to get their weed legally. 

Don’t get me wrong – I’m in favor of legalizing marijuana use by adults and treating it the same as alcohol … taxes, restrictions, and all.  Yet technically it’s still against Federal law – which still has it as a controlled substance. 

Do the Feds and Justice Department not know that Colorado, for example, has legalized pot?  Do they not know who the licensed dealers are?  Of course they do.  But they’ve decided not to bother with enforcing the law, because public opinion is in favor of legalizing pot. 

As much as I agree with public opinion on this, it is simply another example of the agenda.  Instead of repealing a bad law, or modifying that law, it just gets ignored.  For now.  It’s still on the books if someone later decides to use it against somebody, but for now, who cares.     

That’s the part of the agenda that’s so dangerous – you never know when public opinion is going to change, or get headed down a terrible path.  That’s why there are – or were – laws and rules: to put a stake in the ground so everybody knows what lines can and cannot be crossed, regardless of what public opinion might be at the time. 

If the law is a bad law, then there are processes for changing it. Segregation was supported by bad laws, albeit favored by the majority of the public in several states.  Despite public opinion being on the side of segregation for many years, those laws were eventually overturned despite public opinion.     

Another disturbing trend supporting the agenda is that the past few Presidents have used Executive Actions extensively to bypass the processes outlined in the Constitution for making laws. Rather than following the clearly defined rules, they’ve decided they can do whatever they want as long as they feel public opinion is on their side, or ultimately will be. 

That’s set up an ultimate high stakes “catch me if you can” game, where a President challenges either the Congress to impeach them, or the Supreme Court to overrule them. In effect, we now have Presidents betting that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has the guts to set up a Constitutional challenge to their Executive power.  

The Republican Congress learned how politically disastrous impeaching a President can be with Bill Clinton. The Democrats are not likely to repeat the Republicans’ mistake. 

I’m not sure what now rises to the level where a Republican or Democrat Congress would be comfortable impeaching a sitting President. 

They’d have to be proven to have sold critical military secrets to the Russians and Chinese and done something on the order of shipping nukes to ISIS or Boko Haram, for starters.  Then they’d have to be recorded in the Oval Office shooting up heroin with Kim Jung Il while having sex with underage illegal immigrants they later murder, along with a puppy, in a Satanic ritual, all captured in high-def by a Pulitzer-Prize-winning cameraman doing a live network feed from the White House seen by millions around the world. 

It would still be difficult even then.  But maybe the pedophilia and murder would turn off enough of the public to make a Congress think they had popular support.  What constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors is in the eye of the beholder, after all. 

In terms of getting in a fight with the Supreme Court, look at what happened with the Affordable Care Act ruling on whether people could be compelled by government to buy a product or face financial penalties.  Chief Justice Roberts rolled over after criticism and threats from the White House; out of left field he called those penalties a tax and let something clearly un-Constitutional get a pass. 

Such is today’s power of public opinion. That’s just wrong.    

But I guess those unknowingly advancing the agenda won’t realize that until public opinion turns against something they want.  Which it will, eventually. 

What the agenda promotes is mob rule, which is fine for many people as long as the mob is moving in the same direction they are. But mobs are unpredictable. 

One day they might find the mob no longer behind them, but coming toward them.

Then they’ll wish there were laws and rules to protect their rights and liberties against the mob.