The Washington Post's hit piece on newly elected RNC Chairman and former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele is a bit of a yawn--allegations of campaign finance improprieties are small beer next to the conga line of tax cheaters looking for confirmation to the Obama cabinet. Its hard to beat having a tax cheat as the tax man.

Yet as Steve Hayward points out, the real story is how the Washington Post got the story.

Not until you reach well down on the jump page do you learn this interesting little detail: "The U.S. attorney's office inadvertently sent the confidential document, a defense sentencing memorandum filed under seal, to The Washington Post after the newspaper requested the prosecution's sentencing memorandum." Inadvertently sent what was supposed to be a sealed document to the Post? Yeah, sure, and the Post will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge real cheap, too.

Steele is no stranger to this kind of stuff. When he was running for the Senate back in 2005, his credit report was stolen by a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) staffer doing opposition research. Lauren Weiner got a plea in abeyance deal, which wipes out her conviction after 150 hours of community service and if she keeps her nose clear for a year. The irony is that she worked for Chuck Schumer, who has championed identity theft laws in the Senate.

More recently, Joe the Plumber experienced the Democrats data dump of private information after he made the egregious error of asking a question for which Barack Obama didn't have a political cautious response. Helen Jones-Kelley resigned as director of Ohio Job and Family Services for authorizing checks in his taxes, child support and business licensing after John McCain began using Samuel Wurzelbacher's exchange with Obama as a campaign issue.

Let's just call it what it is--Fascism. As far as the Democrats are concerned, you have no rights, unless they are politically convenient for Obama and his associates.

Yet just as disturbing is the very real prospect that Michael Steele is a particular target of Obama's bagmen in the bureaucracy because he's black. Since when do the Democrats point the Washington Post character assassins at an RNC chairman? Do you even know who the last one was? (Mike Duncan). Clearly Democrats don't want the Republican message coming out of a black face. More race politics from the racist party.

Jim Matheson, congressman for Utah's second district, voted 'yea' on H.R.1, otherwise known around here as the looting bill.

There is a political aphorism in Utah about Democrats elected from this state. They vote "Utah values" until their party needs them, and then they throw residents of the state under the bus. In the election following that, they get thrown under the bus by the voters.

Bill Orton is the most recent example of this. He was the Congressman from the Utah 3rd district--arguably one of the most Republican in the nation, from 1991 through 1997. Orton had a tough race anyways because 1996 was a big-time Republic year, but the final blow was Bill Clinton's height-of-the-presidential-campaign, unilateral, dead-of-the-night declaration making the Escalante a national monument. Clinton held the annoucement in Arizona, not even daring to set foot in Utah, and notified the Utah congressional delegation and the governor only 24 hours beforehand.

Karen Shepherd was an even earlier casualty from the 2nd district, as Utah voters expressed their displeasure with Clinton's tax policies.

The so-called Blue Dogs showed their true colors on the looting bill, and I don't think anyone is going to forget it.

US politics these days is a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. The bill of attainder against AIG employees which tears up contract law is the worst legislation I've ever seen. Ok Roe v. Wade is even worse morally and intellectually, but this just makes me gape. Let the names of the 85 Republican congressmen who voted for this go down in US history as bywords for political cowardice. As well as the sheer evil intent of this legislation, it plumbs new depths in stupidity. The story leads the FT:

Bankers on Wall Street and in Europe have struck back against moves by US lawmakers to slap punitive taxes on bonuses paid to high earners at bailed-out institutions.

Senior executives on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday warned of an exodus of talent from some of the biggest names in US finance, saying the “anti-American” measures smacked of “a McCarthy witch-hunt” that would send the country “back to the stone age”.
There were fears that the public backlash triggered by AIG’s payment of $165m (€122m) in bonuses, which followed the US insurer’s taxpayer-funded rescue, would have devastating consequences for the country’s largest banks.

“Finance is one of America’s great industries, and they’re destroying it,” said one banker at a firm that has accepted public money. “This happened out of haste and anger over AIG, but we’re not like AIG.”

The banker added: “This is like Russia 15 years ago. It’s like a McCarthy witch-hunt . . . This is the most profoundly anti-American thing I’ve ever seen.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are evolved servile, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Abortion, Gay Marriage and the pursuit of Hope and Change. That to secure these rights, Mainstream Media are instituted among Men, deriving their just opinions from the indoctrination of the Academy, That whenever any Form of People becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Government to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new People, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its Speech in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Sinecures and Self Regard.

In the UK the socialist/opportunist Labour government has stunk up the country for the last 12 years and now smells of death itself. Even its apparatchiks in the media are sick of it. A General Election must be held by May 2010 and the Conservatives seem threatened only from the right by the anti-EU UK Independence Party and from the far left by the British National Party, a semi-fascist outfit with racist roots which taps into valid concerns about immigration, Islamism, multiculturalism and political correctness. Under such stress it's only natural for Gordon Brown to revert to his core instinct - envy. So the centre-piece of Labour's programme is...wait for it...a jihad against bankers' bonuses with overt threats to legislate to tear up existing contracts. This is self-evidently monstrous in a free society, but so now are other laws on stuff like 'hate-speech' and shutting down adoption agencies which refuse to collaborate with homosexual adoption.

Anyway let me use the bankers' bonus hook to hang up a concise statement of what just happened:

The financial debacle was due to the generation of toxic assets, presided over in the UK by those toxic asses - Chancellor Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The toxic assets were derivatives of mortgages. The mortgage bubble in America was generated by racist left-wing legislation and blackmail plus government mandated underpricing of risk via artificially cheap credit. The whole crap sandwich is wrapped in a depraved level of government debt which essentially funds the pensions of today's government workers and bribes Democratic and Labour voters with money borrowed from China to be repaid by future generations. It's like Saturn devouring his children. In the UK Saturn is Brown. In the US Saturn is Obama. The children are our children.

What is the big theme binding these political phenomena of 2009?

Tea Parties
Palin's resurgence
Obama's shrinkage
The fightback against Anthropogenic Global Scamming
The electoral success of UKIP, UK Independence Party, principle policy-leave the EU.

The theme is that those, the governed, who haven't been bought off by Big Government and who still have folk memories of freedom and citizenship, are saying "Enough, too much."

In the UK we have many repellent, parasitic bosses, but probably the most repellent is the EU....one of the most successful scams in history. Talk about "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." This EU squid wears a t-shirt that reads "we're sucking you dry for your own good." Imagine a supra-national constitution imposed on 27 nations by 27 governments without a single referendum. Oh, there was one in Ireland, but it gave the wrong answer, so there was re-run after suitable pressure points had been pushed. Into this swamp wades Nigel Farage, until recently the leader of UKIP. an elected MEP, to taunt the Vampire Squid in its chamber on the matter of the new EU President and Foreign Minister, 2 unelected nobodies:

A truly bizarre exchange on the Senate floor, and in my view, indicative of a Democrat caucus so divorced from democratic principles, that its become difficult for them to even maintain a pretense of deliberation.

I've always said that the left thinks free-speech is reserved solely for themselves, but its disturbing to see a U.S. senator shut-down someone he disagrees with by appealing to his authority as the Senator from Minnesota. It appears to have completely escaped his notice that Joe Lieberman is also a popularly elected Senator from a U.S. state--and he didn't need to stuff a ballot box to do it.

I've met a lot of nice people from Minnesota over the years, but the state has some of the weirdest politics in the country. I don't think there is anywhere else in the country that would elect a clearly disturbed individual like Al Franken to be a dogcatcher, much less a U.S. Senator.

Franken is not alone though. When McCain properly objects to an unprecedented abuse of power, Carl Levin quickly rises to defend the practice in the interest of legislative efficiency--meaning of course, to ram health-care legislation down the throats of Americans who clearly don't want it. This is Democrat party policy folks. The concentration camps can't be far behind.

On the other hand, its just hugely bad politics. If there is one guy the Democrats don't want to alienate, its Joe Lieberman, but apparently the freshly appointed neo-Nazi from Minnesota didn't get the memo. Look for Harry Reid to keep Franken away from the gavel.

Hey Mark,

Just wanted to know your opinion on the fact that UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IS ABOUT TO BE SIGNED INTO LAW!!!!

- Your nephew, Wormwood

P.S. - Looks like Obama is getting stuff done while the conservatives have been too busy having tea parties.

Nephew,

I emphasize the Party of Death/Party of Life contrast here, but that's because of Stupak's role.

Health care will become a government dept. I'm agin it in principle because it's the very big nose of a humongous camel snuffling into my tent and I'm agin it because I've known about a National Health Service all my life. It's ghastly, costly, murderous and infectious. And smells bad.

In terms of modern history it may be a good thing, as was Obama becoming President a good thing. It crystallizes the issues around big government so that America is confronted with socialism in its face and has to make a choice. Right now the polls and the energy are all on the side of the self-reliant version of your country. Obamacare just heightens the disgust of real America. But who knows, maybe you'll become like Belgium yet, tho I doubt it.

It's still strange to me how intelligent young men like you get taken in. I suppose your world view was formed by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and Tina Fey. Eric Cartman is a better role model.

I differ from most conservatives on government health care. My policy is that there shouldn't be any government health care except for children and front-line military. The rest is one's own responsibility + one's family + voluntary charity as opposed to the involuntary charity of you, Ebenezer Whippersnapper Wormwood, saying: "Weird Uncle Mark, you may be a senior devil but I know how to spend your money better than you, so I'll tax you and give your money to what I say are worthy causes, AIDS in Africa, say, or healthcare for illegal immigrants, AND AND AND on top of that I get to feel good about myself."

Well apart from me wanting to kill you for being sanctimonious at my expense, it turns out that most people get worse health your way. Human Motivation 101. But that doesn't matter because you get to feel virtuous.

Finally you want to regulate my life far more than I want to regulate yours. That places a heavy burden of proof on you.

Your Weird Uncle Mark

Been catching up with the Goldman's Case. I find Henry Blodget pretty persuasive.

Even if there was material non-disclosure outside industry norms tantamount to guilt in a civil case, the whole thing seems trivial unless part of a much vaster scam. Client (Paulson) asks GS to create a product to short the housing market, client proposes elements for the product, more than half those elements not selected by industry expert (Abacus) to compose the product, Abacus itself goes a billion long the product alongside other deep-pocket sophisticates including GS itself which loses $90m on it, then after the trade goes bad Abacus et al complain to the SEC that Goldman committed fraud by not naming Paulson as a short seller. Bollocks on stilts.

From what I've seen so far this is a purely political case which is wilfully financially illiterate. Matt Taibbi, a left-wing journalist on Rolling Stone, famously wrote:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money

You know, this strikes me as a dumb move even by Obama's standards. The whole liberal project has flourished from the support of Wall Street Jews, many from Goldman Sachs, and Hollywood Jews. I know it's always tempting for demagogues to throw the Jew down the well (Borat reference, but the clip is boring) and Obama's doing his damnedest to throw Israel down the well and I know that the true religion of many American Jews is liberalism, but even they, even the liberal Jews in Hollywood, Wall Street, New Jersey and New York, must start to get what really animates Obama (and Obama's supporters and mentors like Wright and Farrakhan and Sharpton). Obama is trying to play America as tho America were an ignorant crowd of victim culture voters in Chicago. I'm not sure who Obama's friends will be once he's alienated the Jews, the Press, Middle America, Democrats in Congress, the Supreme Court. Blacks don't count since they vote monolithically for Obama already. Hispanics? I don't think so. They're not monolithic in politics and most have conservative family values.

Goldman can win this one and the rest of capitalism, Jewish, Hispanic, black or blue, should line up with them. Also significant will be Obama's increasing isolation. Hey, New York, how do you like who you voted for? He wants to screw your biggest industry, he wants to screw your tax base, he wants to try KSM in Downtown Manhattan for a couple of years. Happy?

Cramer too:

Bob Herbert finds this comment by Glenn Beck to be beyond the pale.

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

I don't know what facts and reality Bob is talking about, but the fact and reality of his column is that he hates 'uppity white man' Glenn Beck with a passion, along with the half million or so people, estimated by the media to be attending the "Restoring Honor" even on the Washington Mall. Enough to let loose the dogs and take a few whacks at the bitter-clingers with a billy-club?

Well, let's see--someone shot out the front door of the Republican headquarters in Maryland. Tea Party protesters have been attacked by crazed left-wingers on several occasions. A gold-star Mom was told by a code-pink protester that her son deserved to die because he had gone to Iraq.

Those are facts. That's reality.

Barack Obama's attitude towards white, bitter-clingers is also a matter of record. Is the President a racist? Well, I guess that depends on how you define your terms. If a white candidate had denigrated black subculture with the terms 'bitter' and 'clinger', would he or she be accused of racism?

Damn right they would.

If Bob Herbert comes at me with a billy club, he'll know he was in a fight.