“A few weeks ago, when Newt Gingrich was shooting off his mouth, we thought that we’d found the guy for us, but then he started shooting from the hip and we began to wonder, how’s he going to hit anything that way?

“We took a look at Ron Paul. For a while there, we thought he was a straight shooter, but sometimes he goes off half-cocked and no one’s going to vote for a guy who’s got only half a cock.

“Don’t even get me started on Romney. You ask me, he’s a loose canon. Every time he turns around, he shoots himself in the foot. About a quarter of our constituency seems to like that because he can’t seem to miss but it’s got nothing to do with marksmanship. His problem is he aims to please.

“When you get right down to it, all of our candidates, except Santorum are stuffed shirts. That’s the reason he’s the only one who can wear a sweater vest.”

Holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution, Ouldquest pointed to the Preamble. “Look at this,” he said excitedly. “The purpose of our government is to ‘promote the general welfare.’ Welfare! This is nothing but a utilitarian SOCIALIST document and it ought to be just tossed in the trash heap of history where it belongs.”

When asked what he’d like to see replace the present government, Ouldquest didn’t miss a beat. “Feudalism,” he said, scrounging from that very same historical trash bin. “With feudalism, you didn’t need a government. Everything was private.

“What about roads and bridges?” a skeptic hollered from the back of the audience.

“Back in the good old days, you didn’t need roads,” Ouldquest replied, scowling. “You wanted to go somewhere, you just trampled over peasants’ fields. And if you came to a river, you waded, swam or hired a boatman — just like the way you get to Hell. And sure there were some bridges, but they were private too.  It was pay as you go and that kept the peasants in their place.”

“What about armies, police, fire departments. Shouldn’t those be government functions?” someone challenged.

Smiling, Ouldquest delivered a ready response. “A thousand years ago, if you wanted soldiers, you hung a ‘help wanted’ sign on the parapet of your castle. When your private army wasn’t off trying to rob the guy in the neighboring castle, or starting fires, it was available to put them out. And since peasants had no rights to free speech or to a free press, you could use the same guys to keep them in line. It all worked out fine.”

“But they had taxes back then, didn’t they?”  a reporter asked. “I mean, what was Robin Hood all about if it wasn’t interfering with the Sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collection activities? “

“Look” Ouldquest sniffed, “you must not have been paying attention. Robin Hood was a socialist. He was preventing the guys with the castles from collecting money from the peasants, money they needed to hire their private armies. It’s the guys in the castles, the job providers, I’m worried about, not the peasants whose fields are getting trampled.  You start worrying about peasants, that’s when you get into crap like promoting the general welfare. “

• The Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco dis-invited three clergy who were scheduled to speak at a Catholic Church because they were too gay.
• It was disclosed that there are an average of ten fights per game in the stands at 49er’s games.
• The Golden State Warriors took the position that sending xerox copies of genitalia to women was evidence of a consensual sexual relationship.
• Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina accused the federal government of “bullying” her state because it prohibited her from kicking previously registered black voters off the voter rolls.
• Lowe’s Hardware continued to stand by it’s decision to withhold advertising from a T.V. show that portrays American Muslims as ordinary folks because a single white guy protested that it showed Muslims too positively.
• In Pennsylvania, a guy who claimed he was “cleaning his gun and it went off by accident”  killed an 18-year old Amish girl two miles away.
• YOU ARE WELCOME TO ADD MORE CHEERFUL NEWS IN COMMENTS!

There is precedent for such outcomes. As an attorney during the 1970’s, I represented Iranian students who were being hunted in the U.S. by SAVAK, the secret police of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi. These students were active in organizations seeking the overthrow of the Shah, a loyal retainer of the United States, and the restoration of Iranian democracy. Once SAVAK identified a student as an opponent of the regime, it worked with its colleagues in the CIA to have him (or occasionally her) deported.  Students who were forcibly returned to Iran had little hope of survival.

But it was these students, studying all over the west, who were instrumental in rousing the population against the Shah. Some populated the Mujahedin Khalq, a leftist organization with ties to the Marxist Tudeh Party. But as the revolution picked up steam, so did the forces supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then living in exile in France. Within two years of ousting the Shah, the Iranian revolution was solidly under the control of the Ayatollah and the mullahs. The Mujahedin Khalq militants were hunted down and killed. A handful found refuge in Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein, but with his fall, they were rousted and now exist only in exile or as small isolated cells in Iran. Others managed to remain in or return to the West where they now prosper.

For a time, the Islamists tolerated a limited sort of free elections, but when it appeared that the Iranian people had tired of the extremist religious fundamentalism that was the fare they doled out, the Supreme Leader and his Guardian Council began striking secularists, leftists and moderates from the list of eligible candidates for public office.  And when moderates scored significant electoral support, they had their victories stolen from them through bogus vote-counting. Iranian elections became a sham. Now Iran is mired in popular discontent that can only be deflected by whipping up the masses into anti-Zionist, anti-West and xenophobic campaigns spiced with saber-rattling. There is no more freedom today in Iran than there was under the Shah and the tortures meted out to those in opposition to the Islamists can be even worse because any opposition to it is deemed to be “waging war against God.” Meanwhile, in an embarrassing display of how we can bumble, America has declared the Mujahadin Khalq a terrorist organization and assisted Iraq’s al Maliki in dismantling their safe-haven, when we could use the insights and intelligence they possess, not to mention potential friendship when the current regime departs.

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that it is the mission of the Islamists who have gained power through free elections in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco; who are likely to gain power at the ballot box in Libya; and who will, in time, assume control of Algeria, Yemen and Syria, to make their rule permanent and opposition to them a crime. It is inevitable that Islamists (and indeed all extremist religious parties) will regard opposition to them as opposition to God. And it follows that once in power they cannot brook losing at the ballot box because to lose power is to have failed a holy mission. It is unthinkable. Thus, if it appears even possible that they will lose an election, the Islamists will wipe out viable opposition candidates and rig the results as they did in Iran. And if that doesn’t do the trick, they will call out their militants who will mercilessly and brutally wage a war against the “apostates, blasphemers and infidels” who have the temerity of opposing their rule.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will soon solidify its hold on power. Although they are currently making noises as moderates, the Brotherhood’s protestations of moderation should be received with caution. It may well be a strategy designed to reach an accommodation with the powerful Egyptian army just as in Turkey, where an Islamist party rules but cautiously, because the army has a history of coups against them. Beyond their rhetoric, it must be recalled that these are the same actors involved in the murder of Anwar Sadat. And among their leadership are those who have called for the re-establishment of the Caliphate.

For those who are unaware of the “re-establishment of the Caliphate” platform, it in many ways mirrors the apocalyptic prophesies of Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Rapture as set forth in the Book of Revelations. It holds that Allah has called for a Muslim re-conquest of all lands once Muslim including the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and of course all of Israel. Once the Caliphate is re-established, the Messiah will return along with Imam Mahdi. Ominously, the center of the Caliphate is foretold to be Egypt.

Not only may we safely assume that a good portion of the forty-five percent who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, look fondly upon the prospect of re-establishment of the Caliphate, it is fair to attribute most of the twenty-five percent of the Egyptian vote that went to the extremist Salafi party to the same goal. The Salafis are a party dedicated to jihad. They stand for a fundamentalist, religious Egypt at the center of a great Islamic universe, recaptured from the West by force of arms. Recent voting in Egypt should be viewed as an indication that this dream of greatness, willed by Allah and revealed by the Prophet, is now taking hold among the Muslim downtrodden much in the same way that poor working class citizens of Britain and America embraced imperialism.

In many ways, we in the West have our own benighted policies to blame for this turn of events. In 1953, after it nationalized the oil industry, our CIA along with its British counterparts overthrew the freely elected, secular, leftist government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, replacing it with their puppet, Shah Reza Pahlavi. The ripples of that arrogance haunt us to this day and as much as the Iranian people crave certain aspects of western culture, particularly of the materialist varieties, they are wary of close ties to governments that obviously can’t be trusted to respect their national and personal freedom. So we have a hostile Iran, potentially nuclear and intractably opposed to Israel. We have Iranians who want very much to have the individual freedoms that we in the West take for granted. But when push comes to shove, they will reluctantly side with the mullahs in a confrontation with the West because as benighted as the clerics may be, they are Iranians foremost, and we can’t be trusted.

There is no reason to believe that the outcome in Egypt will be much different than Iran, particularly if the Mubarak-era military loses control.  In short order, Egypt’s women will be compelled to wear the hijab if not a burqa and will be relegated to little better than domestic slavery. Secularists will be silenced and if they do speak up can look forward to being declared apostates subject to execution.

The war to re-establish the Caliphate will, of course, begin with hostilities directed at Israel using the billions of dollars of modern arms we provided to Mubarak’s army. But make no mistake, those with legitimate objections to Israel’s benighted policies toward the Palestinians but who seek a peaceful solution will be brushed aside. There can be no two-state solution when your objective is a Caliphate and the coming of the Messiah.

Machiavelli teaches that what a prince should do when confronted with popular discontent is cook up a foreign war. (Machiavelli may have been an infidel but there is no reason for Islamists not to follow his advice. After all, the fact that nuclear bombs were developed by infidels hasn’t stopped the Wahhabis, Salafis, and the Ayatollahs from wanting to acquire them. Weapons are one thing. Human rights and democracy are something else entirely.) Once the Islamists begin to govern, they will find differences among themselves. To split into factions is inevitable.  Since the downtrodden will remain in the lower strata of society, the same discontent that brought about Mubarak’s overthrow will surely bubble to the surface once again. Because they are the party of God, the new government will not voluntarily share or relinquish power.  As opposition builds and their rule is threatened, the best option will be to engineer a foreign adventure to divert the masses’ attention. What better rallying cry than Allah’s call to re-establish His Caliphate?

We have played right into the hands of the Islamic fundamentalists. Our history in the Middle East over the past century has been a sorry tale of ignorance, corruption and contempt for the culture and human rights of the Muslim population.  Except for a relatively brief period when Nasser governed, Egypt has been run by the British or by clients of the U.S. Throughout the Middle East, we have supported one brutal dictator after another, endorsing their torture of the populace while insuring that the vast majority remains impoverished and powerless. For a century we did nothing to help these new voters achieve the human and civil rights that we hold dear. Indeed, every time they rose up to obtain human rights and dignity, we sent in our operatives with bribes or guns to see to it that they were unsuccessful. We call them rag-heads and hajis. They call us infidels. Whatever common ground there might have been, has been turned into a quicksand of suspicion and fear. Meanwhile we have extracted great wealth from these lands. A few of us have profited greatly. The rest of us have been bought off with cheap oil.

While Islam may not stand for personal freedom, the vast majority of these new voters have no personal experience with concepts such as free speech, freedom of religion or a free press, and we have ourselves partly to thank for the fact they do not. At the moment, their desire is simply to be free of the foreign influences that have financed their oppression for as long as they can remember, and we are they. If the Islamists, who are basically clean of corrupting western influences, offer them a Caliphate and a return of the Messiah in the bargain, so much the better. It should not surprise us then that the region’s newly enfranchised voters have rejected political parties that espouse western-style civil liberties, secularism or even a separation of church and state.

And so the outlook for the West, including Israel, is pretty bleak. A lot of people are going to end up suffering for the sins committed by U.S. and British imperialists over the past century.  In the Middle East, they will include billions of women, secular Muslims and students. But the victims are also likely to include Shia and Sunnis wherever they are in the minority, Israelis, Palestinians, Copts, Maronites, Aliwites and Sufis, not to mention many westerners who will be put on the defensive by the mother of all jihads that looms on the horizon once these Islamic fundamentalists run into trouble –as they inevitably will–while attempting to govern.

For starters, we could fatten the old treasury by increasing income on FCC licenses, oil and gas leases, timber and mining concessions and other assets that we, The People, own but let private corporations exploit for their profit. We could require a percentage of gross profits provision similar to the provisions in many shopping mall leases and restaurants. We’d get the dough off the top. The more they make, the more we make and if it’s on gross, they can stick their fancy accountants where the sun don’t shine. This would virtually moot the issue of corporate taxation.

Then we could charge “competitive rates” for government services using the insurance company model. The more you want to protect from loss, the more you have to pay. Emergency and security services called out to protect private property should result in a service charge and it should be based upon current fair market values. Somebody with a lot of property to lose would certainly pay a lot more than somebody with nothing to lose.

The more a private entity uses our roads, bridges, air routes, the more it pays. For example, corporate jets might pay a toll for using our airspace. Companies that pollute our air and water, would have to pay a resource depletion charge plus the cost of clean up using our people.

If we were running the government like a business, then the government should be able to compete with the private sector. No reason for The People to stay out of business activities where we can make some money. For example, we might stop giving away things to private industry, like the way we give away NIH research to drug companies that end up making large profits from discoveries The People unerwrite. If patients can pay thousands of dollars per dose for some of the medicines developed by our government, then they should be prepared to deliver fair profits to us for the value of our contribution to a drug’s development. And if the drug companies balk at cutting in The People, maybe we ought to compete. I think the government might be able to sell drugs for less, cutting the drug dealers out and keeping the profits.  If we were to use our leverage, we’d have Merck and Pfizer boarding up their shops in no time. That’s how business is run.

Running government like a business would mean that we quit lending to banks at .25% so they can lend back to us ¾when they have a mind to¾ at 4.5% (or over twenty percent for credit card debt.) With that kind of profit margin, we, The People, ought to get into the banking business ourselves. Why shouldn’t we be the ones making those 4.25% loans? I’d bet, if we used our leverage, we’d be able to hire, at pennies on the current dollar, excellent bankers to do the heavy lifting for a real “People’s Bank” that would put right out of business the so-called “to big to fail” banks. And the beauty of the government bank, being run like a business, is that it really is too big to fail.

Indeed, if we want to be/stay in the business of insuring bank deposits and loans –as we do now–we ought to get a piece of that action too. Real insurance companies make money. If that means banks won’t lend, tough. If it means we can offer savers a better return than banks, why not do it.  If it means that we can lend for less and still make a decent profit, which the government clearly can do, why not do it? Right now, banks are really just lending our money back to us, when they deign to lend at all. What kind of real business leverage do they have? They wouldn’t have any money at all to lend if it weren’t for us.

The truth is that if the government were really running like a business, it would have the leverage to put a lot of large corporations out of business, or demand a big cut of their gross profits, not by force or by some violent revolution, but by acting the way big businesses really do. Ironic though it is, a truly capitalist government, operating similarly to a giant for-profit corporation would be a huge job creator, and could reduce or eliminate taxes altogether while putting the richest 1% on the ropes. The one-percenter’s profits could be ours if we ran our government like a business. But the last thing capitalists really want is for our government to run like a business. What they want, and what they have, is a sucker government that will cover their losses and let them loot its citizen’s assets at will.

I recently decided to sell one of my guns through a local gun shop. It worked out quite well, although seeing the quality of the customer base, I sometimes shudder, wondering who bought the thing. It was quite a powerful weapon.

I also write novels – mystery/thrillers and so from time to time I attend to verisimilitude by venturing on-line to check out what’s happening in the gun-toting universe. Not long ago, I stumbled on this:  JEWS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP: America’s Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership, http://jpfo.org/ and its black- hat gun rabbi, Dovid Bendory. When I last checked, the site had more than 2 ¼ million hits! Wow. If I sound stunned, I am.

I find this remarkable for many reasons. First, I doubt that 2 ¼ million Jews in the U.S. own guns. Second, when I surf other gun sites, what I get is a lot of blather about how the U. S. is a Christian nation, how Obama wants to take our guns away and a lot of anti-Semitic stuff that makes me wonder just who is looking at this JPFO site. And although this may be somewhat beside the point, many of the folks who comment on the blogs that attach like leaches to these websites seem to be close to illiterate.

Well, I had such a successful experience selling my gun that I went back with another one, a 12 gauge shotgun in perfect condition,. I did my research on line and knew what my gun was selling for on the private gun market. (In case you are interested, there is an online private gun market and you are free to buy, sell or trade just about anything short of a rocket–propelled grenade launcher without those bothersome waiting periods, or having someone point out to you that the gun in question may be illegal in your jurisdiction.) But to my surprise, the guys at the gun shop were not interested in my shotgun. “We’re running a business,” the paunchy Eastern-European proprietor mumbled, shaking his head as he waddled off to attend t a handgun customer. His assistant intimated that this was a short-handed way of explaining that they couldn’t make any money selling a sporting firearm.

Scanning the other customers in the store, along with the wares on display, I could see they had a point. They were obviously enamored by these military-style items. Just about everything that wasn’t a handgun looked like it came from a National Guard armory. Make no mistake. These were not hunting guns dressed up to look like week-end warrior accouterments. And these guys didn’t look to me like they shot skeet or traps. All you needed to do was look around to tell the guns that matter when you are “running a business” are the ones that are made for one purpose only – to kill people. And the inventory looked to me like any number of those pieces could do that very effectively.

In California, assault weapons are supposedly banned. But there are plenty of work-arounds that are apparently simple enough that even the semi-illiterati can make the modifications. You can’t, for example load up your weapon with a clip that holds more than 10 rounds. But you can get a gun with a fixed magazine that will hold enough ammo to blow away a platoon. And although the mag is fixed, that doesn’t mean you can’t pop it out using a round of your armor-piercing ammo. You can’t have flash suppressors, but they seem to be available. You aren’t supposed to have pistol grips on the stock, but I saw some in the shop. Maybe they were for .22s (I didn’t look at the caliber that closely) but I’ll bet a little filing and chiseling would make them fit something more potent; that is, if you couldn’t get it on line or out of a trunk at a gun show.

The rabbi makes no bones about his interest in guns. He’s a “never again” guy. He’ll go down with his weapons ablazing as he recites the Torah. And– get this –they seem to have a women’s auxiliary. Check out the interview with Candace Dainty.  https://txlady706.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/wisconsin-jewish-women-supporting-gun-ownership-meet-a-non-suicidal-jew/

So, like the rabbi and Miss Candice, let’s be up front. The current gun fetish has nothing to do with hunting. (The next time some politician puts on a yellow vest and claims to be pro-gun because he is a hunter, you can tell him he’s full of it.) It has nothing to do with going after game (for which needing even a ten round magazine is something of an embarrassment) or for target shooting, (because you don’t need a 40 round mag to do that either.) It has nothing to do with defending home and hearth from intruders because —as any hillbilly will tell you — the best defensive weapon for those purposes is a shotgun, (Especially since you almost can’t miss hitting an intruder and even if you do miss the shot won’t travel through five of your neighbors’ houses, bumping off their family members along the way, prior to expiring.) and the gun shops that are “running a business” can’t make a living selling those. It’s all about stocking up for the Armageddon.

I know this is going to cause some people to go ballistic, on both sides of the gun argument. I have no quarrel with the Second Amendment. I just would remind folks that our founding fathers put the words “well regulated militia” in it. They didn’t write those words for the fun of it. And they specifically gave the government authority to put down insurrections. (Hell, even our premier icon, George Washington, put the cabbosh on one of those.) The old white men who wrote the Constitution were FOR the regulation of guns. And so am I. When I see and hear the NRA bitch and moan about how regulation is one step short of confiscation, I have to laugh. They don’t seem to have a problem with the government regulating protest marches, a right we have under the First Amendment, for which permits have long been necessary. Is that one step short of eliminating free speech? You don’t hear that from them. And their whine about registration is completely lame. If I were the government and I wanted to know who owns guns in this country so I could confiscate them, I’d just hack a copy of the NRA’s mailing list off their computers. Don’t tell me the government can’t do that.

So, this whole gun nut thing that’s going on right now in statehouse after statehouse is just a pile of out-of-hand paranoid crap. And to top it off, many of these so-called Second Amendment advocates are so self-conscious about what jerks they are that they have to advocate concealed carry so they won’t be shunned. They’re practically confessing that they are a bunch of losers who can’t qualify to get a carry permit the old-fashion way: need, competence and sanity. Back in the olden days only cowards, gamblers and felons hid guns on their person. It’s not so different today.

In Oct. 2008, an Alameda County jury and judge found that Thomas had defrauded more than 200 tenants out of their security deposits by misrepresenting his intentions to return the deposits at the end of the tenancies. The jury found that Thomas had committed premeditated fraud in his dealings with his tenants. The judge agreed with the jury’s verdict and imposed an injunction against Thomas.

Thomas then appealed through the California courts and lost at each level. In September, Thomas filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court claiming that his tenants hadn’t relied on his misrepresentations even though they appeared in his written leases, the tenants signed the leases and delivered security deposits into his control. Thomas also claims that though he is worth between $20 and 35 million dollars, it is unconstitutional for him to have to pay $1 million in punitive damages. The Washington Legal Foundation apparently agrees. Landlords who swindle tenants should receive only a slap on the wrist according to these self-styled legal ethicists. They want landlords to be able to calculate their downside risks if they get caught ripping off their tenants. That’s their idea of a “free market principal.”

What no one dares to say, as the press wastes forests of paper and barrels of ink covering these people, is that they are all just packaging. The whole process is like  they’re selling us a box of cornflakes, but trying to pretend that there is something unique about the contents based on the picture they put on the outside. But it doesn’t matter what you put on the outside of the box: athletes, happy heteros, bunny rabbits, cartoon characters, waving fields of golden grain, inside it’s just cornflakes. Inside every Huntsman or Pawlenty is the same crappy elephant dung that’s inside Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Check the ingredients. Despite the needs of our country, very one of these fronts has pledged to Grover Norquist never to increase taxes, which means not ever eliminating loopholes such as corporate tax giveaways. That’s right. They have a pledge of allegiance to Grover Norquist that comes before the common good.  They are committed to spending cuts that impact the poor hardest. They want tax incentives for billionaires. They are sympathetic to union-busting legislation, restrictions on voting, unlimited spending for law enforcement against the undocumented and unlimited funding for the enforcement of anti-choice laws while harassing women and clinics. They would repeal any law limiting gun ownership to the sane and/or non-violent, or requiring waiting periods, documenting sales or requiring carry permits. They all would appoint activist Supreme Court justices intent on depriving ordinary people of any remedies they have traditionally had to protect them against the depredations of large corporations. Their administration will limit or not enforce environmental, mine and food safety regulations. They will push for unrestricted drilling for oil and natural gas interests. They will lead the Bible-thumping against gay marriage. They won’t hesitate to borrow for continued warfare abroad.  They will give a blank check to the Pentagon. They will engage in warrantless wiretapping and anti-Muslim rhetoric. They will do what they can to blur the lines between Church and State, such as supporting the teaching of “Intelligent Design”, prayer, and Bible study in public schools. They will encourage book banning in libraries and schools. They will subvert Social Security and Medicare with the intention of ultimately killing them off.

Pretty much, that’s what you’ll get in every box of Republican cornflakes regardless of who the candidate turns out to be. It would be a kindness and a moment of rare honesty if both the media and the Republican Party admitted as much and treated the host of Republican wanna-be candidates according to what they really are, packaging.

Talk about dumb and dumber. Last I checked, Obama was complaining that the government was out of money. Yet he proposes to spend money on enforcing demonstrably ineffective Federal marijuana laws. That’s a priority for his cash-strapped government? Come on. It calls into question his entire argument that the government actually needs money. So the saber-rattling first raises credibility questions.

But that is not all. I think demographic data would show that most of Obama’s supporters either oppose enforcement of marijuana laws or don’t give a shit one way or the other. It is the Republicans generally who want to throw weed-smokers into the dungeon. Most Obama supporters are younger. They don’t want to see money flushed down the black hole of eternal enforcement of antiquated useless marijuana laws. Republicans are older, they think that putting folks in jail or tossing them on trains to Mexico actually solves the problems of causation but, wake up; there is nothing that Obama’s nonsensical marijuana gambit will do to get them to vote for him.

So instead of Obama simply saying, sorry folks, we don’t have enough money in the treasury to waste on trying to cram federal law down the throats of state and local officials to enforce a policy that hasn’t stopped the proliferation of marijuana usage over the past five decades, our benighted president and the imbeciles advising him have decided to waste money on a marijuana masturbation. If the forthcoming election is close, decisions like this will only ensure a celebration for the red side.