The Future is Now

The Future is Now

©2013  Ross Williams

 

 

Perhaps I’ve mentioned this before, or perhaps not.  If you want to see the future of America once liberals get done with it you can look to the failed Soviet Union; to the imminent failure of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal; to the dinosaurs-on-life-support Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia … you probably cannot, though, look to communist China because – say what you will about myopic socialists, the Chinese have always looked ten generations ahead – they saw for themselves the slow toilet swirl their Soviet pals took and the Chinese caught capitalism faster than a street walker catches clap. 

But if none of those examples appeal to you as being too distant and removed in time, location or the foreign inability to pull off American Exceptionalism, then you might look instead to Detroit. 

Detroit just filed for bankruptcy. …like no one saw that coming. 

And when I say “no one”, I’m talking specifically about liberals.  Detroit has been, for two generations, the poster-child of liberal sensibility.   

Detroit had two main industries: autos and Motown.  Both rely on union labor – the United Auto Workers, and the American Federation of Musicians.  While it is perfectly reasonable, though, for the UAW to denounce Henry Ford the 7th as a sweat-shopper, which session musician is going to tell Smokey Robinson or the Jackson 5 that they’re keepin’ a brother down? 

The result is that one generation ago US auto makers started putting out Plymouth Valiants, Dodge K-Cars, Chevy Citations, AMC Gremlins and Ford Pintos.  Not coincidentally, Japan supplanted the US as the maker of the world’s best cars that same day.  Americans were so bitter over Japanese cars, and so desperate to buy a vehicle that wasn’t a US piece-o-crap, that they bought – get this – a Yugoslavian piece-o-crap instead. 

The Yugo rusted on the fly, if anything, faster than the Chevy Monza did.  You could actually watch the corrosion work its way out from a dent caused by a morning hailstorm.  With the Monza, it might take a week to see the rust bubble; with the Yugo, it popped up by lunch. 

And, of course, with union labor comes union pensions.  And early retirements.  And several other factors that Greece is suddenly discovering they can’t afford – even if Germany picks up the tab.  And the pensions that the UAW dopes thought they were so clever to secure for themselves out of the endless coffers of The Big Three’s vaults – they’ve largely gone away.  Chrysler went bankrupt, Ford restructured at least once, and GM went bankrupt and folded two of its brands – Saturn and Oldsmobile – in response to our most recent “economic downturn”. 

Couple this with Detroit’s tax rates – and Michigan’s in general – designed to compel the wealthy to pay their Fair Share®, Detroit saw its manufacturing base move out of state.  Detroit has long had the highest property tax rates of any of America’s 50 largest cities.  Yes, Ford, Chrysler and GM still have a presence in the Detroit area as well as Detroit itself, but they’re a shadow of their former selves. 

For what it’s worth, Berry Gordy moved his Motown to L.A. in the early 70s.  Even California had a better business climate than Detroit, even now.  Of today’s top ten employers in Detroit Michigan, the first eight are one form of government employer or another [or heavily subsidized by the government – like healthcare and health insurance].  It’s not until you get to 9 and 10 on the list that you see a private employer: GM and Chrysler, respectively; Ford doesn’t even appear in the top 20, although three casinos do. 

With the major private employers pulling out to the suburbs – or to Tennessee – and taking their tax debts with them, the city of Detroit found itself learning what so many liberals refuse to: small businesses thrive in the presence of big business.  This is due to a few factors.  The first being the classic economist’s explanation: a large portion of what small businesses do is done for big business; big business is the small business’s biggest customer.  Without the big business there, there’s no big customer, and the small customers aren’t enough for the small business to earn a profit … they fold. 

The second reason is the one that I may have mentioned before in response to the Occupy Wallstreet socialist idiocy: when you kill off the top 1%, there’s always, always, always going to be another 1% on the top of the economic heap.    When you remove the outer layer of the onion, there’s still a layer of the onion on the outside.  When you cut off the top rung of the ladder, there’s still a top rung.  Removing the top layer by layer is fine as long as other people are at the top.  But as the French found out during their Reign of Terror, eventually you will be at the top – and thus removed. 

Soaking the rich through government policy because they’re rich only succeeds in driving the rich to move to other … cities, other … states, other … countries.  Where the rich go, so go the jobs – check out Detroit.  The people who are left can’t afford the taxes – they don’t have jobs to earn the money – and those taxes not collected pay for all the stuff that the government has taken upon itself to do for them.  As a result, it doesn’t get done.  It’s not the rich who suffer; they’re living elsewhere under a different government, and living quite well, usually.  The ones who suffer are the poor because they can’t afford to move. 

Property tax delinquency in Detroit currently exceeds 50%; whole city blocks are abandoned and in ruins.  Fire and police protection is a joke, crime rates have skyrocketed and a small fire is as likely to burn down a whole block as be put out.  It’s a good thing the Detroit Tigers lost the World Series last year: the city would have been completely torched out of celebration. 

Detroit even had their own version of a liberal savior to rescue them from themselves: Kwame Kilpatrick.  The City Savior attempted to fix Detroit’s problems in much the same way our National Savior is doing it for the rest of us; Kilpatrick will be sentenced for it later this year, and it is likely to be a lengthy stint.  He’s already been in state prison on lesser savioring.  Because the fact of the matter is, liberal fiscal politics doesn’t work without cooking the books – what federal prosecutors call extortion and fraud.  And then it typically requires payola and deceit to cover it up – what the same federal prosecutors call bribery and obstruction of justice. 

Only the Mayor of Detroit doesn’t have the same level of plausible deniability that a US President has, and Kilpatrick got caught playing Obama just as Obama was being elected to play himself.  And Obama has minions to fall on their swords for him, people like Shyster General Eric Holder, Indoctrination Secretary Arne Duncan, Poverty Perpetuation Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Disemployment Secretary Hilda Solis, and a few others, all tied into a happy knot by Head Book Cooker Timmy “The Great” Geithner. 

Because, as always, what happens when you go bankrupt is:
1] someone pays your bills for you, or
2] your creditors take a huge loss, or
3] your creditors break your kneecaps. 

If Detroit goes bankrupt, it falls under US bankruptcy law, which obliges creditors – after all the court hearings – to take a financial bath.  In the meantime, though, the rich abandon ship taking their money [and jobs] with them, and there’s no more police or fire protection, essential services – like filling potholes and replacing street lights – end in all neighborhoods, not just the poor sections, and the city gets parceled out to local gangs and to opportunists from other cities.  But that’s only until the courts sort it out. 

The US government has gotten into the sad habit of paying the bills of bankrupt entities, so Detroit may get their bailout.  Greece has Germany; Detroit may have D.C.  It’s happened before.  The opportunity to happen again isn’t even limited to Detroit; following close on these heels is any number of American cities – nearly all having a multi-generational history of liberal fiscal lunacy having guided them – and quite a few states, themselves historically liberal, such as Illinois, California, Michigan, New Jersey [etc]. 

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that the US government is very rapidly going broke itself due to liberal Democrat [and pseudo-conservative liberal Republican] profligacy, and if the US government goes bankrupt, police and fire protection [in the form of military defense] will evaporate; essential services will die; and US territory will get divvied up by local gangs [called warlords in geopolitics] or by foreign opportunists – often called “terrorists”. 

Only the US going bankrupt would not be a matter for US bankruptcy law to handle.  It would be handled, instead, in the traditional way: the bankrupt nation selling off its territory for the cash needed to pay its bills, or foreign creditors breaking kneecaps and repossessing territory by conquest.  Or the nation simply degenerates into barbarism. 

What fun. 

The irony icing on this let them eat liberal cake is that Detroit has just petitioned the US government for a waiver from having to comply with its obligation to join the Obamacare Borg.  It seems that the city of Detroit, having more than 50 employees, is required to provide those employees – all AFSCME union members, as if it needs to be said – their health coverage.  Only this health coverage, under Obamacare, is grossly more expensive than it was before. 

This still comes as a shock to the 40% numbskulls in our country who believed the hucksters who sold them on Obamacare back in 2010; it is double-grossly more expensive than they were promised it would be.  The cost was supposed to come down, after all.  It is The Affordable Care Act.  Remember?  Employers who don’t want to pay for it are simply racist, because the cost of insurance goes down when more people join the premium pool. 

Remember?!? 

I do.  I also remember saying several times that it doesn’t work the way idiot liberals were told it does … by the politicians who desperately needed to buy their votes … because they couldn’t win otherwise.   

They’re now finding out that I was right.  Again. 

So if Greek and Soviet foolishness won’t convince the liberals what their liberal folly will bring, then they should take a drive to the Motor City and see for themselves.  Tomorrowland has never been so real.

 

 

Neophyte, Come Home!

Neophyte, Come Home!

©2013  Ross Williams

Been watching the news, lately?  A winter of discontent seems to have overtaken the ballyhooed Arab Spring.

Last we looked, the Egyptian Parliament elected by the suddenly free people of Egypt was consisting of 80% anti-democratic islamists and 20% various pro-democracy seats – of which a grand total of 2 seats, comprising 0.4% – belonged to the party of those student activists who first descended upon Tahrir Square to protest against Mubarak’s rule in the first place.

Most of the world’s republics choose their Chief Executive by a vote of the Legislature, and Egypt is no exception.  This is what makes the election of the Legislature so important in so many places.  The US, sadly, not being among them.

Just imagine what kind of President we would have if a Democrat Senate and a Republican House did the choosing instead of 80 million Americans.  Would we have had Obama?  Would we have had Bush?

But I digress.

With Egypt’s Parliament being 80% anti-democratic islamists, what sort of President do you think they’d select?

A] a statesman like Mohamed ElBaradie who, unlike some I could name, actually earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded, and who is respected worldwide, despite his connection with the UN, or

B] an islamist henchman named Mohamed Morsi, who supports Sharia, al Qaida, unlimited executive authority [as long as the executive is an islamist named Morsi] and has a severe loathing of both democracy and Israel.

That’s right.

Morsi became Egypt’s President – the world’s boobs call him The First Democratically-Elected President in Egypt’s History® – and upon taking office he accomplished these feats of anti-democracy unilateralism:

He arrested pro-democracy activists for being pro-democracy – those whose activities led to the elections that ultimately put him in power – including those from Western nations, to include a few dozen from the United States … including the son of an Obama Cabinet Secretary, Ray LaHood;

He suspended the type of free elections that put him and his islamist kin in power, returning to the same sort of elections that Mubarak had run: you can vote for anyone you like as long as it’s me;

He curtailed the majority of Western tourism traffic into and through much of Egypt, and by which Egypt made most of its money.  Western tourism was suddenly seen as “undesirable”, mostly because those tourists were not Muslim;

He suspended much of Egypt’s archeological activities as those activities were not based upon post-Islamic studies, but instead were dedicated to digging up dead Pharaohs.  Dead Pharaohs are not Islamic enough for the new regime;

He reinstated the Legislature that had been disbanded by the Egyptian Supreme Court, but gave himself “supreme” legislative authority anyway, just in case.  This legislative authority was declared to be beyond legislative or judicial review;

He denounced all Jews and publicly called for their extermination; and

He imposed Sharia law, which was greeted warmly by the 80% islamists in Parliament, but the 20% democracists opposed it, saying "it might lead to religious rule".

All this within three months.

Within five months of him taking office and reinventing himself as a second Mubarak only bigger and better, the protests in Tahrir Square started up again.  Most American neophytes would claim that this is nothing worse than being sent back to square one.  Those who know world politics understand it to be significantly more sinister than that.

Both Morsi and Mubarak are autocrats, yes, but their similarities truly end there.  It matters greatly upon whom their autocracies were levied.

Mubarak was onerously dictatorial upon islamists – primarily the Muslim Brotherhood and its subsidiaries, as well as the Salafis.  He left the academics, the intellectuals, the Jews and Copts, the Western tourists, the archeologists, and the run-of-the-mill political contrarian whose major input consisted of shouting “The King is a fink” … he left these people alone.  These people – if we are to believe the American neophyte – are 98% of the population in each nation of the Muslim world.  Egyptian women had more political freedoms than women in almost any other Muslim nation.

On the other hand, Morsi allowed the islamists to run rampant, killing Jews and Copts, burning their homes and shops, and instead imprisoned political contrarians and women wearing mascara, cut off Western tourism, hamstrung the academics and intellectuals, and – despite naming token women, Jews and Copts to positions in his government – declared that being a woman, Jew or Copt was effectively illegal, considering that Egypt was now under Sharia law.

Does any American neophyte sincerely believe that Mubarak is, in any meaningful way, comparable to Morsi as regards imperious despotism?

In a similar vein, does any American neophyte believe the world is better off with the Ayatollahs running Iran in place of the Shah?  The Shah was an autocrat toward the islamists who kept shooting at him; the Ayatollahs are autocrats toward everyone else in Iran and the rest of the world besides.

And just like the Shah of Iran, Mubarak imposed severe restraints on islamists’ activities because of their history of being … for lack of a better term … Grade-A Assholes.  The major islamist group in Egypt has been Muslim Brotherhood.  A brief – very brief – list of their activities over the past three generations includes:

Staging three coups, of which one was successful;

Creating two terrorist groups – Hamas and Islamic Jihad – and being a primary financial contributor to a third: Hezbollah;

Manipulating Egyptian politics behind the scenes for the purpose of joining other Arab states in perpetual war against Israel; and

Assassinating Anwar Sadat for his being smart enough to realize that perpetual war with Israel qua Israel was slow-motion national suicide.

For better or worse, Egypt doesn’t have the same rules as we do in the US, and Mubarak was allowed to do what he wanted to his country’s assholes.  And he did, relatively benignly all things considered.  The major imposition upon them was that they were not allowed to seek or hold office.  The neophytes in America, though, cried foul, for they believe that every nation on the planet deserves US political freedoms even if it is the freedom to obliterate everyone else’s political freedoms.  Furthermore, other nations are  obliged to have our political freedoms imposed upon them if they resist adopting them willingly.  …which is mighty high-handed and autocratic of these American neophytes, a sentiment that is echoed by much of the rest of the world, I might add.

Not that this high-handedness is unique to the American neophyte.  Our politicians suffer the same condition.  When American political ideals are imposed on other nations by Republican administrations, the American neophyte calls it imperialism, hegemony and regime change; when these same ideals are imposed on other nations by Democrat administrations, it is called self-determination.   ToMAYto, toMAHto.

For what it’s worth, the second-most influential group of islamists in Egypt is the Salafis, who are the political arm of the Wahabi-sect Sunni, … whose military arm is better known as al Qaida.

How does the American neophyte feel about it all now?

Because Egypt’s military has been caught so many times in the cross-hairs of Egyptian islamists’ power-plays – being forced to counter-coup and install Nasser, and then being the guys with the targets on their backs when islamists’ manipulation inspired yet another war with Israel … that Egypt invariably lost – Egypt’s military doesn’t like islamists any better than Mubarak did.  Can you blame them?

The military laid down rules when the Tahrir Square revolution first happened: they don’t really care who wins as long as it’s not the islamists, because they [the military] aren’t going to go through that again.  Once, twice, three times, was more than enough.

Eight months into the presidency of Morsi, however, and eight months of Morsi advertising that Egypt will indeed go through all that again, to include anti-Israeli agitation and islamist nonsense in general, the Egyptian military forcibly removed Morsi from power last week and restated their rules: they don’t care who runs the country as long as it’s not the islamists.  They don’t want to run the country themselves, but if it’s going to be a choice of the military or the islamists, then the military it is.

Once again, we are seeing American neophytes declaring that they haven’t the sense to come in out of someone else's war.  Huge wads of Americans are boo-hooing over this denial of Democracy by military force, and refusing to understand that Democracy was never in the game to begin with.  Elections, to the power-brokers in most of the world, simply exist as a means to placate idiot Americans, in Washington or otherwise, dumb enough to think that one election is as good as another.

And millions of these Americans, taking their clues from the clueless Jimmuh Cahtuh, all need to sit down and shut up.  They’re making the rest of us look stupid.

Thanks for the Memories

Thanks for the Memories

©2013  Ross Williams

 

Janet Napolitano, nicknamed Big Sis by the Drudge Report for her Orwellian incursions into US liberties, is stepping down as Head Pain Mistress of our “Slavery is Freedom” Department of Homeland Security – DeHoSec, as it were, to indulge the appropriate Newspeak efficiency.  She’s leaving to take a position as High Schoolmarm of the University of California system, an “Ignorance is Strength” outfit in its own Orwellian right.  She will go from being SecDeHoSec [DeHo, to make the Newspeak even more efficient by removing the redundancies] to HiCal.  So to speak.

Common wisdom holds that there is some conspiratorial pretext for her resignation coming out of phase with the Cabinet turnover that usually accompanies a presidential re-election, and the scandal sheets are all a-twitter over it.  It cannot simply be the $750K salary she will receive.  Among the explanations given by the conspiracy theorists for her oddly-timed departure are:

1] impending fallout over DeHoSec’s ammo buying spree.  In the wake of three notorious mass shootings in recent years, idiot liberals attempted to make Constitutional hay while the sun shone on popular paranoias.  The most recent form this took was for DeHoSec to buy up as much ammunition as it could in states where there was a reasonable likelihood of the state passing laws which would outlaw guns and/or magazine sizes and/or specific types of ammunition.  The thinking [sic] being: why wait on the State Legislature to infringe the 2ndAM?  Do it now.  …because god knows, the federal government has all the money it needs to spend on such things.

2] blowback on our nation’s disastrous immigration policies, and even more notorious non-enforcement of them.  On the one hand, she was very correct, when Governess of Arizona, that a 50-foot wall would be met with a 51-foot ladder – that’s just the nature of the game.  But when she, as head securer of our border security, willfully refuses to comply with federal immigration laws in a fit of PMS because state and local authorities in her ex-state of Arizona show up her DeHoSec time and again by doing what federal law already authorizes them to do, regardless what Arizona’s laws say, that goes beyond incompetence and enters the region of criminal malfeasance.  …which would put her in good company among our National Savior’s Cabinet … but still.

3] festering resentment over her blue-shirted Brownshirts at TSA.  In an apparent attempt to assuage our nation’s Great Disquiet over TSA’s arbitrary and – frankly – psychotic rules on what can and cannot be brought aboard airplanes, and the indignations one has to endure to get there, DeHo announced a relaxation of those rules … to test the waters … to see what would shake out among the public.  So were the pointless exercises of removing shoes and pitching coffee cups discontinued? Was the creepy porno-scope turned off? Did they finally realize that their fears over snow globes and cupcakes-in-a-can made them look like laughable amateur charlatans among legitimate security operations? 

Nope, to all.  They allowed knives and boxcutters to be taken on board, the very weapons which made 9/11 possible in the first place.  Instead of discontinuing those rules which do not, cannot and never would be useful, and periodically adding in new relaxations as the paranoid public lost their irrational fears, they started with step 16 – allowing actual weapons, however trivial.  This, in a population made paranoid by the psychotic rantings of both the Bush and Obama Administrations over American passenger planes.  It was doomed to fail, and I believe they knew it.  And because it did fail – Americans made paranoid by twelve years of fear-mongering US government propaganda hit the roof – the government now has all the justification it needs to continue imposing new and more diabolical nazisms at our airports in the name of security that such rules do not, cannot and never will acquire.

4] full blossoming of DeHoSec’s infamous report listing the security concerns of the United States, and having not one of the concerns being the islamists which made so many attacks against the US – before and after 9/11.  Instead, their report cited Libertarians, the Tea Party, ex-military, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, anti-abortion activists, those who complain about illegal immigration … essentially, anyone who is not a registered Democrat.  They are all more worrisome to the future security of her United States than dozens of groups of islamists, which together total millions, who have declared war – and have waged that war for decades – on it.

DeHo’s curriculum vitae is quite an impressive history of political cynicism, graft, fraud, shystery, deceit and plain old manipulation, and it’s unfair to judge her based solely on her tenure as DeHo at DeHoSec.  For example, she gained prominence as a loyyer during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings by representing a witness for Anita Hill, who famously alleged Thomas was a bounder and a cad – which he likely is if only because almost everyone in his position is, but it’s irrelevant to being a Supreme Court Justice.  This witness, in pre-hearing investigation, promised to confirm these allegations before the Senate, but when under oath could not.  DeHo pulled her witness for further consultation, and when retaking the hotseat later, the client gave a story about sudden-onset amnesia.

For this ballsy performance, she was promoted to Attorney General of Arizona, where she made the state safe from office place Christmas decorations.

Following on this success, the future DeHo was elected Governess, and spearheaded a move to rid her state of any electoral influence from one of the two political groups her brand of left-wing lunacy abhors: middle-of-the-road independents.  It would only be later on, in her position as DeHo, when she would be in a position to label everyone not a registered Democrat as terrorists more dangerous to America than the actual terrorists who are waging actual war on the US.

And, of course, there is a further conspiracy theory regarding her oddly-timed departure from DeHoSec: something so vile and sinister, and still unknown to the general public, that it would put all her previous political crimes and misdemeanors to shame.

Then again, many of DeHo’s critics are refusing to speculate on reasons for her departure, and are simply lamenting her arrival in California as HiCal.  She will surely be as despotic and partisan as a college Mother Superior as she was in her previous positions, and the fact that she will be able to impose her loathsome views on tens of thousands of young minds all at once makes many cringe in fear for the future of America.

Most of the young minds she’d be polluting, though, are already done polluted having been steeped in the poison from birth, but she might just serve to inspire those high school graduates not already in goosestep with her nazist views to seek higher education elsewhere – where they might not have to endure as much institutional bigotry as they would at, for example, UC Berkeley.  It was Berkeley, we must remember, that served as the cradle for the hyper-liberal’s infant Free Speech movement … made possible by silencing, forcibly, if necessary, anyone who disagreed with them.

Additionally, those pre-polluted young minds, armed with UC-whatever sheepskins and student loans out their asses, will be looking for jobs upon graduating.  Unless they’re going to stay in California where the Big Ideas® their illiberal education got them will be rewarded, they’ll find it tough going.  Which serves them right.

They’ll even find it tough going in California, which has shown itself over the last several decades to be unfriendly to any type of labor not involved with the self-congratulatory entertainment industry, or technologically infeasible “green” manufacturing.

These nitwits will come to learn that idealistic demagoguery won’t repay their student loans, and that they wasted their time, effort and money – not to mention their integrity – on political quackery.  …although it must be said that they will only understand about their integrity after they turn 40.  And it’s these people who will lead the masses away from the self-indulgent myopia of liberal sentimentalism.  …if we are going to survive long enough to abandon it.

For in the long-run, every system, be it physical, mechanical or political, sets the stage for its own self-destruction.  And DeHo Janet Napolitano – and the countless others who share her strident political psychoses – are setting up their own demise, just by being their intolerant, ignorant selves.

I wish her well in this new undertaking.

The Liberals' Unfree Press

Freedom of the Press … Not for the Press?
©2013  Ross Williams

 

  

Every once in a while you’ll run across an idiot liberal still pouting and moping about the Citizens United ruling.  Citizens United was – still is, actually – a conservative lobbying group which sued the Federal Elections Commission over the ramifications of the McCain-Feingold Act, which sought to limit the sources of political campaign spending to individuals and keep political campaigns out of the hands of deep pocket corporations and lobbyists.  Political campaigns work by partisan propaganda – i.e., advertising – i.e., engaging in public discourse – i.e., free speech and press.  The free speech Citizens United was prohibited from speaking was called Hillary: The Movie, a hatchet job on the former First Lady MacBeth.  This was back in ’08 before the ascendency of Barry Hussein, when Hillary Clinton was the shoo-in Democratic candidate to go up against Not-Bush, the Republican.

The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United [well after Hillary: The Movie would have helped Hillary not get elected], struck down much of the McCain-Feingold lunacy, and earned the idiot wrath of liberals who, as ever, are just as quick with the torch and pitchfork as the social conservatives they love to claim still live in the days of torches and pitchforks.

The typical idiot liberal response to the USSC upholding the Constitutional rights of corporations is “Corporations don’t have Constitutional rights!”

Oh really?

So when … let’s find a Big Business that appeals particularly to the liberal side of the spectrum … when Planned Parenthood is accused by the government of a socially conservative state – for instance, Texas – of breaking state laws on abortions, Planned Parenthood must submit to cops seizing all its computers and other records … without a warrant?  The 4thAM is a Constitutional right, after all; Planned Parenthood doesn’t get to enjoy it?

Does Planned Parenthood not get to have a jury trial, since the 6thAM is also a Constitutional right?  Is the entire spectrum of American jurisprudence and its “fair trial” paradigm tossed because Planned Parenthood is a corporation and corporations don’t have Constitutional rights?  No, of course not.  That’s stupid.

Oh, but that’s not what the issue was with Citizens United, was it?  Citizens United was a First Amendment matter regarding partisan politics, and which could affect an election.  It’s unfair that well-heeled corporations get to monopolize the political speech.  Particularly when much of this speech must be bought.

…which means that the only Constitutional rights not enjoyed by corporations are … religion? petitioning government for a redress of grievances? free speech and press?

That’s just as stupid, compounded by arbitrary hypocrisy.  Why would a business be protected from warrantless government search and seizure by the 4thAM, and be guaranteed a fair and speedy trial by the 6thAM, but not from government interference in saying what it wants by the 1stAM?  Just because there’s an election going on?

Here’s the thing: there’s always an election going on.  Six months into the National Savior’s second coming, both major parties are already grooming wannabes for his successorship – in the event he doesn’t get the USSC to interpret the 22ndAM as broadly as they did Article I Section 8 in the Obamacare case; eighteen months before midterms there’s already major party posturing for that.  There’s Special Elections and primaries, federal, state and local.

The arbitrary time limits imposed by McCain-Feingold on this prior restraint are just that: arbitrary.  They can be changed and they can be fudged.  Sixty days prior to a general election means nothing when there’s YouTube and DVRs.  Thirty days prior to a primary means nothing when there’s cable television pulling in commercial advertising from the entire nation … and YouTube, and DVRs.  It would only be a matter of time before the time limits went away, or bought political speech was totally banned.  If Congress has the authority to impose arbitrary limits on commercially delivered political speech, they have the authority to outlaw it altogether.  Citizens United declared they don’t have the authority at all.

Reversing Citizens United would ultimately effectively silence all political speech that wasn’t inarticulately shouted by individuals on street corners, or hand-slathered on placards.  The moment the crowd joined in the chant, the very second professionally printed picket signs came out…  Those are the markers of organization, and organization implies wealth, and wealth implies paying someone to deliver the political speech; paid electioneering is verboten according to McCain-Feingold.  It’s not “fair” to allow it.

Indeed, anything said for or against any government policy can be construed as electioneering – and it would be in fairly short order, considering how rapidly the government seizes all opportunities to expand its power.  This was the argument made by the Obama Administration in defending McCain-Feingold before the USSC against the loyyers for Citizens United.

Which means Papa John’s Pizza would not be allowed to whine about Obamacare; Hobby Lobby couldn’t sue over it – lawsuits are public record, and the public is where political speech by monied outfits cannot be.  Nor would the ACLU be allowed to sue over detention at Gitmo, even if they knew what they were talking about.

Only individuals in this hallucinatory world idiot liberals inhabit possess the right to say what they want.  Michael Moore can film all the Fahrenheit 9/11’s he wants because he is an individual [I’m assuming he hasn’t incorporated into his own production company – if he has, he’s screwed], but he would not be able to show his film anywhere, because that takes distribution and movie theater conglomerates, and they are prohibited from making Moore’s psychotic conspiracy theory available.

James O’Keefe would be able to stuff hidden cameras in every orifice he’s got in order to catch “community organizers” conspiring to assist in human smuggling, child prostitution and racketeering, along with their standard inner city vote fraud activities.  But getting Fox News to air the videos? impossible.  Even youtube.com is a corporation and could not show them.

Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olberman can both say what they want, but there would be no one allowed to broadcast it.  …okay, so there’s an upside to all this.

But the New York Times – a large corporation – would not have been able to print anything critical of Bush policies, nor would they have been able to deflect some of the [deserved] criticism of partisanship by introducing us to Obama’s IRS witch hunt directed at the Tea Party.  Silent are Fox News, Newscorp, CNN, ABC news, CBS news, and MSNBC.  News magazines are winnowed down to their book review section and are otherwise remade into Soap Opera Digest and People magazine.  Newspapers the nation over are pared down to boxscores, the comics [sans Doonesbury and Dilbert], theater listings [which cannot show Hillary: The Movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, nor The Day After Tomorrow], classifieds, and Sudoku.

And when you think about it, a newspaper that is not allowed to exercise its freedom of the press because doing so might, gorsh, sway an election sorta defies the purpose of having freedom of the press to begin with.  Y’know?  When you think about it?

Liberals?  You’re up.  Can you think?