State bankruptcy and a heartland home-grown solution
The New York Times reports today that policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers: “Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. [...]
Rick Perry’s “Fed Up!” An Eagle Scout’s guide to states rights
If Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, gets up here any time soon and I have a feeling he will, he might take a look at Henry’s James classic, “The Bostonians.” He might find us today much as James found us then in 1886; feminists, utopians, New England Hindus, mesmerists and socialists, and feel some kinship [...]
Mr. Kafka goes to Washington: TSA’s groping is torture
The TSA’s Kafkaesque groin groping and full-porn scanning, championed by Obama’s lackluster Cheney, Joe Biden, enters the realm of dominance, intimidation and sexual threat and knowledge that goes to the core of total government control: totalitarianism. It is the sickly sister to torture; Drusilla, the undead – torture without the physical pain but with the [...]
Requiem for the Tea Party
The thinking of the Tea Party was co-opted the moment it started being called a Tea Party. But the original ideas hatched and awakened simultaneously in 37 states after NH state rep Dan Itse proposed a Jeffersonian states-rights defense against federal overreach. Might have been better had he never done that Glenn Beck interview. A [...]
What will Ron and Rand Paul do now?
On the David Asman show Wednesday night Ron Paul was asked what plans he and son Rand had for the new term. He said they had talked about entering legislation together in the Senate and the House on the first day. Half joking, Ron Paul said his son suggested legislation to “end the Fed.” I [...]
The end of two flavor political parties
For well more than a century, Americans have had the choice like that in an old general store I used to go to in rural West Virginia with a swinging sign that read, “ice cream, guns and ammo.” The ice cream came in two flavors, vanilla and chocolate. That has been our choice in political [...]
The pig is dead
The great anthropologist Joseph Campbell said one of the legendary moments in the spirit life of America was when the Lakota shaman, Black Elk, turning and pointing north to northwest, said to the poet Flaming Rainbow, “There is the center of the world.” Then he said, “but wherever you are is the center of the [...]
The American Anti-President and the New Federalism
It is increasingly clear now that the American anti-president simply doesn’t understand that governance is not a world soccer match in which everyone gets a little trophy from their mother; that when he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and a bunch of degenerate rock stars in opposition to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, he [...]
Will Hillary kill us all?
The list of federalist incompetencies is spiraling the country down the drain: Health care, Medicare, a broken dollar, a 13 trillion dollar deficit, Katrina, Arizona, Afghanistan, Blagojevich. The turning began when Bill Clinton turned a prefect failure of a presidency into a cult movement of himself by having kinky sex with an undergraduate in the [...]
Free California
California’s fate today begins to suggest that of Tibet. It is a free and independent place with its own unique culture and vital life force, and its will is clear. But self governance is quashed by autonomous and arbitrary magistrates thousands of miles away. Here is a proposed amendment for the fledgling California constitutional convention: [...]
The burden of Northern history
There has been a spate of books on America’s presumed decline in recent days. Most now and ever before compare with the rise and fall of Rome. I’ve always thought we should be compared with two empires, Rome and Athens. Or better yet, Rome and Constantinople, equal and opposite cultural counter-forces for at least 1,000 [...]
Citizenship and the man-child president
I was turned against federalism by two things. First, when I’d walk up to get my first-grader after school in the neighborhood of Duke University in Durham, N.C., I had to keep my hand on my 3-year-old, to keep the students from touching her. They were not bad kids, but they were nervous and erratic [...]
Tea Partiers to watch out for: Tim Bridgewater and the 17th amendment
The New York Times editorialist, David Firestone, starts with the patronizing “So you Still Want to Choose Your Senator,” in his warning to the rubes about the dangers of a free republic . And he wants his regular readers to know that along with Ron and Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, [...]
Miss Oklahoma’s simple declarative sentence
There are three issues in the Arizona situation. In order of importance they are: a state’s right to act without permission from the federal government, chronic federal incompetence and mismanagement and the third: Is the controversial Arizona plan a good and workable solution for controlling the border? I was struck by the clarity of Morgan [...]
The Year of State Sovereignty?
At a press conference last October Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” She replied with that wild-eyed self-assurance that drew more shrill and extreme as we got to Christmas: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” [...]
