The plot thickens

Can't believe I'm wasting time writing about this... but... Nancy Pelosi stuck her foot in her mouth again.

Leon Panetta, head of the CIA and appointed by the prez, issued a fairly simple statement today saying that it's not the policy of the CIA to lie to congress.

In response, Pelosi stated that she didn't mean to cast aspersions upon the CIA as it is now; rather, she's going after George W. Bush.

So the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, third in line for the presidency, is pleased to tell the American public that she's wasting the time and resources of the federal government trying to create a scandal.

Is this her idea of an acceptable explanation for her actions and accusations?

I wrote in a blog a little ways back how the Democrats ran on a deliberately incited hatred for George W., and that now they're running out of steam because they have nothing more positive to offer.

Pelosi proves my point: "Excuse me, I didn't mean to step on any toes, I'm just whipping a dead horse....."

This idiot really should resign, but I doubt she has the grace to do so. She's one of those people who believes with her whole heart that "right" consists of getting people to agree with you and support you. If she can get a "yes" from some pathetic creature who's afraid to hurt her feelings, she'll persist in her lies and reckless harangues and accusations. I mean, doesn't she have enough to do, she's got to fill her days trying to destroy an administration that has left office?

Hey, Nancy -- there's a Democrat in the White House now. Or did you miss that briefing? Or did your staffer only inform you that there had been an election, but didn't tell you who had been elected?

In another news video, we see the now-familiar scenario of Barack Obama wandering around some kind of auditorium-style venue, adoring fans in bleacher-style seating hanging on every word. So what's he saying?

He's telling his audience that the US economy is burdened with an unsustainable debt.... This is news only to him. Maybe he should have thought of that before jamming all this so-called "Stimulus" B.S. through congress.

And can someone please explain to me why shutting down car dealerships will help Chrysler and GM? The dealerships pay their own way, they aren't on the manufacturers' payrolls. Seems to me, all the closings accomplish is to make the cars less easily available, as well as throwing thousands more people out of work.

Meanwhile, back in congress, Obama's Democrat minions are laboring over adding an ever-increasing load to our unsustainable debt by trying to saddle the nation with socialized medicine... and prodding the EPA to take autocratic and totalitarian action to penalize anyone who breathes. We all exhale carbons, so it's only fair that we should all be taxed for it to save the planet.

And Barney Fudd has introduced a bill for a federal bail-out of California. This man is just totally insane. He really is. And that's being kind to him.

Why do I feel like I woke up in the middle ring of a Barnum & Bailey production? This would be funny, except that these idiots are really in charge.

If any one thing is certain, we will all be taxed to death -- quite literally, as health care will not be readily available. Remember the French Revolution.

Oh, and the prez also has re-thought the matter of military tribunals for the terrorists at Guantanamo. Seems that during the campaign, he had assumed with most other liberals that the Bush administration was only wholly satanic in devising the procedures they did to handle the terrorists. However, now that Obama has "seen the elephant," he's finding out that there was some reasoning behind all that. In other words, the Bush administration wasn't acting out of blind hatred. Gee, fancy that.

So maybe Obama's finally stopped campaigning and decided to try to govern.

Heaven help us all.

Trouble in Nancy-land

Something to watch:

Nancy Pelosi came out swinging this morning, claiming that the CIA is "misleading" congress and the public. That's her prissy way of calling the CIA a liar.

The CIA says that in Sept., 2002, a month after a couple terrorists had been waterboarded, Nancy Pelosi, who was then minority leader in the House, was told that the prisoners had been waterboarded and even explained the process.

Nancy Pelosi says the CIA told her and others that it was considering waterboarding, but hadn't actually done it yet. She said, "They didn't tell us anything they were doing. And the fact is, it didn't matter." This last refers to her sense that congress had nothing to say about what the CIA was doing. Her protest wouldn't have made any difference, she claims.

Porter Goss, former head of CIA under George W. Bush (appointed after this incident, however) and serving as a congressman from Florida, says that he attended the CIA briefing with Pelosi. He says Pelosi's main concern at the time was whether or not the CIA "was doing enough" to get information from the terrorists. Seems it was perfectly clear to him at the time that the CIA was informing the group that they were waterboarding some terrorists. Goss had no confusion about this message.

Interesting that another congressional rep -- can't think of her name off the top of my head -- actually did write a letter to George W., protesting the waterboarding, and Pelosi refused to sign onto it.

I guess whether or not waterboarding is a useful and practical thing depends upon how close you are to 9/11, for Pelosi, anyway. One pundit remarked that if Pelosi admitted to anything that suggests she was less than red-faced outraged over waterboarding, that would send all of her San Francisco Kool-Aid liberals into conniption fits, and they might not want to vote for her again.

Gee, what a shame. Though I can't in my wildest dreams imagine who they'd send in her place. The prospect is even a little frightening.

And CIA quickly struck back at Pelosi. Not sure what-all they did beyond making a statement, but apparently they are trying to substantiate their own claims. But they also have refused Dick Cheney's request to release the memos that noted what the waterboarding had accomplished. Supposedly the memos contain information that is either still classified or at least extremely sensitive. Of course, that's an easy claim for the CIA to make. Heaven only knows what they have in their files.

My money's on the CIA in this one. That is, I've been convinced for some time that Pelosi's a liar about a wide range of things. She's power-mad and will stop at nothing, including selling the USA into slavery, if it means she can hold weekly press conferences and fly around in an Air Force jet. Some people are so easy to please. They don't have any principles; they're just greedy for attention and don't care how many bodies they have to step over to get it.

And it's quite evident that Pelosi's a super-hypocrite, too. Actually, looking at photos of her with her half-shut eyes, and considering her labored way of speaking and usual klutziness, I always kinda suspected she was a drug addict. At least on Xanax or something. She can lie all she likes so long as it doesn't cost me any time or money, but what really rubs me the wrong way -- in Pelosi and quite a few others in Washington -- is the hypocrisy.

I hope the Democrats start getting antsy and send some low-level gopher to suggest to Pelosi over a nice glass of Mendocino and maybe some cheese and water crackers, that she resign -- at least as Speaker. She doesn't deserve the job. She's a rabid partisan and blind to anything like the Public Good. Her way or the highway, the republic be damned.

Funny how Pelosi was one of the people who initiated this whole flap, muckraking, hoping to dig up dirt on the Bush administration and tie up congress for the next few years slinging mud.

How does it feel to be on the receiving end, butthead? Get used to it. The honeymoon is over.

An instructive historical anecdote

Just briefly, because I'm busy with something else.

At the end of the 18th century, France was getting very weird. They had been pretty glorious under the Louis kings, I - XIV, but the whole house of cards was beginning to collapse. Monumental corruption for one thing. They were already going broke when Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson talked them into funding the American Revolution.

And what was really going on was the growth of the bourgeois -- the middle class. Previously, there had been the monarchy and nobility and the rest of the population were peasants or maybe soliders. At any rate, they had all been largely dependent upon the monarchy and the nobility and lived to serve them.

The middle class were merchants and skilled tradesmen; in every case, they were people who were managing to get a living and even get wealthy in other ways than simply bowing and scraping to the nobility. This period saw the beginning of real science and its natural child, technology.

These upstarts -- these bourgeois -- began to complain about the king's policies if and when they interfered with the interests of the independent bourgeois. Like, France was almost continuously at war with England and Spain. This really slowed down trade between the nations. Most European nations, and especially the "empire builders," who were going around the world setting up colonies, had adopted a mercantilist economic system. This system often messed up trade and commerce. It certainly made it more expensive.

For example, Boston (Massachusetts) was a British colony at the time. And most sugar was grown on plantations in the Caribbean -- both British and French colonial plantations. (By this time, Spain had taken itself out of the running and was pretty much sitting and staring its own navel and burning people at the stake in the Inquisition.)

Now in Boston, distilling sugar into rum was a pretty big business. But the distillers couldn't just buy sugar directly from the planters in the Caribbean. Under the mercantilist system, the sugar had to be shipped to England first (or to France, from a French plantation) in order to be weighed and taxed.

Only then would the sugar go to Boston for distilling. And it would cost more, carrying the extra burden of taxation, and probably also the cost of shipping it halfway around the world and back. The Boston rum smugglers were people who bought sugar off-the-books in the Caribbean and carried it directly to the distilleries in Boston, untaxed. I do believe they could have been hanged for that.

The same process applied to all the mining done in South America, silk from Asia, mahogany from Africa, etc etc . Mercantilism was extremely inefficient as an economic system, but it did make the kings and the nobility rich.

So, anyway, there's the background. The bourgeois would be the distillers, even the ship-owners, shop owners and merchants, and the dock workers.

And in France, the bourgeois started taking note of the excesses of the court of Louis XV and his son, Louis XVI. The younger Louis was supposed to be kind of an idiot, or at least very weak and kept under the thumbs of the nobility and court advisors. I'm quite sure he'd only ever had limited exposure to the real world. I mean, "the court," any royal court in any country, was a pretty exclusive club that rigidly enforced their own interests, as a class.

At any rate, things started slipping in France. The nobility didn't believe they were rich enough, and began taxing all kinds of things. Like, they would tax your doors and windows (I've heard that this is still done in Europe), tax your harvest, tax your cattle, tax your shoes, make you pay for toll roads, etc. They probably had a VAT even then. You got taxed for everything. This made it more and more impossible to make a living -- for peasants and for the growing bourgeois.

Unrest was growing. For one thing, the public media, known as "the Fourth Estate," was growing up alongside the bourgeois. The press had the nerve to insult Queen Marie Antoinette once for wearing an 8-foot wig adorned with pearls and little replicas of sailing ships. They didn't think it was fair that they worked so hard and had so little, while all Queen Marie did was sit on her butt and eat bonbons. Or maybe cake.

To appease the masses, the French monarchy would invite people into the palace at Versailles to watch the Queen eat breakfast. She constructed Le Petit Trianon on the grounds at Versailles. It's a little idyllic farm, so she could look out the window of the palace and see a pastoral panorama. A real-live family of peasants lived there and worked the place. She so loved the common people. It's rumored she used to meet lovers there, too.

For some reason, all of these kinds of public relations moves only pissed people off even more. The nobility couldn't figure it out. Here they were setting themselves up as models of perfection night and day, and the common herd just didn't appreciate it.

So Louis XVI, in perhaps the only useful thing he ever did, called upon a Swiss economist named Colbert to try to figure out exactly what he was doing wrong. He asked Colbert, "What can we do to help the bourgeois and ensure their happiness and prosperity? And keep them from murdering us in our beds?"

Colbert told him: "Laissez faire." That is, "Leave them alone."

Well, Louis didn't listen and I guess Colbert just went back to Switzerland. At least I hope so. And the rest is history. Louis and Marie couldn't leave the bourgeois alone. Louis and Marie needed more and more taxes to support the lifestyle at their court.

So the bourgeois locked them up and eventually beheaded them -- and their little dogs, too. The French Revolution was one of the bloodiest on record. It went on for years. The revolutionary government was, by all accounts, a little nuts. They didn't really have much of plan beyond murdering the nobility. Eventually, they began murdering each other. One leader, Marat, was assassinated in his bath tub.

And some of the nobility actually weren't too bad. They did fund the American Revolution. Among them were some of the leading voices of The Enlightenment, and among these were some of the loudest critics of the monarchy.

And then, or course, as the French Revolution wound down -- no one left to kill -- Napolean Bonaparte took over. By all accounts he wasn't such a terrible emperor. He didn't really care about micro-managing the country so much as expanding its borders. He left people largely alone, as long as they funded his wars and in other ways paid the consequences for them. However, due to his appetite for conquest, he didn't end happily, either.

Interesting note: I've heard that when Napolean died, a doctor took a lock of his hair. This was analyzed some time later and found to be saturated with enough arsenic to kill an elephant. Apparently Napolean had developed some kind immunity to poisoning.

I was stuck on a bus once at Place de la Concorde in Paris, where La Guillotine once ruled. It's a large plaza now with a big obelisk, kinda like the Washington Monument, where La Guillotine once stood. It was rush hour, the dog-poo covered pavingstone streets were jammed with gridlocked traffic, the air blue with auto exhaust fumes. And all the lights came on all at once. Paris is called "The City of Lights." It was very pretty, but not really my taste. Being a Lit major, I kept thinking about Madame LaFarge hunched in some dark corner knitting.

The French Revolution did clear away a lot of the Old World deadwood and paved the road for a better -- though not necessarily more peaceful -- world. Quite a price to pay, though.

People like Franklin and Jefferson looked at places like France and they invented the USA instead.

Has the human race learned nothing?

Better than secession

Being a Civil War buff, I've been in endless arguments about whether or not it's legal for a state to secede. I don't think it is. The US Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and no laws or actions of the states can contradict it. Possibly a state could petition congress for separation from the union, but that's about it, as far as the legalities go.

Some people claim that the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights ensures state sovereignty -- that is, that the states are fundamentally independent little countries that have voluntarily opted to join the US for the sake of convenience, and that they can opt out at any time.

Nullification is a similar issue. That means the states simply refuse to enforce a federal law or policy. The states often do this, simply by ignoring a federal mandate or not actively implementing it, but they are liable to be sued in the Supreme Court for it, and they may be fined or otherwise "punished." Or the feds might simply storm into a state and take over enforcement of a particular law -- like Civil Rights laws in some states in the 1960s.

So here's the 10th Amendment in its entirety:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.

Please note how even in this statement, which supposedly guarantees states' rights, the states are held to be distinctly subordinate to the federal government and the Constitution. And also -- very important -- the amendment says the "powers" delegated to the states, not the "rights." No government has rights under the US Constitution; only citizens have rights. Rights come from God or nature; powers are allocated to a government by its citizens.

On top of that, the US did suffer through a civil war, and the results of that, as well as judicial decisions and legislation since then, make arbitrary, self-proclaimed state secession less and less possible.

That's not to say that no other -- and perhaps better -- means exist for the states to exert authority against the federal government. This is an article in the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044199838345461.html

The article details how, according to the US Constitution, the states can meet in convention on their own and propose constitutional amendments. The author offers as an example a repeal of the 16th Amendment, which enabled the federal income tax. The states could propose and pass amongst themselves an amendment repealing the 16th Amendment, and this would invalidate the federal income tax.

To pass an amendment, they'd need a 3/4 majority of all the states, determined by the state legislatures or conventional caucuses, and the federal government would have to comply.

As an example of this type of action, the article notes that the US Constitution itself was created by a convention of state representatives who met to propose improvements of the Articles of Confederation, which were then in effect. At the time, the states decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation and wrote the Constitution to replace it.

So it works. And it's legal -- no cause for civil war. In addition, in at least one case where the states undertook this kind of action, the federal government and congress acted to legislate the desired policies before the states could act. Very interesting..... Apparently under this Constitutional authority, the states can do anything to the federal government they want, can make any changes they want. But all of this does have to be approved by a majority of the states, and that's no easy process. It usually takes years.

So, something to think about. This is a way for the states to limit intrusive federal policy and spending mandates. And it is these mandates that caused a few states recently to refuse to accept at least portions of the largesse the feds were trying to pass out via the Stimulus package. By taking the money, the states agree to spend it as the feds want them to. And when the federal money runs out, the states are stuck maintaining the programs on their own.

Amending the US Constitution at the state level sounds like a good idea, but it requires a lot of organization and effective leadership. And probably much funding to keep it going.

Any volunteers?

Stress testing federal agencies

The prez recently announced something like $18 billion in cuts from the federal budget. Turns out this is an amount similar to what John McCain had suggested during the campaign. Apparently the irony was lost on the White House or.... maybe not. The cuts seem to be mostly in national defense and security areas, though I'm not sure of this. (So stay away from high-rise buildings.)

I have a better idea, borrowed from the free market.

When a big business is ailing, one of the first things the managers do is apply their own kind of "stress test." They review all their operations to see which are the weakest performers and/or those that have nothing to do with the "core" business. For example, a company started out producing potato chips, then expanded into offering ceramic dishes for chips and dips. If the potato chips are still selling and the ceramic dishes are not, they'll probably dump the ceramic dish operation.

Anyway, they measure which are the most costly and/or least profitable divisions, which may have the most and/or least potential for future growth, etc. Some of these may produce a marketable product or provide a useful service, and then they're sold to other corporations or investors, spun off as independent companies, or they may sometimes be purchased by the division's own executives as a stand-alone company, etc. The divisions that can't be sold off or operated independently are usually just shut down. Nobody wants or needs them.

Why can't the federal government apply a similar stress test to its own operations? A few blogs ago, I talked about how difficult it is to get rid of a federal agency once it's been established. (see blog for 3/3/09 Just give it a try.) It's nearly impossible.

So why not do what commercial, profit-making organizations do? Take the Bureau for Studying the Early Demise of Pantyhose, for example. First you look at the costs, then you look at the benefits.... that is, the sales and/or profits it brings in.

Government organizations, of course, are non-profit. Well, they are now. But both the US Post Office and the Government Printing Office have "been encouraged," shall we say, to try to operate on a commercial basis to try to streamline operations and costs so that they can be at least partly self-sustaining -- or pay their own way to some extent.

The federal government generates a lot of data and statistics. These are mostly free to anyone who wants them. Sometimes you have to pay for a printed and bound copy, but the feds don't charge for the data itself. Like data collected and analyzed by the national census, for example. This is valuable information for marketing companies, who might want to know where young families live or senior citizens in order to open a store in those locations. Or, how much tin do US manufacturers import in a year? Very valuable to foreign tin miners who want to sell to the US.

The Census Bureau and other agencies in the Commerce Dept. could probably be self-sustaining if they were operated as independent businesses. And to tell the truth, I'd feel much more comfortable giving my personal information to a private business than to the government. But that's just me.

I don't think the Bureau for Studying the Early Demise of Pantyhose would pass any kind of viability stress test. And, unfortunately, probably about 80% of government agencies fall into this second "useless" category. Many have simply outlived their relevance and/or their work is duplicated by another agency in another cabinet department. They could and should be dumped. They're just boondoggles to keep prospective poliltical donors and voters on some payroll somewhere, or to demonstrate the "Your Tax Dollars at Work" concept.

Anyway, just a thought. But this whole idea would probably fall under the heading of "privatization," so I seriously doubt that this particular administration, which is making a beeline in just the opposite direction (toward socialism) would be interested in undertaking something like this.

But, you know, the feds are now stress testing banks. Maybe they should stress test their own operations before they set themselves up as abiters and referees of what's efficient and productive. I mean, do they really know?

Just a thought.

Alter egos

I haven't wanted to use my real name as the author of this blog because I do a lot of work in public relations and marketing as a freelance writer, and I'm rather apprehensive about being shut out of the market due to my political beliefs. I'm still not going to give you my real name, though it's not all that hard to figure out for anyone who's interested.

The thing is, apart from my "paying work" and this blog, I also write fiction. Thus far, it's been generally historic novels and one really offbeat mystery, but nothing really political. Of course, one of my novels was about the US Civil War, and even 150 years after surrender, the US Civil War remains a political issue.

I would have been on the Union side, probably. But I probably would have voted for Douglas rather than Lincoln. (And the slave states might have seceded eventually had Douglas won rather than Lincoln.) I think I would have been quite concerned about preserving the Union -- and that's what the North was fighting for initially. Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves until 1863, halfway through the war. Everyone understood that it was all about slavery, though.

But I digress....

I love the mystery novel I wrote, and I'm apparently almost alone in that. Most mysteries follow a kind of formula, but this one doesn't. Unfortunately, most mystery readers like some degree of predictability; that's why they read genre fiction. My mystery is kind of surprising, and it's not clear at the outset exactly what the mystery is. (Don't worry, plenty of other things to keep the reader occupied.)

In one way, the mystery was inspired by Doctor Zhivago, although it's not at all political and no one but myself would ever see the links between the two books. My novel is actually absurdly funny in a lot of places and is meant to be.

I also published it myself, since after years of studying the fiction market and contacting agents and all that, I scientifically calculated that I will probably be dead for 31 years before I get anything read and considered by a bona fide trade book publisher. I don't think I want them tampering with my work, anyway. They want things that are either 1.) mindless and continuous action, with some silly supernatural element; or 2.) heartfelt and touching and identifying a whole new, heretofore overlooked set of social victims.

The key to writing this second type of novel -- the more serious kind -- is to stick in some random word in the very first sentence so it doesn't make any sense. Or it sort of does, but... What exactly does the author mean by that? No one will have the faintest notion, but they'll all pretend they do to avoid looking like ignorant clods. And they'll probably publish it. It may even be nominated for the Pulitzer or National Book Award or Critics Award or whatever it is. But not my taste. I can't read that kind of stuff, let alone try to write it. I find it depressing to read some really nice work, only to find out the theme was borrowed from a "Brady Bunch" rerun.

So, anyway, I publish myself. That means you can't get the book into book stores -- another long story, but the existing publishing and distribution system just isn't set up for book stores to sell books from independent authors. Also, I don't do much marketing. A.) I have very little money. B.) For some reason, I can't get it out of my head that once the damn thing is written and edited, I'm done with it. Continuing to market it for months and months is kinda like having your grown children yo-yo back home to live in your basement, pilfer all the ice cream from the refrigerator, and keep borrowing your car.

At any rate, I'm writing a sequel to the mystery now that is very political. So that might explain why I'm not blogging as often as before. It's a whole lot more fun to write fiction. In fiction, I can make a happy ending.

So, who is "Gigi"? That's a name my sister gave me. She was 14 months older than me and just learning to talk when I was born. I still remember her poking her fingers through the slats in my crib, probably hoping I'd suffocate or something so she could continue to be Dad's exclusive "Princess." Eventually I became his "Pigeon." I'd rather be called Gigi than Pigeon.

Anyway, if you want to get in on the ground floor, my published mystery is called Life Without Music and it's available at Amazon. The sequel, so far, is called The General Welfare, but that might change. I'm sure I can come up with something better than that. It's a thriller-conspiracy thing, of course. But if my past work is any indication, it sure won't be what anyone expects -- nothing predictable, including the characters.

But I also will keep on blogging, probably just not as often. Try to stop me...

Cannibals

I'm never happier than when I see liberals deteriorate into factions fighting each other like dogs over a bone.

In one case, I would guess the bone of contention is power. Obama already signed the order to close the terrorist incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay. He wants about $85 million to make this happen. The Democrat majority in congress isn't giving it to him.

Oh, Happy Day....

I suspect this is because the Dems in congress have heard about the Tea Parties and they want to prove -- somehow -- that they aren't entirely under Obama's thumb, no matter how personally charming and popular he is.

The Dems themselves say they won't fund the shutdown until the administration has a viable plan about where to send these guys -- many of whom are really uncivilized and desperate criminals who plotted and schemed to blow up the USA in one way or another.

Other prisoners are merely wannabe terrorists, apparently from China, who also wanted to blow up the USA but never found a really good opportunity to do so. These guys are characterized as "innocent" for some reason. And despite their "innocence," if they're returned to China, China will probably execute them for not following the Party Line closely enough or something and, God forbid, their deaths will be all our fault. The alternative is to set them free in the US.

Gee, what's the better option? Maybe it depends upon how much you love the USA and your own skin.

The really nasty guys at Guantanomo, including the guy who claims to have planned the 9/11 attacks, are supposed to go into US prisons, apparently for trial. Yeah, right. The only thing is, nobody wants them, except for one minimum security facility in Montana somewhere. (The place was built at considerable expense, but Montana doesn't have enough criminals to go around.)

Why not give the prisoners jobs in the White House? Or as Capitol pages? If the Dems are so concerned about the "rights" of demonstrably vicious and pathological criminals, they can take care of them. Maybe Nancy Pelosi can put up a couple of them at her place. Whaddaya think? Maybe farm out a couple to ACLU headquarters, answering phones and such. I bet they'd raise a lot of money: "Pay up or your family are hostages." It might get them a whole bunch of new recruits and donors.

Anyway, the Dems themselves are sobering up from their election campaign hysteria and are beginning to figure it out. They don't want these prisoners living next door and marrying their daughters anymore than anyone else does. Except Montana.

Something else on TV today -- don't know what; I was half asleep, waiting for the coffee to brew -- reminded me of something related.

You know during the Cold War, much internal criticism claimed that US foreign policy was propping up totalitarian states and petty dictators just because they weren't communists. It's true. We supported some really evil psychopaths in South America, Africa, and elsewhere because they promised to join the "Free World" rather than beg for rubles from the USSR. Castro was one who went with the Soviets. Bet he's sorry now.

Anyway, the argument against this policy stated that the US shouldn't be friends with any nation that didn't agree to support at least minimal "civil rights" for its own citizens. This concept has been more or less in place since the USSR went under. Hence, a generation or two of boycotts and refusals to grant diplomatic recognition and things like that. Our relationship with China seems to have slipped through the cracks, though, somehow.

OK. According to the new regime, that doesn't work anymore. The idea now is that we all have to try to just get along. So Hugo Chavez terrorizes the mayor of one his nation's major cities, spits on the US flag, and actively tries to publicly humiliate our president. And this guy is a "keeper" to the Obama crew and the people who voted for him.

Same for Grand Sultan Abracadabrajab in Iran. Let's see if we can talk him out of developing an atom bomb. I'm sure he'll listen to reason.

Always nice to start the day with a good laugh.

Anyway, so now we're back to supporting totalitarians and petty dictators, only this time there's no Cold War, no USSR for them to play with. So what's the reasoning behind this?

True, the USA almost always undermines other countries' cultures with things like blue jeans, rock-n-roll, and cowboy movies. This is one reason France usually hates us. So anyway, the idea is, establish friendly trade relations with a hostile nation, overwhelm them with automatic can openers, Tom Petty CDs, and Clint Eastwood movies, and they'll see the light of western (and American) culture. And they'll love us.

On the other hand, this cultural thing is one reason the Saudis and the muslim world, like France, usually hate us.

And this is also where I disagree with Libertarians about foreign policy. They say free trade and no political proselytzing will aid the US in winning friends and influencing people. But it was trading freely with these butthead nations that turned them against us.

Like, no westerner (US, European, etc.) can gain entry to Saudi Arabia.... They have like buffer zones or DMZs where western tourists are allowed, but only there. Like a cultural quarantine. They want the trade, yeah, but they don't want the culture. Western culture would mean infecting their populations with democratic ideas, decentralized politics, secularization. They don't want that at all. Osama bn Ladn made that absolutely clear.

No amount of butt-kissing on the part of our president or secretary of state is going to change that.

So, it's a lose-lose situation. Guess we don't have any really viable alternative to guide US foreign policy except self-preservation -- trying to protect our own rights and values. And that's tough enough with Democrats in the White House as well as the majority in congress.

Anyway, integrity always seems to work best in human relations at any level. Personally, I don't hang out with people I can't respect. I don't want to. I'm always afraid I'll say something rational without prefacing it with "in my humble opinion" and offend them. I would guess Hillary Clinton has had a similar problem in many of her recent travels.

So, let's just be the USA -- recklessly free, ruthlessly capitalist, noisy, vulgar, jeans-wearing, cowboy-movie-watching, a tad xenophobic, and jealous of our independence. What's to lose?