Glenn Greenwald at the Hillside Club

Went to see Glenn Greenwald in Berkeley last night. He was speaking at the Hillside Club on Cedar Avenue on the north side. It was a very packed house, all come to hear Glenn talk about his new book With Liberty and Justice for Some. Or at least that was the ostensible reason. Glenn is something of a folk hero of the civil liberties Left, and I am one of his admirers.

He's a little shorter than I imagined, a little stockier, and I had the strange, slightly out-of-body perception as I listened to his hard-driving, uncompromising style of oration (he is hyper-articulate, and forms complete sentences together in his head as he speaks so that it is almost like reading a ticker tape from the brain), that this must have been a little like things were about 235 years ago when the somewhat nervous Revolutionaries of the Colonial Period heard John Adams get up and give the Brits hell. Which is to say, this guy is a formidable intellectual presence, and infused with passion for what he does.

One interesting aspect for me particularly was that Mr. Greenwald began blogging about the same time I did, and apparently for many of the same reasons. That is, he was a lawyer concerned with civil liberties, and he simply could not believe that the country was sitting idly by while the Bill of Rights was torn utterly to shreds, amendment by amendment, right by right, with the lamest possible excuses given by Congress and Big Media for letting it all go by. That the years after 9/11 were now so "special," that we were in such mortal peril, that a country which had nurtured the founding precept of a "government of laws and not of men" since the Declaration of Independence could now let it all safely go in favor of an arbitrary, case-by-case, subjective rule by elites, who could grant or withhold Due Process at their whim.

That process has continued unabated since the arrest, imprisonment, denial of counsel, and merciless torture of Jose Padilla, an American citizen detained on American soil and abused to the point of insanity by the Bush Administration, all while Congress sat idly by, afraid to challenge any injustice taken in the name of the Holy War on Terror. I wrote at the time that the Bush/Cheney Administration knew that Padilla had not credibly been involved in any "dirty bomb plot," and that the sole purpose of violating every known precept of the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments with respect to Padilla was to see, quite simply, if they could get away with it.

Well, they did get away with it, and after that illegal wiretapping (another felony, committed thousands, maybe millions of time), torture, denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention and now White House-sanctioned murder of American citizens were very easy to get away with. Once the populace gets used to the idea that there are simply no rules, they take the next logical step: they look out only for themselves, and the State simply becomes something to protect yourself from. If that sounds more or less like the stories we used to hear of life behind the Iron Curtain, the resemblance is not coincidental. Both Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD were unconstrained by principles of Due Process; whatever the state wanted to do to you, it could do, and it was pointless to talk about "rights." Why is it that Americans cannot see that starting down a road where the President is given an unquestioned right to murder fellow citizens, without presenting any evidence, let alone an indictment or conviction, is already a long way down the road toward a similar tyranny? I simply do not understand the naivete that permits such a devolution.

As Mr. Greenwald relates, America has 5% of the world's population yet incarcerates 25% of the world's prison inmates. Although the United States is always careful never to inconvenience the political, military or economic elites with prosecution or even investigation. The greatest financial crimes in the history of the world (systematic violations of the criminal aspects of Rule 10-b5 of the Securities & Exchange Act, to give a specific example) were committed on a massive scale in the previous decade, but not a single Wall Street banker has ever faced prosecution or imprisonment.

Mr. Obama says it is because what the banksters did was "immoral but not illegal," but in this Mr. Obama, as in so many things, is just completely, absolutely wrong, leaving one with one of two (and only two) unpalatable choices: he is either (1) in way over his head or (2) a complete stooge. That he might be both is, of course, not logically eliminated. Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama, with his mantra of "Looking Forward, Not Backward" as the "answer" to all questions about why we never did anything about financial crimes, or war crimes and violations of the Convention Against Torture which were admitted on the record, before Congressional panels, and in television interviews, is, as Mr. Greenwald sadly relates, simply part of the problem.

Thus, Glenn's enthusiasm for the Occupy Everything movement. With his rigorous logic, Mr. Greenwald points out that if the Occupy movement had anything to do with support for Obama, the assemblers would take the much easier, nicer step of going door-to-door and canvassing for Mr. Hope&Change, sending him those frequent donations as in 2008, and not facing down billy clubs and cold weather. The Occupy Movement is all about a rejection of that, a statement that the Commoners are not going to be taken again by a smooth-talking phony, a bag man for Big Money, without an ounce of sincerity in his body, nor a spark of fire in his belly. Deficiencies not shared by Glenn Greenwald.

Leaving the question, of course, what's left? Personally, I don't think there needs to be an answer right now. Grasping at "answers" has accomplished nothing except to change the oversight of the economic and constitutional destruction of the country, as the voters, in bipolar spasms, throw out first one group of scoundrels and replace them with another, then grow restive and disappointed and do it all over again in two-year cycles.

Something else needs to happen, which is why it's so interesting to listen to a mind as protean and resourceful as Mr. Greenwald's. Real hope, real change, begin with first realizing where you are.

Econothermodynamics

I confess that I don't quite get it. Money is supposed to be a representational medium - it stands in for wealth, but paper currency (other than the value of paper as fuel for a Franklin stove or maybe as wall insulation after the gas service is shut off) is not intrinsically valuable itself. I realize that this contradicts the ideas of the so-called Modern Monetary Theorists or Chartalists - if I understand the ravings of this quasi-cult, they are convinced that the creation of money out of nothing, whether or not offset by debt, is a useful economic tool in and of itself. Further, I was not aware, until I read some of his recent columns and blogs, that Paul Krugman has apparently come under the sway of the MMT people, although he likes to draw specious, irrelevant distinctions between his particular brand of cash conjuration and the MMT cult.

Just as an aside: the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times are in a real sense dominated by cultists. Thomas Friedman, the porn-'stached (h/t: Matt Taiibi) major domo of the columnists there, is a globalization freak, for example. It doesn't matter that globalization does not work toward the well-being of the United States. All that globalization has ever done is to enrich the U.S.-based multinational corporations who use it to arbitrage cheap labor and environmental destruction, at the expense of the American middle class. Nevertheless, Friedman, who is taken seriously for reasons I have never remotely understood, is so ga-ga over flat earths, and plug-and-play platforms, and taxi drivers in Bangalore who explain to him how international trade works, that he keeps the global meme coming, book after poorly-written book.

And now Krugman, whose colossal intellectual arrogance is such that he looks with pity on any other analyst who fails to see that America's economic problems are not even necessary, that they all result from the universal failure to appreciate that he (and he alone) is right -- declares that salvation for America and Europe is at hand, through the simple mechanism of money creation by the central banks. He's at a loss to understand why everyone can't see that this is so clearly the way to go.

As I said, I don't quite get how that works. Economics is certainly not a hard science, I understand that. It's full of "principles" and "laws," but they don't mean anything. In a field such as physics, laws such as those for the conservation of matter and energy have to be observed. For example, let us suppose you decide to drive from Ely, Nevada to Tonopah, Nevada on U.S. Highway 6, a distance of 168 miles. It's desolate out there, but as you leave in your Buick Riviera you are aware that you have one gallon of gasoline in your fuel tank, and your gas-guzzling car gets about 16 miles to the gallon. Moving the mass of the Riviera (and you) requires energy supplied by burning gasoline in the engine. Since you are scientifically inclined, you are aware you can conserve gasoline by coasting on downslopes (so that the engine is at idle RPM) and keeping the speed down, since wind resistance increases on the square of velocity. These sophisticated adjustments allow you to go 18 miles before you run out of gas, which means that your scientific acumen actually placed you two miles farther from help than you otherwise would have been.

At this point, I assume that Krugman and the Chartalists would simply declare the existence of more gasoline and be on their way again. Lesser mortals would have to thumb a ride back to Ely.

When the United States ran out of money in 2008, the Federal Reserve stepped into the breach through the first of its quantitative easing episodes. The "quantity" in question was the monetary base, which at the time was about $800 billion, almost all in the form of Treasury securities held by the Fed. The Fed decided to "purchase" mortgage-backed securities to the tune of about $1.2 trillion, not by exchanging the Treasury notes and bonds in its vaults but by declaring the existence of money sufficient to take the MBS off the owners' hands. The Fed further "purchased" about $300 billion of Treasuries through "POMO" operations, that is, Treasuries purchased mostly from Primary Dealers on the secondary market. In QE II, the Fed extended the POMO operations and "purchased" another $600 billion in Treasuries on the secondary market. These exercises in artifice increased the "monetary base" of the Fed to its present roughly $2.7 trillion.

Krugman and the other Keynesian Kultists have been taking relentless victory laps because of the failure of Weimar-style inflation to break loose in the United States, and because the interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities have remained very low. Of course, one needs to point out that even the Fed's roughly $1.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities represents only about 10% of the total American mortgage market of $13 trillion. By physical analogy, if one were to pour 8 fluid ounces of sulphuric acid into an Olympic-sized pool 50 meters in length (with an average depth of 2 meters), and allowed time for dispersion and dilution, it is doubtful that any harm would come to any swimmers using the pool.

I think this is why we have "gotten away with" wholesale money conjuration by the Federal Reserve. Compared to the total capital stock of the United States (about $50 trillion), the money which Bernanke has pulled out of his silk top hat is not a lot of cash. It's heavily diluted by the preexistence of all the money and credit aggregates already in existence; however, if fiat creation becomes a standard way of doing business, it will, at some point, tip the balance so that anyone swimming in the pool will suffer a third degree burn.

This is why I think cash conjuration is so fundamentally insane. It seems obvious that introducing fake money into the system can have a marginal effect on real wealth, as for example, the "support" which the Fed's MBS "purchasing" program has had on the real estate market. The Fed, by becoming the New American Century of the post-crash era, has created a small secondary market for all the mortgage trash floating on the surface of underwater America. The goal, as with the suspension of FASB 157, which allows banks to pretend that all the worthless encumbrances they hold on real estate (the value of which is less than the loan, or, worse, stand in second place behind an underwater loan), are nevertheless worth 100 cents on the dollar, is always the same. The particular set of politicians and banking chiefs in charge at a given time do not want to be the ones in power when the remnants of the economy spiral down the toilet. Thus, rather than face the music, the goal is to use any means, fair or foul, visionary or extremely short-sighted, to keep the contraption huffing and puffing along on the road to Tonopah for as long as possible.

It stands to reason that creating money out of thin air, and then using it to buy something "real," cannot by definition actually create any new wealth. To the extent that the real estate market, for example, has been slightly levitated by these tricks, this anti-gravity maneuver represents a form of disguised inflation (too subtle for Krugman to see), since the delta between the "real" value and the values maintained by counterfeit money is a form of inflation. Again, this idea is borrowed from physical science: you could call it "negative deflation."

But here's the problem: you can only do this to the point where, by definition, it's not enough to matter. At the threshold of non-triviality, you must introduce so much fake money into the system that in fact you completely debase your currency (pour too much H2SO4 into the pool - I suppose that's acid rather than base), and then Weimar, 1922, does ensue. As soon as the existence of all the extra fake money becomes perceptible, in a tangible way, to the general public, as opposed to the little klatch of insiders who fatten their binary accounts at the Federal Reserve courtesy of the Fed's favoritism, the game is over. However, the charade has the intended effect of extending the game of make-believe a little longer, while meanwhile doling out something of a "moneyish" character (lots of 1's and 0's) to computer entries of Primary Dealers, which are then payable as bonuses. This is the actual "threshold" used: can the Federal Reserve do its magic trick just enough so that the moneyish, digital flow keeps moving to the owners of banks which were in reality bust-o long ago.

The Ungrateful Nouri shows us the door

A comment thread on Facebook recently explored, in a revealing way, the various attitudes that a certain cross-section of liberals display when it comes to President Barack Obama. His die-hard partisans wanted credit for Obama's "decision" to finish the Iraq War by bringing home all combat troops by December 31, 2011. The usual cynics (who, me?) pointed out that the Exit Sign was flashing red because time was up: the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) expires on December 31, 2011 and under the express terms of the agreement negotiated years ago by the Bush Administration, we have to be out.

The O Man did not actually want to leave; in order to stay, however, the USA needed continuing immunity (as currently enjoyed by U.S. forces) from the criminal justice system of the Iraqi courts. A lot of stuff has happened over the last eight-plus years, involving U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and it is highly probable that the continued presence of American soldiers in 2012 and after would engender more such unfortunate incidents. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about a 2006 incident in the central Iraq town of Isahqi, where a group of at least ten Iraqi men, women (including the elderly) and children were massacred in a raid by American troops, and a U.S. airstrike was called in after the fact to obliterate the evidence. A coverup of the true nature of the event was then engineered by the military. The damning details were revealed by some of the Wikileaks cables voluminously released in May, 2011, to the great consternation of Message Control Central at the White House.

The Iraqi citizenry, on the other hand, are not subjected to the same level of Pravda-like propaganda as their American counterparts receive courtesy of the New York Times and Washington Post. The 2006 incident has become common knowledge in Baghdad, and if Maliki had any lingering misgivings about the SOFA and the 12/31/11 exit date, he lost most of his negotiating latitude when the Wikileaks cables hit the wires. Although I don't think that the Ungrateful Nouri actually had any such hesitations. It seems that even Mr. Greenwald has forgotten that the "immunity issue" has been around for years, and Maliki (and I confess here that I have long marveled at how this clever politician, involved as he is in completely "asymmetrical" negotiations given the disparity in power between Iraq and the U.S., finds ways to level the playing field) has used this issue precisely because he knows there is no way the Americans are ever going to turn over their own GI's to the tender mercies of the Iraqi mullahs.

Thus, Obama's "announcement" of a troop pullout was simply presidential campaigning, an extremely cynical exploitation of the profound ignorance of the American voting public concerning the historical record in Iraq. The Big Media went along with the gag, of course, except for some of the usual complainers.

We'll still have lots of "contractors" and mercenaries in Iraq, of course, but they will be taking their chances with the local legal system. It remains to be seen what happens with Iraq's oil, which was, after all, the main reason we invaded in the first place. The removal of all combat troops would seem to place our ability to direct the outcome of this vital resource in serious doubt. It also opens the door to much greater Iranian influence, and it should never be forgotten that Maliki spent a great deal of time in exile in Iran when he worked with the Dawa Party to undermine Saddam Hussein.

4,500 American soldiers dead; multiples of ten thousand grievously wounded, maimed, crippled; maybe a million Iraqis killed, millions more displaced; a trillion dollars spent; a huge burden added to an already unsustainable national debt.

This is the way the war ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

On the other hand, Moammar, you only missed one day

I'd nearly forgotten that tomorrow is It. Despite suffering a stroke in June, Harold Camping, noted East Bay eschatologist, tinkered with his End Times algorithm, crunched the numbers, and came up with this:

"I do believe we're getting very near the very end," Camping, 90, said during a podcast recorded earlier this month and posted on his Family Radio website. "Oct. 21, that's coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything." SF Chronicle, October 20 (gulp), 2011.

Just as a style note, I think if you're going to be in the end-of-the-world prediction business, you owe it to your public not to use weasel words like "very near the very end." In terms of the age of the Earth (6,000 years, of course), very near the very end could be a year away from the blowing of the Trumpet and still be "very near," since we only have 1/6,000th of our allotted time left. Also, the "final end of everything" doesn't really "look like" anything else except, you know, the final end of everything. Sui generis, as they say. A unique occurrence. (I suppose; I mean God, who always "just was" according to the tenets of Abrahamic religions, could easily have created a lot of these diversions. This time through, He invented quantum theory, introducing the element of chance into causality maybe as a means of concealing from Himself what was going to happen next. After 6,000 years of watching the incredible suffering of all the sentient beings He created, He figured it all out [He is omniscient, you know, and it's up to Him to decide what He doesn't want to know and for how long] and the fun went out of the game. Even if Einstein said that God "did not play dice" with the Universe. Au contraire, Albert: He is the Croupier in the Sky.)

Still, I think the operating instructions for the Universe are very, very complicated, and I am willing to bet one million dollars against a buck that the sun will rise as usual on October 22, 2011, and that Harold Camping is not actually some version of a modern-day Nostradamus but is instead a senile fruitcake.

Anyway, Moammar, sorry you won't be around for the day after the Final Day. Our bloodthirsty foreign policy as conducted by the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, in which we "capture or kill" all the Bad Guys, and yet never seem to do any of the "capturing" part, requires periodic, and increasingly frequent, instances of murder and mayhem to keep the folks riled up back home, sort of like Aztecs with virgins. Two years ago you were shaking hands with President Obama, you were a big player in the oil markets, you were on our list of Most Favored Dictator-Thugs. Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter brought down the strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt, and we let it happen since there's no oil to speak of in either shithole sand pile, and then this "popular democratization" thing just sort of got out of hand. And with assurances from the rebels that they wouldn't do anything wild and crazy, like nationalize the oil industry in Libya, we got on board with our newly-found love for the "common Arab" (as long as those Arabs don't live in countries like Saudi Arabia, which attacked us on 9-11, or Bahrain, where we supply the autocrats with weapons and airplanes to suppress the "freedom fighters" there). You had to pay the price, Moammar, because we could use you as the exception that proves the rule, and if you can't figure that out now, well, what possible difference can it make to you.

A few notes on attending the local OWS

Ours had Roy Zimmerman performing, so that's already a good start (see picture).

It was a low-key affair, as one might expect in our community. No one gets too worked up about anything, especially on such a nice day. I would say the mood was overwhelmingly "liberal," but then so is the county.

Just a few ideas: I don't really think it's wise to cast the OWS movement as class warfare, or to use lines of demarcation such as 99% versus 1%. The real break points are not so much income-related; in our culture, where medicine is practiced for profit, for example, many of the high earners are in such fields as neuro-and cardiovascular surgery, and other arcane specialties. Depending on how you feel about allopathic medicine (with its exorbitant waste and poor efficiency), you may or may not think surgeons pulling down high six-figure or low seven-figure incomes "deserve" what they make, but their incomes do not present a political problem, per se. They pay a lot of income and FICA tax, in fact, as do rock stars, superstar athletes and other social icons. But this, again, does not have much to do with the fundamental problem, which is the disenfranchisement of the American electorate through corrupt politics. The politics in Washington, D.C. are completely unresponsive to the needs of the American commoner, as the Empire simply acts to serve its own interests.

I think that's the major issue. Until money is removed as the driving force from politics, there is no hope for reforming the American political system. I'm very dubious there is any hope anyway, simply because the reason that money became the controlling force in politics was the hyper-concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands through monopolization (mergers, Big Box consolidation, etc.) and the rise of the multinational corporation, on one hand, and the "financialization" of the American economy on the other. The latter tendency (by which about 40% of all corporate profits are generated through the paper-shuffling work in the FIRE industries of finance, insurance and real estate) has joined Big Finance to federal government at the hip - all these businesses are "too big to fail," and yet are now dependent on the money-creation games of the Federal Reserve in order to survive. How does the economy, acting through its elected officials, go about the orderly redistribution of wealth so that the economy is again diversified without a complete collapse? Something to ponder.

And would a system of publicly-financed political campaigns actually work any better in the United States anyway? As I've said before, the United States is the one Western democracy which has Third World size (over 300 million people) joined to a modern economy. The country is simply too big and the candidates running for office too remote from the electorate for anything other than the election of imagery. The last couple of presidential elections are probably good evidence that the system simply doesn't work anymore.

If I were an OWS honcho writing a platform, I would revive the idea of a Constitutional convention which would completely revamp the electoral system. Get rid of the direct election of a President and move to a parliamentary system (a unicameral legislature) where a primus inter pares system, as in Great Britain, is used whereby the representatives themselves elect one of their number to serve as Prime Minister (or President) for one term not to exceed six years. Such a system could encourage the formation of additional parties, since all politics, in effect, would become local. The general populace would only vote for members of parliament and leave the executive decisions to those (closer-at-hand) representatives. The single legislative house could be increased to 1,000 members or so, so that the anti-democratic tendencies of the present system were smoothed out somewhat (populous states being under-represented on a per capita basis).

Anyway, the OWS movement does need an agenda at some point, because otherwise it will devolve into pointless anarchy or will be hijacked by special pleaders in its midst. People in OWS are doing the right thing, but they are people and subject to the usual foibles.

Texas Used Car Salesman Brings World to Brink of WW III

For the hell of it, I read the federal complaint against Mansour Arabsiar, the Persian American allegedly behind an Iranian plot to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. I confess I have a weakness for such reading - it's always interesting to me to see how the other guys try to get mileage out of the very little evidence usually available at the outset of a case. This one did not disappoint in that regard. In essence, the case against Arabsiar and his Iranian confederate (Gholum Shakuri) comes down to this:

1. Mansour was a used car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a history of financial problems and minor run-ins with the law. Over the last several months, he got involved with a guy called "CS-1," which stands for Confidential Source 1, a paid informant working for the Drug Enforcement Agency in the Texas-Mexico border area. CS-1 worked a deal with the Department of Justice where he got a narcotics rap dismissed in exchange for working undercover for the FBI.

2. The complaint does not tell you how Arabsiar found or encountered CS-1, other than they met in Mexico on one of Mansour's trips down there. By itself, that is a very interesting (and perhaps telling) omission. One way or the other, Arabsiar and CS-1 began discussing a plot to blow up the Saudi Ambassador, in Washington, D.C., with C-4 (no relation) explosives. Both Arabsiar and CS-1 then began blowing voluminous quantities of smoke up the ass of the other (inter sese, as we say in law). Mansour said he had a cousin in Quds, the bad ass corps of Revolutionary Guard paramilitaries in Iran. CS-1 said he was tight with Los Zetas (Drug Cartel #1, in the complaint), a Mexican drug and gun-running gang with a major rep for what you might call excessive, even wholly gratuitous, violence.

3. Mansour (or maybe it was CS-1) then suggested that this group of Mexican bandidos would be the perfect outfit to blow up the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, D.C. Personally, I would think that this hit would be somewhat beyond, and a little too subtle for, their usual skill set, which normally involves blasting away at local police, judges and other Mexican citizens with weapons of awesome firepower, then decapitating the victims and placing their heads in the local zocalo (see, "Murder City," an excellent book about life and death in Laredo).

4. CS-1 told Mansour that killing the Ambassador was no problem, but, lamentably, such things cost a lot of money, and suggested the figure $1.5 million. Of course, there would be the requirement of a down payment, or earnest money, to show that Mansour, the failed used car salesman who was so disorganized that the guy who bought him out of the car lot said Mansour often had trouble finding the titles to cars he had just sold (he sounds a little like the Bill Macy character in "Fargo"), could command this kind of cash from the villains back home in Tehran.

5. There are a bunch of references to "international travel" by Mansour in the complaint, but they aren't really place-specific. Did he go to Iran over the summer? I wasn't able to tell. What you can be certain about is that Mansour arranged for two wire transfers to a bank account set up by CS-1, each in the amount of $49,960 or so (there must be something about keeping it under 50 grand). This made the FBI's job easier, since it provided the "overt acts" in furtherance of the conspiracy necessary to nail Mansour, and, in a twist of luck, the money was routed through New York City, establishing a nice, convenient venue for filing the complaint in Federal Court in Foley Square (who wants to spend next summer in Houston, you know?).

6. The money was wired in from a "foreign country" by a foreigner. Was this Gholum Shakuri, Mansour's co-conspirator? I presume so.

Well, there you have it. Two Persians, money changing hands, plans to blow up the Saudi Ambassador. It seems to me the Feds have their conspiracy case fairly well made. An agreement to commit a felony, a couple of overt acts (wire transfers). That's all the Feds need; no one actually has to get detonated.

As to the reality of the plot, what I notice right away is that you can't find anything in the complaint which describes "planning" of the assassination between any two people other than Mansour Arabsiar, the used car salesman, and CS-1, the guy who beat the drug rap by becoming a snitch.

Also, since the FBI knew that the plan was not in any sense real or even close to fruition (after all, CS-1 was not really a honcho in a Mexican drug cartel so no one had actually been enlisted to carry out the assassination), why did they interrupt the plot when it had been funded only to the $100 K level? See, this is how lawyers think: if the Republic of Iran was actually behind this Robert Ludlumesque plot, then the balance of $1.4 million would surely have been forthcoming, and the actual payment, in such size, would be impressive evidence that it wasn't just Mansour and Gholum playing out a reckless fantasy with a bunch of (nonexistent) Mexican desperados. But maybe a hundred grand could find its way from Iran one way or another, with or without the Iranian government, Quds, or the Ayatollah's petty cash drawer.

I suspect this one will sink beneath the waves pretty soon. It looks suspiciously like a Wag the Dog Op, the way it instantly became front page news with really so little of substance to actually connect it to the Iranian government. It's curious, as to the question of the hurry-up timing, that all this comes to light just as Eric Holder, the Rip Van Winkle of Attorneys General, had his boredom-induced coma interrupted by cries of "perjury!" from Darrell Issa and others in the House concerning the "Fast & Furious" controversy, where Mr. Holder stated (under oath, to a House panel) that he only lately found out about the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco (ATF's) role in allowing the sale of AK-47 weapons to criminals (mainly sales in Arizona gun shops), and then permitting the guns to "walk" across the Mexican border to, uh, drug cartels. Part of a tracing operation, I guess.

Well, you certainly would not want to harass your own Attorney General about some gun-running program, harebrained as it might have been, when he's busy unraveling a plot involving those same drug cartels and the Evil Republic itself, Iran. Would you? So even if an old Iran hand like Robert Baer says unequivocally that it's ludicrous to imagine that Quds and the Iranian government would get involved with a couple of small-time losers and a Mexican gang to carry out an embassy assassination - well, I say, wait till all the facts are in. That's my legal training talking. Although that same training tells me all the facts are probably already in.

What if we didn't have Roe versus Wade?

Criticisms of Barack Obama seem to come in two distinct styles. From the Right, particularly the radio voices which provide the Loony Bin Conservatives with their Weltanschauung, are the usual totally unhinged, clinically insane descriptions of Obama as a Hitlerian Socialist, whatever that is, bent on forcing collectivizaton of the people, herding everyone into FEMA Death Camps, and giving over what little the federal government has left to a cabal of Wall Street Bankers who go to dinner parties with him in Manhattan. Weirdly enough, this is not in any sense an exaggeration of the tone.

From the liberal side of politics, the criticisms focus on Obama's relentless double-crossing of the people who elected him; his abysmal record of refusing to take any kind of prosecutorial action against the thieves and grifters of those same people in his dinner parties at Robert, the trendy Manhattan eatery where he raises money; his free pass to the war criminals and torturers of the previous administration; and his worse-than-Bush record on civil liberties and transparency in government. One could go on and point out his doubling-down on the most pointless and absurd war in American history, the invasion of Afghanistan and our residence there for the past ten years to avenge attacks emanating from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula - but it all just becomes words.

The question is what to do about it. Despite the increasingly faint-hearted "support" Obama draws from die-hard Democratic partisans, I think he's been a colossal disappointment, almost surreal, movie-like, "Manchurian Candidate" in scope, but there he still is, and he'll be on the ticket next year for the Democrats, matched up against either a guy who believes in a fable about Jesus Christ visiting Native Americans in the Missouri area (according to Joseph Smith's reading of gibberish through the portal of a Magic Box), or a C+ student from Texas A&M who makes George W. Bush look like Charles Van Doren.

So then what? One liberal trope an apostate is immediately hit with, of course, is always the same: what happens to the "composition" of the Supreme Court if we put someone like Rick Perry in the White House? My first reaction is that we'll have much bigger problems than the composition of the Supreme Court in that bizarre eventuality, but the composition of the Supreme Court will suffer yet more, to the extent that a court which agrees that corporations should be allowed to control political elections entirely can get any worse. But certainly one casualty of a court which finally tips over to the definite 5-4 or 6-3 Cro-Magnon majority necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade is that a woman's right to choose what to do with a pregnancy during the first two trimesters may very well lose its federal guarantee.

I wrote a blog a while back on the subject of Wade reversal, and pointed out that if a future Supreme Court decision decided that the "zone of privacy" reasoning which supports Roe vs. Wade was a bunch of liberal nonsense, that such a ruling would not mean that abortion would automatically be illegal, nationwide, the following day. Far from it. Such a decision would mean that the states were not prevented from enacting laws to limit or eliminate abortion, but it would not compel the states to criminalize abortion. The distinction is very important.

I have long thought that the abortion decision rested on a very slender reed, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion per se is certainly not mentioned in the Constitution (one would not expect it to be), but more fundamentally the "zone of privacy" implied in the Ninth Amendment in the Bill or Rights is also a legal concoction, and it is on this construct that Roe vs. Wade is built. The Ninth Amendment only says,

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Did the people retain the right of abortion when the Constitution was enacted? I don't want to sound like Antonin Scalia (ever), but it is a stretch. Of course, did the people retain the right of back-door sex and other fun bedroom activities all protected as well by the Ninth Amendment's "zone of privacy" (Griswold vs. Connecticut, 1965)? It all depends on whose ox is being gored, or whose....never mind.

Further, Justice Harry Blackmun's neat and tidy analysis based on trimesters and viability has also been superseded by the current state of gestational science. Be that as it may: provided the Supreme Court simply left it at that, reversing Roe vs. Wade on its own terms, and the Clowns of Capitol Hill did not rush into the vacuum thus created and attempt to pass a federal criminal law banning abortion, then those states favorably disposed to choice issues would provide abortions; and those states which are inclined to believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and will only be around a little while longer until things heat up in Israel can do what they want at last, and we all know what that is. Perhaps a happier country all the way around, for as long as it lasts (the country, I mean). Indeed, abortion has been such a polarizing issue (like forever) in this country, that a state-by-state decision through local plebiscites might accomplish both the goal of local self-determination and a goad to the realization among the states that, you know, we just really don't have that much in common anymore, but we'll always cherish our initial misconceptions about each other. What a relief, however, if the issue of court-packing could finally stop distorting national elections, and we could all blissfully accept that we were throwing away our vote because we just can't stand voting for someone we don't really enthusiastically support simply because the other guy will appoint another Luddite to the high bench and disrupt the delicate Roe balance.

Looked at that way, maybe the Ransom Note approach to presidential elections could be altered somewhat. Forget the Supreme Court; they've certainly forgotten you, my fellow American commoners. If you want to vote for Roseanne Barr, who's running for president (of both the USA and Israel, simultaneously) on a platform of replacing fiat currency with a barter system based on vegetables, restoration of the guillotine as punishment for the obscenely rich, and a return to an agrarian economy in America, then you can do so with a fairly clear conscience, simply remembering that if you want to have liberal rights in the state where you live, you'll have to work for them at that level. Which, now that you mention it, is where there's a chance you could actually affect the outcome.