There are realities that do not depend on politics or elections; laws that are independent of legislation or ratification; powers above the ones we call supreme.  The sun rises without permission, darkness falls unbidden to be banished again each morning by the dawn... daybreak serves no earthly master.

    There was a storm this week in Texas.  Multiple tornados, one a mile wide; death, devastation and loss.  The random havoc of nature is not an occurrence we are unfamiliar with, grievous, but a fact of life.  Often these storms seem to come in the night time, as this one did, and when they do we all wait with trepidation for daybreak to reveal the extent of the damage.

    Natural calamities can happen day or night, but man-caused wickedness seeks out the darkness, the secret places in which to work its mischief.  From the revelations in the past several days about Benghazi, the IRS debacle, the AP controversy, and beyond, we appear to have come through a deep dark night; and the long awaited daylight is beginning to show us the scope of the plunder.

    The revelations from the shadows are not limited to politics; there were the monstrous activities of Dr. Gosnell revealed after more than 30 years, the Cleveland kidnapping atrocity ended after more than ten years, the stories of three different military officials, whose duties involved dealing with sexual abuse amongst service members, themselves accused of abuse...  This is, however, a political blog, so I will restrict the conversation to governmental events.  Even there, we do not have only three scandals, we have many.  The first glimmer of dawn came with some of the early questions about Benghazi and the Susan Rice talking points, although only a few were awake that early.  Then came the sequester exaggerations, the White House tour passive aggression, the mass release of illegals, many serious criminals; the alarm clock was ringing.  Then the big ones hit; the Benghazi whistleblowers, the IRS targeting conservative groups, the AP phone records secretly accessed; lost in the glare of these is even more mischief, the Kathleen Sebelius extortion of businesses for Obamacare funding, the revelation that the Affordable Care Act  itself is now expected to cost double the initial projections, the EPA discriminating against conservatives in FOIA requests... it just goes on and on.

    I am not the first to point out the irony of President Obama's commencement address where he ridiculed those who warned that "tyranny is always lurking just around the corner", followed by the revelations that to some extent tyranny is no longer just lurking, nor waiting around any corners.  We are apparently supposed to take comfort in the repeated explanations that there was no malice intended in any of these debacles, just stupidity and incompetence.  As lawmakers probe for information, the default answer of our leaders seems to be "I don't know" or "I didn't know"... (read:  "It wasn't me, you can't prove anything").  Is anyone in charge?

    You know that the White House is frantic.  They did a document dump not on a Friday, and a few hours later the President addressed the nation on the IRS scandal.  His solution?  Request the resignation of the guy who was resigning next month anyway, and who really didn't have anything to do with what happened.  Interestingly, the Q and A that broke the story about the IRS debacle was revealed to have been scripted; that's right, it was something the IRS wanted to disclose, and they engineered the way it would be revealed, before it could come out in a more damaging way.  In a new twist on Rahm Emanuel's maxim of never letting a crisis go to waste, the administration actually seems to be attempting to use one scandal to divert attention from another.  It's high stakes poker here, but the simpler scandal of the IRS, and to a more limited focus the AP controversy (a revelation also provided by the administration), seem to be the shiny objects being used to divert our attention from Benghazi and the whistleblowers.  The talking points being picked up by Democrats across the board seems to be that the IRS scandal is huge, and that the AP issue is troubling, but that Benghazi is nothing.  "Nothing to see here...  look!  look over there!".  How bad is the truth on Benghazi, if they're willing to take this kind of heat to hide it?

    IMHO:  We can chew gum and walk; we can multitask; we can deal with one issue without neglecting another.  Unlike a flashlight, daylight reveals all shadows.  Transgressors always overestimate their ability to keep things hidden, human beings are not particularly good at keeping secrets, and truth, like water, finds its way.  If we are, in fact, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights... life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness... would we really expect the Creator to remain forever neutral when those rights are being attacked?  The sun rises, darkness flees; daybreak.  If you don't want to see the truth, you will need to close your eyes.  In the words famously sung by Johnny Nash:

  "It's gonna be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day!"

    This will not be an easy post to write, nor will it be an easy one to read.  There are things that must be spoken that we would prefer not to hear; ghastly things that must be looked at that we would prefer not to see.  Whistling in the dark will not banish what lies lurking in the shadows; hiding our heads in the sand only leaves us more vulnerable.

    The Benghazi scandal seems forever doomed to be pushed from the headlines by other more compelling stories.  Consider this week's hearings with three whistleblowers who might turn out to be the collectively conglomerated equivalent of "Deepthroat" for Benghazi.  It seemed at long last that the nation's undivided attention might finally be focused on what actually happened last September.  But then the perfect storm of news stories hit.  Headlines, front pages, and lead stories had to accommodate some of the most compelling and outrageous news stories in months, and Benghazi was again overshadowed by other events.

    The biggest story was the horrific kidnapping, imprisonment and repeated rape of three young women in Cleveland.  Ten years.  Hard to even fathom it.  A decade of sexual assault, psychological intimidation, beatings, induced miscarriages.  Day after day after day of bondage.  Hidden in a busy city for ten years, yet no one knew, no one saw.

    Another big story was the Jodi Arias trial and verdict.  It's a little easier to see an ugly middle aged man like Ariel Castro as a monster than this attractive young woman who stabbed her boyfriend in the shower twenty-seven times, shot him in the head, and slit his throat.  Apparently the jury was able to see through Jodi's disguise, and didn't buy her claim of self-defense.  She had friends, family, coworkers, neighbors... did any of them know that in the skin of this harmless looking girl next door hid a homicidal raging demon? 

    Then there was the slightly less publicized (probably for political reasons) trial of Dr. Gosnell in Philadelphia.  Final arguments were given and jury deliberations begun in the case of this abortionist accused of not accepting birth as a boundary to abortion.  Babies accidentally born during late term abortions; moving, breathing, moaning... routinely were snuffed out outside the womb by the insertion of scissors and a snip to sever their spinal columns, to stop the twitching, silence the screams.  The details of the trial revealed even more atrocities; unsterilized instruments, infecting of women with venereal diseases, accidental deaths of patients, perforated uteruses... severed heads of fetuses, callous jokes about the butchered babies, dozens of jars of carefully preserved babies' feet... God knows why.  Gosnell has spent the last 40 years enriching himself at his clinic in West Philadelphia where the sheer number of abortions performed caused one employee to comment, "It would rain fetuses and blood".  Thousands of pedestrians walking past the shoddy clinic every day, while Josef Mengele style horrors were routinely occurring within.  None stopped, none saw, none knew.

    Evil exists on a continuum, and stories about monsters so wicked that we can't wrap our minds around them are only slightly more disturbing than news of fiends closer to home, evil at a level nearer to our understanding.  Lesser stories included the simple greed of New York State politicians and the release of a whole list of representatives under investigation; the IRS targeting conservative groups for increased scrutiny; the election of Mark Sanford in South Carolina showing that adultery is no more a fatal flaw for conservative Republicans than it is for Democrats; and, of course, the bungling, lying, and obfuscation of Benghazi.

    The lesser evils we ignore, like the funny noise you hear from under the hood; no time, other things to worry about, the car's still running so just turn up the radio, right?  Small fires can ignite giant blazes; we have let things pass that should not have been tolerated, and now we have a real problem.  Our nation is broken.  Our people are broken.  Like the pedestrians in Philadelphia, and the neighbors in Cleveland, things have been going on for years right under our noses... but we have been too involved with other things to take notice or action.  We have moved beyond apathy; in our quest to demonstrate our sophistication and tolerance we have winked at ever increasing levels of moral failing.  Geraldo Rivera last night explained the obfuscation surrounding Benghazi by saying that the President's job was to get re-elected... and he was serious.  The President's job was to serve the American people, and to have kept them safe!

    IMHO:  There are things we tolerate from politicians, especially if they belong to our party.  Lying to us is not one of those things.  Surprisingly, despite the sadly stiff competition in the headlines this week, Benghazi is not being ignored.  the whistle blowers and revelations I spoke of in previous blogs (see here, and also here) are difficult to ignore.  The idea that the talking points were intentionally altered to hide information, that even the parents of the dead were lied to in order to promote political considerations of the President and Secretary Clinton, and that even the sympathetic press was misled, is just too much to be ignored.  People weary easily of confusing stories, and up until now that is what Benghazi has been.  With the clarification of the facts interest is extending beyond partisan critics.

    We all have busy lives, and in the past we may have excused our failure to see, act, or educate ourselves by our preoccupation with other things.  Multi-tasking, however, is a peculiarly human strength, and one we need to develop even further going forward.  We can follow the frightening stories of the day without losing focus on the things that are right under our noses.  We can attend to our families and jobs, police our own neighborhoods, and oversee what is occurring in our various levels of government all at one time.  We must fix all that is broken, and much is.  It is not an easy task, but a necessary one if our children are to inherit a nation worth having.  Having fixed first ourselves, we must lend our hands and strong backs to the tasks at hand.  At the end of the day we may be very tired, but we will sleep well.

    There's an e-mail going around with some excerpts out of the 1934 Montgomery Wards Christmas catalog.  It's always fun to see what things used to cost less than a lifetime ago.  A pair of shoes for two bucks, dress shirts for seventy-five cents, bras for a quarter apiece; heck, Wards would sell you all the materials needed to build a six room house for $558!  Times change, we have Wal-marts instead of Montgomery Ward, a good pair of shoes can easily cost you over a hundred dollars, and your kid's Christmas presents will probably cost more than that house did back then.  It's one of those facts of life we seldom question, prices go up.  Temporary price hikes due to market factors are easy enough to understand, yeah, supply and demand... but why has basically everything in the economy just steadily risen approximately 10,000 percent in eighty years?  Of course the main explanation is that we made money.

    When I say that we made money, I don't mean that we earned money.  I'm saying we created it, printed it; like God, we called it into being from nothing.  From 1937 to 1971 the US money supply doubled, from 1971 to 2005 it increased by 13 times, and since then it really started growing in earnest.

    Okay, okay, I'm not going to go off on a Ron Paul style rant on the gold standard and the Federal Reserve.  Understand though, that putting money into the economy naturally leads to inflation, and of course that hurts the poor the most.    Everybody ends up with more money that is worth less.  "Figures don't lie, but liars figure", and multiplying the money supply provides many opportunities for creative math.  If you had two employees one earning $100,000 a year and the other $10,000, and you doubled both their pay; some would say that was fair and equal treatment, while others would point out that the higher paid employee received 90% of the pay increase.

    Much is made of the increasing income disparity between the haves and the have-nots.  Generally speaking, the insinuation usually seems to be that the rich are taking an ever larger share of the ever increasing pie, leaving an ever shrinking share for the rest of us.  Since the beginning of the war on poverty, the disparity has only increased.  Poverty is relative, and some of what is considered poverty in our country, would be considered living high on the hog in some third world nations.  There is true poverty even in our country, but we do the truly impoverished no favors in exaggerating the plight of the poor.  The "War on Poverty" has been nominally successful in that, thanks to food stamps, welfare and other benefits, the destitute can often live somewhat comfortably and have their children adequately fed and medically taken care of.  In some regards though, this success has spawned a failure, and there are whole segments of the population that consider living on public assistance their lot in life.  It's not by any means a good life, but neither is it sufficiently bad to drive us to look for a better way.  We have created a caste system whereby the poorest among us are permitted the scraps from the table, and maybe we argue over how many scraps they should be allowed, yet few seem concerned with how to move them toward owning their own table.  "Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day; teach a man to fish...".  We sometimes seem content to just give the man a fish; but in not finding a way to "teach him to fish", we rob a vital part of his humanity, and our charity becomes the shackles that keeps him in his place.

    IMHO:  As the Fed continues to create money, it should not surprise us that most of this new money ends up in the hands of those who already have more than enough, but also have the pull to corrupt politicians, pay lawyers and accountants, and buy influence.  Is Capitalism to blame?  We seem to increasingly imbue inanimate articles with spiritual values.  Capitalism is not inherently evil, nor is Socialism by the way; but both can fail with the failings of men.  When virtue is considered quaint, vices accepted and even admired, crudeness commonplace, cheating and lying expected... then no set of laws or economic system can give us justice.  Forgiveness is one thing, but we can't be the blind leading the blind.  We have leaders that lie to us, enrich themselves through corruption, cheat on their wives... and we re-elect them!  We seem to no longer have any standards at all.  We fully expect our politicians to be very bad people, and we're ok with that as long as our side wins.  At our present trajectory our greed will preclude economic justice in our Capitalist system, and our sloth will ensure the predictable failure of any Socialist one.  The greatness of America has always been dependent upon her goodness, today is no different.  We must do better, expect better, be a better people, demand better leaders.  Virtue and hard work will bring prosperity as it always has...  you can't tax or print enough money to buy that.

    Some folks I know recently joined the great exodus out of what used to be known as the Empire State, to make a new life in the land of cowboys and the Alamo... Texas that is.  The decision was not a sudden one, but the recent gun control legislation certainly was a factor in their desire to find a less regulated home to raise their children.  First day there this fellow got his Texas driver's license, and with that was able to then purchase a hand gun within an hour. You have to deal with some pretty shady characters to pull that off in New York!

    I was reminded of Sandra Bullock in "Miss Congeniality".  She played an FBI agent posing as a contestant in a beauty pageant in Texas.  She tackles a man because she deems him a threat when she sees a pistol hidden beneath his jacket.  Explaining herself to the pageant director she explains that the man had a gun!  The director responds "Of course he had a gun, this is Texas, everybody has a gun!".  In a nutshell that shows how difficult it is for the two sides of the gun control debate to understand each other.  One side associates the gun only with nefarious activity, while the other sees it as natural an accessory as a pair of boots or an oversized belt buckle.

    New York, especially the City, would be a different place if we adopted Texas standards for firearms.  Some would argue it would be a better place, but they don't have the votes to reverse course; and in a democracy votes count so long as they do not infringe on rights.  So New Yorkers who are offended by New York's restrictions can fight to change things, or they can just go someplace else, like Texas.  Texans offended by the lack of regulation in Texas can come here to New York; we increasingly have room for them, though there seem to be few takers on that offer.

    I'm sure there must be people who are searching for a more regulated existence, but the pattern of migration seems to be the opposite, particularly for the wealthy and middle class, for whom such moves are more feasible, and more beneficial.  States highly taxed and highly regulated like New York, Illinois, California, and many of the Northeast states have been bleeding population for years to less regulated, less taxed states like Texas and Florida.  More importantly the people who are leaving are taking their money with them.  So the states with the greatest need for a monied population to fund their burdensome social budgets are the ones losing their human resources.  One only need look as far as Detroit, which has been losing one person every 22 minutes for the last ten years, to see what happens when the money leaves.

    The diversity of the states is the free market at it's best.  A state that drives its population to other states will not be successful, and adjustments will need to be made, either in the standard of living or at the ballot box.  Governor Cuomo seemed to be moving in that direction until returning to his roots with the Safe Act, which may have endeared him to his minions downstate, but has threatened his popularity in every upstate county except the cultural island of Tompkins.  As economies of various states succeed, pressure is exerted on the other states to emulate the causes of that success.  I'm not saying we're likely to see the fracking policy that has been a boon to the economy of North Dakota here in New York, there are other considerations, but it clearly applies pressure.  If you're willing to forego a little prosperity in pursuit of high environmental standards New York or California might be your destiny... again, we have room for you!

    IMHO:  The diversity of the states is a wonderful thing.  You can be an American without being like every other American; and you can choose your priorities by choosing where you live.  The more things that are controlled by Washington the less diversity we can enjoy, and the more powerless we are to order our lives by the place we choose to live.  By forcing states to comply with standards set by majorities geographically and ideologically removed from them, we alienate them by shunning the will of their people.  In attempting to impose a unified policy we actually bring unintended division.  This has historically not been a modus operandi restricted to one party or the other.  The Federal government doesn't handle every issue as well as local government can, and it doesn't need to.  Everyone in the country doesn't need to agree with you on education, drug policy, gun control, and gay marriage.  Federal policies enacted by both parties have sometimes tried to force round pegs into square holes, building not unity but resentment.  Maintaining good relationships with neighbors sometimes means allowing them to run their house the way they see fit even if it doesn't match what you think best, or even if it marginally affects you.  If Republicans can begin to move toward embracing some of the public policy leanings of their more libertarian factions, they will distance themselves from the increasingly "central planning" orientation of the Democrats, and in so doing energize a whole range of voters.  Handled correctly, a voter base could be developed from voters who disagree on a variety of issues, yet agree to disagree, and agree that we have the right to disagree.  E pluribus, unum.

   To quote President Obama, "It's been a tough week.".  It's hard to believe how much news coverage of one event you can fit into one week, and I'm not sure what is left to be said regarding the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon.  Just the same, in light of the gravity of the situation, to discuss anything else this week would be as absurd as calling a press conference to throw a temper tantrum over a failed gun control bill.

    Despite the loss of life and limb in Boston, there was a much larger bomb, with much more loss of life and property than the ones the terrorists set off.  It received only passing attention as the nation was riveted by the events unfolding in Boston.  I speak of course of the accidental fertilizer bomb that devastated the small town of West, Texas.  On any other week, this would have been a bigger story, but still not a huge one.  Clearly, the size of the explosion does not dictate the size of the story.  The number of lives lost does not correlate with the level of the sense of tragedy in the public at large.  No one is gathering in West to sing the national anthem or to chant "USA! USA!"

    No, I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip with the short shrift that the fertilizer plant tragedy received this week.  Indeed, President Obama did well to make mention of it in his speech.  There is no guilt due in being distracted from one tragedy by another.  But when the smaller of the tragedies is the one that is the bigger story, the more captivating story, one wonders... why?  That's it, isn't it?  The networks have let us know in infinite detail exactly what happened in Boston, how the terrorists performed their heinous act; they provided us with ticking timelines of events as to when every important one occurred.  The endless news cycle repeatedly has answered the questions of what, where, when, and how; but they have been ultimately unable to answer the question utmost on our minds.  Why?

    We understand catastrophes like the one in West, Texas.  The universe is random; bad things happen; people make mistakes; there are accidents... "why" doesn't really enter into it unless you get all metaphysical.  Most people just shake their heads, say a prayer for the victims, and move on with their lives freshly aware of their own mortality.  But Boston was different.  9-11 was different.  These were not random; there was intention.  It is intention we can not understand, seemingly inhuman and demonic.  What would make a 19 year old with a life full of privilege and promise throw that life away to kill a little boy and two women?  What hatred can be so powerful toward people you don't even know that would justify spending hours creating devices to tear off their limbs?  What heart of darkness would shun the joys of youth for pursuit of mindless murder?  ...Why?

    We are wondrously made creatures, and the complexity of our biological framework is dwarfed by the infinite intricacy of our emotional and spiritual design.  All of our emotions serve a purpose when they are warranted, even the negative ones, "and a time for every purpose, under heaven".  The irony of the sanctimonious "Coexist" bumper sticker on the SUV the terrorists hijacked should serve to show us that it is never that simple.  We do not live in Paradise, and there unfortunately are always enemies at the gate.  We can't always tolerate, we can't always have peace, we can't always be loving.  Negative emotions such as anger, hatred, retribution, and indignation exist for a purpose, and employed appropriately and judiciously in a controlled fashion they can effectively right wrongs.  But as a fist can be used for self-defense, so also it can be used for assault.  Evil men have often perverted religion to direct these negative emotions toward those they considered their enemies.  Eventually the perversion becomes the core of their creation; and when the core is hatred, death, and violence, neither man nor God is in control; the darkness is.

    A common denominator for all these atrocities seems to be sub-dividing people into categories of chosen ones versus sub-humans.  The white Europeans were the chosen ones, the native americans were savages, the slaves were sub-human.  The Inquisition considered those of their "faith" the chosen ones, and the heathen needed to be purged.  The Nazis believed that the Aryans were the chosen race, and so their extermination of the Jewish "mud-people" was justified as the "final solution".  Pro-choice advocates are both the chosen and the choosing, and the little "cluster of cells", "fetus", or whatever you choose to call "it"... well... not chosen.

    IMHO:  The reaction of the nation after the second terrorist was apprehended was one of joy and nationalism.  It was reminiscent of the reaction in the days following 9-11, and I suppose that is this cloud's silver lining.  Experience tells us that this unity will not last and we will again return to our animosity for our brethren, in some quarters sooner than others.  The outlandish desire for some to prefer that these terrorists had been from homegrown groups shows that misplaced hatred exists apart from the terrorist organizations.  Political differences ought not cause us to deny the humanity of our adversaries, we just see things differently.  Fortunately, wrong-headedness does not disqualify us from being Americans.  The anger and hatred visible in the political debate in this country borders on extremist religious fervor, and the end result will be division and darkness regardless of who is victorious.  Whatever lessons we learn from Boston we should acknowledge this:  No creed of conviction or convenience ought cause us to view any person as less than human.  Monsters masquerading as humans are rare; assume that people are not sub-human.  Life is sacred, and the value of humanity surpasses the divisions we have in this dark world.

    I couldn't let April 15th go by without some mention of our wonderful federal income tax.  One is tempted at this time of year to recall the adage that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.  Indeed, there are likely none left among us who can recall the time before the 16th amendment, allowing Congress to levy an income tax.  On the other hand, that was only 100 years ago; death has been with us quite a bit longer.  Just the same, neither death nor Constitutional amendments are often overturned.

    The Obamas released their 2012 tax return this week; they made a bit less than last year, but they still have the free house, so I think they'll be ok.  Despite the hundreds of thousands they arguably earned, the effective tax rate they paid was just slightly over 18%, which isn't too much higher than the much maligned rate Mitt Romney was vilified for, and approximately half of the top rate that the President fought for and won.  Of course, the irony of these numbers is not lost on the President's Republican critics.  Never the less, all of the Presidents deductions are legal, and easily located somewhere in the thousands of pages of regulations in the current tax code.  Actually, most of the reason for the low tax rate is attributable to the Obamas' generous charitable giving to their preferred non-profits.  The same could be said for Mitt Romney (though it wasn't), and who also benefitted from capital gains regulations and other legal tax shelters.  While one could label as loopholes  deductions for charitable gifts and lower rates for capital gains than ordinary income, they are loopholes designed by the central planners for reasons.  Such is the case with most "loopholes", they are designed by those who consider themselves to be geniuses, and then used and abused by the scrupulous and the unscrupulous who actually are geniuses, or at least have enough money to hire geniuses.

    The original idea of an income tax was sold to the public as a tax on the rich... sound familiar?  I'm sure the middle class of the day was told that it wouldn't cost them a "single dime".  The problem then, as now, is that there wasn't enough rich people's money; and the rich, like the rest of us, avoid taxes as much as possible.  So the limits get pushed, the wealthy find loopholes, and the middle class inevitably feel the pain.  You can talk all you want about justice and fairness, but the rich have the means to find ways to keep their money.  In anything short of a fascist society confiscating a rich man's wealth is about as likely as selling gun confiscation to a man with an AR-15 in his hands.

    There was a time when leeches and bloodletting were considered good medicine.  When sucking blood from a sick man did not cure him, which I imagine it seldom did, the answer was more leeches, more bloodletting.  When hundreds of pages of tax code were not enough, more were added, and more, and more.  The regulations intended by the planners to cage the elusive tiger of tax fairness, only provided an ever growing jungle for it to hide in.  The rich with their lawyers and accountants easily navigate the regulations and use them to their advantage, while the rest of us are at the mercy of the jungle, and the IRS.  The more people avoid taxes, the more regulations, intrusions, and IRS agents we need, to the point that the IRS now deems it appropriate to look at our personal e-mails without a warrant to try to track down cheaters.

    It's a complicated mess, but it doesn't have to be.  Consider the simplicity of the Thruway toll.  You drive the road, you pay the toll.  There aren't special exits that rich people can use to avoid the toll... everyone pays.  Cars pay one toll, big trucks pay more, but there are no exemptions.  The problem isn't in the tax, the problem is in trying to do too much with the tax system.  If all we were trying to do is fund the government it would be easy, simple, and progressive.  A simple national sales tax would make sense on many levels.  Income is simply a precursor to consumption, and the wealthy do the most consuming by far.  As in Florida, foreign tourists would end up paying much of the freight.  Adjustments for the poor could easily be made in the form of rebates, prebates, or exemptions.  Instead of looking into the private lives of 300 million citizens, the IRS would only need to keep an eye on a far smaller number of vendors.  No tax forms, no record keeping, no audits.  Simple.  But funding the government isn't all the tax system is for, so it can't be that simple.

    The tax system has become the proverbial carrot at the end of the stick by which the central planners can bribe people to do what the planners consider to be good.  I won't waste space with examples because emotionally we will often agree with the planners about what is good, and lose track of the question as to whether coercing the citizenry in a particular direction is a valid function of government in a "free" society.  The concepts of central planning and a free society are mutually exclusive.  A free people cannot tolerate some elected or appointed elite to "plan" their existence from Washington and continue to call themselves free.  We know what is good and do not need that any should coerce us to do it.  Likewise, planners will be frustrated by freedom, as the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.  And so, having your life decisions decided for you is not consistent with freedom; and planning society is not feasible in the chaos of freedom, the two can not long coexist.

    IMHO:  Nothing speaks as clearly to the attempt of Washington to influence the legal decisions we make as the Tax Code.  Freedom repeatedly frustrates that attempt as ordinary citizens prove themselves more intelligent than the elite planners.  Like the leeches they are, the answer is always more bloodletting... more rules, more regulations, more IRS agents, more taxes.  Funding the government need not be an overwhelmingly onerous procedure... but ordering the Universe is a little more complicated.

    Professor Jennifer Graves in a lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland revealed that men are on the road to extinction.  Men, not women.  Apparently the Y chromosome is dying.  Three hundred million years ago the Y chromosome had about 14,000 genes on it, contends Professor Graves, though how she gained this knowledge I do not know.  It now has only 45 genes left.  At this rate the Y chromosome will run out of genes in about 5 million years.  Men may vanish well before that.

    Though Professor Grave's theory is considered dubious, a wider consensus exists on the shrinking dominance of men in American society.  Numerous articles have been written, almost invariably by women, about how men's dominant role in society is on the wane.  Equality for women is beginning to appear to be a very achievable goal, indeed "equality" might be proving to be an understatement.  Male dominance in the upper echelons of management and politics is being viewed as a discriminatory vestige of a day whose sunset is upon us.  Women are beating men at almost every other level of career development, from college graduation to employment opportunity.  As traditionally male dominated vocations increasingly vanish, career paths seemingly more suited to female strengths are on the rise, and while women have historically been open to venturing into male dominated professions, men seem more reluctant or unable to reciprocate in this role reversal.  Like the Y chromosome by which they are defined, men are being destined for the trash heap of obsolescence in a post-male world.

    In the seventies, biologist Ronald Ericson developed a technique to isolate male sperm from female.  He leased the method to clinics nation wide and marketed it in his preferred cowboy attire with accompanying male bravado.  This was of course a feminist's nightmare, and the warning sirens were sounded as to the doom of the female gender if couples were permitted to choose the sex of their child.  Interestingly, the opposite has occurred.  When Ericson tabulated the numbers in the nineties, despite the method being more dependable for choosing males than females, couple's requests for females topped males at clinics sometimes as high as two to one.  Since then a newer method has been developed and the girl baby requests for that method run about 75%; the decision when it comes to gender selection is also overwhelmingly coming from the female of the species.

    Historically, mankind has often demonstrated a preference for boy babies, sometimes with hideous results for the unwanted girl babies.  That can no longer be said to be the case in our country.  Sociologists theorize that parents are seeing the writing on the wall in today's society, that they recognize that women face a brighter future than men going forward, and so why wouldn't they choose female?  I think this possibly attributes a little too much sophistication and foresight to the thinking process of most young parents.  As one college student at a predominantly female college put it, "Men are the new ball and chain".  She reflects what is a common, and to a large degree accurate, view of today's man, a burden for a woman to bear if she enjoys male company.  For many years the image of men portrayed in the media has been one of buffoonery, and frankly insulting.  The problem is that men have begun to believe their own press, and if the portrayal was inaccurate at one time, life has begun to imitate "art";  men are becoming the inferior gender they have been portrayed as.  Couples are less likely to want a baby of a gender considered inferior.

    What was once presented in the media as comedic jabs at men designed to appeal to the egos of women at  man's expense, has in today's world transformed into a depiction of emasculated men no longer funny, just an expression of a gender become little more than a clumsy pet.  Consider the home security commercial where a young couple is shown in bed when they hear a noise downstairs.  No, the man does not go down to investigate.  He basically hides under the covers until the security company sends the police; his timid expression is priceless.  The message is clear; you don't need a brave man or to be a brave man, you need a security system.  This is perfectly understandable in a commercial intended to sell security systems, but the replacement of the traditional roles of men with government programs and societal alternatives have fostered a generation of men who view themselves as useless.  Few government programs have been initiated to provide services to men that were traditionally performed by women, and so the crisis is somewhat one-sided.  The natural fulfillment that men derived in their roles of provider, protector, chivalry, honor, discipline, and leadership were sometimes bound in the past to the injustices and perversions of inequality, manipulation, domination and abuse.  In our quest to eliminate the inequity, though, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water, the boy baby,  and a truly good man is increasingly hard to find.   Today's man's masculinity is perceived as no longer needed, and so instead of productively using it to contribute to a stable family or society as a whole, full grown men vent their masculinity increasingly in inconsequential activity like sports and gaming, and often enough in antisocial behavior proving they are men by acting like animals.

    IMHO:  In a society that seldom confines it's solutions to the actual transgressions, maleness itself has become sullied by the actions and attitudes of a  far more limited population who have shared that gender.  Like blaming all gun owners for the murder of children, all white people for racism, or all Republicans for the comments of Todd Akin; society stands to lose if it can't make a distinction based on the content of character rather than stereotypes.  As much as Woman, Man is a remarkable creation of God, and can hardly be effectively replaced by government or society.  Nature is an exceptional architect, and humans do themselves a disservice when they imagine their own naive designs to be superior.    We regularly cut down great forests to build cheap houses.  As we build, we need to pay close attention to what we destroy.  Like great forests, men are more fragile than one might suppose. At every stage of life the male is more likely to perish than the female counterpart; male sperm, fetuses, children, teens, adults, and seniors.  And now we are informed that the Y chromosome itself is doomed.  Relax ladies, you still have another 5 million years to enjoy males.  Good men may be harder to find... but who needs them?  

   Being Holy Week, permit me to begin this week's entry from the Bible.  One of the seemingly less relevant of the Ten Commandments would seem to be the one about not making graven images.  The admonition against creating "gods" from molten metal would seem to have little to do with modern society.  Mankind in the 21st century, for the most part, seems to have overcome the temptation to create golden calves or giant statues to bow down to and worship... or have we?

    Man will always seek to replace the immutable and unchanging truth with what he deems more convenient, less daunting, and centered on his own needs and desires.  Today's idolatry emanates from opinion polls, and our idols are formed in the foundry of popular culture.  Progressive thought sees Truth as a destination, an unknown that we are ever journeying toward, constantly adjusting our attitudes as we become more and more enlightened.  Conservatism regards Truth more as a light for the journey, the unchanging North Star by which we set our course.

    Consider the Constitution.  Conservatives view it as a sure foundation, possibly divinely inspired; at any rate a wondrously effective structure for government stumbled upon by the founding fathers, the lodestone of our success as a nation, not to be taken lightly or trifled with.  Progressives tend to see it with less sanctity, as an imperfect document written for a society that no longer exists; more a tether than a compass, the rules as they now exist, but a starting place rather than a road map.

    It is in most men a natural motivation to do what is right and good.  Only sociopaths live their lives free from conscience and a moral compass.  The concept of absolute virtues dates back to Plato and Aristotle.  Attributes universally seen as desirable for a person to have, and inherently good,  are juxtaposed to vices, attributes deemed to be unacceptable and inherently evil.  Humility is preferred to Pride, Patience to Wrath, Temperance to Gluttony, Chastity to Lust, Diligence to Sloth...

    In keeping with the Progressive world view, the idea of unchanging virtues in a changing society is antiquated.   In a world where there is no absolute truth, there are no absolute virtues.  People still desire to do what is right, but "what is right" is adjusted to be more convenient, more in keeping with the times, more the products of the gods we have created.  The quaint virtues of yesteryear are replaced with more modern ones.  Chastity is adjusted to "safe" sex.  Humility is replaced with Celebrity and Fame.  Fairness and Justice are redefined from "getting what you deserve", to "everybody gets the same".  Where kindness and deference were once admired, domination, violence, and coercing respect are increasingly regarded as virtuous.  Charity is replaced with raising taxes, Social Conscience with laws and regulations.  Restraint falls to enlightened license; Courage to an exaggerated quest for safety, Diligence to success, Wisdom to sophistication, Mercy and Love to tolerance.

    IMHO:  The hubris of Man persuades him to believe that he can order the Universe.  There is truth that is eternal, virtues whose roots run back to the day of creation.  Men have wrongly considered all manner of things to be virtuous; human sacrifice, slavery, genocide, infanticide, apartheid, tyranny.  True virtue is seldom something newly arrived at or discovered, but a truth that though possibly deviated from, has been there all along.  We often lose our way, but that doesn't mean we need a new way.  "Just because you're lost doesn't mean your compass is broken."  We can no more redefine virtue than change the orbits of the planets.  True north does not change because we would like to walk downhill.  You can't redefine reality.

    I know there's a lot of important issues in the news to discuss this week, and I do believe we may be at a pivot point in the balance of power in Washington; but do forgive me this if I take just a moment to engage in some commentary on a more human subject I hope you won't find frivolous; the relationship of Barack and Michelle.

    Okay, I have to admit to my shame that I've had kind of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to Michelle Obama.  Ever since that crack about her having never been proud of her country until the voters smiled upon her husband, I've found it difficult to appreciate her as the first lady of the country she was so embarrassed by.  Then of course her constant haranguing about my relationship with the Big Mac... no fat guy wants a skinny girl telling him he needs to eat better; if I wanted to be badgered by a woman I would have stayed married.  Of course her sharing her husband's message about us all needing to make shared sacrifices, and then jetting off to Spain, or Aspen, or Hawaii... while I fret over the $300 ticket to Orlando... well that hasn't endeared her to me either.

   But recently I've softened a bit toward Michelle.  You see I've considered what it must be like to be married to Barack.  Oh, I know she puts on a happy face, but so does Hillary; it's a gift politician's wives seem to have (though Mrs. Spitzer did not seem so gifted).  But it hit me the other day, people seldom behave more courteously at home than they do at the office.  With the exception of Mafia bosses, people's behavior at home is invariably more negative than at work.  It's a sad truth; we are generally at our worst with those we claim to love most.  And so, although we are not privy to the Obama's relationship off camera, it is relatively easy to extrapolate what Michelle has had to endure judging by Barack's more public persona.

    From the beginning we saw a President steeped in Chicago style politics.  "My way or the highway"; those who didn't bend to his will were subjected to cajoling, coercion, and arm twisting.  Imagine that in a marriage!  Yeah, the strong-willed confident decision maker might seem attractive to a naive teenager, but it gets old fast, and controlling behavior is never in the recipe for long term happiness in a marriage.

    Ask John Boehner how well the President communicates in a disagreement.   If he talks at all it's to the press, or sympathetic friends on college campuses.  Translate that to Michelle.  If there's a disagreement he probably clams up and won't even talk.  Maybe he meets up with Biden for a beer summit, or rings Beyonce... she understands him.  And that wouldn't be his fault, the sign on his desk says "The buck stops anywhere but here".  How many times has Michelle needed to listen to excuses like "The strip club was the Secret Service's idea" or "Susan Rice said our anniversary was next week".

    You don't want to be on Barack's bad side.  He's not a shouter; he handles his victims with sarcasm and mockery.  Pretty easy for the leader of the free world to make anyone feel small, even Michelle.  You've seen him with the Republicans, Fox News, the Tea Party, Pennsylvania voters, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan... you  really think he hasn't reserved a few gems for his wife?

    Some wives complain that they've lost their husbands to ESPN.  You think a guy that is more concerned with his NCAA brackets than the legal mandate for proposing a federal budget might fit that mold? And imagine the husband who insists there's nothing wrong with him putting the big screen TV on the credit card; "We don't have a spending problem, Honey, you just need to make your boss give you a raise... we can keep spending, we still have more checks!".  And if she does get tough with him and cut up the credit card, I imagine Michelle would get the Sequester response of passive aggression.  "Well I guess we won't be able to buy tickets to visit your mother this year."

    IMHO:  Next time you're tempted to complain about having to endure the Obama presidency, count your blessings; he'll be gone in a few years.  It could be worse; you could be married to him.

    A few years back Eddie Murphy did a film called "The Distinguished Gentleman".  Okay, maybe it was more than a few years ago... "few" is relative when it comes to years.  Anyway, in the film he played the part of a Florida con man named Thomas Jefferson Johnson.  When the Congressman from his district running for re-election dies suddenly from a heart attack, the con man realizes that the dead legislator's name, Jeff Johnson, is remarkably similar to his own.  He drops his first name, shortens his middle name to "Jeff", and enters the race under the slogan "The name you know!".   Unlike most politicians, he avoids the camera, uses the dead Congressman's worthless campaign materials, and launches a low budget campaign that succeeds because low information voters vote more on the basis of name recognition than issues or familiarity with the candidate.  Once in Washington, he realizes government is the biggest con of all.

    Name recognition clearly plays a role in American politics.  While one might understand John Quincy Adams following in his founding father's footsteps to the presidency, what are the odds that both Roosevelt cousins would join that elite club?  Or that two recent Presidents would need to be differentiated by their numbers because father and son shared the name "George Bush"?  And then look at the near misses that have run for the office; two Romneys, a second Clinton, how many Kennedys?  Get into Congressional elections, and name recognition becomes even more important.

    Few would argue that Hillary Clinton would have become a contender in 2008, Secretary of State, or the presumptive Democratic candidate for 2016 had she not been married to Bill... and "Clinton" is a pretty good name for politics anyway.  Name recognition is not always a blessing though.  It may be quite some time still before anyone named "Nixon" or even "Hoover" will have an easy road to the Whitehouse.  The same could be said for Jeb Bush.  In other circumstances, like if W. hadn't been President, Jeb would likely be the establishment pick for the GOP in 2016.  As it is, even if W. wasn't so unpopular, three presidents from one family might be more than the voters would go for unless it was one fantastic family.

    Another GOP candidate both benefiting and suffering from sharing a last name with a famous father is Rand Paul.  He is of course the heir apparent to his dad's Libertarian legacy.  That is proving to be both a blessing and a curse.  Rand is a better politician than Ron ever was, and far more diplomatic in pursuing his agenda.  I never got the feeling that Ron Paul thought he could actually be President, or even wanted to be; Rand is another story, and is acting accordingly.  Unfortunately for Rand, the rough edges of the old man are being projected on the son, and it remains to be seen if he can clear the hurdle of being palatable to more than just hardcore Libertarians.

    For the Dems, Hillary has made the most out of her familiar name.  For voters who remember the Clinton presidency with fondness, she was the "Co-President".  For those who were rightly embarrassed by Bill's behavior, and still amenable to a Democratic candidate, Hillary is a sympathetic character, not responsible for Bill's foibles, and at the same time experienced and familiar.  Despite her loss to Barack Obama, she parlayed her status into a highly successful Secretary of State stint, where she often seemed more like President than the President did.  The one blemish on her record was Benghazi, and she seems to have made the best out of that, with the President and Susan Rice taking most of the heat... another scandal not of her making that she was caught in the middle of; familiar territory.

    Not saying I like much of what Hillary stands for, but she's going to be a tough candidate to beat.  So tough that there really aren't too many other candidates even being mentioned for the Dems.  That could be a problem for them if Hillary decides against a run, she makes the rest of the Democratic field look small.  I guess the next possibility would be our own Andrew Cuomo, Mario's son.

    Of course I suppose Americans could dispense with political families and go with an unfamiliar name.  This is more likely to happen with Republicans than Democrats, who seem to value fame and celebrity a little higher.  An intelligent and reasonable candidate like Ben Carson might have a shot if voters are finally completely disgusted with politics as usual.  It's a little hard to figure out what Carson is trying to do though.  He spoke at CPAC (the Conservative forum), and says he'd be more than willing to speak at a Democratic function as well.  He identifies as a registered independent, and has steadfastly refused to identify with Republicans, though his positions are more right than left.  He is obviously testing the waters, but the question is whether he is being coy to court independents, or if he is engineering a third party run... he'll have to make his intentions clearer before too long.

    IMHO:  As with most of life, a family name can be a blessing or a curse.  Whether it gives you a head-start or a handicap, a name is not enough to entirely make or break the individual.  Often there is more to a name than just a name; honor and ability can be passed through generations, as can deceitfulness and a lust for power. All in all, the voters seem to be swayed more by name than heritage, so look for the usual suspects going forward... Bushes, Clintons, Pauls, Cuomos, Romneys, Kennedys.  Some will deserve the attention their name garners, most will not.  I'm looking for a candidate who can make a name for themselves... that will be a name worth knowing! 

    Everyone likes to be a winner, but being a well rewarded loser is not that bad either.  The Forty-niners may have lost this year's Superbowl, but don't cry for them; they'll be fine.  Then there's the Washington Generals, the famous opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters.  These guys get paid to lose; it's their job.  They've only won one game in sixty years, and that was by accident.  They occasionally change their name, but it's the same group of professional losers.  I'm sure they'd like to win occasionally, but they're willing to play their role as long as they get a check every game... it's theater.

    Of late, Senate Republicans have played the role of the Washington Generals in the game of government.  They never seem to win any battles, but they play well enough to add some drama.  They make a little noise, get their faces on the Sunday morning news shows, but in the end they understand how the game is played, and they have no desire to risk their positions for principles.  They don't mind so much being on the losing end as long as they're playing in the big game, with the big paychecks, big notoriety, and big power.

    In the 2010 election something happened on the Republican team.  A faction arose that was tired of losing, tired of looking the other way, tired of maintaining luke warm positions to avoid conflict, tired of compromise, tired of the game itself... ready for war.  The revolution was restricted for the most part to the House, but there were some incursions into the Senate as well.  Romney's poor showing for the establishment Republicans in 2012, along with some of the fiascos with Tea Party candidates have widened the divisions between the establishment and the rebel Republicans.  What was in 2010 a curiosity, has blossomed into a civil war in the GOP, as the establishment has discovered that these young turks have no desire to "play nice".

    Rand Paul's filibuster this week may have been the equivalent of the firing on Fort Sumter.  For years both parties have been the parties of big government, hence the howling over Sequester as all parts of the Federal hog are introduced to diet and exercise.  The worst thing that could happen for both the big government Democrats and Neo-con Republicans would be if life as usual continued after the Sequester.  Both like the idea of a big central government, the only controversy has always been the priorities of that big government, and who was running the machine.  Enter Rand Paul and his ilk.  His filibuster gumming up the smooth running of the Senate, is representative of the way Libertarian and Tea Party Republicans have messed things up for both the Democrats and the establishment Republicans.  Here is a group of politicians seeking less to increase the level of their own authority as to decrease the level of Washington's.  Rand's rant and the support he received from the right and the left, showed a glimmer of new alignments on the political landscape.

    The chaos caused by these congressional radicals has not been lost on the President.  Fresh from his first failure to influence legislation through campaign style bully pulpit cajoling and coercion, his new tactic seems to be in the forming of alliances with the enemy of his enemies.  His dinner date with a group of high power Republican senators (the guest list was set by Lindsey Graham) seems to indicate a strategy of marginalizing the rowdy rebels who have been so uncooperative by increasing the stature of Republicans more willing to play along.  The status quo never dies easily; that's why there is a status quo.

    IMHO:  American politics is at a fork in the road.  Time will tell if we will continue on the track of two parties playing the same game with minor and vanishing distinctions; or will we find another way?  The division in the GOP is evidence of a segment of the population trying to find that other way; smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation and control, decentralization, fewer foreign entanglements, more liberty.  There are only two viable parties in our country, so they work within the framework of the more amenable of the two.  If they are unsuccessful with their coup of the GOP, expect a third party to arise, which would not be good for anyone but the Democrats.  Liberty includes freedom for people with whom you disagree, and this new faction might continue to produce strange bedfellows, and alienate a few who like big government when it agrees with them.  It's clear that the establishment can't tame these rebels, the question remains as to whether the rebels can win the civil war.  If they can win the heart and soul of the GOP, there's still a war on the horizon for the heart and soul of the rest of the nation.  Revolutionary fervor has a short shelf life; it may already be dying.  The next few years will show if the public can be energized to return to the constitutional principles that inspired its greatness, or if it will turn to the ways of fallen empires.  People prefer slumber to work, theater to struggle, and games to war;  it remains to be seen if the public will tolerate these principled rabble rousers, or call for the return of the old-school Generals.

   The snub of popular New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in not being invited to this year's CPAC conference, and the predictable outcry, demonstrate the fact that Republicans are caught on the horns of a dilemma of their own making.  Much is made of the civil war developing within the party.  On the one side are the establishment Republicans, who purportedly espouse the philosophy of William F. Buckley, to nominate the most conservative candidates who are electable.  In reality, electability to them is key, and conservatism tends to be an afterthought, or merely a component of their electability.  For them, principled conservatism is a pitfall that can lose you votes with independents, and risk losing elections.  After all, what good are conservative principles if you lose elections?  On the other side are all the factions that are tired of what that political philosophy has achieved, with losing candidates like Romney and McCain, or winners that do little to forward the conservative agenda.  This side would include Libertarians, Tea Party types, and old fashioned Conservatives.  Their contention is that there is little advantage in winning elections against Democrats with candidates who will govern like Democrats.  Increasingly Chris Christie fits that mold.  Establishment Republicans salivate over his popularity in blue New Jersey, while conservatives, still stinging from his over the top validation of the President in the last election cycle, see him basically as Mitt Romney with a personality.

    I never liked the term "lesser of two evils" when applied to political candidates, particularly when referring to two starkly different choices as in 2012.  That no candidate will be considered perfect is a given, and so you're always voting for the lesser of two evils.  However, the GOP establishment have come to depend on their base to vote for unpalatable candidates because they are less objectionable than the alternative Democrat.  With all the noise about changing demographics and independent voters, Republicans were defeated in 2012 because their base didn't vote.  If voting for the opponent of Barack Obama was not enough to energize the conservative base, then we have seen something foreboding for the future, a constituency that would rather lose than compromise their principles.  The solution is not as simple as nominating candidates that will appeal to the conservative voters; there is some validity in remaining in the good graces of the rest of the electorate.  And there you have the dilemma; abandon conservative principles and lose your base, embrace them and lose the independents...  either way, you lose.

    The word "dilemma" comes from the greek word for "two premises".  It was originally a form of argument where one is given the choice between equally unfavorable alternatives, no matter which choice you make, you lose.  Of course in real life, there's seldom only two choices.  The premise that Tea Party conservatives are unelectable is no more valid than the premise that the only factor for nominating candidates should be their conservative or libertarian credentials.

    We find ourselves caught on the horns of the dilemma only because we buy into the idea of a generally static electorate.  We of course assume that left leaning voters will always vote for left leaning candidates; and right leaning voters for right leaning candidates.  Then we look at the independents and assume them to be "moderates", people who want something in the middle.  And so the political dance ensues, candidates who try to engage their base without seeming extreme and losing "the middle", resulting in bland and shallow nominees.  Instead of dancing, Republicans would be wise to understand the true nature of most independents, not moderates, but undecided... undecided, unconvinced, and uninformed.  These voters are easily swayed because they are not sold out to either party, and will lean toward whichever candidate is most compelling.  Certainly, it is wisdom not to accentuate strong principles that somebody somewhere might find offensive, but in the end it is better all around to stand for something and convince the voters, rather than abandoning core principles to appeal to a group of voters who largely have none yet of their own.

    IMHO:  Choosing between electable or principled candidates is a losing proposition.  Candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Richard Mourdock, or Todd Akin might have seemed like a good idea to the conservative base, but in the end they were too incompetent to be elected.  Politics, like any other career choice involves a certain skill set.  I want my doctor to be a good and honorable man, but it is also important to me that he be a good doctor!  On the other hand, candidates like Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, or Michael Bloomberg might have the skill set or name recognition required to get votes, but of what value are they once elected?  Increasingly, RINOS fail to energize the base, or switch parties when it's to their own benefit.  I want my mechanic to be a good mechanic, but it is also important to me that he be a good and honorable man!

    The republican civil war is a battle neither side can win, because neither side is a winning position.  Only candidates that can sway independents, energize the base, and govern in a principled fashion to move the nation forward are worth the time it takes to vote for them.  Successful candidates for the GOP going forward will not be compromise candidates, but encompassing ones; skilled politicians with a soul.  That may seem like a tall order, but we expect it of our doctor, our mechanic, our kid's teachers... should we look for less in those who run the country?

    One form of borderline child abuse that has been fine tuned for adult populations by national leaders is the use of the dreaded "bogeyman".  Many cultures have employed their own version of this amorphous monster to terrorize their children into acceptable behavior.  It should come as no surprise that politicians who view their constituents as childlike would employ the same tactic.

    In the past, such fear-mongering was reserved for the most serious policy initiatives, and of course to the campaign season.  In today's world the campaign season is perpetual, and the threat of the bogeyman has become a constant hum in our national psyche.  Gone are the days of great leaders telling us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself; today's leaders remind us that fear springs eternal, it is new and more deadly every day.  If we can't see the crisis, they will paint it vividly for us in apocalyptic colors.

    The latest iteration of the bogeyman technique is playing out this week with the impending possibility of the sequester.  Sequestration was originally a legal term that referred the act of a valuable property being locked away by the court for safekeeping until disputes over ownership can be resolved.  Politically, the term has been hijacked to refer to across the board spending cuts in lieu of agreement on a more targeted approach.  To be clear, sequestration doesn't decrease government spending, it is by no means a spending cut.  Rather it is a cut in the rate of increase in government spending; so we will be spending less than what we might have if we had spent more.  It's kind like riding in a car with someone who is driving too fast and still accelerating.  You ask them to slow down a little, and they don't slow down, but they reduce their rate of acceleration; they go faster slower.

    The automatic cuts amount to about 90 billion dollars, which is on average about half of the amount the budget has increased each year over the past ten years.  It represents approximately a 2.5% cut to the total budget, if we had a budget.  Of course many mandatory expenditures are exempt from the cuts, so the remaining departments bear more like a 9% cut to allocated funding, spread relatively evenly between military and domestic discretionary spending.  It is from this 9% cut that the specter of the ominous bogeyman arises.  With a 16.5 trillion dollar debt, a 3.6 trillion dollar annual expense account (of which about 40% is borrowed), it is somewhat disconcerting to imagine that even this diminutive decrease will trigger the Mayan apocalypse after all.

    Chief among the prophets of doom regarding the sequester is the President.  His forecasts of a national catastrophe ranging from military inadequacy, to economic disaster, to loss of day care services, teachers being fired, air travel security hazards, lay-offs galore... all paint a picture of a truly toxic situation should the sequester become a reality.  His forecasts of national ruin are ironic in light of the revelation that sequestration was in fact his idea.  It begs the question, if this is such a horrible idea, why did he suggest it?  The explanation of course is that the intention was to make it such a bad idea, such a bad alternative, that it would motivate all sides to come up with something else.  Democrats, having no desire to face such a motivation, were widely opposed to the measure.  Republicans went along with it, and the President signed it into law.  Both sides imagined that the threat of sequestration gave them leverage in negotiation.  It's like two poker players all in with bad hand bluffs, all that remains to be seen is whose hand is worse; only trouble is that they're both betting with our money.

    IMHO:  An important rule in behavior management is that you never give someone a choice that you aren't willing to live with the consequences of them choosing.  We have come to the place where politicians set up the nation for failure so that they can blame the failure on their opponents.  If the horror of the sequester proves as anticlimactic as Y2K, the President begins to look like the boy who cried wolf.  If such a minor cut as this does indeed bring on the crisis he forecasts, what hope is there for ever digging out of this hole?  The President speaks of manufactured crises as though he has played no role in the process.  I, for one, am tired of a national existence fueled by fear.  Is there only darkness on our horizon?  There are plenty of monsters in the world, but we are equal to them, provided we we are not paralyzed by the bogeymen invented by our leaders.

  Humans search for limits.  Put a man in a dark cell and he will seek to find the walls, moving for the sole purpose of discovering where he needs to stop.  Give a teenager a fast car and he will want to discover just how fast it really is.  Give a tyrant Czechoslovakia and he'll invade Poland.

    Besides the natural limits imposed upon us by environment and our own physical constraints, the first guides most of us have for identifying societal limits are our parents.  One of the first words learned in most toddler's receptive vocabulary is "NO".  For a time, "no" became a dirty word amongst parental advisors, and young parents were instructed to use the word sparingly or not at all.   We've all seen the results; toddler tantrums, teens behaving outrageously, and adults who believe they are the center of the universe; unguided regarding limits, they come to imagine there should be none, and react abominably when they discover there are.  We do children no favors by keeping them in the dark when it comes to appropriate limits.  It can be difficult, particularly with a strong willed child, but that is supposed to be one of the things you sign on for when you become a parent.

    Of course if your parents aren't there, they can't very well instruct you on limits.  Barack Obama Sr. may have left dreams for his son, the future President, but otherwise he was largely absent in his upbringing.  After divorcing the elder Obama, young Barack's mother remarried and moved him to Indonesia, but he was soon returned to Hawaii to be raised by his grandparents.  Now I know that some grandparents do a superb job of child rearing; but I am a grandparent, and I also know that the all important "no" comes a little less naturally to grandparents.  A single child raised by grandparents in paradise?  One could understand if Barack Obama emerged from that upbringing having seldom being told "no".  In any event his current political demeanor reflects the attitude of a man who has rarely heard that word.  A combination of circumstances and ability has led to a man who has won every election in his career but one, including some he probably should have lost.  His seemingly charmed progression from community organizer to Commander in Chief may have contributed to a sense of manifest destiny, and the hubris to believe that the term "Commander" should apply to more than just the armed forces.  Indeed, some of his supporters, like Chris Rock, would seem to view him as the country's boss or dad!

    Such was the animosity of the founders toward tyranny that they intentionally designed a government that no single man could rule.  Our Constitution and the system of checks and balances it outlines were intended to serve as limits to the government itself, a way to say "no" to leaders exceeding the powers delegated to them.  Men will constantly test limits, it is in our nature, but with politicians just as with children, it serves no one to be permissive when they push beyond the rules.  No mortal man is invincible, but success can create that illusion.  Hence the propensity for the arrogant to overreach.  There is little question that the media has been in the tank for the President from the beginning, but rather than a humble acceptance of his good fortune, he has begun to believe his own toady press.  As such, the President is moving ahead full bore with his liberal agenda, apparently not having learned the lesson of 2010.  Whether we are still a center-right electorate, or whether we have begun the move to center-left, the operative word is "center", and the voters do not long suffer radicals of any persuasion.

    IMHO:  We do the nation no favor to extend to any President or politician permissiveness when they violate the constitution or principles upon which our government is founded.  Limits are a function of reality, and make good public policy.  Most presidents would prefer to function without such checks and balances as debt limits, congressional oversight, and judicial review; but that is why it's "Mr. President" and not "Your Highness".   As with any other relationship we see moving in the wrong direction, it is best to nip the problem in the bud.  If the President can be instructed on his limits early in this term, perhaps the next four years won't be a total waste.  If the President misinterprets his fortuitous election success as a mandate for transforming our beloved country to a shadow of its greatness; if he chooses to proceed by ignoring the Constitution and the specified structure of the Republic, if he mistakes the momentary naivete of the voters for either informed consent or a permanent state of stupidity...  then there may need to come a day when We the People remind him who really are the dads, moms, and bosses of this country.  He may finally need to hear the word so unfamiliar to him:   "No!"   ...Hell no!