Kleptocracy and Misdirection.

The Kleptocrats from both sides continue to play their political games in Washington while our Liberty is being sold to the highest bidder. The so-called stimulus package is laden with pork and paybacks to the special interest groups that brought these thieves to power. I guess that explains the about 37% confidence rating people have that it will have any positive effect. The politicians and the media would prefer that the public look at the American financial crisis in isolation. The picture they paint from that perspective is bad enough, but don't you dare examine it as a self-portrait of the artists. Blame the banks, blame the lack of regulation, blame anyone but the politicians that created the mess in the first place.

But there is more than just the picture that is being put before us. Just because there are things off the edges of the canvas and unpainted by the artist doesn't mean they're not there and are not elements of what you can see. The wider view is there for all to see, and it does not take a whole lot of research to find it. But even if you can see those elements of the wider picture the last thing the kleptocrats want you to do is to bring them into focus and integrate them into that wider view.

I for one am not buying the "Don't look behind the curtain" sales pitch coming out of Washington. That the politicians have pushed the economy to the edge of collapse through profligate spending and irresponsible regulation is bad enough, but it's not just the US that is in peril. The economies of all of Europe are in worse shape than we are. Iceland has already gone bankrupt, Ireland is on the brink of default and all of Eastern Europe, only so recently liberated from the yoke of Communism is preparing to default on hundreds of billions in loans from Western Europe. The Russians have put all their eggs into the basket of high oil prices and are now reaping the whirlwind of budgetary collapse. Small wonder then, that they have resorting to their old ways of saber rattling and imperialist aggression.

On our own southern border Mexico is in such a state of chaos the viability of the government is in open question. Drug cartels have so intimidated and corrupted law enforcement and local governments that the crime there has become the prevailing way of life and is spilling over our border and spreading the cancer of chaos from Texas to California.

Here at home one state after another are facing budgetary collapses of their own. California seems a lost cause; Kansas has run out of money, many others are seeking to tax everything in sight, chasing fool's errand short term solutions to the seemingly insoluble.

In an attempt to keep the public oblivious to the chaos they themselves have created, the politicians are now embarked on a campaign of misdirection, a new crusade to narrow the public's focus away from seeing the problems created by their quintupling the money supply and the accumulation of massive amounts of un-payable debt. They would rather we be concerned with the "imbalance" of opinion expressed in the free market place of ideas! Conservative talk radio is to be targeted for having become a commercial success. This of course is being put forward in the name of "Fairness," or localization of radio content.

In their typical overreaching manner they will not be content with just demonizing the likes of talk radio. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is now looking at what policies could be put in place that would allow government oversight of the internet. Even looking so far as to require those who would editorialize, i.e. express their opinion, on the internet, to post links on their sight connecting to sights of opposing opinion.

It might be 25 years late but 1984 is here.