Survival strategies of Governmentus Omnipotus
Government, an aggressive and complex multicellular organism, can be found in nearly every region and climate of the planet, including those such as North America where the natural habitat is often inhospitable. In order to thrive in such climates, government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies. These have enabled it to co-exist with, and often out-compete, other species.
A full examination of these strategies falls beyond the scope of this paper, but a brief summary should suffice to acquaint the lay reader with the more salient ones.
Learned Predator Recognition. Government in the United States has several highly sophisticated means, from satellite surveillance to warrantless wiretapping, to scrutinize its environment for potential threats, both external and internal. The Nixon administration maintained an enemies list. The administration of President Barack Obama developed an “attack watch” website, and its Department of Homeland Security identified veterans returning from Iraq as potential terrorists. And, like the FBI under President Bush, the Justice Department under Obama trolled through the phone logs of national reporters, seeking out potential weaknesses.
Hypertrophy. Size alone confers distinct advantages in the competition for resources and the battle for survival. It is not surprising, therefore, that government grows at a remarkable rate. Consider public education: In 2009, the cost of a K-12 education, per student, exceeded $151,000 – almost three times the amount, after adjusting for inflation, spent per student in 1970. The story is the same for social-welfare spending, which has increased 375 percent in constant dollars since 1965. Even the most fearsome apex predators often are daunted by the prospect of confronting such powerful creatures.
Metastasis.Many government operations are able to permeate the bureaucratic lining and spread to other agencies. The federal government alone operates 33 distinct housing-assistance programs across four different agencies, and 49 job-training programs across eight different agencies. This strategy helps ensure that even if one strain of programs dies off, many others will remain.
Alleopathy.In the competition for finite resources, government has developed various means of inhibiting other organisms. Public school systems have become adept at fending off school-choice proposals, for instance. The Internal Revenue Service also has been used as a weapon. The earliest known occurrence of this in the wild was recorded during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Nixon highly favored this tactic as well. More recently, the Obama administration has targeted tea-party groups and other organizations that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution,” according to published accounts.
Crypsis.The simplest way to evade attack is to avoid being detected. Government therefore has several means of remaining unnoticed – principal among them taxpayer withholding. Through withholding, the government is able to feed its voracious appetite without, in many cases, the host organism’s knowledge or awareness.
Thanatosis. Many creatures, including the possum and the hog-nosed snake, feign death to avoid predation. This behavior has been observed in government as well. Programs thought to have been killed off only to spring back to life at a later date include the WWII-era mohair subsidy and the even older federal helium program, originally created to ensure a supply of helium for WWI-era dirigibles. In 2013, The Washington Post reported that the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to continue its operations.
Symbiosis. In many cases government programs have developed mutually beneficial relationships with other organisms that help them to ward off attack. Military systems are particularly adept at this survival technique. The F-22 Raptor program involves more than 1,000 contracting companies in 46 states. Military systems have even developed defenses against attacks from other government colonies. In 2010 the U.S. Army conducted a review of MEADS, the Medium Extended Air Defense System, which found it ill-suited to current defense needs. “Current Army position is: Terminate MEADS,” the Army wrote. Yet according to a 2013 issue of Government Executive, MEADS “is continuing to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding.”
Invasiveness. Constantly seeking out new territory and food sources, government is among the most aggressive of all invasive species. Anti-poverty programs, once designed to ease the plight of the poor, now routinely seek out applicants with incomes of two to four times the federal poverty level. The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010, conferred on government the unprecedented power to force Americans to purchase a commercial good independent of any consumer behavior. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proclaims as its goal to “increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” To that end it has adopted a variety of strategies, including a partnership with the Mexican government through which Mexican consulates spread the word that resident aliens can apply for U.S. food stamps without having to answer questions about their immigration status. And in 2013, The Washington Post reported on the experience of federal employee Dillie Nerios in Florida: “It is Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a quota she usually exceeds.”
CONCLUSION: While a certain amount of government is necessary for the health of any ecosystem, too much can prove devastating. It is important, therefore, to actively monitor and limit government lest it threaten Nature’s delicate balance. However, government’s aggressiveness and highly developed survival mechanisms will make this an arduous task for the foreseeable future.
The IRS v. the First Amendment
The First Amendment doesn’t say “Congress shall make no law so long as you apply to the IRS and register under section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code, but if your ‘major purpose’ under the Federal Election Commission’s regulation is politics, you have to register with the FEC and disclose your donors, and if you are a lobbyist, you have to register and disclose your clients.”
The First Amendment doesn’t say that if a person wants to exercise the rights of speech, assembly, or petition, the person should have to wait months for IRS approval and spend all kinds of money on lawyers and accountants who have expertise in navigating these shoals. It doesn’t say there’s a higher bar for Tea Party groups, or that those groups have to wait longer or supply more information.
What the First Amendment does say is pretty plain: “Congress shall make no law…”
The rest of the document is pretty clear, too. The powers of the Congress and of the President are enumerated. Nowhere among those enumerated powers is the power to demand that individuals disclose their donors, their plans to run for elective office, or their social media posts as a condition of exercising their rights to speech, assembly or petition. And the Ninth Amendment makes clear that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
In other words, if people read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they might realize that the entire elaborate regulatory apparatus that politicians and bureaucrats have erected to limit these rights of speech, assembly, and petition rests on constitutional ice that is thin-to-nonexistent.
True Scandal
A tea-party group targeted by Democrats gets attention from the IRS—and the FBI, OSHA, and the ATF.
REVEALED: IRS letter to tea party groups
The long-awaited Treasury Department inspector general report … says the agency itself decided some of its questions to conservative groups were way over the line.
— POLITICO
Dear Sir or Madam,
We have received your application for tax-exempt status. In order to complete our consideration of your application, we require additional information. Please answer the following brief questionnaire and return it no later than 12 p.m. the day before yesterday.
Your response must be signed in blood by an officer whose name is listed on your application; a notary public; singer Kanye West; Simon Abney-Hastings, (the former Lord Mauchline), 15th Earl of Loudon and the rightful heir to the throne of England; and three eyewitnesses.
Please seal your response in a Klazomenian sarcophagus constructed no later than 500 B.C. and ship it by horse-drawn carriage to the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office at P.O. Box 2508, Cincinnati, OH 45201.
Please provide the following information.
(1) The names of all board members, officers, and employees, in phonetic Klingon.
(2) Your current membership total, converted to base 7.
(3) The complete genetic code of each member, written in longhand.
(4) A high school yearbook photo of each board member, officer, employee and member, unretouched.
(5) The results from each board member’s, officer’s, employee’s and member’s latest colonoscopy.
(6) The complete names and current addresses of the first persons each board member, officer, employee and member ever kissed.
(7) The location, date, time of, and weather conditions surrounding said kisses.
(8) As a result of said kisses, did any board member, officer, employee or member get to Second Base?
(9) When you play “Los Angelenos” from the 1974 Billy Joel album “Streetlife Serenade” backward, what do you hear?
(10) How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?
(11) Do all notrivial zeros of the analytical continuation of the Riemann zeta function have a real part of one-half? Explain (please show your work).
(12) Why is there something rather than nothing?
(13) If Theseus replaces each plank of his ship as it wears out until every plank has been replaced, does he still have the same ship, or does he have a different ship? … .
IRS stalled conservative groups, but gave speedy approval to Obama foundation
IRS office in the middle of controversy gave nod to Obama group in about a month’s time.
Flashback: Schumer, Franken urged IRS to target tea party in 2012
Long before the Internal Revenue Service revealed it had improperly targeted conservative 501(c)(4) groups, a group of Democratic senators led by New York Sen. Chuck Schumer urged the IRS to do just that.
Letters show top IRS official knew of targeting
A top Internal Revenue Service official knew last year that the Richmond Tea Party was the target of extra scrutiny and reminded the Richmond organization to comply with requests for information, according to IRS letters.
In March 2012, the Richmond group received two letters signed by Lois G. Lerner, the agency’s director of exempt organizations, following up on the status of their applications for tax-exempt status.
Lerner’s letters to the Richmond Tea Party contradict claims in a recent inspector general’s report that the improper targeting was just a low-level effort and that she attempted to avert it… .
Here's the Letter From the IRS to the Richmond Tea Party
Among other things, the IRS wanted…
* the “time, location, and [a] detailed description of each event” the group held since Oct. 2010;
* “detailed contents of the speeches” at such events;
* “copies of all the publications and/or advertising materials that you have distributed”;
* “your presentations on … social networking sites and blog sites”;
* “copies of your website that your members can only [sic] access.”
* “A resume for each member of your governing body.”
* “Copies of all your newsletters.”
* “Copies of your materials on Face Book [sic].”
Tea Party Test Case
Republicans win when they stay true to conservative principles, conservatives claim after every Republican defeat. (examples here, here, and here ). As Texas Gov. Rick Perry said at this year’s CPAC, “”You need to nominate conservatives if you’re going to win elections. You can’t do it with moderates or even moderate conservatives. Americans want the real thing.”
We’ll soon see. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real thing: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Cuccinelli not only disputes climate change. He has challenged the EPA’s endangerment finding in court and hounded climatologist Michael Mann over emails.
Cuccinelli not only opposes gay marriage, he considers homosexuality “intrinsically wrong.”
He not only opposes tax hikes, he has challenged Virginia’s new transporation funding plan, which was championed by the state’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell.
He not only opposes abortion, he equates it with slavery. He not only dislikes Obamacare, he was the first AG to file suit against it.
And the tea party movement treats him like a rock star.
In short, you can’t get much more purely orthodox than Cuccinelli on the big conservative hot-button issues. There is not the slightest chance that he will risk losing by moving too far to the center. So, as political analyst Robert Holsworth told the Washington Post, that makes him “almost a test case of the argument that Republicans win when they don’t trim their beliefs.”
The only flaw in the experiment may be Cuccinelli’s opponent: Democrat Terry McAuliffe. In Virginia’s last gubernatorial election, McAuliffe came in a distant second in the Democratic primary. He is not, to put it gently, the most formidable candidate the Democrats could field. So if Cuccinelli wins, he may owe part of his victory not to his strong views but to his weak opponent.
Come November, will it be Sauron vs. SpongeBob?
With Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling’s announcement this week that he will not make an independent bid for governor, residents of Virginia are left to choose between Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Save for some tea party stalwarts and yellow-dog Democrats, few will cast their ballots with unbridled joy. By campaign’s end, a lot of voters may think they are choosing between Sauron and SpongeBob Squarepants.
Both candidates have written a book. And while you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can tell a lot about a pol by his tome.
Cuccinelli’s just came out. “The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty” contains no surprises. It calls the EPA “an agency of mass destruction” and declares the Obama administration “the biggest set of lawbreakers in America.” As Cuccinelli told The Times-Dispatch earlier this month, its central theme is all about “first principles” — federalism, the Constitution, the proper limits on government power.
Cuccinelli — who just gave the kickoff address at the Conservative Political Action Conference — has made himself a lightning rod in the Old Dominion by, among other things, attacking two of liberalism’s most sacred cows, climate science and abortion rights; by warning that Social Security Numbers are “how they track you”; and by declaring homosexual behavior “intrinsically wrong.” His book steers clear of some of those issues, but Democrats won’t. (Those positions also overshadow his deviations from right-wing orthodoxy: He is wary of expanding the death penalty, and recently slammed Dominion for exploiting green-energy mandates to the detriment of utility customers.)
McAuliffe’s book came out in 2007. “What a Party! My Life Among Democrats” regales the reader with tales of the former DNC chairman’s derring-do: raising funds that seemed impossible to raise; rescuing the 2000 Democratic Convention (“the convention had been in trouble and I was brought in to save it”); and, of course, schmoozing with celebs and golfing with his good friend Bill Clinton. The narrative voice is authentically inauthentic, conveying a salesman’s bombastic credulity. McAuliffe writes, for instance, that Clinton “got out of bed every morning thinking about how he could give the average Joe a shot at the American Dream.”
Cuccinelli’s record will give McAuliffe plenty of fodder for negative ads. McAuliffe, by contrast, has little record — because he never has held public office. (When he parachuted into the Democratic gubernatorial primary four years ago, he came in a distant second out of three.) And his antic ebullience may partially disarm critics posing tough questions — some of which McAuliffe does a poor job of answering.
Most of those questions have to do with the way “The Macker” has mingled business and politics to his own great personal gain. E.g., he once made a mint off a Florida development deal in which he invested a measly hundred bucks. A union pension fund invested $40 million — and eventually drew Labor Department disapproval for having done so.
At present McAuliffe is the chairman of GreenTech Automotive, a maker of electric vehicles that is building production facilities in Mississippi. Why not in Virginia — where, McAuliffe says, he wants to create jobs? McAuliffe claims Virginia wasn’t interested while Mississippi was willing to pony up. And “I have to go where, obviously, they’re going to put incentives.”
About that, two points. First, Virginia claims otherwise. Officials at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership tried several times to get straight answers from GreenTech and never could. “We did not receive enough information to respond to GreenTech’s business proposal,” says a VEDP rep.
Second: Why “obviously”? Virginia consistently ranks as the best or second-best state in the nation to do business, whereas Forbes ranks Mississippi 46th. But McAuliffe is friends with former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, who “put the most aggressive [incentive] package on the table for us.” Besides, as McAuliffe once told The Washington Post, “Who do you do business with? People you meet in life.”
Such wheeling and dealing represents the sort of crony capitalism so many people on both the left and the right have come to abhor. Conservatives deplore the way it facilitates the political allocation of economic goods, to the detriment of fair and open competition in the free market. Progressives despise the privileging of powerful elites who leverage insider connections to get rich through avenues unavailable to working stiffs. Bill Clinton might have wanted to give the average Joe a shot at the American Dream, but Terry McAuliffe seems more keen to wrangle a better-than-average shot.
At one point in his book, McAuliffe says raising money for gubernatorial candidates is easy because “they have all kinds of business to hand out, road contracts, construction jobs, you name it.” As governor, whom would McAuliffe hand that business out to — the most qualified, or the most connected? The fear about a Cuccinelli administration is that it would, like Savonarola’s, yield a reign of far too many principles far too stridently enforced. The fear about a McAuliffe administration is that it would yield a reign of far too few.
Will the Right Come Around on Pot?
Advocates of treating marijuana more like alcohol gained another ally recently: the United Nations.
The U.N. would claim otherwise. In fact, the U.N.’s International Narcotics Control Board would hotly deny it. The agency’s latest report laments the legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington, declaring the approval of recreational marijuana use “in contravention to” the 1961 U.N. Convention on Narcotics.
Raymond Yans, the head of the INCB, has gone further — arguing that ballot measures legalizing recreational, and even medical, marijuana “undermine the humanitarian aims of the drug control system and are a threat to public health and well-being.” Echoing America’s domestic drug warriors, Yans called medical marijuana “a backdoor to legalization for recreational use.”
Here in the U.S., United Nations disapproval can only help the cause of legalization where it needs help the most: on the right. According to a December poll by Gallup, Democrats favor legalization 61-38. Independents are about evenly split. But Republicans favor continued prohibition, by a 2-1 margin.
They might favor it less if they knew the U.N. were, implicitly, telling states what to do. Just look at the conservative reaction to Agenda 21 — a voluntary U.N. program that encourages bike paths and urban planning. Conservatives see it as nothing less than the first step on the road to serfdom.
Take Scott Lingamfelter, who is running for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in Virginia. This year he sponsored a resolution denouncing Agenda 21 as a “radical” plan for “social engineering” that was being “covertly introduced” across the nation. In a January memo to constituents, he wrote that Agenda 21 is a conspiracy to “consolidate liberal power over the rest of us” and then “tear down private property ownership, single-family homes and other basic tenets of American life.”
The national GOP shares such sentiments. Its 2012 platform declared, “We strongly reject Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.” It also devoted an entire segment to federalism. Republicans do not like ostensibly higher authorities mucking about in local matters, and that includes federal authorities. So it may be worth notice that the Gallup poll also showed a lopsided majority of Americans — 64 percent — think Washington should not step in to enforce federal marijuana laws in states where pot has been legalized.
That may be one reason the Obama administration continues to hem and haw about its plans for Colorado and Washington. During a Senate appearance last week, Attorney General Eric Holder said — again — the administration was “still considering” its options. This hasn’t pleased the nation’s drug-war hawks, who want the Obama administration to file suit, pronto, to pre-empt the legalization measures.
Federal law trumps state law, and federal law defines marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance — in the same category as heroin. This probably seems jarring to the 42 percent of Americans who have used marijuana at least once. Marijuana is not good for you, but it is not on the same plane as smack.
The consequences of marijuana prohibition, however, have grown high indeed. Marijuana accounts for nearly half of all drug prosecutions. Even if you assume half of those cases are plea-bargained down from trafficking, the country is still spending tremendous resources to punish people for having an occasional toke.
If Holder does move against Colorado and Washington, it will be interesting to see the response from another attorney general — Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli. On Thursday, the tea party hero and champion of states’ rights will give the opening speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. This year CPAC organizers shut out Republican Govs. Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, who evidently committed the sin of ideological deviationism. But the organizers apparently did not mind Cuccinelli telling a class at the University of Virginia he has no objection to state-level experiments with legalization — or that his own views on the issue are evolving.
In his new book “The Last Line of Defense,” Cuccinelli contends the states provide protection from federal tyranny. This is an argument many conservatives find as appealing as they find the U.N. objectionable. And if they extend that line of thinking just a bit, they may come around on pot.
The syllogism is easy enough to follow: The U.N. should not tell Washington what it can do, and Washington should not tell the states what they can do — so why then should the states tell individuals what they can smoke? What sovereignty is more important than the individual kind?
With liberals such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dictating how much soda you can buy, tea party enthusiasts already are primed to declare not just “Don’t tread on me” but also, “Keep your laws off my body.” After all, as Lingamfelter put it in his January memo about Agenda 21: The great threat from the U.N. is that it wants to “tak(e) away individual freedoms from people like you and me.” And that would be, pardon the term, a real drag.
The Tea Party: Driven By ‘Harshly Coercive Toilet Training’ and ‘Anal Eroticism,’ Says Unintentionally Hilarious Study
Seriously, here’s the abstract.
This has gotta be a spoof. Please, please let this be a spoof. Because, if it’s not… .
Union Violence vs. Tea Party Rhetoric
Remember all the hand-wringing over the angry rhetoric of the Tea Party a couple of years ago? Irresponsible voices even blamed that rhetoric for the Gabby Giffords shooting.
But if violent rhetoric is bad, what about actual violence? Isn’t that much, much worse?
(Hint: yes.)
