Putin's Useful Idiot At Work

That's the most sane thing they have done all year.

 

For anyone searching for the truth in this mountain of Ruskie-hysteria:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-17/david-stockman-blasts-derangement-danger-potomac

The horrific shooting spree on the practice field of the GOP's congressional baseball team was hardly the end of this week's madness on the Potomac.

As it happened, the former was apparently another random eruption by of one of America's sicko lone wolves -- a wretch in the same league as South Carolina church killer, Dylann Roof. Notwithstanding that the latter had littered the nether regions of the internet with racist rantings while the former was apparently a prolific Never Trumper left-winger, neither represented a real threat to the nation's equanimity -- even if they did bring a savage rain of violence to bear on those unfortunate dozens caught in their immediate line of fire. Not so for the 325 million American citizens who were pounded upon during the balance of the day by the allegedly "sane" Imperial City officialdom which rules the roost in America.

Specifically, we have in mind Janet Yellen's hideous presser in which she declared "mission accomplished" and that the US economy is blessed with "solid fundamentals" that are getting ever stronger. And in the same vein of unreality, there soon came the Senate's 97-2 vote to smack the Donald in his ample jaws and impose even more sanctions on Russia, thereby bringing the nation another step closer to the brink of war and bankruptcy.

Let us unpack this. The American people are being brought to ruin by three institutions that are mortal threats to liberty and prosperity. To wit, the Federal Reserve, the military/industrial/surveillance complex and a sinecured Congress that is burying unborn generations in debt -- even as it sanctimoniously presumes that it is doing god's work by servicing the beltway racketeers who keep it perpetually in office.

On the latter score, it is worth reminding once again. An incumbent House member standing for reelection has a smaller chance of losing his seat than did a Politburo member during the heyday of the post-war Soviet Union.



So it is no wonder that the Congress is filled by Warfare State lifers like Senator John McCain. This senile old fool appears to believe that he is some kind of latter day proconsul of the American Empire -- who struts around Washington spreading bellicose lies and flagrant exaggerations about Washington's self-created enemies.

So doing, McCain helps to keep the Imperial City enthrall to the defense contractors and military and intelligence bureaucracies that he champions out of sheer will to power and ornery bloodlust.

Not surprisingly, therefore, McCain was one of the principal authors and movers behind this week's latest spasm of anti-Russia hysteria. The bill would impose new sanctions against Russia “in response to the violation of the territorial integrity of the Ukraine and Crimea, its brazen cyber-attacks and interference in elections, and its continuing aggression in Syria,” according to the deal's sponsors.

Everyone of these assertions are blatant lies, of course. Russia is in Syria at the behest of its constitutionally established government; it is the CIA and its stooges among the Persian Gulf states which provides arms and billions to the head-chopping jihadist radicals, who are the real aggressors in what is now a desolate land of ruin and refugees.

Likewise, it was Washington's aggression -- via funding and political support -- in February 2014 that led to a coup on the streets of Kiev and the overthrow of its honestly elected President. The latter made the "mistake" of spurning NATO and the EU in favor of a more palatable economic deal with Moscow -- its historic suzerain.

Moreover, it was the virulent anti-Russian neo-Nazi putsch -- handpicked by the US Ambassador to Ukraine -- that led to insurrection against the Kiev regime in the historically Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimea regions; and then to the 90 percent referendum vote of the latter to rejoin Russia, which it had been an integral part of for more than 160 years after 1783.

As for Russian "interference" in the 2016 elections in America -- the very idea of it is ludicrous. The overwhelming source of "influence" in the American election process is the respective political parties, the legions of self-interested lobbies and PACs and the mainstream media and cable channels, which are overwhelmingly and irrationally anti-Putin.

So where did this nefarious "influencing" come from? The RT television network?

Puleese! Your editor can attest to having appeared on that network several times and to have attacked with some vigor the three rotten American institutions mentioned above---the Fed, the military/industrial/surveillance complex and the Congress.

But never once did we get any instructions from the Russians on the formulation of our broadsides. We thunk 'em up all on our own!

More importantly, we never heard from a single American viewer, either. Perhaps that's because RT apparently has fewer than a million viewers per day in the US.

So all the brouhaha is apparently about two-bit cyber-hacking that may or may not be the work of Russian State actors.

But so what? There exists a massive $200 billion per year internet security business in the world because by its very nature the worldwide web begets legions of hackers, thieves and malicious trolls.

These hacking operations are overwhelmingly conducted privately for profit and malice, but there is one giant state actor that does operate for the purpose of political influence and meddling in the affairs of nearly every nation on earth.

We are talking about the massive multi-billion hacking operation at National Security Agency (NSA) called Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The latter spends billions not only trolling every agency and bureau of the Russian Government -- and the French government and Canadian government, too, among others -- but also engages in worldwide cyber-false flag operations designed to lay down the "footprint" of Russian and others foreign agencies on top of Washington's own skullduggery.

And that's just NSA. The CIA has a counterpart operation in the same kind of worldwide hacking business, and these may only be the tip of the iceberg. After all, the total acknowledged budget of the 17-agency "Intelligence Community" (IC) is upwards of $75 billion or nearly 50 percent more than Russia's entire military budget including aircraft fuel, soldiers pay and spare boots.

Needless to say, the self-appointed imperial proconsuls' like McCain never stop to ask whether or not Washington's massive cyber warfare operations might be expected to generate counter-actions from those targeted as Washington's enemies or, more importantly, something even more insidious.

That is, McCain and in his Capitol Hill war party do not even know for sure whether "fancy bear" and the other code-named Russian state malefactors constantly bandied about in the mainstream media are really anything more than a couple of fat guys siting at desks at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade propagating false-flag cyber-attacks.

In any event, Senator McCain, was delighted with this week's handiwork. The amendment allows “broad new sanctions on key sectors of Russia?s economy, including mining, metals, shipping and railways” and authorizes “robust assistance to strengthen democratic institutions and counter disinformation across Central and Eastern European countries that are vulnerable to Russian aggression and interference.”

Likewise, these new sanctions would be imposed on “corrupt Russian actors” and those “involved in serious human rights abuses". They would also target those who supply weapons to the Syrian government or who work with the Russian defense industry, as well as “those conducting malicious cyber activity on behalf of the Russian government” and “those involved in corrupt privatization of state-owned assets.”

In short, Wednesday afternoon the US Senate just plain went nuts attacking a largely non-existent threat emanating from a pipsqueak nation that has a GDP equal to only seven percent of that of the US and no capacity whatsoever -- other than one smoke-belching 40-year old aircraft carrier and a fleet rowboats -- to attack the shores of New Jersey or any other place in the USA.

But those realities did not stop McCain from gassing effusively about his own dangerous handiwork:



'We must take our own side in this fight. Not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans,' said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) before the vote. 'It?s time to respond to Russia?s attack on American democracy with strength, with resolve, with common purpose, and with action.'

The truth is, Russia has no more attacked American democracy than did the North Vietnamese at the Bay of Tonkin or the Spaniards on the Battleship Maine in 1898.

More importantly, no one else in the world thinks Russia is a serious threat -- except the bureaucrats of NATO who make a living concocting such threats; and some itinerate nationalist politicians in Eastern Europe who are never loathe to play the Russian card in their quest for power and attention.

Even the Donald's own Secretary of State had this to say earlier in the week during his congressional testimony:

 

'I have yet to have a bilateral, one-on-one, a poolside conversation with a single counterpart in any country: in Europe, Middle East, even South-East Asia, that has not said to me: please, address your relationship with Russia, it has to be improved,' Tillerson said on Tuesday, testifying before the Senate appropriations subcommittee about the proposed State Department budget.

Folks, the point is quite simple. Unless Washington's bloated and wasteful $700 billion national security budget is pared back drastically, there is not a snowball's chance in the hot place of re-establishing fiscal discipline. As long the GOP hawks and pro-war Dems are pumping massive funding into the Deep End of the Swamp, the will be no cuts in domestic appropriations and no entitlement reforms, either.

Indeed, ever since Ronald Reagan's mild assault on the Welfare State was decisively turned back on Capitol Hill in the spring of 1981, the "guns and butter coalition" has ruled the roost. And that insidious coalition has taken the national debt from $1 trillion to $20 trillion along the way -- even has it has locked in an automatic growth to $30 trillion or 140 percent of GDP by 2027.

That is also why the Deep State and Washington's bipartisan War Party will not desist until they have removed the Donald from office. And that's for the unspeakable sin of suggesting that rapprochement with the Russians and Putin makes more sense than the path to war and fiscal bankruptcy that is underway today.

Self-evidently, hell hath no fury like the prospect for world peace and the dismantlement of Imperial Washington's destructive global empire. A tiny step in that direction was all that General Mike Flynn undertook during his infamous calls with the Russian Ambassador in late December -- a welcome initiative for which he was unceremoniously fired and is now under unrelenting persecution.

But it gets worse. Based on new leaks to the Washington Post it is now clear that the Deep State has used the Flynn Affair and the Donald's naïve request to former FBI director Comey to "go easy" on Flynn as a pretext for obstruction of justice charges against the President himself:



The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia?s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.



The move by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump?s own conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

In this context, it is truly amazing that the "markets" have not yet woken from their stupor. The drive to unseat the Donald will leave the Imperial City in ungoverned chaos during the interim -- meaning an unending crisis over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and government shutdowns.

Still, perhaps by the looks of today's sea of red, the whopper told by Yellen during her presser yesterday may finally be sinking in.

Our clueless Keynesian school marm not only falsely claimed "mission accomplished" and that the US economy is heading for the promised land of permanent full employment and unprecedented prosperity. She also claimed that the Fed would soon begin normalizing its balance sheet to the tune of $50 billion per month of bond holdings runoff (i.e. effectively bond sales) -- ultimately shrinking its holdings by more than $2 trillion -- and that there would be nary a negative ripple effect thereupon.

As we will soon document further, the first part of Yellen's proclamation is a risible lie. There has been zero net gain in industrial production since September 2007; no net gain in breadwinners jobs since January 2001; and zero gains in real median family incomes since 1989. And that's permanent full employment prosperity?

But the real whopper was her assurance that the Fed's balance sheet normalization would be of no more moment than "watching paint dry" on a wall.

Say what?

Surely, Yellen does not mean that the law of supply and demand in the bond market has been repealed -- such that $2 trillion of extra supply will not have any impact whatsoever on the price and yield of government debt securities. After all, if that is true when the Fed is selling bonds, why would it not have been true when it was buying them hand-over-fist?

Indeed, by the Fed's own lights its $3.5 trillion balance sheet expansion after the financial crisis caused bond yields to decline by more than 100 basis points -- and we think that sharply understates the matter because it does not account for the "front-runners" effect.

That is, the hundreds of billions of bond purchased by carry trade gamblers, who were given free overnight funding to the tune of 97 percent of their investment, in order to by the very same bonds -- down to the exact CUSIP numbers -- that the Fed had announced it would be buying.

Stated differently, what was the point of QE if it was not to falsify and suppress bond yields in order to goose economic activity -- even if that "stimulus", as it happened, never really left the canyons of Wall Street?

By the same token, why in the world would Yellen expect that the front-runners who fueled the bond bubble during QE will not find is profitable to short-sell what the Fed will be selling once its balance sheet shrinking campaign gets started?

Needless to say, the 100-300 basis points rise in the 10-year bond year bond yield that would result from the combination of Fed selling and speculators piling on would cause the entire global bond bubble to implode, and all the economic rot that is built upon it to shatter.

How long, for example, would the $2.6 trillion market in junk loans and bonds last under that regime. Given that the Fed's own action fueled a manic stampede toward yield, the havoc implicit in the chart below is nearly unfathomable.

The fact, is when there are no new breadwinner jobs, there is no gain in living standards or real prosperity. Indeed, Janet Yellen is lost in a Keynesian puzzle palace -- and that is extremely bad news for the casino punters who still refuse to acknowledge the obvious.

 

Um, @shorerider, um, interesting posts. I had never heard of zero hedge before, and since I hadn't, and with all of the, um, interesting, assertions presented, I searched for info on zero hedge. I saw descriptions like pro-Trump, pro-Russia, and "nearly indecipherable analyses".

 

Yeah, it was trying to be the conservative/libertarian version of Matt Taibi in style and Alex jones in substance. Filled with unsupported assertions and gusses, "America is worse because of xyz", References the "Deep state" along with other dog whistle nonsense, and then blames Crimea on the US Ambassador(at which point I stopped trying to take it seriously).

 

i read them a few times researching market. They are batsh*t crazy. Keep on predicting doom day for the stock markets every few weeks. Get out of stocks, it's coming now literally throughout 2016. One of those piece of junk website not worth anything.

EDIT: I don't know if they are pro-Trump, I just know they are idiot. But comes to think of it... maybe they are a Russian run website.

 

Yes a lot of it is level 10 Doomsdayer tripe, but to the original article I posted: It was not written by Zerohedge - it was a re-post of a piece written by David Stockman, who if you do a bit of research, is one of few outspoken voices of sanity in a sea of fake news, in my opinion. His economic and geo-political analyses are generally spot-on in my opinion. Whether you agree with him or not, well, it is politics...

 

FYI the origin of the phrase "Deep State" is not the brainchild of a conspiracy whack-job:



For anyone interested in how modern day DC works, I highly suggest the read.

 

I guess my main criticism is pasting such huge blobs of text. Give us a link and then share some of what you see as highlights.

On that article's topic, I tend to start slowly backing away from authors who froth about The Federal Reserve as a demonic force. The Fed is not what concentrated all wealth in the pockets of a select few Americans over forty years. Or I have not been convinced that it is even in the top ten reasons.

 

I know of David Stockman... Reagan's original architect of "trickle-down" who I have posted quotes saying that trickle-down economics is wrong.

 

And that's fine, but when the author questions if the Russian hacking even happened and then that the US is far worse, I'm out--all rational thought is suspended because the author has show their glaring bias.

 

Sure will do.

 

Clear about what? I already pointed out that I find his analyses well-informed. He presents a point which usually well supported by information you will not often hear or see in the MSM. Agreeing with his proposals is another matter entirely.

I'm not sure how a change of position on a subject somehow invalidates their opinion or any information they provide. If he has changed his mind about a topic - that's a bad thing? After the Reagan years his analysis concluded that the expansion during the Reagan was nothing more than deficit financing. I can see how one could call that a failure in hindsight. Clinton used to be against gay marriage. Now she is for it. I don't hold that against her, I change my mind too. I was hopeful that Trump would've actually done some swamp draining when he was elected 8 months ago. Now I believe he is a phony POS.

If you haven't noticed that's one of the major issues with politics in general: How many people on this board actually change their minds about something? Notice a trend on here? People usually come with hammer cocked and in general there is no changing anyone's mind.

 

The basic sentiment for me in all of this is the all-too apparent (now) need to seriously restructure our economic principles.

Specifically, moving our nation (finally) from what has basically been a perpetual war-footing in financial terms for what's been more than 50 years now.

The current size of the national defense budget is not an accident. We say or hear "appropriations" or "resolutions" now as a way to normalize it...but the fact of the matter is that we haven't really needed the size of the U.S. military since at least the end of the 1950s (if we're going to allow for the need to fight the cold war with the Soviet Union as a reason for that growth at all). These were/are decisions made by elected legislators across all political spectrums.

(...I remember reading somewhere, incidentally, about Hirohito, Japan's emperor in 1940, lamenting before and after he ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that he had possibly awakened a sleeping giant in the potential American war machine...and now with the past fifty-some-odd years of history for review...maybe he WAS divine, as he seems to be prophetic.)

The problem with that, among many other things, is that economically there are large swaths of demographics who need the money that the military brings to a community, in the form of jobs and housing which then beget quality of care and education and so forth...

...We tend not to call or think of these things as "government spending"...since that phraseology has taken on such a negative connotation for decades now...but that's exactly what it is.

...I'm sure everybody knows that the creation of the internet was accomplished from the R&D budget afforded to the U.S. military...

...all of this hand-wringing about what the government can or cannot (or should or should not) do domestically in terms of policy has always BEEN done whenever it could be justified by the lawmakers, and sought to improve the quality of life for the citizenry...or at least, the citizenry deemed worthy of that much consideration (got my own reverse-racist-n!gger spiel about that, but I'll stay on track)....

The idea that the government has too many fingers in too many pies doesn't do anything about the fact that those pies are going to get baked anyway...and that the best thing to do is to make sure somebody's watching the oven or everything's going to get burned.

...Aren't many people alive who remember what America was like before 1940...mostly unregulated...publically underserviced...socially fragile and topically acerbic...I hear tell that people used to self-medicate and could get anything (like morphine and heroin) over the counter in true "...pull themselves up by their bootstraps..." fashion...sort of like what's suggested should happen now, for all intents and purposes...

...which of course led to ridiculously high rates of drug addiction and crime...which subsequently led to forming the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms...I'm guessing this or sometime thereabouts was when America was great....

...and it STILL amazes me just how predicated human beings are on repeating the same patterns of behavior when there's so much effort put into ignoring history or context or consequence. Hell, we don't even do ourselves the courtesy of calling a "lie" a "lie" anymore...

Funny.

The more things change, it seems...the more it seems things NEED to change.

Hm.

There's a thought.

 

Too many profound points in one short post. I'll just comment on some that jumped out at me. Absolutely the money poured into the defense industry by the government is a subsidy, but that is a good one for many people... not like the bad ones that are designed to help those in poverty.

And yes, there is no doubt that people repeat the same patterns of behavior over and over. That's bad enough, but even when we don't repeat the same mistakes, there are many that shout out for them to be repeated as far as removing regulations that have protected people. They do this even though we've seen instances of what happens when there aren't enough regulations (Flint Michigan, etc.). They do it even though we've seen what was happening when we didn't have those regulations.

Great post.

 

You know what?
Would you mind indulging me in a bit of a thought experiment? It's an experiment because I've heard about the mental capacity of Negroes being analogous to puppies...and just wanted to bounce an idea or two off a higher order of intellect.

'Kay? 'Kay.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago...she was frothing about how difficult it was to get that whole "electric car" concept off and running. She blasted then-President Obama for not driving hard enough (...ugh, bad pun...) to get things going, and for his admittedly ham-handed attempt (as the National Executive) to try to do it through basically "subsidizing" a private company...

...she was like me (except that she's younger and prettier) in her wild-eyed ideas about how America could do pretty much anything we wanted if we wanted it bad enough.

What I asked her to do was to understand something about our government (here's where the experiment starts)...

She needed to recognize that we have something called the Department of Transportation in the Federal government. It's the top of the administrative food chain in terms of monitoring and/or regulating interstate travel...got its start from being part of the Federal Aviation Association...which as far back as the 1920s was established to try to get a handle and set some generic standards for airplane travel and safety. Franklin Delano Roosevelt doubled down on it during the war, and eventually the FAA and FCC were born...

...some of those same principles operate at state and local levels in terms of civilian transportation, but those functions are largely domestic, where air travel was obviously more international....

Private businesses (which grew exponentially because of the creating of the Interstate Highway system---see the internet) had a lot to say about where and how funds for the project would be spent. Not to mention the fact that the military determined a system like that made moving troops and equipment during wartime more practical and efficient.

If we're talking about what industries the government "subsidizes", then we're talking about not just what's in the national interest ( i.e. military), but also the private enterprise sector (business). Business and government have always had a largely cooperative and interdependent relationship in this country, whether people want to believe it or not.

There's a significant difference between "patriotism" (what largely contributed to the enormous ambition and practical need for constructing the interstate system---which I believe began as early as the 1910s) and "nationalism" — essentially self-sacrifice (patriotism) vs. self-indulgence (nationalism).

What would she think, I asked my friend, would be the biggest aid in creating and owning an "electric" (or that is to say, alternative fuel source) car, and making them as practical and accessible to the masses as is, say, even a foreign car?

The very thing that makes such an enterprise even entertainable...an accommodating system of transportation. I suggested that creating a compatibility with an "electric" car on our interstate system (let's say a glorified "rail" system for those things to travel on...for the sake of economically traveling more than a couple dozen miles before your battery dies out...) would have to be facilitated by not only federal, but state and local governments as well.

Think about how something like that affects (or rather threatens) the industries of transportation, if it ever gets adopted in anything like a universal context.

I asked her if she remembered some of the blowback the group Tesla got from the used car industry (and later the state government here) on trying to market their "electric" cars as "alternatives".

Just asked her to think. Not to decide. Just think.

What we need to start doing is making sure that that business/government relationship serves the public good instead of the individual interest as often as possible. And the only way to do that that keeps anybody alive long enough to benefit from it is to establish that "rights" are not "privileges" and "privileges" are not "rights".

And to stop trying to manufacture the types of reasons for national solidarity that worked in the first half of the 20th century (behind a military prefix in large part) because of an external threat. That whole "...invade Iraq..." angle has been done to death...in more ways than one, unfortunately..

It's been suggested that, had there not been the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs and initiative would have collapsed because it was performing so poorly beforehand. Keep enough wars going and you can easily mask nationalism with patriotism...until such time as that logic runs its inevitable course, and you have to face the problems you never wanted to face before.

You're not getting electric cars to replace gas cars, for example, unless you really want that to happen. And nobody with the ability to change that in our government has any intention of that happening anytime soon...at least not before they can get a "department of electric cars" or something set up to get their cut of the public trust out of it first...

....Ow.

...all this thinking hurts my head.

...s'pose that's what I get, being some fool-minded uppity dumb-as-a-dog Negro, who wouldn't know what to do with an electric car if the gub'ment nanny gave him one (other than put some 20s and spinners on that bad boy)...

 

You know, our country has done amazing things with the help of the Federal Government. You mentioned some of it, and another super important one would be rural electrification. That administration and the government funding is probably the only reason we have electricity everywhere we do now. Maybe by this point most places would have gotten it, but doing that back in the 30's really helped businesses, citizens economies, food storage and preparation, health on many levels in many ways, and without it, it would be hard to imagine all of the internet and technology industries that we have today.

Those kinds of huge government spending projects and subsidies catapulted our nation to the prominence it has enjoyed for decades. I originally thought the one thing I liked amongst all the other crappy ideas from Trump was his infrastructure project and spending. He gave a nice speech about it. It sounded worthwhile.

Then when the budget comes out, he actually cut money from the department of transportation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and gave tax cuts to the wealthy which was going to supposedly spur private enterprise to do most of the trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. What a joke it turned out to be. Trump pulled back money from places that would improve our infrastructure and called it a boost to our national infrastructure.

As far as getting Electric or other alternative fueled cars up and running on a really large scale, it would be difficult. I can only think in a theoretical way, and not really practically. I think that it would require government subsidies so much so that the profit incentive would be there. It's the only way I can imagine. But getting that to actually happen is where it falls apart. It would require a national change of heart and way of thinking. While most people believe that switching over to electric cars would be profitable eventually, they want profit now. Whole industries would have to change their line of work. But once it was done, the United States would undeniably be the leader in the field, it would spur more and better innovations in the field, and private businesses would sprout up to take advantage. It would employ huge numbers of workers who would then spend their money back into the economy, and be a real boon to our economy.

I think of France and how the government subsidies boulangeries and allows the owners to concentrate on making the best croissants there are. It is part of their identity, so people don't mind their taxes helping that. It keeps the croissants affordable and allows the bakers to take pride in their work. That really is their concern is taking pride in making the best product they can. So if there was a way to make Electric Cars part of our national identity the way automobiles used to be, then perhaps people would be willing to have the kind of subsidies needed to make it huge on a national scale.


Anyway, if we had learned from our past, we would know that government spending and subsidies aren't always a bad thing done, to help the lazy people who don't want to work. Not only do most people not think about that idea, there are those that try and erase the successful projects such as the New Deal from history. They try and make it look like it was all a failure and that the United States pulled itself out of the depression in spite of the New Deal and not because of it. Of course, the times when the New Deal was ineffective was only when Congress cut back on the funding and programs. Once they went back to funding it, it started working again.

 

....and this is exactly what's going on with the "healthcare" debate, isn't it?

Supreme Court decides that money is the same thing as free speech. Supreme Court then decides that healthcare is a "right".

Add your assortment of garden-variety fruits and nuts and voila! NOW it's a party.

Change of thinking, hm?

How about, just for grins...
...we actually practice SOME thinking....you know, crawling before walking and all that rot...