Fox News inadvertently blew the cover off the issue, and it's exactly as I maintained in my earlier column.

Here's what I said:

There is nothing preventing the Church from organizing groups and soliciting health insurance quotes for those groups.  Being comprised of "faithful" people, that policy might include the provision that one could obtain these services but with the membership being comprised of faithful individuals who do not believe in such things there would be no use and thus the rating would not include that which is not used!  Contrary to popular belief all health insurance ratings are in fact simply a composite of the risk factors of each participant. (I know this to be factually true as I negotiated and purchased same for my company when I ran it.)

Yep.  The Church could put together a group of faithful that would not want to buy such services, and they thus would not pay for them.  Oh sure, they'd be required to "make them available" but that which you don't use you don't pay for, and if nobody in your group uses them they won't be part of the rating either.  In other words, it would be a nullity.

Well, if there was such a group....... and that's the problem.

A report last year from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual health research organization, found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control despite the church's teachings. According to a Reuters report on the study, only 2 percent of Catholic women rely on natural family planning.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding.

There you have it folks.  The truth.  There is no ability to create such a group because if you actually required people to live to the Catholic Church's view on these matters the pews would be empty and so would the donation plate on Sunday.

So the Bishops can whine and scream like petulant children all they want but the facts are something else entirely.  They can't excommunicate everyone who uses birth control as they'd wind up with 2% of their current population of Catholics and the Church (at least in America) would instantly collapse.

They know this as well, despite their screaming from the pulpit.  These Bishops are not stupid people.

What they are, in fact, is dishonest and in this dishonesty they dishonor the faith, they dishonor their office and they dishonor The Church as an institution.

In point of fact were the issue as stated the Bishops would have, as I noted, also been opposed to Obamacare from the start because the very act of requiring someone to pool funds to buy someone else's health care inevitably leads to you funding someone's personal decisions you have a moral problem with, whether it be sloth or gay sex.  But they had no quarrel with and in fact supported Obamacare's forced individual mandate, along with Medicaid and its forced transfer payments and mandated tax structure, even though both did and do support medical treatment for various diseases that are either in the main or even only contracted through behavior that wantonly violates Catholic dogma, along with both birth control and abortion.

Among these treatments, incidentally, are those for essentially all sexually-transmitted illnesses.  Oh sure it's technically possible in some cases to contract them without having sex, but it's difficult and in the most-egregious of cases (e.g. HIV) the remaining non-sexual vectors that are statistically significant are also prohibited behaviors (e.g. IV drug abuse.)

This much is certain -- if both parties to the sexual act adhere to Catholic teachings then it is impossible for them to contract a STD since neither of them would have ever slept with anyone other than the spouse to which they were married, both being virgins at the time of marriage.  If neither party ever sleeps with any other person than their spouse, and both spouses are virgins at marriage, those two people by definition will never contract a STD.  So why should they pay (monetarily) for someone else's sin and why has that never been an objection over the years of Medicaid and in fact when Obamacare was debated?

Well?

Here's what I believe the truth to be and my evidence is here and in the previous article. The Bishops and prelates have been agitated about birth control and (of course) abortion for a very long time.  The latter is a shared position of many people, including Catholics.  The former, however, is definitely not -- virtually all Catholics who are sexually active, married or not, despite the Church's protest and catechism, use artificial birth control, and that's a fact.

So this little brouhaha gave the Bishops the opening on an issue they have not been willing to take on before.  The Church has, of course, been against artificial birth control and abortion forever.  That's not new, but it's also almost-universally ignored among Catholics, whether the Church likes it or not.

What the Church has never been willing to do, however, is raise a conscientious objection under the First Amendment to the provision of these services with employment tax dollars, even though they've been paying into said funds for decades.  Nor have they been willing to agitate for the congregation to also find an objection of conscience predicated on the First Amendment, to paying taxes (at both a State and Federal level) that go into Medicaid, which provides not only artificial birth control but also abortion.

In fact, the Church was for Obamacare for everyone, including the general congregation of Catholics, even though they knew damn well that it would pay for not only birth control but abortion services along with treatment for STDs that can only be contracted by acts that violate Catholic Canon, and none of this was concealed at the outset of the Obamacare debate.

It was only when the Church as an employer was tagged in the same way they were willing to have silently shoved down everyone else's throat, including the faithful that fill the pews on Sunday (myself included) that suddenly they became exercised over the issue of both birth control and abortion services to the degree that they state they "won't" comply.

Hypocrisy is a terrible thing, especially when it comes from the leaders of a powerful and influential group.  What the Bishops owe their congregations is both an apology for being willing to foist off on the congregation "acceptance" of these taxes for the last couple of decades along with an explanation for exactly why the faithful should comply with something they themselves claim is a rank Constitutional violation, and why they've advocated that Obamacare specifically, and Medicaid and other government-provided health care generally that happens to include both abortion and birth control services, is a social good and thus worthy of not only vocal but monetary support.

It's a simple word, really.

But few practice it.

This failure, incidentally, is partly because nobody learns about it any more, but in those who did, it's an intentional act. 

It is why we're in this economic mess.

It is what is stoked by the hard-core partisans on the left and right.

And it is what people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Maddow, Mathews and others pray to their favored deity you never figure out, because the day you do their entire little empire crumbles around them.

Discernment is about accuracy, not popularity.  It is about depth, not surface perception.

It has been said that great minds debate ideas.
Mediocre minds talk about events.
Small minds attack people.

Labels are so much fun, aren't they?  Faggot.  Nigger.  Racist.  Homophobe.  Anti-semite.  Communist.  Marxist.

But one must discern.  That is, one's ideas may be Marxist, but a person is not Marxist.  And note carefully: That one particular idea someone has is Marxist does not mean the rest of what they believe or know is. Find their error of logic, discuss, debate and convince and suddenly you can't call them names any more.

Of course there are those who refuse to look at ideas, and instead label people.  It's easier, you see, as you don't have to practice discernment.  You only need to see a T-shirt, the color of someone's skin, a cross, pentagram or Star of David around someone's neck.  You need only observe dreadlocks, a pierced nose or tattoo. 

Do recall that Einstein was considered "slow" by some early in his life.  There might have been a discernment problem there, eh?

We have become a nation that is apparently incapable of this function, and that's a problem.  And this is an indictment that deserves to be leveled at both the left and right.

For literally two years we have heard that the Tea Party is a "Nazi" organization, that it's a bunch of "white boys who hate blacks", that the Tea Party is all "gun-toting rednecks" and other similar charges.  Yes, there are probably people who call themselves "Tea Partiers" who have committed various offenses, including serious felonies.  I recall news stories trumpeting that this guy was dealing dope, that one was engaged in some sort of kiting offense, and there was even an allegation of criminal sexual conduct in the news at one point. 

But that there are bad acts committed by individuals does not mean that the ideas embodied in the Tea Party are evil.

That fact certainly didn't stop the left from making this claim on an incessant basis literally from the time of Santelli's Chicago Scream.

But now the shoe is on the other foot.  No less an authority than the Oakland PD said that "about 100" black-clothed violence-loving jackasses showed up out of a crowd estimated at 10,000 in Oakland.  They committed a few acts of vandalism but were stopped by the protesters in the main (and video of this has been posted; it was also shown live from news choppers hovering over the scene.)  Just as telling on the 3rd there were multiple reports of demonstrators returning to where some of these thugs had committed vandalism helping to clean it up.

So does a 1% "infiltration" by these thugs make the entire demonstration "violent" or "violence-loving?"  Well, if you're the right wing it does. 

Similarly there is an alleged thug who demonstrated with the Ft. Collins folks and is now sitting in jail on an arson charge.  The newspaper says: "Arrest papers available to the public do not connect Occupy Fort Collins to the arson fires, and police made no connection between the group's protest and Gilmore's arrest."

The right wing, of course, says no such thing.  A quick Google search shows multiple "titles" claiming "Add Arson to Obama-endorsed #Occupy Activism."

Smearing political opponents is nothing new in America, but it is especially galling coming from the same people who themselves complained (and rightly so!) when they were identically smeared over the last two plus years. 

The problem is that their smear is no more valid than it was when the left wing ran the same crap against the Tea Party.

Indeed, this afternoon there is one particular right-wing agitprop who was all but issuing threats that I'd become "irrelevant" if I don't decide and declare that the "Occupy" movement is what the hard right wants you to believe about it - not about individual acts either piggybacked or even unassociated with the protests, but about the protests themselves and by association everyone in them.

Let's remember that it wasn't that long ago that I had the same slurs and "threats" made against me by the hard left when we were all told that the "Tea Party" was behind Giffords' shooting.  You do remember that charge -- later proved entirely false and baseless in the fullness of time -- right?

Well for those of you who don't remember that I'm an equal-opportunity clue-by-four applier to those in the media and blogosphere who run this sort of baseless garbage let me remind you of my lead story on that event:

Using the actions of someone who is clearly disturbed - the gunman was, from the results, not interested in only shooting Giffords as he targeted anyone in the vicinity - in an attempt to foment political fervor is both unhelpful and exactly how you take a nation from Freedom to Fascism.

Those who attempt to do so must be shunned and permanently turned aside, without exception and irrespective of which side of the political aisle they may hail from or argue for.  Not only are such attempts wildly destructive to our Republic and inherently evil they also are outrageously disrespectful to those who have been injured or killed today.

And this is what I later wrote as more became clear surrounding the events of that day:

It took only a few hours for the radical left to literally infest the entire Huffington Post with what amount to a litany of lies.

....

Jeff Biggers:

.....

"What is clear to me, at this chaotic moment, is that no one should be surprised by this turn of events. The bullets that were fired in Tucson this morning are the logical extension of every bit of partisan hatred that came spewing out during the last election, in which Gabrielle Giffords---a centrist, representing well and faithfully a centrist district---was vilified and demonized as a socialist, a communist, a fascist, a job-killer, a traitor, and more.

Anyone who uttered such words or paid for them to be uttered has his or her name etched on those bullets

Anyone care to rethink their position that my views on this are not one of discernment and have a partisan bent?  That I expect that people will be judged individually and that if you are going to smear an entire group of people you damn well better be able to prove it -- not by claim but by strict proof?

I want answers.

I want to know who's funding these black-dressed folks that showed up in Oakland.  I want to know because there's a recurring theme here among protests and demonstrations, going back to several examples during G20 meetings, including the last one in Toronto.  There is evidence that some of these people at some of these protests have been intentional plants.  Well all that nice new gear costs money folks, and while it's not exactly "high tech" the fact remains that a bunch of do-no-good dope-smoking hippies don't have the funds to put toward something like that, never mind the very real risk of a prison term.  Who were these clowns?  I know who they are pretty-clearly not -- they're not representative of the people "Occupying" Oakland.

Likewise, I want to know what the truth is about this arson charge.  Arson is a very serious felony; this guy, if he did it, is going up the river for a very, very long time.  But this doesn't fit either; he's a businessman if the news reports are correct, which hardly fits with an "Occupy" motif for setting fires.  The truth will come out on this one, of course; he's entitled the presumption of innocence under the law but the judge was convinced that the bond should be held at a very high level, so whatever might be in the arrest report the judge is buying it -- at least for now.  If you're going to claim that this person is somehow connected to the goals or acts of the actual "Occupy" movement then present your evidence -- thus far that claim is no more valid than that Gifford's shooter was a "Tea Partier" or that "Tea Party ideals" were responsible for her attempted assassination.

We have a serious set of problems in this nation folks.  That the left smeared the Tea Party for the last two+ years is no excuse for the right to pull the same crap now.

It was wrong when they did it and it's wrong when you do it too.

I called the left out on it and I'm going to keep calling the right out on it as well.  If that means both sides send me hate mail, so be it.  I refuse to play this game no matter which side of the aisle it originates from.

We must have a debate of ideas, not people.  I don't care whether the person with a good idea is white, black, Chinese, Indian or Martian.  I don't care if they vote Democrat, Republican or Libertarian.  I don't care if they're liberal or conservative.

I do very much care if they speak out of both sides of their mouth.  I will attempt to debate and discuss if an obvious logical flaw is apparent, but if you display a closed mind and partisan crap I will come after you like a nest of angry hornets and for each straw man you care to stand up I will chop it down without fear or favor.

As just one example of this from the right's set of "charges" leveled against the OWS demonstrators relates to student loans.  The claim made is that "it's your own damn fault for taking on $100,000 worth of debt for a degree that doesn't pay well enough (or at all!)"

Ok, let's examine that.

First, College Debt was made non-dischargable in bankruptcy.  Congress did that at the behest of the banks and it's relatively recent.  This status is unique among types of debt, with the only other type being as difficult to discharge being that for child support.  The common cry from the right is that one has a "moral obligation" to pay all debts incurred.

The problem is that these people are speaking out both sides of their mouth.  Two examples will make this clear.  First is the Mortgage Bankers' Association, which walked on its own building and repudiated its debt, jingle-mailing the keys.  Where was the outrage from the right on this practice and why wasn't that outlawed? 

Remember, it is a moral obligation to pay your debts, especially your mortgage.  Well?

Second, I want to draw a different and much-more damning parallel: Drug abuse.

See, leverage -- that is, debt -- is an addictive drug.  Doubt me?  Ok, if it's not addictive then the Federal Government can stop deficit spending tomorrow, cold turkey.

Who on the either side of the aisle -- left or right -- has advocated, pushed for and demanded this happen (other than me)?  Nobody.  Therefore, the assertion is false.  Therefore, you're forced by basic logic to accept my premise -- it is addictive.

Now let's look at the right's argument on addictive substances.

The essence of the argument is two-fold:

1. Drug addiction is wrong and thus is and should be punishable by prison terms.
   
   
2. Drug dealing is even more wrong and thus is not only punishable, it is more-severely punishable than drug using

Hmmmm....

So therefore the purveyor of a loan that knows, or has reason to know, that the borrower cannot pay should be held more liable than the borrower.

Guess what?  If we got rid of the "special case" educational loan problem, and those loans were able to be discharged in bankruptcy, how many "sociology majors" would have $100,000 in student loans?

That's easy: Zero, just as there were zero before the law was changed.

Why?

Because nobody would loan you the money to go to school unless the lender, in their analysis, believed you could pay -- that is, the loan would not be a harmful drug to you.

Therefore they might determine that you could borrow say, one times the average annual earnings for your particular field of study over four years, provided you got acceptable grades (checked every quarter!)  If not, well, you'd get cut off.

You want to borrow a lot of money?  Ok, go into engineering.  Or some other high paying field.  If you want to study the liberal arts that's fine, but you're not going to be able to borrow $100,000 to do it, as if you default the lender will eat it and thus they won't lend to you unless they believe they're going to get paid back!

At the same time get the government out of the student loan business.  Now we have private loans and they're fully able to be discharged.  Therefore, in the main only good loans will be made because the lender will have skin in the game.

That in turn will drive down the cost of college - a lot.  Like by more than half.  Why?  Because nobody will be able to get a loan for $100,000 to pursue a sociology degree, ergo, it won't cost $100,000 to obtain one.

Is this so difficult to understand?

Not in the least.  It's basic logic.  But if you follow it, then the right's incessant claim that the banksters "did nothing wrong" evaporates instantly and they're forced to admit that the essence of all that happened during this time frame with the abuse of leverage was intentional predation.

Several people at the Pensacola OWS were waving signs about student loan debt and trouble getting a job.  With just five minutes spent explaining this proposed change in the law I had every single one of them I spoke with agreeing that this path represents a real answer to the problem.

That's discernment of where the problem actually lies and then it's communication, conversation and debate leading to conversion of belief through logic, not name-calling and bomb-throwing rhetoric.

That is what we need in this nation folks.

Discernment, communication, conversation and debate and if we engage in it we can obtain conversion of belief through logic.

Yes, it's easier to name-call and bomb-throw, rhetorically and otherwise.  But it's fundamentally dishonest and we're out of time -- we simply cannot afford that sort of crap any more.

For four and a half years I've tried to accomplish this job through the path that begins with discernment, because it is the only way you will ever do anything constructive.  Name-calling is not constructive, nor is the rhetorical and political crap that passes for "debate" among the banal. 

One path leads out of the woods in this nation and brings us forward.  It is not an easy path and it requires effort, but it is attainable. 

Of that I am certain.

The other is more of what we've had: Hypocrisy, lies and smear jobs.

It is your choice to make folks, but here's the rub: The mathematics of where we are as a nation, and where we're headed, is not a debate topic.  It's a fact.  The longer we wait to take the path of discernment the greater the probability that it will not matter any longer -- that events will foreclose that option as a viable path forward, leaving no constructive options at all.

There are those who think hastening or praying for such is a good idea.  You're wrong.  Down this path lies almost-certain ruin.  Only about 1 in 20 "revolts" succeed; the other 19 are put down at horrific cost.  Put another way, as I've said before, for ever 1 George Washington you get 20 Hitlers, and those odds suck.  To those who believe that being an agitprop for same will get you some privileged position history says the exact opposite: Those who participate in the incitement are immediately rounded up and killed by the new dictator as he consolidates his power, as he's well aware that the people who did it before could do it again, this time to HIM!  History thus tell us that it's nearly certain that you will wind up in a shallow ditch with 10,000 of your closest friends and a literal splitting headache as your "reward" for such activity in the event your "provocation" is successful.  That should be something to think long and hard about before you engage in this sort of foolishness.

Discernment folks. 

It's the correct first step, it's the necessary first step, and it's the one you ought to be taking, because it's the only path forward that works.

I linked a Youtube presentation a couple of days ago by a professor who explained the exponent thing.  It was dry and I bet nobody went and watched the whole series; it was basically an hour long.

Yet if you don't understand this, you understand nothing when it comes to economics and the lies told by both the left and right.  You are not stupid, however: you are ignorant.

That ignorance is intentional.  Our "educational system", our bankers and our politicians intentionally fail to explain the fundamental concept explained in this Ticker for one and only one reason: Once you understand it - truly understand it - you can never fall victim to a ponzi scheme.  Not only that, you will never allow any society you are a member of to fall victim to one either, as you will recognize the inherent danger and demand that they be stopped and the people responsible either locked up or burned at the stake (after a proper trial, of course.)

Ignorance falls to education.  It is why we learn, hopefully, so we become less-ignorant.  As such I was prodded in email this morning by someone who said "you get this well for a non-scientist" and I had to reply in riposte: Ah, but I am a scientist you see....

Anyway, here we go.... pull yourself a nice Espresso and sit down for a short story that will explain why we're utterly screwed if we don't act and why acting to stop the progression of what is going in our economy right now is not an option - it is an imperative.

There happens to be a particular species of pond lily that is extremely prolific.  In fact it grows so fast that it doubles in size through both growth and reproduction in just one day.

We will start with a pond of a surface area of 4096 square feet, or about 64 feet square.  We will place within that pond one lily with an area of of one square foot; that is, a lily that is a square of 12 x 12".

This pond contains fish, which would like to live in symbiosis with the algae and other growing plant material within the pond.  In order to do some part of the pond's surface must be exposed to the air so that oxygen and carbon dioxide can be exchanged, and some part of the pond's surface must be open to the sun, or the algae that make up a good part of the food the fish eat (we will assume they do not eat the lilies directly) can survive.  The lilies will conveniently consume the urea (nitrogen) that the fish excrete, preventing the pond water from becoming poisonous.  So long as this symbiosis is maintained all is fine.  But if this symbiotic relationship fails all the fish will die.

We are the fish, incidentally, and the lilies are debt.

Now here's the question: Will the fish inevitably die and if so how long, in days, will pass before they perish?

That's easy.

On the first day there is 1 square foot of pond that is covered.
On the second, 2
On the third, 4.
On the fourth, 8.
On the fifth, 16.
On the sixth, 32.

Note that on the 6th day just 0.8% of the pond is covered with lilies.  You would not detect any problem on the sixth day, I suspect.  More than 99% of the pond is open to the sky!

Now here's the nasty truth: If you're a fish you're halfway to being dead!

Wide awake yet?  I hope so; let's continue.

On the seventh day 64 square feet are covered.
On the eighth, 128.
On the ninth, 256.
On the tenth, 512.

The pond is now 12.5% covered.  More than 80% of the surface area is open to the sky.  When you hear someone say "we have 80% of our resource left; we can't be in trouble", consider exactly where you are.  Why?  You'll see in a moment....

On the eleventh day, 1024 square feet are covered.
On the twelfth, 2048.
On the thirteenth day there is no surface open to the sky and every fish in the pond dies.

When did you figure out you're in trouble?  Was it on the twelfth day?  Well if so you had literally less than 24 hours to commit mass lilicide or you're all dead!  You literally can't spend one day debating with your fellow fish even though you still have half the surface area open to the sky on that 11th day.

This is the nature of exponents folks.

When it comes to economics we need to consider what the doubling time is to figure out how soon our situation will get intolerably bad.  Math provides us the answer; we can use the natural logarithm to determine time, but most people's eyes fuzz at the beginning of the discussion of "e" and thus I won't explain it that way (those of you who were awake in high school and college math, however, should be perking up right about now.)

Years ago, long before calculators, bankers reduced the use of logarithms to a "rule" called "The Rule of 72."  Simply you can take the growth rate of anything and divide that into 72 to find the approximate doubling time.  So if we have debt growing at 7% a year in the economy we can divide it into 72 and find that it takes about 10 years for the debt in the system to double.  This is an approximation, but it's close enough to do in your head (72 is a convenient number for mental division as it is divisible by both 12 and 6 and 6 of course factors to 2 and 3, so most common multiples can be quickly figured in your head without pencil and paper.)

Now go back and read the lily example again, and remember that when you're one period away from being extinct half of the available resource, in this case the money you earn to pay interest and/or principal on your debt, remains available to you!

Yet even with a fifty percent current economic (in this case) surplus you're just one period away from certain destruction!

Do you see the problem more-clearly now?

All the so-called "economists" (cough-Krugman-cough!) and the various commentators both in the mainstream media and blogosphere either do not understand this or simply refuse to accept and discuss it. 

But it doesn't matter whether you choose to accept that you're inevitably doomed in three days when the pond is 12.5% covered with lilies.  You see blue sky and breathe easily, yet you are literally three days away from certain extinction and your refusal to accept mathematics cannot change what is about to happen to you!  You either start killing lillies FAST or you're dead!

These are facts folks.  They are governed by natural laws that are fixed and cannot be avoided.  I cannot change them, you cannot change them, Barack Obama cannot change them, the Republicans cannot change them.  Nobody can change them.

These facts are why this chart happened:

and why, if we don't cut that crap out right now, we are screwed with absolute certainty.

The willful refusal of politicians and financial types, the latter of whom absolutely know this and the former who have no excuse for not understanding it, to discuss this point clearly when it comes to all matters in the economy is why I wrote Leverage.

We cannot avoid the mathematical facts or their effects.  Unlike the laws of man that can be evaded through bribery and trickery mathematics cannot be. 

You either accept these facts or you suffer the consequences.

One final point and I will leave you to think this over: The World Economic Forum (WEF) said recently that for us to achieve a 3% GDP growth for the next decade we would have to double the total systemic debt.  That is a roughly 7% annual growth rate in debt, or a "spread" of about 4% over "growth".  In order to do this, the amount of earnings from everyone in the economy that will have to be diverted to interest payments will also have to approximately double.  Yet it is the inability to pay that interest (and principal where it is paid down) that is factually known as the trigger for the 2007/08 financial collapse and this growth in debt, at their assumed 3% growth rate in GDP, will produce only a 34% increase in output with which you must pay for that doubling!

We must accept what we have done.

The fact is that if the pond will be covered entirely with lilies on October 31st it is now October 30th.

We have two choices: We either start killing lilies and find a way to keep them from reproducing, even though it appears we have half of our pond still uncovered and all is fine, or we will all perish with certainty.

If this report is accurate, we have a serious problem on our hands folks:

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol buildingsomething that didnt end up happeningone Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: Use live ammunition.

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were political enemies and thugs who were physically threatening legally elected officials. In response to such behavior, he said, Youre damned right I advocate deadly force. He later called me a typical leftist, adding, liberals hate police.

Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.

We saw exactly that in Egypt.

It's illegal for a private citizen in Egypt to own a rifle.  Yet there were people being sniped - shot in the head from a long distance - during the protests.  Who was doing the shooting?  Obviously it was government goons as they were the only ones with the requisite weapons.

Now we see advocacy of doing exactly the same thing right here in America.

An apparent government employee - a Deputy Attorney General no less - appears to have publicly advocated firing on protesters. 

We've got Mubarak's police force - here.

Isn't it funny that all the Nazi signs, all the threats, the fact that Madison's Assembly was shut down due to threats of violence are all coming from the political left?  And now we have a Deputy DA advocating the shooting of protesters.

Let me repeat this just so you don't misunderstand: If this report is accurate, a deputy district attorney is advocating the shooting of civilians exercising their First Amendment rights by the cops.

It's not just your dog that's going to get shot any more.

The left is always the side that wants people disarmed entirely.  The Right seems to favor "reasonable" restrictions on firearms (wouldn't it be convenient to declare everyone one of the "prohibited" under those "reasonable" restrictions?) The cops always want to have SWAT-style weaponry "at the ready" - and they use it regularly too.  Why would all that be?

It wouldn't be so they can shoot at you and you, as an ordinary civilian, won't be able to shoot back, would it?

How soon we forget what happened in Germany - and a lot of other places as well.

Unfortunately this is here, this is now, this is America - or what's left of it.

If you want to know why I advocate that the Second Amendment means what it says - the right to keep and bear arms without tracking, registration, regulation or other interference by government is necessary, despite the fact that criminals use guns, the proof of my argument is right here in the form of advocacy of the unlawful use of deadly force by a government employee.  Those who argue otherwise are arguing for you to be a target when, not if, that unlawful use of force occurs.

As far as I can determine the original report is authentic.  I found the tweets on his timeline.

Update: It appears he was just fired.

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - The Indiana Attorney Generals office announced Wednesday afternoon its deputy attorney general is no longer employed by the agency, after reviewing political website Mother Jones' published allegations that he advocated the use of force against protesters in Wisconsin.

It took less than six hours for me to be able to wave the "told 'ya so" flag:

An early push by New Jersey Republican Rep. Scott Garrett to add some teeth to the GOPs new Constitution rule requiring every bill cite its specific constitutional authority failed in a Republican conference meeting Tuesday.

What was the rule?  That you couldn't claim "general welfare" or "necessary and proper" as justification - you had to point to an actual enumerated power.

The very so-called "Tea Party" and "Conservative" members of Congress could not even agree to cite a specific clause in The Constitution that enabled legislation to be brought to the floor.

Oh, it gets better.  The actual proposed rule would not have prevented passing something that nobody could manage to find a clause in The Constitution that enabled the bill.  It in fact only required that a point of order be raised if the language was not present, allowing a gigantic and overwhelming 20 minutes of debate (10 each side) before a simple majority could vote to table the objection and move forward anyway - Constitution be damned.

The Committee rejected that watered-down milquetoast rule!

That would be enough to call the Tea Party and so-called "Conservatives" we sent to Washington a failure on the day they took their oaths of office all by itself.

But no, that wasn't enough for them.  They had to make damn sure that I could get out the megaphone and holler from the rafters that every single thing we were sold by these clowns during the campaign - the entire Palin thing, the entire "we're gonna take back Washington!" screed was an out-and-out fraud from the very first breath that passed their lips.

Remember, the claim by the Republicans (including but not limited to The Tea Party) was that they would cut the budget by $100 billion?  Which, I might remind you, would have been less than five percent of the deficit this year.

Well, it turns out that was a lie too.

Even some Tea Party types who are sticking to the original goal concede that it'll be hard to reach as long as the GOP exempts -- as it plans to -- funding for defense, homeland security, veterans and entitlements.

So we simply exempt the more than half the budget, then say "well, we can't get there."

By how much can't we get there?

And over in the Senate, a top GOP aide told me that the real bottom line is a max of $30 billion for the rest of this fiscal year.

What was the deficit again for the calendar year that just closed?

Oh, that was $1,700 billion, give or take a few.

So we're talking about.... one point seven six percent of the deficit?

Yes, 1.76%.

Really.

Washington spends that $30 billion, incidentally, in roughly three days.

LIARS and FRAUDS, every last one of you. 

Anyone remember this Ticker?

I, and FedUpUSA, ought to sue anyone using this moniker for their so-called "political affiliation" for defamation.

Yeah, that's a joke.

But so are you.

All of you.

Especially Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, and douchebag groups such as the "Tea Party Patriots."

Or the follow-ups to it, like, for instance, this?

But telling me that I'm voting to "fix things" if I go to the polls and vote Republican in a couple of weeks is a flat lie.  I will get no such thing, as the standard-bearer for the Right-Side Party, Tea or otherwise, at this point is Sarah Palin who I remind you suspended HER campaign along with McCain's to blow Lloyd Blankfein and company in 2008.

Right up above is your "fix" that we voted for.  That America sent The Faux Tea Party to Washington DC.  The above is the "result" of "America speaking loudly at the ballot box."

I was called all sorts of names by other so-called "Tea Party" folks after my string of posts, from people who said I had no right to speak at all and those who simply said "you're wrong - we'll do it - you'll see."

Admit it you jackasses, every last one of you: You were dead fucking wrong, you were lying to the American public the entire time, and I was right.

It took less than SIX HOURS after the swearing in of the new Congress to prove you were full of crap.  You couldn't even manage to wait for one day before repudiating the two most-important things you claimed you were going to do - quit blowing money we don't have and actually follow The Constitution.

When the market figures out that irrespective of the grandiose claims you were completely full of crap, expect the bond market to go bananas.  Or Bernanke will go bananas and so will the commodity markets. 

Doesn't really matter - either way the American People - especially the middle class and below - are going to get financially raped.

Again.

And this time, it's your - and only your - responsibility, because you told us you'd stop it.