As IF Times

link AFP: US senator calls for aid to Arab democracy.

And speaking of fantasy world,  John Kerry is making the case now to send U.S. financial aid to help the strife ridden Arab economies in order to build democracy.  !!!  There are few representatives more removed from reality save perhaps the other 52 Democratic senators and 193 members of Congress.  Kerry is the guy who, like his buddies, exhorts the little guy to pay more taxes but who parks his yacht in another state to avoid… taxes.  If he was a contestant on Jeopardy, his answer to the query, ‘taxes’ , would be ‘what other people pay’.

Unfortunately, all the time spent on the yacht precluded him from being able to keep up with the news affecting the U.S. economy, the main story being that the government, aka the people, are out of money.  I’m not sure how he reads the polls, but my guess is that if you asked the average Joe to shovel more money to the middle east to support nationhood, it may get a some push-back.  Heck, when you balance paying the mortgage against  paying taxes to support the middle east, the decision could be tough.

Recently, another guy, by the name of Bush,  spent a few billion with the hope of  building nations and spreading democracy in that part of the world too.  That didn’t go very well as he was roundly excoriated for his ‘imperialist’ and meddling efforts.  Ironically, Iraq is now the only nationstate there besides Israel that can be considered a democracy.   In fact, Kerry was one of the leading critics of that effort.  He is now officially against nation building before he is now in favor of it.

The other fact that has become evident with the ouster of despots in that part of the world is that the leaders have somehow managed to squirrel away some rainy day money during their time in office.  From accounts of the amount of money involved, it looks like there’s enough to sustain these guys for about 200 years of rain.  Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, 5 billion.  Egyptian Hosni Mubarek, rumored to be up to 70 billion.   This guy Gaddaffi, some large amount, yet to be counted, but rumored to be in the mid ‘B”s.  Assuming that this money wasn’t made from the hourly rate of being in the state leader business, perhaps it would be wise to re-funnel that money back into the respective states!   Even Bernie Madoff gave back his ill-gotten loot.

Finally, it may only seem illogical to the rest of the rational world that the middle east, the greatest source of natural resource wealth in the world today, should be the recipient of financial aid from a nation that is essentially running on financial fumes.  This however is logical when all your life, you’ve only dealt with other people’s money.  In the case of Kerry, maybe he thinks that if you put a bit of ketchup on it, people will swallow anything no matter how distasteful.

link African-American lawmakers blast budget plan as step back for civil rights – The Hills Floor Action.

If I had a nickel for every time a white person complained that public policy laws were racist against them, I’d be two short of enough change for a dime.  According to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, coincidentally all Democrats,  the proposals by the Republican members of Congress to curtail spending are destined to roll back civil rights advances. 

While this appeal may reasonate with a certain crowd, the logic and validity of the argument are as absent as the missing 14 Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers.  Actually, this notion is insulting to people of many constituencies.  At its root, the logic seems to be that only people of color, namely blacks would be adversely impacted by budget cuts.  It’s truly giving false credit to those lawmakers that apparently are able to  direct legislation to isolate only blacks and exclude other ethnic minorities.  Do these proposed budget cuts somehow not affect Latinos? Chinese? South Asians?  How are they able to do that?

If in fact this is the case, the racism claim is valid since that means only blacks have been specifically excluded from access to prosperity.  This implies that all other racial subgroups have somehow managed to exclude  blacks as well since they don’t seem to be lobbying against budget cuts.  It’s intriguing to me that there are not more vocal black groups complaining about how they are specifically kept out of the grocery store business, or the laundry business, or the gardening business, or the restaurant business.  Those damn ethnic cartels are likely running closed shops.  How are they able to monopolize this slice of American business?  It must be racism.

What’s truly remarkable is that these other visible minorities can hold such influence within the economy without the benefit of significant racial representation in the Federal government.  There is no Congressional Chinese Caucus, no Mexican, Cuban or Central American Caucus.  There is no South Asian Caucus. 

The real racism here is from the Black Caucus itself, which by virtue of its very existence influences policies that have been detrimental to that minority.  The usefulness of this subgroup of lawmakers is very questionable since the world has changed dramatically over the past 50 years.  It’s hard to believe a legislative body exists only to forward the cause of one racial subgroup in an ‘inclusive’ society.  In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the present President is a person of color.  It is the height of hypocrisy to claim that the success of many blacks are due to individual effort while attributing failures to systemic racism.  When failure is rewarded, it perpetuates the culture of dependency. Ask any parent who has a 30 year old living at home.

If anyone needs help, it’s the contingent of Americans who are willfully non productive.  We’ll call it the Congressional USELESS Caucus which stands for  Union of SEdentary,   Lazy, Entitled, Sanctimonious Slobs.  This would work only if you could convince anyone in this group to run for office.  And besides, there already is a Democratic Party.