Author: David S. White

As an early AM riser, I have
watched Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe show
on MSNBC for years.  I even watch "Way
Too Early with Willie Geist," aired at 5:30am ET, which goes
on before Morning Joe, at a truly ungodly early hour when only my dog and I
have ventured out of our bedroom in search of coffee (me, anyway; the dog likes
peanut butter crammed into one of her hollow bones, but that’s another story.)

Joe has officially launched what he
and, his co-host, Mika (who often acts in the annoying role of cranky
Schoolmarm to Joe and his guests’ often funny locker room banter) are calling,
what Howard Fineman terms a Centrist
Civility Group.   To say that Joe is
not thrilled with Sarah Palin’s Facebook postings and speeches of late would be
an understatement.

Joe is part of a growing cadre of
Republicans who are beginning to come out and openly question whether running
Palin in 2012, against Obama (or Hillary??) would be an act of utter political
suicide for the GOP, which Democrats would welcome with glee.  

We awoke Monday to news of the latest Wiki Leaks document dump of some 250,000 documents or cables or whatever. Early news had stories of our State Dept. personnel, from top down, furiously making international calls over the Thanksgiving Weekend just passed (now, just a belly-busting memory), to try to mitigate the almost incalculable damage. But, the information leaked and posted worldwide to anybody with a computer and an internet browser, is so massive that it will take time to digest all of it and to assess the damage to our relationships with our allies, our enemies, and governments, big and small, all over the globe. To say nothing of how many people flying below the radar, making comments or working behind the scenes, are now seriously jeopardized.

It is hard to imagine a more threatening act of pure terrorism, which, having searched my own soul, truly cannot benefit anybody rational at this point – other than the obvious and increasingly ominous risk that one fine day like this one, we will all look up from our work (or play) to our last sight on this planet this time around . . .. a flash . . . .

Like the proverbial spoiled child, North Korea has taken to having regular tantrums when it seems that the rest of the world is not paying enough attention. Following the ‘bad boy’ syndrome that negative attention is better than being entirely ignored, quite recently, we have seen a few strange and bold moves by North Korea in yet another attempt to provoke.

First, American scientists observed, or were shown (it is not clear) a previously unknown North Korean facility which had ‘thousands’ of centrifuges spinning away – capability to produce a whole nuclear arsenal. More recently even, North Korea attacked a small island occupied by South Korea, which the Madman Dictator claims, when not watching John Wayne in his favorite western movies. Several people, both military and civilian, died.

Earlier, North Korea repeatedly tested missiles and nukes, including a missile fly-over of Japan, and actually sank a South Korean vessel. Clearly, the days of occasional skirmishes across the DMZ are over and troubling days in that part of the world have begun anew. For anybody unfamiliar with the Korean War, which never officially ended, David Halberstam’s last book, The Coldest Winter, possibly his best of all, tells the whole brutal story in great, and moving, detail.

Our federal government has nearly run out of economic tricks of late. The latest program, one of asset-buying, is known, charmingly, as Quantitative Easing. It has given conniptions to some conservatives and many other countries.

We simply cannot lower interest rates further. They are effectively at zero and this allows major banks who can shop at the Treasury window to back up and load up on huge trucks-full of dollars at virtually no interest charges, so they can lend them out or even buy T-Bills at some 3%. Some pour the dollars into credit card lending and turn that nearly free money into interest rates of 30%, or more; even more when you constantly change the due date or the credit limit and then slap on late or over-limit fees. But, even this is not working to give our nearly comatose economy a much-needed shot in the arm (as opposed to a shot in the head, delivered back in the Fall of 2008, from which we all continue to reel).

Quantitative Easing is what you try when all else has failed – literally buying up, on an enormously large-scale, our very own debt and Treasury paper. The day after our elections in early November, the Fed announced it was purchasing some $600 Billion in our own long-term Treasury securities. This came on the heels of the Fed deciding to re-invest proceeds coming from mortgage-related holdings – you guessed it – to buy Treasury debt, some $250 to $300 Billion worth. See how easy it is to get to a Trillion these days?!?

Rumblings from the Conservative side of things concern me lately.  There is suddenly loose talk about having to do something about the 14th Amendment, like one has just discovered an ant invasion in one’s kitchen after a heavy rain.

First, the whole idea has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever happening.

Second, the 14th Amendment has a long and fascinating (if you are a legal scholar) history, from its post-Civil War 19thC roots through today.  It underpins so much of our modern jurisprudence that it is unimaginable to mess with at this point.

Like something caught between being the Great Oracle and the Wizard of Oz (ignore the man behind the curtain), on Tuesday, the Fed met and has now spoken about the lousy economic numbers of late last week and the general morass in which we find ourselves.  The Fed announced Tuesday morning, that it will use the proceeds from the Fed’s own gigantic (and getting bigger all the time) mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

So what, you ask?

The dismal economic performance of late (can you spell DoubleDipRecession) has, in the Fed’s inscrutable judgment, required it to now continue, as it has done since 2007, pumping vast amounts of US Dollars into our gasping economy, to prop up the housing and financial markets.

Citing both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Federal Constitution, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, on Wednesday, held that Prop 8’s ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. 

Next stop, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, then on to the US Supreme Court.  When Prop 8 was passed in the Fall of 2008, I wrote a piece for F&HD predicting this result on these very grounds and my article here provoked, shall we say, just a bit of controversy – some very critical comments were posted concerning my constitutional law analysis.  Now that the formidable legal talent from both sides of Bush v Gore have combined, the results, at least at the Federal Trial Court level are in. 

You can read Judge Walker’s Decision and Order here and likely in many other places in cyberspace by the time you get around to reading this.

Last Friday, the news wires carried this from Newt, while speaking at an AEI event: a call for a US war now on both North Korea and Iran, now – re-labeling the War on Terror as a War on Radical Islam.

Now, let me get this right.  Newt just broadcast into the whirlpool of our 24/7 21stC Media, a call for our economically troubled nation of some 300 million, to declare a War against Islam (the Arab Street will not hear the word "Radical") – the religious belief of 1+ Billion people, out of nearly 7 Billion currently crowding this planet?  Did I read that right? 

Would you take on three or four guys in a street fight tonight when you leave the restaurant at which you have enjoyed dining?  Will we really force our truly exhausted military (and their beleaguered families) who have served 3, 4, 5 or more tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan (literally, the ends of the earth) to now make ready for, not one, but, two more wars, one against a Hermit Kingdom, run by a little Madman who thinks he is John Wayne; the other against a huge, intensely mountainous country, run by a little Wise Guy in a cheap golfing, zip-up jacket, who is shilling for a bunch of Mullahs with attitudes, but not much else in the way of guts or brains?

Once, long ago, we had the Great Depression, which our history books tell us started with the crash of Wall Street in Fall 1929.  Many of us either still remember what the 1930’s were like in this country, or grew up hearing about them from parents and grandparents, at times ad nauseum. 

Few in our 24/7, fully-connected, 21stC Media, have either been brave, or honest, enough to call what we’ve been living through since late 2007, (first fully impacting in late Summer 2008 and now coming up on it’s second full year since them) with that name starting with the dreaded D-word: "Depression;" yet, as I have said here repeatedly since Fall 2008, that’s what this is in reality.

Pundits (not pundints, as we hear the word mispronounced too often lately) have stuck a toe in the water by calling our own economic agonies this time around, the Great Recession, but not further.  Yet.