In Pennsylvania, the police can now search your vehicle whenever the spirit move them. This is all about stopping drug mules on the interstate. Those drug mules are almost exclusively black and Hispanic. The cops don’t advertise it, but they are trained to look for young NAM males driving rented cars. The drug gangs want to eliminate one reason to stop the vehicle. Using a rental means all the lights work and license is in order. They also figured out that local cops tend not to pull over out of state drivers.

The problem with that is they need a reason to pull over T’Q’uan. These people are idiots so the mule is often smoking weed while driving or otherwise doing something the cops can use as an excuse. But, it will be a lot easier to run a wide-scale version of stop and frisk on the nations highway system if they no longer need a warrant. They would also like to search mobile phones without a warrant as well. That way they can get a jump on the rest of the crew once they pull T’Q’uan or Julio over in I-95.

That sounds great until you think about the abuses that will surely follow. Cops are mostly decent people, but it is a close call. A lot of cops are sociopaths, attracted to the position because they can push people around with impunity. Many are just crooks with enough on the ball to know it is better to be a crook with a badge than a crook without a badge. The crime rate among cops is not encouraging, if you are looking to trust your liberty to these people.

There are a couple of things to consider in that graphic. One is cops are much whiter than the general population. Adjusted for race, the crime rate of cops will be much higher than the general population. Second, the number of robberies is most certainly an outlier. Bad data is my guess. Cops steal like mad. Everyone knows it, but it is rarely reported or prosecuted. Violent crimes are too difficult to hide so they get investigated.

Crime in America is mostly a NAM issue. The drug game, outside of crystal meth, is a black and Hispanic activity. Plenty of whites take drugs, but the drug game is run by blacks and Hispanics. Legalization of weed will further this trend. Murder is not entirely drug related, but a big part of the yearly homicides committed by young NAM males in the drug game, mostly at the street level. Controlling this population has been the focus of policing, prisons and social policy for 50+ years.

The fact is, you can have diversity or liberty, but not both. Otherwise, you get a violent free-for-all of tribal warfare. The reason Continental Europe is naturally authoritarian is it is how you survive when surrounded by a bunch of people not like you. For the Dutch to have remained Dutch for 2,000 years meant defending their turf against all comers. This required a high degree of discipline. The same is true of every other group in Europe.

The same will be true of America.

I saw this post on National Review and could not help but laugh. Through the Bush years, National Review was just a clearing house for the GOP. Whatever crackpot idea the Bushies cooked up, NR would brand it “conservative approved” and peddle it to the masses. In fairness, the caterwauling by the Left made it easy to fall into this trap. Every left-winger was constantly chanting “Bush Lied”, making it impossible for anyone to think straight. It was one big swindle on all of us.

By 2006 most sensible people threw in the towel on Bush and the GOP. His ratings fell into the high 20’s exclusively due to the Right walking away from him. It turned out that the paleocons were right and Bush was just neocon. Professional conservatives still struggle with their full-throated support of Bush and the GOP. Even today they struggle to separate themselves from the Republican Party. I guess this post over at NRO should be viewed as a positive development.

Jack Kemp famously called for the GOP to “take off its green eyeshades” in the late 1970s. By this he meant that the GOP needed to stop focusing primarily on balancing budgets and start focusing on how to grow the economy and improve the lives of average Americans. After its brief, unsuccessful detour into modern greeneyeshadism by nominating venture capitalist and business consultant extraordinaire Mitt Romney, most nationally serious Republicans are back to talking less about numbers and more about middle-class people. But if this map is any indication, even this effort still views America through a lens of green eyeshades.

This map shows household income for every county, town, and neighborhood in America. Wealthy and upper-middle-class areas are colored green, while the rest of America is colored in orange. As you can see, most of America is some shade of brown, while most of the eastern seaboard is colored in some shade of green.

This small detail on a map makes a world of difference to conservative and GOP chances to run the country. Virtually every major national consultant, analyst, staffer, and journalist lives in the green areas in and around Washington D.C., America’s Emerald City. This is a land where families making $100,000 a year struggle to buy a decent house, where everyone has a college degree, and the major health-care struggle is finding a doctor who takes your insurance.

This problem is compounded by the rise of super-donor-driven super PACs. Virtually all of the large donors who give to super PACs and GOP campaigns live in local versions of the Emerald City. They see highly educated people who get ahead by working hard, lots of prosperity and wealth, and think this is what America looks like. The major political problem they see is that some of their neighbors and friends vote Democratic, so they naturally think a national majority can be crafted by persuading those people to vote more on their self-interest and less on social and other issues. That view makes sense within the walls of the Emerald City, but outside of that realm America is a horse of a different color.

Pat Buchanan said a long time ago that the problem with the GOP is that people get sent to Washington to represent their people back home. They start out okay, but before long they go native. They forget where they are from and start thinking they are Washington’s representative to their home state or district. If given enough time, they no longer remember where they are from. They are just members of the ruling class.

Contrast that with the vast bulk of the country, especially in the swing states needed to retake the presidency. Ohio has very few green counties; Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa have virtually none. In those states, making $100,000 is rare and enables you to live a very comfortable life. Most people make between $25,000 and $75,000 a year, with many more on the low end of that range than the high. In most of these counties, more people get by on less than $25,000 a year than earn more than $75,000. In these places, “decent home” means something much more humble, very few people have college degrees, and the major health-care struggle is getting or keeping private health insurance at all.

People with high-school degrees making $40,000 a year face problems very different from those of college-educated folks making $80,000. Their economic future is much more unstable, their job opportunities more limited, and their family finances more precarious. There are many more families in these circumstances among the growing Hispanic populations of the Southwest or the vast plains of the Midwest than one would guess living in the Emerald Cities. Republicans are right to focus on the needs of the middle class, but they must better understand who the middle class is if they are to succeed.

That sounds great, but I wonder if the gap between the typical American and the ruling class is too broad to cross.  Our rulers live lives that are so estranged from what the typical American experiences, they may as well be foreigners. America, the country with a people, a culture and a shared history, has been colonized by pod-people. They make noises that sound familiar and they sort of look like us, but they are alien to us in all the ways that matter. This story in the Financial Times touches on it.

The UK Independence party does not represent the start of a revolt but the culmination of it. A spirit of anti-politics began permeating the country around the turn of the millennium when Tony Blair, the last politician the British allowed themselves to love, broke their hearts by turning out to be a prime minister and not a miracle worker. The disillusion intensified after the Iraq war, a work of naive over-ambition forever remembered as an act of heinous deceit. Then came the crash, the expenses scandal and much more immigration than voters were told to expect.

Cynicism verging on nihilism is the closest thing modern Britain has to a national ideology. It has become common sense to assume the worst of anyone in public authority. Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, profits from this foul zeitgeist, not because he is a manipulative genius but because he is the nearest populist to hand. If it were not him, it would be some other jobbing demagogue with the dumb luck to be here now.

It is not obvious how to take him on. But it is increasingly obvious how not to. Hounded by the mood of anti-politics, Britain’s political class has become self-loathing and scared of its own shadow. Mainstream politicians ape the language and manner of populists. They vie to disown a “metropolitan elite” that they themselves constitute. They hope that nodding along as voters express their scorn for them will somehow spare them from it.

Politicians used to wound each other with accusations of incompetence, immorality or intellectual wrongness – all slurs grounded in substance. Now they try to define each other as “out of touch”. When David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, attacks Labour for indulging dependency culture or withholding a referendum on EU membership, he points to the party’s estrangement from public opinion. When Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, attacks the Tories for overseeing a fall in living standards, his point is that millionaires cannot care about the plight of the ordinary.

The measure of a politician’s worth is how much he is like “us” and not like “them”. Mr Farage’s real achievement is not electoral – his party has no MPs and runs no councils – but cultural. He has spooked the mainstream into emulating the values and priorities of its own tormentors.

As a ploy to neutralise Mr Farage, this self-abasement gets nowhere because it concedes his basic point – that Britain is run by a conspiracy of malign people – and radiates the most lethal weakness in politics: inauthenticity. Mr Cameron is the highest-born prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home half a century ago. Mr Miliband is a professor’s son whose main detour from north London’s cognoscenti was a year teaching at Harvard. They stand for major parties. When they or their similarly rarefied lieutenants play at being the man in the street, it looks craven and affected.

This is certainly true. When John Kerry was running for president, he tried to pass himself off us a regular guy. They kitted him out in an Elmer Fudd costume and sent him into a gun shop to buy a hunting license. It may very well have cost him the election, as normal men could not stop laughing at this effete over-class pansy. They would have been better off putting him in a sun-dress and having him sing duets with RuPaul.

The political classes believe they are unpopular because of something they have done. Certainly, expense-fiddling compounded their scuzzy reputation. And their sheer narrowness is alienating, too. Parliament has become a job guarantee for apparatchiks and activists who relax by watching television dramas set in other political capitals. In Britain politics is not just showbiz for ugly people but for weirdly obsessive people too.

The rise of populism, however, is not primarily the fault of any person – even Mr Blair – or any event. It is powered by structural trends that have been in train for decades. Prime among these is the fragmentation of class loyalty, which has cut the vote share commanded by the two main parties from 97 per cent in the 1951 election to 65 per cent in 2010. More votes are up for grabs, giving rebel parties a look-in.

People do not like being ruled by foreigners. That’s what it feels like in many Western countries today. In Britain, the major parties are more concerned about the Continentals and their European project than the needs and wants of the native Brits. In the US, our politicians and their toadies make noises that sound like American English, but it is all gibberish. The technical term for it is echolalic babbling. The press serves as the interpreter. We are ruled by pod people.

Every society has its mythologies. The American founding myth is that the country was founded by people looking for religious freedom. It is certainly true that many of the original settlers were religious fanatics, but the Constitution was written by rich guys who financed the Revolutionary War. It’s why the Constitution is mostly about protecting private property and commerce. The men running America in the 18th century were property holders and a merchants. For them, religious liberty was as much about taking religion off the table as any idealistic notions of liberty. But, we still teach kids in school about the Pilgrims, even making some of them black and Latino to be inclusive.

Another enduring myth in America is the people have a say in the running of the country. There’s little evidence to back this up, but it makes for a nice myth. It keeps the peace. The proof of this is the last thirty or so years. If you go back to 1980, the Republicans have been the majority party for 16 years and the Democrats for 18 years. If the polls are correct, the GOP will tie the score here with the next election. At the end of Obama’s term, both parties will have split the White House evenly.

Over that period, taxes as a share of GDP have changed very little, a percentage or two one way or the other. What has changed is who pays how much. Middle class tax rates have remained fairly static, while lower income taxes have disappeared and rates at the top declined. The rich have been made subject to new taxes and have seen many of their shelters disappear so the net result is the tax burden on Americans has changed little. The spending has gone up every year, regardless of who is in charge.

The point being that regardless of the party in charge, the polices remain the same. The counter is that the people like this stasis, but that easily shot down. The people have never favored ObamaCare, yet it passed and will never be overturned. It is also why, despite widespread opposition across all demographics, amnesty will probably be passed this summer. No one in charge cares about the voters.

A bipartisan overhaul of immigration, considered dead in the water just a few weeks ago, is not only alive, according to the House Republican leading efforts to broker a deal — it’s gaining steam.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., told CQ Roll Call that pro-rewrite calls earlier this week from two Illinois Republicans, Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Aaron Schock, recent comments from Speaker John A. Boehner, combined with a rash of immigration rallies and protests across the nation in recent days, are indications that momentum has shifted back to those hoping to implement an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws this year.

Diaz-Balart, a major player in ongoing efforts to produce a bill that could balance Republican demands for border security with Democratic calls for legal status for the undocumented, said a solution is closer than ever.

“I think we finally have the policy right,” he said in a phone interview. “I think we have figured out a way to secure, to have border and interior security, holding the administration accountable for the enforcement … forcing the administration to enforce the law whether they want to or not. And I think we figured out a way to deal with the folks that are here in a way that is fair — fair, by the way, to those in the legal system … who are doing everything legally, and also deals with the folks that are here in a way that is fair and reasonable. And adheres, strictly adheres, to the rule of law.

“So I think we finally have the policy right. And what we’re finding is more and more people out there as they’re seeing it, different aspects of the policy, are starting to say, ‘Hey, that is something that makes sense.’”

Diaz-Balart said he thinks they’re close to a deal that can pass both chambers.

“It is as close as we have ever been. It is still a big, big, heavy lift,” he said. “I think we’re going to get there.”

The Florida lawmaker’s optimism comes as the immigration overhaul, declared dead by pundits and politicians alike earlier this year, is back in the headlines. Boehner, speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in Ohio, doubled down on his support for an overhaul and openly mocked those in the Republican Conference who have dismissed immigration proposals as “amnesty.”

The reason, of course, is two fold. One is the Cult likes new citizens from authoritarian hell holes like those in South America. These little brown people don’t mind working in the field and living in tin shacks. More important, they never question the big man in the big house on the hill. Those rowdy white people from Northern Europe make bad subjects so the Democrats, the political wing of the CML, favor open borders.

The GOP, on the other hand, just likes being bribed. Boehner is stuffing his pockets with money from the Billionaire Boys Club to push amnesty. This post from Steve Sailer makes clear who is against whom.  When all the rich people are for something, there’s no stopping it. They have no qualms about handing traitors like John Boehner their pieces of silver. To them, it is pocket change. For Boehner, it is an easy way to get rich.

Inflection points in a culture are not always obvious. In the 1970’s the political culture changed in America, but not everyone was seeing it. Nixon, who relied on the same political tactics used by both parties through most of the 20th century found himself standing on shifting ground. Johnson and Kennedy, after all, played dirty tricks and used the power of their office to help their election chances. Kennedy beat Nixon because the Illinois Democratic machine rigged the election.

Then all of a sudden the rules no longer applied to Nixon and he was hounded from office. The press was not going to merely be an observer of the battles. They were now part of the fight. Ever since it has been axiomatic that the press is liberal and has different rules for covering Republicans and Democrats. The new rules were in place and everyone in the political class had to adapt to those new rules.

In the 1990’s, the political culture changed again. The Republicans had caught up to the Democrats and were winning a lot of elections. The response from Democrats was public relations. The lesson they learned from Reagan was that a good presentation can change minds, even if the argument was flawed. Since they were convinced Reagan was a loon, the only explanation for his success was the presentation.

The Clinton years gave us “spin”, which is just a nice word for baldfaced lying. An army of “spinners” were sent onto TV to tell one whopper after another, often violating the rules of decorum that had prevailed in public affairs broadcasting for decades. Just as important, the liberal press had to be aggressively partisan. It was no longer enough to be biased. They had to aggressively campaign for their side, even if it meant destroying their own credibility.

I think we will look back and see the Bush years as when it became OK to assault the basic institutions of democracy. In the Bush years, the need for vote reform became a hot topic on the Right. The reason is ballot stuffing operations kept turning up all over the country. The left was furiously trying to sign up illegal aliens to vote and the Right was furiously trying to pass laws to stop them.

By the Obama years, nationwide voter fraud schemes like ACORN were in league with major Democratic financial operations like the SEIU. This story is just another example of how much abuse has crept back into the system as the Left tries to get around the limits of public tolerance for their madness. Of course, open borders makes stuffing the ballot box that much easier, as it provides unlimited stupid people.

That’s just one type of abuse. You also have organizations busing around bums and Latinos to vote at multiple locations. The Left cross-checks the death certificates with the voter rolls and suddenly they have thousands of new votes wherever they need them. This is nothing new, of course. Liberal Democrats have been stuffing the ballot box since the 19th century. Today they have better data and better tools to do it. Still, the outright contempt for the idea of self-governance is what’s appalling.

When you look at the serial abuses from the Obama administration that the press shrugs at now, it is fair to say the ground has shifted once again. Instead of ritualized combat between citizens, who agree on the big issues, American politics is looking more like a gang fight. There are no rules, just what you can get away with. Whatever respect the ruling class had for the institutions of the republic is now gone.

What will come next is the security agencies like the NSA, FBI and CIA getting into the political process like we saw with the IRA. When politics is a pirate ship, then the rules don’t matter. What matters is how you use the weapons you have at your disposal. The political class is looking like a Mafia family now. Soon, a Republican president is going to learn like Nixon that the old rule don’t apply.

Historians generally point to the Whiskey Rebellion as the point at which the American public accepted the authority of the new federal government. The aftermath established the limits to and avenues for resisting the federal government. You could organize to get your people in Congress, but you could not burn down the local offices and hang the federal agents. In other words, the people had embraced the authority of the new government as legitimate and therefor defensible.

The Civil War ushered in a new relationship between the citizen and the national government. The states were no longer sovereign. If a state cannot leave the union, it is no longer sovereign as a practical matter. Put another way, the original republic was a government of consensus among the states. After the Civil War, that consensus was no longer required, as the states were now subordinate to the national government.

What is difficult to grasp is how it undermined the foundation of the Republic. The government created by the Founders pitted the power of sovereign states against the power of the federal government. Certain rights were granted to each exclusively. The idea being that this tension would put limits on both, thus providing the maximum amount of liberty to the people.

Here were are 150 years on and this broken relationship staggers on. The reason for this is that America is a big country with loads of resources. Being rich and powerful cures a lot of ills. Even so, those contradictions are there, slowing becoming fissures in the country. There’s a limit to this papering over the problem and we may be reaching that limit. The Bundy Ranch imbroglio is possibly a hint of what’s to come.

Wealthy interests allied with powerful members of the national government are stealing the property of citizens. All the technical nonsense aside, that’s what is going on here and all over the country. The federal government no longer represents the people, but rather it represents the ruling class to the people. It’s job is to impose the will of the ruling class, which is no longer connected to the people.

The trouble is the states are effectively bankrupt. That is, they are not able to meet their cash requirements. They borrow to cover the gaps, but that only delays the inevitable. As public pension liabilities come home, the crisis will overcome the state’s ability to pay their bills. According to the numbers, 32 states have been borrowing from the Fed to make ends meet. Demographics tells us the problem is just starting. Simple mathematics says it must get much worse.

In order to avoid collapse, states will be looking around for money. They will be looking at the state resources that Harry Reid wants to sell off to China. This means we are heading to a very serious problem.  The states are already making noises about regaining control of their lands.

It’s time for Western states to take control of federal lands within their borders, lawmakers and county commissioners from Western states said at Utah’s Capitol on Friday.

More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-, timber -and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.

“It’s simply time,” said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. “The urgency is now.”

Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was flanked by a dozen participants, including her counterparts from Idaho and Montana, during a press conference after the daylong closed-door summit. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee addressed the group over lunch, Ivory said. New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington also were represented.

The summit was in the works before this month’s tense standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing, Lockhart said.

“What’s happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Lockhart said.

Fielder, who described herself as “just a person who lives in the woods,” said federal land management is hamstrung by bad policies, politicized science and severe federal budget cuts.

“Those of us who live in the rural areas know how to take care of lands,” Fielder said, who lives in the northwestern Montana town of Thompson Falls.

“We have to start managing these lands. It’s the right thing to do for our people, for our environment, for our economy and for our freedoms,” Fielder said.

Idaho Speaker of the House Scott Bedke said Idaho forests and rangeland managed by the state have suffered less damage and watershed degradation from wildfire than have lands managed by federal agencies.

“It’s time the states in the West come of age,” Bedke said. “We’re every bit as capable of managing the lands in our boundaries as the states east of Colorado.”

Ivory said the issue is of interest to urban as well as rural lawmakers, in part because they see oilfields and other resources that could be developed to create jobs and fund education.

Moreover, the federal government’s debt threatens both its management of vast tracts of the West as well as its ability to come through with payments in lieu of taxes to the states, he said. Utah gets 32 percent of its revenue from the federal government, much of it unrelated to public lands.

“If we don’t stand up and act, seeing that trajectory of what’s coming … those problems are going to get bigger,” Ivory said.

He was the sponsor two years of ago of legislation, signed by Gov. Gary Herbert, that demands the federal government relinquish title to federal lands in Utah. The lawmakers and governor said they were only asking the federal government to make good on promises made in the 1894 Enabling Act for Utah to become a state.

The intent was never to take over national parks and wilderness created by an act of Congress Lockhart said. “We are not interested in having control of every acre,” she said. “There are lands that are off the table that rightly have been designated by the federal government.”

A study is underway at the University of Utah to analyze how Utah could manage the land now in federal control. That was called for in HB142, passed by the 2013 Utah Legislature.

None of the other Western states has gone as far as Utah, demanding Congress turn over federal lands. But five have task forces or other analyses underway to get a handle on the costs and benefits, Fielder said.

“Utah has been way ahead on this,” Fielder said.

In fairness, there’s a bit of emotion and romanticism at work here. But, money is at the root of the issue. The federal government owns a lot of land. That land has value the states would like to exploit. The resulting collision is inevitable. Bandits like Harry Reid versus the states. Maybe this time we can address the errors of Lincoln.

One of the stranger things about modern times is the war on the language. In English speaking countries it is close to tipping into insanity. In other countries with more reverence for their language, it is not as far along. The French have always been an odd exception to this part of Cultural Marxism. They jealously hang onto their language and resist the importation of foreign words. They even have a government department working to keep English out of their language.

But, that does not mean their Cultural Marxists cannot make war on the language too. Consider this story about recent labor rules.