PoliticalBastards.com featured on Editor and Publisher

Let me again point you to the new animated site by my friends Mike Shelton and Jocelyn Leger: PoliticalBastards.com.

The latest animation — which pops up right away — is one of Obama’s new “change you can believe in” policy on taxes. I’m still chuckling about it. A snapshot is above; the actual animation is the real thing.

President Obama is going to be a rich vein of humor for our two animators. It almost makes me look forward to paying higher taxes.

Editor and Publisher, a newspaper industry magazine, just wrote a nice feature on their site:

“Animation is where the future of editorial cartooning is heading,” Shelton told E&P.

“It’s an exciting time as political cartoonists animate, take it to the Web, and hope the art form doesn’t die out,” Leger added during a separate phone interview.

As followers of the newspaper business know, the number of staff cartoonists at print dailies has dropped sharply in recent years.

Animation IS labor-intensive; Leger said each new weekly offering can take as much as 60-80 hours to create. But she hastened to add that “we have a passion for it. It’s fun.”

Shelton agreed, noting: “It’s been a lot of fun and it’s been a lot of work”….

The duo hopes the new site — designed by Leger — will eventually become self-supporting via ad revenue after traffic for PoliticalBastards.com grows. “We think there’s an audience for it,” she said.

Currently, the site includes faux ads. Visitors will, after a minute or so, see caricatures of Joseph Biden and Fred Thompson emerge out of the lower left corner of the home page and run across the screen into the faux beer ad in the upper right corner.

“Jocelyne’s a wiz at special effects,” said Shelton.

This is the future of political animation and their site is going gangbusters. Don’t miss the laughs.

(Here’s my original article on PoliticalBastards.com.)

Bush and Cheney should resign after McClellan revelations

I’ve been saying for years that Bush and Cheney lied us into the Iraq War. This war was not needed, and now has killed more than 4,000 brave American troops and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan gives us the first — of many to follow — rat’s eye view of the inside of the Bush rat’s nest. You’ve probably read most of the revealing excerpts from his new book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” — published next Monday — so I’ll just include a couple:

He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest.

Or, as the anti-war slogan has it: Bush lied, people died.

The Iraq war was not necessary.

Like I’ve been saying from before it started. As I have been pointing out for six years, Saddam didn’t have WMD, didn’t have ties to al-Qaeda, and couldn’t hurt the USA.

The Bush team imitated some of the worst qualities of the Clinton White House and even took them to new depth.

Clinton was a massive liar, but any American with an IQ above room temperature knew he was lying. A lot of people still bought his hokum because they wanted to believe it was true, like some people believe the U.S. Constitution can be restored.

Bush was different because he had that East Coast patrician sensibility about “honor”: he went to Phillips Academy, Yale, and Harvard, after all. They’ve been running the country for 450 years and England for millennia before that. The patricians know what’s best. They’re better than us. They have a code of chivalry — don’t they?

Maybe they used to. But now that reputation is just a facade behind which lies even bigger than those told by Clinton were percolated, then unleashed upon us.

If there’s any chivalry left with Bush and Cheney, they would resign today. Of course, there isn’t — and they won’t.

They’re dishonorable and mendacious cads and bounders, the opposite of the ancient ideal of the gentleman. They’re chickenhawks who avoided Nam, but sent young men — and even, the ultimate unchivalrous act — young women, to die in a pointless and unneeded war.

They won’t resign because men who commit the kinds of crimes they did are not the type to act honorably.

Just McClellan’s book, but the many more that will follow, will tell the story of this administration of infamy.

The truth will out.

Fomer Cali Gov. Pete Wilson weeps he never could “count on” Tom McClintock

California has had a lot of miserable governors the past 50 years, including the incumbent, Gov. Steroid. But one of the worst is ex-Gov. Pete Wilson, in power 1991-1998. He’s now written a letter carping at state Sen. Tom McClintock — the great friend of taxpayers who’s now running for the U.S. House of Reps. Wilson gripes:

As Governor, I could never count on Tom McClintock. He was always the first to criticize, but the last to help the team. His record doesn’t match his rhetoric.

That is, Wilson couldn’t “count on” McClintock to back his Tax Increase Team. McClintock led the opposition to Wilson’s $7 billion tax increase in 1991 — the equivalent of a $18 billion tax increase today. The increase not only didn’t balance the budget, as promised, but cut tax receipts by $2 billion, from $42 billion a year to $40 billion. The state economy imploded. I remember seeing signs reading, “Nevada, Here We Come!” (Nevada has no state income tax, compared to California’s top rate of 10.3%, then and now.)

The only good thing about the whole taxing episode was that it destroyed forever Wilson’s chances of getting the GOP nomination for president. Even Bob Dole — the “tax collector for the welfare state” — looked good by comparison.

Wilson simply was obsessed with walloping taxpayers so he could fund his favorite program: tax-funded abortions.

And he’s still defending the tax increases:

But I am going to say they [Gov. Steroid and the state Legislature] have the deficit which I was seeking to avoid. I didn’t want us to get started on it. I didn’t want to be on that slippery slope…. We did it the hard way. And it has frankly worked out pretty well.

No, it didn’t work out!

Yes, I will cite the infamous budget numbers

Ok, Pete, you made me do it. To prove you’re a phony, I’m going to link to the state budget numbers [.pdf] in Gov. Steroid’s budget proposal, so readers can check it out themselves. Folks, just click on that link and it will pop up as a .pdf document. Then scroll down to Appendix Schedule 6, which is on page Appendix 13.

Then look under the “Revenue…General Fund…Millions” column. The numbers are for the state’s “fiscal year,” which begins on July 1. So, the “1991-92” fiscal year is for the period July 1991-June 1992, and so on.

1991-92 (first year of the tax increase, before businesses could adjust by leaving): 42,026. (That is, $42.026 billion in revenue.)

1992-93 (first year of tax increase impact): 40,946.

1993-94: 40,095.

1993-94: 42,710.

1994-95 (as most of the tax increases began to expire): 46,296

Even a second-grader cans see that the tax receipts dropped after the tax increases. Those first three years also showed budget deficits. Wilson didn’t “do it the hard way” because he didn’t do it at all.

So McClintock obviously was right to oppose Wilson’s Tax Increase Team back in 1991.

Appointing “Justice” George

It also was Wilson who put on the state Supreme Soviet — excuse me, Supreme Farce — excuse me again — Supreme Court the ridiculous tyrant George III, a/k/a Chief “Justice” Ronald George in 1991, then as chief “justice” in 1996. I was at the Register at the time and wrote several editorials against the appointments, noting that it was for one purpose: George was, like Wilson, a pro-abort. As soon as he was appointed (I think the 1991 appointment), the court tipped pro-abort, and restored a ridiculous ruling that the state Constitution mandated tax-funded abortions. At the time, everybody knew that this was George’s purpose on the court.

And it was George who just penned the risible “opinion” “legalizing” so-called same-sex “marriage” — but in effect redefining real marriage out of existence.

Thanks again, Pete.

Except on opposing illegal immigration — and even there, Wilson was just an opportunist — Wilson prefigured Gov. Steroid’s calls for “post-partisanship” and “rebranding” the GOP. In his 8 years in office, Wilson disheartened and discombobulated the GOP so much there’s not much left of it. Except for Gov. Steroid’s two quirky victories, the party hasn’t won a race for the state’s three top positions (governor and the two U.S. senators) since, and only a couple of other statewide races.

Back McClintock

And McClintock, of course, has been a thorn in the side of another spendthrift governor, Gov. Steroid himself — a Wilson progege. McClintock warned over and over again that Ahhhhnold was overspending like Cimino on “Heaven’s Gate.”

McClintock is a California version of Ron Paul: a principled, longtime opponent of spendthrift, tax-obsessed government. He should be honored that Wilson opposes him.

If Wilson really wanted to help his party, state, and country, he would retire to Cuba or some other place more congenial to his tax-and-abort policies and leave real Republicans like Tom McClintock alone.

If you can, give Tom a hand in his campaign for California’s 4th Congressional District. His site is here.

Gov. Arnold injects steroids into state apparatchiks’ pay and perks

Now we know what Gov. Arnold’s “post-partisanship” means: bankrupting the state, never balancing the budget, effectively abolishing marriage (by changing its definition), and paying huge perks and pay to state apparatchiks. He’s injecting state government with the same steroids he shot into his body during his bodybuilding days.

Dig this:

The state of California’s payroll is skyrocketing, even as its budget deficit has grown to billions of dollars in recent months.

In Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first four years, the total bill for state workers’ salaries jumped by 37 percent, compared with a 5 percent increase in the preceding four years under then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Chronicle analysis of state payroll records shows.

One month before Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, just eight state employees earned more than $200,000 a year working in the core state government, which excludes universities and the Legislature. In April of this year, there were nearly a thousand, according to records.

And the number of state employees making six-figure salaries has more than doubled since 2003, to nearly 15,000. Meanwhile, the number of state workers has grown by 26,000 under Schwarzenegger after being cut by Davis, who was recalled from office in the midst of a severe budget crisis.

Was your salary last year $200,000? I didn’t think so. Yet the tax-eating parasites who run our lives like Soviet commissars were rewarded by Arnold with massive pay boosts, putting them in an overclass of their own. He’s much more a spendthrift than even Gray Davis, who was recalled!

I’ve been warning Californians for years that we need to Recall Arnold.

It’s not too late.

Gov. Arnold assaults property owners by opposing the great Prop. 98

Not just in California, but in the rest of America and the world, Gov. Arnold has a PR-primed reputation of working for the “people,” as he always says. He’s the “post-partisan” governor who only wants to “terminate” our problems, and supposedly “right-wing” Republicans need to “re-brand” themselves in his image.

It’s all nonsense. Arnold’s political philosophy is: Government of Arnold, by Arnold, for Arnold.

I got in the mail today what’s called a “Slate mailer” for the June 5 election. These are half-sheets of cardboard that urge one to vote a certain way. They look “objective,” but are in fact paid for by special interest groups.

This slate mailer opposes Proposition 98, a crucial reform to protect our property rights by banning government seizure of private property — what’s called “eminent domain” — if the property is given to another private person, such as a developer. (Eminent domain still would be allowed for public purposes, such as building a road or school.)

It also would get rid of rent control, long an insidious way to destroy the housing stock. (If owners can’t raise rents, they let their buildings fall apart, or convert them to another use, thus cutting the housing supply and raising rents.)

A great book describing how abusing eminent domain destroys property rights is “Abuse of Power,” by my former Register colleague Steven Greenhut.

The slate mailer I got is by a group called “Continuing the Republican Revolution,” but isn’t associated with the GOP. It’s also not associated directly with Gov. Arnold. But it boasts that he opposes 98.

It uses the No on 98 slogan, “Stop the Landlords’ Scheme” — that is, their “scheme” to end rent control and restore their own property rights.

The slate mailer shamelessly writes, invoking not only Ronald Reagan but God:

President Ronald Reagan will be forever remembered. His ideals of limited government and personal freedom have been passed on to President Bush and future Republican leaders. God bless him and God bless America.

Reagan, of course, would have supported Prop. 98. But such is the confusion of the Republican Party today under such leftists as Bush and Gov. Arnold that a lot of folks don’t know that.

The anti-Prop. 98 campaign also came up with a gimick: They put on the ballot Prop. 99, which seems to protect property owners, but doesn’t. It’s a fake. If both props get a majority but Prop. 99 gets more votes than Prop. 98, then it will become law and Prop. 98 will become like one of the victims killed in Gov. Arnold’s ultra-violent cartoon movies.

Why Gov. Arnold opposes property rights

So, why does Gov. Arnold oppose Prop. 98? For an answer, we should look to Public Choice Theory. People usually think their public officials are mostly well-meaning, although sometimes misguided. Public Choice Theory, as Wikipedia describes it, is more realistic:

Public choice theory is often referred to when discussing how individual political decision-making results in policy that conflicts with the overall desires of the general public. For example, many special interest and pork barrel projects are not the desire of the overall democracy. However, it makes sense for politicians to support these projects. It may benefit them psychologically as they feel powerful and important. It can also benefit them financially as it may open the door to future wealth as lobbyists (after they retire).

Let’s apply the theory to Arnold. He’s worth more than $100 million and invested most of it in real estate. He’s also friends with other real-estate big shots. What if they want to grab some little guy’s house or small business to put up a shopping mall? Then they can abuse eminent domain to do so. What if it ruins the little guy’s business and life? Tough. He’s just a dumb schlub — who probably even voted for Gov. Arnold. He doesn’t count for the “post-partisan” governor.

Prop. 98 would protect the little guy’s property, forcing Gov. Arnold and his friends to pay the little guy more money — a fair market value — to get his property. The little guy might even be stubborn and just refuse to sell his home or business, no matter what the price. It’s called ownership and freedom.

Prop. 98 is essential to every Californian’s right to own property. So it’s typical that Gov. Arnold, who’s spent his almost 5 years in office doing little but destroy this state, opposes it.

If Gov. Arnold wins and Prop. 98 loses, he’ll be putting California property rights in a coffin and burying them.

Next California joke: legalized polygamy

Having “legalized” same-sex “marriage,” next on the agenda in California is legalized polygamy. If one has the right to same-sex “marriage,” why not “marry” many people? The California court will wait a couple of years, then do so.

Say what you will about the tenets of polygamy, they at least gets right what to do with the body parts. And it has existed in history in many cultures, such as Israel under King Solomon. Although it didn’t turn out well even for Solomon, the wisest man the world ever has seen, or for Israel. 1 Kings 11:

³ And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

⁴ For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

⁵ For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.

⁶ And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David his father.

Mark Twain on polygamy

Which reminds me of Mark Twain’s argument against polygamy. After the Civil War, Mark was a journalist out West, including in California, and saw Mormon polygamy first-hand. A Mormon once challenged Mark to cite anything in scripture forbidding polygamy. “Nothing easier,” Mark said. “No man can serve two masters.”

In “Roughing It,” Mark also gave this account of the troubles Mormon honcho Brigham Young (pictured at right with his many wives and children) had with polygamy:

Mr. Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing in private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin, remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to No. 6, and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it. Mr. Young reminded her that there was a stranger present. Mrs. Young said that if the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger, he could find room outside. Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she went away. But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and demanded a breast-pin. Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young cut him short. She said No. 6 had got one, and No. 11 was promised one, and it was “no use for him to try to impose on her — she hoped she knew her rights.”

He gave his promise, and she went. And presently three Mrs. Youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of tears, abuse, and entreaty. They had heard all about No. 6, No. 11, and No. 14. Three more breast-pins were promised. They were hardly gone when nine more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest burst forth and raged round about the prophet and his guest. Nine breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again. And in came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Eleven promised breast-pins purchased peace once more.

“That is a specimen,” said Mr. Young. “You see how it is. You see what a life I lead. A man can’t be wise all the time. In a heedless moment I gave my darling No. 6 — excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has escaped me for the moment — a breast-pin. It was only worth twenty-five dollars–that is, apparently that was its whole cost–but its ultimate cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more.

“You yourself have seen it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars — and alas, even that is not the end! For I have wives all over this Territory of Utah. I have dozens of wives whose numbers, even, I do not know without looking in the family Bible. They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and valleys of my realm. And mark you, every solitary one of them will hear of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or die. No. 6’s breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before I see the end of it. And these creatures will compare these pins together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in the family.

“Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant servitors of mine. If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your hand. Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an exactly similar gift to all my children — and knowing by experience the importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself that you did it, and did it thoroughly.

“Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle — a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty or ninety children in your house. But the deed was done — the man escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance. I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains. But they never caught him.

“I am not cruel, sir — I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged–but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death. By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assail!) there was never anything on this earth like it! I knew who gave the whistle to the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me. They believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection could have foreseen: I had to order a hundred and ten whistles–I think we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are off at college now — I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn’t have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got tired of the whistles.

“And if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than Haman! That is the word with the bark on it! Shade of Nephi! You don’t know anything about married life. I am rich, and everybody knows it. I am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it. I have a strong fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me.

“Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. Why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and she my wife — that I had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could not remember her name. Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me–a common thing in the Territory — and, to cut the story short, I put it in my nursery, and she left. And by the ghost of Orson Hyde, when they came to wash the paint off that child it was an Injun! Bless my soul, you don’t know anything about married life. It is a perfect dog’s life, sir — a perfect dog’s life.

“You can’t economize. It isn’t possible. I have tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all occasions. But it is of no use. First you’ll marry a combination of calico and consumption that’s as thin as a rail, and next you’ll get a creature that’s nothing more than the dropsy in disguise, and then you’ve got to eke out that bridal dress with an old balloon. That is the way it goes. And think of the wash-bill — (excuse these tears) — nine hundred and eighty-four pieces a week! No, sir, there is no such a thing as economy in a family like mine. Why, just the one item of cradles — think of it! And vermifuge! Soothing syrup! Teething rings! And ‘papa’s watches’ for the babies to
play with! And things to scratch the furniture with! And lucifer matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves with! The item of glass alone would support your family, I venture to say, sir. Let me scrimp and squeeze all I can, I still can’t get ahead as fast as I feel I ought to, with my opportunities.

“Bless you, sir, at a time when I had seventy-two wives in this house, I groaned under the pressure of keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads when the money ought to have been out at interest; and I just sold out the whole stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet long and ninety-six feet wide. But it was a failure, sir. I could not sleep. It appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once. The roar was deafening. And then the danger of it! That was what I was looking at. They would all draw in their breath at once, and you could actually see the walls of the house suck in–and then they would all exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out, and strain, and hear the rafters crack, and the shingles grind together.

“My friend, take an old man’s advice, and don’t encumber yourself with a large family — mind, I tell you, don’t do it. In a small family, and in a small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford us, and for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth, and no acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us. Take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need — never go over it.”

California government de-legitimitizes itself by “legalizing” the joke of same-sex “marriage”

People in government, and even many outside of it, can’t conceive of a government losing its legitimacy. After all, government has the guns, the tanks, the nukes.

But less than two decades ago we saw scores of governments in the Soviet Empire lose their legitimacy, fail, and be replaced by different governments.

California is leading the way — its usual trend-setter role — in de-legitimizing American governments, including the federal behemoth. As I’ve been saying, last week’s California Supreme Court ruling “legalizing” same-sex “marriage” is a mammoth joke. Every time I think about I’m overcome with laughter, even when I’m off the bourbon.

The latest joke is that our ridiculous governor, best known for prancing almost naked before audiences in a contest resembling that for Miss America, says “legalizing” this joke will help the California economy (after he’s wrecked it).

So, here’s how Arnold thinks it would work: The future Mr. & Mr. X fly into San Francisco and spend a lot of money on their “marriage” ceremony and party, thereby boosting the California economy; then they like it here so much they move here and pay taxes happily ever after. Arnold wastes all the money.

That’s Arnold’s fantasy.

The reality is that the future Mr. and Mr. X will look on the Internet and see how high taxes and regulations are in California, causing sky-high room and party costs. So, the’ll plan their party for Reno; then they’ll slip across to California to get “married” at a cost of maybe $100, returning Reno to party with their friends, giving Nevada their custom and taxes.

The whole escapade is so humorous that only a de-legitimized government could perpetuate it. Let’s just keep laughing at the California government until it goes away.

How can Republicans win with oil at $139 and gas at $4 rising to $5?

Gas out here in Orange County now approaches $4 a gallon. At the cheapest station around, run by Arco, I just saw the lowest price, for 87 octane, at $3.956.

Oil’s price now is $139.40 a barrel.

There’s one person to blame for this: Bush. When he took office, oil’s price was about $20 a barrel. Weren’t he and other oil industry big shots like Cheney supposed to know how to keep oil prices low? Wasn’t the Iraq war supposed to turn on the spigot of Iraq’s oil supply, second biggest in the world?

But Bush and his Federal Reserve chairmen, first Greenspan and now Bernanke — whom he chose for their jobs — have been inflating the dollar. That’s the real reason for the increase in prices. Inflation means higher prices, first for commodities like oil, then for everything else.

Abandoning the gold standard

It all stems from America not being on the gold standard since 1971. If we were still on the gold standard, gas would cost 31 cents a gallon. I remember the price because that was the year I turned 16 and got my license to drive on my birthday.

The Democratic Congress, backed by most Republicans and even more clueless than Bush, is blaming OPEC. Reuters reports:

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

All that would do, if it becomes law, would be to spur those countries to stop selling to us.

It’s embarrassing that such economic illiterates run America’s government. They have the wrong target. For one thing, the top oil importer to America is Canada, with 1,727 thousand barrels/day, as of March; followed by Saudi Arabia with 1,535, Canada with 1,232, Nigeria with 1,138, Venezuela with 858, and Iraq with 773.

What are they going to do, invade Canada and Mexico?

Or maybe, invade Iraq? (Wait, they already did that. Hmmm.)

If Congress really wanted to do something, they would abolish the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Inflation Board. Kick Bernanke and his cohorts back to academe.

The Constitution stipulates that Congress, and only Congress, has the power: “

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”

That is, money is supposed to be given a specific value, much as the “Standards of Weights and Measures” fix a yard at 36 inches, and so on. For most of America’s history, until the Fed was imposed, gold was fixed at $20.67 and ounce. Check out this historical chart. The Fed was imposed in 1913 and, for until 1933, behaved itself somewhat. Then in 1934 FDR mandated that gold be devalued to $35 an ounce — a vast stealing of the nation’s wealth. FDR made Bonnie and Clyde look like pickpockets.

4,367% inflation

As of today, after almost a century of Fed inflationism, gold was at $923.28. That’s inflation of 4,367%.

I’ve been writing about this for 35 years — especially the last 7 years of Bush inflationism.

Do you get it now, America? Apparently not, because you keep electing these planariae to Congress.

The only one in Congress who understands this, Ron Paul, couldn’t gain contraction even in the GOP primaries (although he just got 15% in Oregon; maybe people are waking up a little from their Ambien overdose).

Americans don’t much understand what’s going on. But they’re going to blame the party what now runs the White House: the Republicans. The GOP once got this stuff, at least sort of. Reagan’s two election platforms promised a return to the gold standard. Although he broke those promises, at least he made them.

Bush is going to be gone in 8 months (thank God!), but the Fed will still be with us — unconstitutional, unelected, undemocratic.

So, don’t blame OPEC, or the Arabs, or even the Iraq War. Blame Bush and the Fed, the Fed, the Fed.

Then abolish the Fed.

Ron Paul, not Gov. Arnold, is rebranding the GOP

If he hadn’t gone into politics, by now Gov. Arnold would be filming “Terminator VII: Terminator vs. Predator vs. Alien, Beyond Thunderdome,” directed by Sylvester Stallone and co-starring Dolph Lungren and Vin Diesel.

Instead, he’s amusing us from the governor’s office. His latest humorous idea: Republicans need to “rebrand” themselves, and stop being right-wingers.

But since when have modern Republicans — besides Ron Paul — been right-wingers? The right wing always wanted to balance the budget, which Gov. Arnold has not done any more than has President Bush or the Republican Congresses of 2000-2006. And right-wingers — such as the great Sen. Bob Taft of the 1940s and 1950s — favor a modest foreign policy. It’s liberals — Truman, JFK, LBJ — who began invading the world after World War II. Bush’s policy of invading the world comes from his neo-“conservative” advisers, who aren’t conservatives at all, but neo-Leninist-Trotskyists.

Columnist Paul Mulshine explained:

[Bill] Kristol is in fact a neoconservative and neoconservatism is, as conservative columnist George F. Will so aptly put it, “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism.”

The radicalism of the neocons is rooted in the thought of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary whose theory of worldwide liberation was passed down to the lesser neocons by Kristol’s father, New York intellectual Irving Kristol. (If you are not aware of this connection, please Google “Kristol and Trotsky” before you go any further).

So, when Arnold implicitly criticizes Bush — whom he helped elect in 2004 — for being right-wing, he’s covering up that Bush really is left-wing.

Gov. Deficit

Arnold’s own legacy always will be that he soon will become the first governor in California history never to sign a single balanced budget, although in his case he will have had 7 chances. His budget won’t be balanced this year. And his last two years in office it won’t be balanced, either, because of the recession. What a legacy.

Yet he was elected in the 2003 special election after Gov. Gray Davis was recalled for running up a $20 billion deficit! What a phony.

His other ideas also have fizzled. His $15 billion socialized medicine scheme was so Soviet that even the leftist Democrats who run the state Senate turned it down. His Gore-ish obsession with a global-warming apocalypse is disproved by science.

Arnold became governor only because:

1. He’s a celebrity. He brought not a single new idea or policy to the campaign.

2. It was a special election, without a primary. If it had been a normal election, he would not have been nominated by the GOP because of his leftist views.

He was re-nominated by the GOP in 2006 because Republicans are too deferential to those in power, and because the economy hadn’t yet imploded and the deficits exploded.

The Ron Paul Rebranding Revolution

The real re-branding of the GOP is being conducted by Ron Paul. He’s doing what Barry Goldwater did in 1964: Winning by losing. Paul’s Revolution is growing like grassfire among young folks. By contrast, know any young folks enthusiastic about Arnold?

Ron Paul’s new book, “The Revolution,” was No. 1 on Amazon and the NY Times bestsellers lists. It’s sold out in most Orange County bookstores.

Currently, it’s No. 12 on Amazon — but they won’t even ship a copy until May 25 because the publisher can’t keep up.

By contrast, Arnold’s top book is his “The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding,” which ranks a pathetic 1,149.

If you want to pump up your biceps, buy Arnold’s book.

If you want to pump up your liberties, buy Ron Paul’s.

Arnold is a has-been bodybuilder, a has-been actor, and soon will be a has-been governor.

Ron Paul, amazingly, although a 72-year-old grandfather, is the exciting leader of the new, youth-energized Freedom Movement in America — the heir to the Founding Fathers, the great President Grover Cleveland, Sen. Taft, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.

Ron Paul, not Arnold, is the prophet of the iPod generation. Ron Paul, not Arnold, is rebranding the GOP into a post-Bush, post-Neocon, post-interventionism, post-police state, party of freedom.

Americans love freedom and won’t settle for the warmed–over Austrian socialism Arnold is offering up.

Ron Paul is leading the fife and drum corps of liberty to victory.

Check PoliticalBastards.com

Catch the fever. It’s a contagious new animated political cartoon site: PoliticalBastards.com.

This is going to be a “viral” site that spreads like a comic bubonic plague. You’re in at Ground Zero.

No doubt, the politicians soon will ban it. (Something about the “double-secret cartoon codicil” in the McCain-Feingold Act.) So don’t miss PoliticalBastards.com while it’s up.

It’s created by my great friends Mike Shelton and Jocelyne Leger.

Have fun poking around the site. There are many animations up there, such as the one at the top. That’s just a snap-shot. The real one on PoliticalBastards.com, called “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” is animated.

And there’s the animation making fun of Gov. Arnold’s political response to the Orange County fire: snap-shot to the right.

My favorite area is the “Interactive” section where you can “drag to dress” a politician. I put Bush in a clown outfit. (Too bad it’s not one of those “Twilight Zone” episodes where the fiction becomes the reality. Or is it?)

And make sure to click on the “Rant eCards” button to send an animation to a friend.

Oh, and don’t miss the poignant Memorial Day animation. Not everything in life is a joke.

Back to the levity: Watch these animations at work and you’ll laugh so hard you’ll get fired. (You have been warned.)

Uncensored.

Unadorned.

Unadulterated.

Unrated.

Uncouth.

PoliticalBastards.com.