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I came across an article at Hot Air, where Justice Scalia talked about how fundamentally misunderstood our government is by it’s own citizens:

I ask them, “Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in out Constitution that makes us what we are?” And I guarantee you that the response I will get — and you will get this from almost any American *** the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes… those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.

But then I tell them, “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy.” Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!

Of course, it’s just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a “parchment guarantee.” And the reason is that the real constitution of the Soviet Union — you think of the word “constitution” — it doesn’t mean “bill” it means “structure”: [when] you say a person has a good constitution you mean a sound structure. The real constitution of the Soviet Union *** that constitution did not prevent the centralization of power in one person or in one party. And when that happens, the game is over, the Bill of Rights is just what our Framers would call a “parchment guarantee.”

So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our govenment. One part of it, of course, is the independence of the judiciary, but there’s a lot more. There are very few countries in the world, for example, that have a bicameral legislature. England has a House of Lords, for the time being, but the House of Lords has no substantial power; they can just make the [House of] Commons pass a bill a second time. France has a senate; it’s honorific. Italy has a senate; it’s honorific. Very few countries have two separate bodies in the legislature equally powerful. That’s a lot of trouble, as you gentlemen doubtless know, to get the same language through two different bodies elected in a different fashion.

Very few countries in the world have a separately elected chief executive. Sometimes, I go to Europe to talk about separation of powers, and when I get there I find that all I’m talking about is independence of the judiciary because the Europeans don’t even try to divide the two political powers, the two political branches, the legislature and the chief executive. In all of the parliamentary countries the chief executive is the creature of the legislature. There’s never any disagreement between them and the prime minister, as there is sometimes between you and the president. When there’s a disagreement, they just kick him out! They have a no confidence vote, a new election, and they get a prime minister who agrees with the legislature.

The Europeans look at this system and say “It passes one house, it doesn’t pass the other house, sometimes the other house is in the control of a different party. it passes both, and this president, who has a veto power, vetoes it,” and they look at this, and they say (adopting an accent) “Ach, it is gridlock.” I hear Americans saying this nowadays, and there’s a lot of it going around. They talk about a disfunctional government because there’s disagreement… and the Framers would have said, “Yes! That’s exactly the way we set it up. We wanted this to be power contradicting power because the main ill besetting us — as Hamilton said in The Federalist when he talked about a separate Senate: “Yes, it seems inconvenient, inasmuch as the main ill that besets us is an excess of legislation, it won’t be so bad.” This is 1787; he didn’t know what an excess of legislation was.

Unless Americans can appreciate that and learn to love the separation of powers, which means learning to love the gridlock which the Framers believed would be the main protector of minorities, [we lose] the main protection. If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard on some minority [and] they think it’s terribly unfair, it doesn’t take much to throw a monkey wrench into this complex system. Americans should appreciate that; they should learn to love the gridlock. It’s there so the legislation that does get out is good legislation.

Let me leave you with this – of all the nations of the world, many of which concentrate power into the hands of a single party, which is better governed than the US?  And I don’t simply mean right now, as many a nation can have a good ten year run only to see it turn to ash (looking at you Ireland) but over the course of decades?

The red-line is the deficit for 2009.  Each of the columns represent the amount of additional revenue raised if we increased the tax rate for those that earn over $1 million to those level, with a theoretical maximum of 100%, where all income is taken.  Even is the US had no millionaires, and all income from those making over $999,999 was taken, we’d still be running a massive deficit.  Or, put another way, if we had confiscated all that money, we still would have had a deficit larger than the previous three-years combined.  That’s why the Tea Party pushed so hard on the debt-ceiling fight – because raising taxes for politicians is an easy thing to accomplish,  but solves nothing.  It doesn’t matter how helpful or well run a government program is if you can’t afford it.  We obviously can’t afford the programs we’re paying for now, and so cuts need to be made.

Most Republicans privately acknowledge that tax increases will eventually be part of any solution.  But we’ve been down the road of tax increases now for promised cuts down the road – the cuts never come, and the problem actually gets worse as politicians look for ways to spend the new revenue.  Republicans, backed by the Tea Party elements, are now insisting on cuts first, and then followed by tax increases.  Considering that we’ve gone from 60% of our GDP allocated to our national debt to 100% between 2007 and 2011, something needs to be done.

NY-26 and NY-23 both are now controlled by Democrats, after decades of Republican control.  In 2010, despite historic pro-GOP results nation wide, NY-24 and NY-25 barely broke for the Republicans and could easily swing back.  Upcoming redistricting promises to make the situation even worse for the New York State Republicans, as Democrats dominate state government, and the Republican Party has never recovered after the end of the Pataki administration, and been largely devoid of the ability to put forward credible state-wide candidates.

Demographics have a great deal to do with the issue – New York is shedding population, largely due to poor economics and high taxes.  Those capable of leaving the area tend to be Republicans, a situation that hurts doubly when congressional district contraction occurs and gerrymandering results in fewer Republican safe/competitive seats (already almost non-existent in NY).

It could be said I’m reading into NY-23 and NY-26 too much, but Bill Owens in NY-23 won a straight-up election in 2010 in the face of the Republican tide.  Even with the shadow of Doug Hoffman, given that he did not run that year, the seat should have been an easy Republican win, given the decades of Republican control under McHugh and Gerald Solomon and the general Republican sentiment of the election.  In NY-26, the Democrat, Hochol managed to beat the Republican by a fairly significant margin, offsetting to a great degree the fact that the third-party run by a (widely regarded as fake) tea-party candidate siphoned off votes from the Republican.  Over the last week, national Republican and conservative apparatuses had gotten out the word about the tea-party candidate, so as to minimize the impact, but the margin of victory of the Democrat can’t be dismissed.

As a side note, much will be made of whether or not NY-26 hold any significance nationwide.  I don’t think so – there was simply too much local politics involved in the race to draw a meaningful lesson, and it was a single congressional race – it simply doesn’t significance as the 2009 elections did as bellwethers for 2010.  I do, however, think it holds significance for the state of the NY Republican Party – that is that the GOP still can’t organize to win elections that it should win.  In 2008, the Republican congressional delegation was nearly wiped out.  I expect that trend to continue.

While it might feel good to tax the rich more, unless dramatic tax changes take place, the result will be negligible.  In fact, as the Wall Street Journal noted, “Even if [everyone earning over $100k] were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.”

With the Republican wave of 2010, Republicans captured all the branches of government in Wisconsin.  They held majorities in both houses of the legislature, the governorship and held a 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court.  Given the anger over the legislation going through the government, and given their lack of ability to prevent it, the Supreme Court election this year became exceptionally important to the Democrats, and money poured into the race.  They wouldn’t be able to block the union reform bill (as the new justice wouldn’t be seated until after a ruling was made), but they would be able to call it a rebuke (as this was the first election following the passage of the bill) and would be able to block future legislation.  The base was as energized as it ever was – the Democrats felt they were fighting for their very existence in the state.

Wisconsin is a historically very-Democratic state.  It hasn’t voted for a Republican President since the Reagan blowout of Mondale in 1984, when all but one state in the Union voted for Reagan.  It had two Democratic Senators since 1993, until the surprise unseating of the quintessential liberal, Russ Feingold, in 2010.

Given the Democratic nature of the state, given the energized base, given the desperate nature of the situation to Democrats, and given the amount of money poured into the campaign, the fact that the Republicans, in an off-year election for a normally ignored race, managed to match Democratic turnout, things do not bode well for Democrats in 2012 (and especially Herb Kohl, the other Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, who is up for election that year).  The fact that Republicans appear to have won the race (a few thousand votes separate the two candidates out of 1.5 million) will put a dampener on the enthusiasm the Democrats have built up, and possibly hamper their efforts to recall legislators in the state.  The 2012 elections look to be a tough one for Democrats, especially if they need to fight just to retain a state like Wisconsin.  It’s like Republicans fighting to retain Alabama.

According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.

This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.

Stratfor goes on to note that Mexico doesn’t bother to submit to the ATF guns they are able to positively identify themselves, which include guns from other nations (they use the example of popular South Korean munitions used by the cartels) as well as arms coming from their own government stocks.

But the political opposition seem to be opposing it because, lacking an increase in the debt ceiling, it will require spending cuts.  Playing games with the debt ceiling is a bi-partisan activity.  Republicans have done it to tweak Democrats in office, and vice versa.  However one gets whiplash watching Obama go from arguing and voting against raising the debt ceiling just a couple years ago to his surrogates question the sanity when Republicans, heavily influenced by the Tea Party (who’s raison d’etre is the economy) argue for austerity.

But Kent Konrad and the liberal blogosphere are arguing that Toomey’s idea is “paying China first”, because those financing the debt (of whom, China is famously one of the largest) get paid first .  The cynicism of this argument is just staggering.  The implication is that bond holders shouldn’t get paid – otherwise who cares whether their money is first or last.  It’s a blind appeal to the worst aspects of nationalism – something that drove places like DailyKos and TPM nuts when they perceived it coming from Bush.  Now they echo the “Paying China First” line, at the expense of the credit standing of the US.  We want, we need China to continue to buy US bonds, so long as we continue to run deficits.  Why would anyone want to buy bonds when those that control the Senate and the White House opening imply that they should default on that debt?

Both sides are playing politics on the issue, but the Republicans are playing politics towards the goal of austerity, which given the state of the economy and national debt, makes a good amount of sense.  If Democrats aren’t playing politics out of pure self interest, I honestly don’t know what they’re working towards.