Obstacles and opportunities for tyranny. The Pelican Brief and "where the money is."

"If the Supreme Court's membership could be increased to twelve, without too much trouble, perhaps the Constitution would be found to be quite elastic." -- Letter to FDR at the time of the Supreme Court's overturning of the National Recovery Act.

Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts. Who knuckled under to blackmail and voted in the West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish case as a strategic measure to save the judicial integrity and independence of the U.S. Supreme Court from FDR's court-packing scheme.

Dear Leader's problems are compounding, causing many to believe he will be a one-term President. For a man of such a huge narcissistic ego and prodigious appetite for power and adulation this simply will not do.

The LA Times reports that much of the Mighty Kenyan's agenda will come apart upon contact with the Roberts Supreme Court. Now this has happened before with another egomaniacal Democrat president. He responded by trying to pack the court. This threat, though it cost FDR much, succeeded in blackmailing another Justice Roberts to change his vote. It was called "the switch in time that saved the nine."

Obama doesn't have the political base to do that. What he came in with is rapidly ebbing and everybody knows it. No, there will no court-packing this time. What is left to them is The Pelican Brief. If Obama is the tyrant wannabe I suspect he is (and if his backers are as ruthless as believed), the actuarial tables on the five recalcitrant justices of the present-day Roberts court might be tipped in Dear Leader's favor.



Willie Sutton is the 1930s bank robber who is famously (and he later claimed falsely) known for answering a reporter, Mitch Ohnstad, who asked why he robbed banks by saying, "because that's where the money is."

In his partly ghostwritten autobiography, Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (Viking Press, New York, 1976), Sutton dismissed this story, saying:

"I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...

"If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say...it couldn't be more obvious.

"Or could it?

"Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all."

"Go where the money is...and go there often." -- Wikipedia.

Of course this regime's version of government-regulated Voodoo Economics has failed spectacularly, introducing huge economic uncertainty into an already awful market. Obama's fortunes COULD be rescued by a dramatic economic turnaround and Fareed Zakaria thinks he knows where the Mighty Kenyan can get it. All he has to do is follow Willie Sutton's advice.

The American economy is sputtering and we are running out of options. Interest rates can't go any lower. Another burst of government spending -- whether a good or bad idea -- looks politically impossible. Can anything protect us from the dangers of stagnation or a double dip? Actually, there is a second stimulus that could have a dramatic effect on the economy -- even more so than government spending. And it won't add to the deficit.

The Federal Reserve recently reported that America's 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets. By any calculation (for example, as a percentage of assets), this is higher than it has been in almost half a century. Yet most corporations are not spending this money on new plants, equipment or workers. Were they to loosen their purse strings, hundreds of billions of dollars would start pouring through the economy. These investments would probably have greater effect and staying power than a government stimulus.

So how does Dear Leader force this stash out into the market? It won't be pretty and you can bet it won't be constitutional. It will be a robbery that dwarfs anything Willie Sutton ever contemplated. As the fictional Sir James Manson commented in Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War:

“Knocking off a bank or an armoured truck is merely crude. Knocking off an entire republic has, I feel, a certain style.”