This happenstance juxtaposition of paragraphs caught my attention

Bear with me. It will be worth it, promise.

• The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation (Dr. Tim Stanley, The Telegraph, 8/14/2013):

The cynical might infer from the NYT piece that the Clintons are willing to sell themselves, their image, and even their Foundation's reputation in exchange for money to finance their personal projects. In Bill's case, saving the world. In Hillary's case, maybe, running for president.

It's nothing new to report that there's an unhealthy relationship in America between money and politics, but it's there all the same. While the little people are getting hit with Obamacare, high taxes and joblessness, a class of businessmen enjoys ready access to politicians of both Left and Right that poses troubling questions for how the republic can continue to call itself a democracy so long as it functions as an aristocracy of the monied.

• The Plot to Save America (Andrew C. McCarthy, September 2013):

Despite some 11,539 proposed modifications since the first Congress convened nearly two-and-a-quarter centuries ago, the Constitution has only been formally amended twenty-seven times (and just two times in the last forty-two years—the last in 1992). One must say “formally” because ... the Constitution has been contorted to a fare-thee-well by judicial ukase (which, for example, enables Leviathan to hyper-regulate virtually every item in your home by construing the Interstate Commerce Clause to control intrastate commerce), by ambitious legislative schemes like Obamacare, and by imperious presidents overseeing the vast, metastasizing, and unaccountable administrative state to which Congress has delegated much of its legislative authority.

To roll back this tide is the burden of The Liberty Amendments...

...Although most discussions of separation-of-powers focus on checks and balances among the federal departments, the principal curb on federal power was to be the states. The Constitution, as the Federalist Papers attest, left control over the infinite details of everyday life to the individual and the local government closest and most accountable to him. The federal government was to handle just a few external matters, mainly dealing with national security and foreign relations. To restore that balance, to strip Leviathan back down to size, would take the collective strength and determination of the states...

...No priority is greater than supplanting the entrenched Beltway ruling class. As designed, the Republic’s central government featured citizen legislators, representatives of the people who actually were, well, representative of the people. More out of patriotic duty than financial remuneration, they met infrequently in the nation’s capital—just a few months out of the year—reflective of the fact that the national government’s responsibilities, though vital, were few and critically reliant on the indulgence of state governments. Over time, as the progressive administrative state grew, particularly under the Wilson and FDR administrations, Washington incrementally devoured state sovereignty. With this dramatic shift in the balance of power, a governing elite emerged—a permanent Beltway ruling class of career politicians whose main interest was in increasing federal power. They now inhabit Congress as if they were life peers or revolve between the bureaucracy and its back-scratching cottage industry of lobbyists, consultants, and celebrity media commentators.

I've concluded that there are two major political parties in this country.

There are the Beltway Elites, Democrats and Republicans, who are committed only to bigger government even as the country commits fiscal suicide.

And there are the rest of us.