Great WSJ Editorial

I laughed out loud when I read this great Journal editorial mocking the idiocy of the libtards in our Congress.

American Jobbery Act

Dissecting this week's stimulus bill.

President Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill are publicly fretting about the dangers of spending and debt, which can mean only one thing: Another big spending "stimulus" bill is in the works. And sure enough, the House plans to vote this week on $190 billion in new spending, $134 billion of which it won't even pretend to pay for.

Sander Levin, the new Ways and Means Chairman, calls this exercise the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. Mr. Levin has waited 28 years to ascend to this throne and this is the best he can do? "Jobs" were also the justification in February 2009 for the $862 billion stimulus that has managed to hold the jobless rate down to a mere 9.9%. Maybe Mr. Levin's spending can hold it down to even greater heights.

The nearby table gives a flavor of what's in this grab bag of political payoffs, corporate welfare and transfer payments. There's $24 billion to help states pay the exploding tab for Medicaid, the same program that ObamaCare expands by some 16 million new recipients. The bill also offers $1 billion for summer jobs for teens, whose jobless rate is 25.4%. Congress could do far more to create teen jobs if it merely suspended last year's minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour, which priced millions of young workers out of the labor market. But that would be too rational.

The biggest item is $65 billion to prevent a 21% cut in Medicare physician reimbursements. Democrats promised this to the American Medical Association in return for its ObamaCare support, but they left the $65 billion out of the health-care law to make it look less expensive. Now they're pushing it through under separate cover when they assume the press corps won't notice.

The $47 billion to extend unemployment insurance to nearly two full years will bring the total spent on this program to $137 billion during this recession—five times more than in either of the prior two recessions. That's nearly as much as the federal corporate income raised in 2009.

The sages in Congress continue to claim that these payments for not working will lead to more work. Representative Jim McDermott recently declared on the House floor that jobless payments are "one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus" because "every unemployment dollar spent returns $1.64 of economic benefits." So let's lay off everybody, pay them for not working, and watch the economy really boom. Where do they teach this stuff? <-- my emphasis -- I love this!

This bill is also one of the most expensive corporate welfare giveaways in recent years with subsidies for municipal bond traders, cotton farmers, yarn producers, sheep growers, Hawaiian sugar cane cooperatives, motor sports businesses, renewable energy firms, the steel lobby, and so on. Any industry that doesn't get a tax credit or other handout in this bill should fire its lobbyist.

All of this is "paid for," in the Beltway lingo, with a net tax increase on business of about $40 billion and at least $134 billion of new debt. There's a new 24 cent a barrel tax on oil companies, which would flow to consumers in higher gas prices, because Congress says the industry's profits are excessive.

U.S. multinational companies would pay a higher tax rate on their overseas income, which will not help them create more jobs here. The better way to discourage job outsourcing is to cut the corporate income tax rate, but Mr. Levin and his union allies will have none of that.

Managers of private equity and venture capital firms that provide the start-up and expansion funding to businesses would see their tax rate rise to as high as 35% from 15% today—a huge tax increase when businesses are starved for capital. And small, often family-owned Subchapter S companies that provide professional services would be required to subject more of their profits to the self-employment tax. These firms already pay up to 35% tax on these profits, so under the Democratic plan their tax rate could reach 50%.

Perhaps you're wondering what happened to the "pay as you go" budget rules that Mr. Obama announced to great media fanfare as recently as February. Democrats now say "paygo" doesn't apply because this spending qualifies as an "emergency." But while the new spending isn't paid for, Democrats are insisting that the bill's extension of the R&D tax credit and small business depreciation allowance must be offset by the tax increases.

Oh, and by the way, the President is unveiling a new line-item veto proposal this week to "rein in wasteful spending and hold Congress accountable," as Senator John Kerry put it yesterday in a press release. If any of them were remotely serious, they'd start by line-item vetoing this entire bill.

Adios Facebook

I deleted my facebook account. I could not say anything about it for two weeks though. Facebook is set up so that if you access your account in any way for two weeks after you cancel, facebook treats that as recanting your request to delete your account and restores it.

I had set up my blog to "push" any posts to my facebook account. So, in addition to deleting facebook from my work pc, my home pc, my iTouch, and my crackberry, I had to remember not too blog anything to avoid inadvertently restarting my account.

More on the Legion

Sandro Magister has some good articles on the continuing (sad) saga of the Legion on his website. His insights are particularly keen on my second point below regarding the obtuseness and denial manifested by the Legion's upper echelons.

The Legion Awaits a New General. And Trembles

A commissioner appointed by the Vatican will take command of the Legionaries of Christ, orphans of their founder Marcial Maciel, disgraced by scandals. This is the likely outcome of eight months of investigation. Many things should be changed, including the current leaders

by Sandro Magister

ROME, March 16, 2010 – In the thick of the storm rocking the Catholic Church on account of the sexual abuse committed against minors by priests, an end has come to the apostolic visit ordered by the Holy See among the Legionaries of Christ, the congregation founded by Marcial Maciel.

The Maciel case is extreme in every way. It pushes the contrast between image and reality to exaggerated limits. Between the beatified image of the priest founder of an ultra-orthodox, ascetical, devout religious congregation, flourishing with vocations, some of them exemplary, and the reality of a dissolute second life, made up of incessant violations not only of the vows but of the commandments, of continual sinful affairs with women, men, and minors of every age and condition, with children and lovers all over the world, their number still unknown.

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Still today, after the eight-month apostolic visit, Maciel's successor as director general of the congregation, Fr. Álvaro Corcuera, and vicar general Luis Garza Medina – who were also for decades, especially the latter of them, very close collaborators of the founder – show no intention of leaving their command. And neither do any of the other high and mid-level directors, central or peripheral.

Their defense is that they were always unaware of Maciel's second life, and that their fidelity to the Church and to the pope, in addition to their leadership experience, are the best guarantees for the congregation's continuity.

Last February 5, in "L'Osservatore Romano," Fr. Luis Garza Medina, unruffled, published an article describing the "virtuous life" of the ideal priest. He who more than anyone else lived side by side with Maciel, knowing all his secrets and managing his money, and who always held him up as a model.

But that the current leaders of the Legionaries should be left at the head of the congregation is entirely unlikely. The more probable decision is that the Holy See will appoint a fully empowered commissioner of its own, and will set the guidelines for a thorough reform, including the replacement of the current leaders.

But rebuilding from the ground up a congregation still deeply influenced by its disgraced founder will be an arduous enterprise.

Priests and seminarians who until very recently were steeped in the writings attributed to Maciel will have difficulty finding new sources of inspiration, not generic but specific to their order. The current leaders of the congregation aren't helping, either. On the contrary. One of Maciel's former personal secretaries, Fr. Felipe Castro, together with other priests of the Legion, has worked in recent months to select from among the founder's many letters a group of letters to be "saved" for the future, to keep a positive image of Maciel alive.

The dependence of the Legionaries on Maciel was – and for many still is – absolute. There wasn't a shred of daily life that escaped the rules he dictated. Absurdly exacting rules. Which prescribed, for example, how to sit at the table, how to use a napkin, how to swallow, how to eat chicken without using one's hands, how to debone a fish.

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The Big "Wager." How to Remake the Legion from Scratch

Maciel's offenses. The system of power that covered up his disgraceful life. The Vatican authorities are making accusations. And dictating the agenda for reconstruction. With full powers entrusted to a cardinal delegated by the pope

by Sandro Magister

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THE COMPLICITY OF THE LEADERS

The statement also makes a severe and unprecedented judgment of the "system of relationships" constructed around Maciel, of the "silence of the entourage," of the "mechanism of defense" of his disgraceful life.

Writing that "most of the Legionaries were unaware of this life," the statement implicitly affirms that some of them did know about it.

So there will be no indulgence for the "system of power" that closed ranks around Maciel before and after his death, meaning the current central and territorial leaders of the Legion.

In particular, it is completely unrealistic to think that the ax might spare the two supreme leaders, director general Álvaro Corcuera and vicar general Luís Garza Medina.

The latter of these, until now the real man in charge of the Legion from the financial point of view, has done everything possible over the past few weeks to position himself as a new Talleyrand, capable of remaining in the saddle even in the Thermidor, after having supported the Terror.

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New Developments re the Legion of Christ

The Vatican moved to take control of the Legion of Christ over the weekend. Two interesting, related, aspects of this story:

(1) The Vatican issued it's announcement without notifying the Legion; and,

(2) It appears from reports that, despite the evidence, some (many?) of the Legion's leaders still don't get it. They still seem to think that this latest scandal involving Fr. Maciel will blow over and it'll soon be "business as usual".

Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal:

Pope Benedict to Overhaul Legion of Christ
By STACY MEICHTRY And JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA

VATICAN CITY—Pope Benedict XVI will overhaul the Legion of Christ, one of the most powerful orders in Roman Catholicism, in the wake of a Vatican investigation into decades of cover-ups inside the order that allowed its founder to sexually abuse seminarians and father at least one child.

In a statement Saturday, the Vatican announced plans for Benedict XVI to appoint a special envoy and set up a commission to restructure the Legion. The commission, the Vatican said, will rewrite the order's statutes and redefine the military-like culture, which led its members to maintain a code of secrecy in the face of sexual abuse committed by its late founder Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado.

"The conduct of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado had consequences in the life and the structure of the Legion that are so serious as to require a journey of profound revision," the Vatican said.

Father Maciel, who died in 2008, had always denied the allegations of sexual abuse. The Legion, which defended the founder for years, repudiated Father Maciel last month and apologized to his victims. "The Legionaries thank the Holy Father and embrace his provisions with faith and obedience," the Legion said in a statement posted on its Web site Saturday.

In an email responding to an interview request, Luis Garza, the Legion's No. 2 official, said: "For the moment, we will have to wait a bit to have the context and full knowledge of everything."

The overhaul of the Legion comes as Benedict XVI is under intense pressure to show his willingness to crack down on sexual abuse in the highest ranks of Catholicism. Over the years, Benedict XVI has stripped many sexually abusive priests of their ministry and met with victims in the U.S., Australia and Malta.

Benedict XVI, who visited the Shroud of Turin Sunday, will meet with bishops from Belgium this week to discuss their response to the sex-abuse crisis, the Associated Press reported.

Critics have faulted the pope for not taking swift action against bishops and other powerful figures within the Church hierarchy who for decades allowed the abuse to occur on their watch and, in many cases, failed to alert police and other civil authorities.

The decision to act against the order came one day after Benedict XVI met with top advisers inside Vatican City to receive a briefing on the Legion from five Vatican-appointed investigators, including Denver Archbishop Charles Joseph Chaput.

A person close to the Legion said the order was taken by surprise Saturday by how quickly the Vatican acted, and didn't inform the Legion prior to making its plans public. "It's a defining moment for" the Legion, he said. "No one expected such a quick decision," the person said.

Father Maciel, who founded the Legion in Mexico in the 1940s, thrived at recruiting seminarians and used his connections with Mexican businessmen to raise millions of dollars for the Catholic Church. That, and the Legion's conservative outlook, made him a favorite of the late Pope John Paul II who was struggling to halt a drop in the number of priests world-wide.

Father Maciel also cultivated close ties with top Vatican officials, including Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who was then the Vatican's No. 2 official and is now the dean of the College of Cardinals. A nun who responded to a phone call to Cardinal Sodano's residence on Saturday said the cardinal was unavailable for comment.

In its statement on Saturday, the Vatican said Father Maciel led a double life, benefiting from a "system of connections" that allowed him to create phony alibis and suppress internal dissent.

At the same time, Father Maciel's loyalists inside the Legion fostered a "mechanism of defense," the Vatican said, that shielded the founder from allegations of abuse. "It made him untouchable," the Vatican said.

The Vatican didn't elaborate on exactly how the Legion managed to insulate its late founder from allegations over the decades.

The person close to the Legion noted the Vatican statement didn't specify what would happen to the head of the Legion, Rev. Alvaro Corcuera, and his second-in-command, Father Garza, both members of prominent Mexican families who were placed in leadership positions by Father Maciel.

The Vatican decision, the person said, will require a thorough rewriting of the Legion's constitution and governing documents to uproot Father Maciel's influence from the order. For example, many of the pastoral letters Father Maciel wrote to the Legion community were written by other Legionnaires and signed by him, the person said. "The commission has to go through all of the Legion's history and determine what really happened," he added.

In 1997, nine former Legion seminarians went public in an article in the Hartford Courant about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Father Maciel. A year later, the seminarians filed a formal complaint to the office of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, who was then among a handful of top Vatican officials in charge of removing sexually abusive clerics from the priesthood.

Cardinal Ratzinger, tabled the former seminarians' 1998 complaint until quietly reviving it in December 2004, a few months before Pope John Paul II died.

One year after his election as pope in April 2005, Benedict XVI sanctioned Father Maciel, prohibiting him from celebrating Mass in public and ordering the priest to live a "private life" of prayer and penance.

Although the sanctions were regarded as unusually tough inside the Vatican, critics faulted Benedict XVI for allowing Father Maciel to retain his formal status as a priest. He remained a member of the clergy when he died in 2008.

In 2009, Benedict launched an investigation into the Legion itself, naming five church investigators, called "visitators," to inspect the Legion's global network of seminaries, schools and centers for its lay movement.

The Legion has some 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians operating universities and schools in more than 20 countries from Brazil to Chile and Spain. In the U.S., it operates 21 prep schools, a start-up university in Sacramento and the U.S.'s only three seminaries for teenage boys. The Legion's lay movement, known as Regnum Christi, has more than 50,000 followers around the world.

"That's All The Ammo They Had"

I love common sense and plain speaking. This is a couple of years old, but a post on a gun forum reminded me of this story today, so I googled it and found it in Fox New's archives. We need more public officials like Sheriff Judd.

Florida Police Shot Suspected Cop Killer 68 Times
Sunday , October 01, 2006

LAKELAND, Fla. —

Officers fired 110 rounds of ammunition at the man suspected of killing a sheriff's deputy, killing the suspect, according to an autopsy released by the sheriff's office.

Angilo Freeland — who was suspected of fatally shooting the deputy after being pulled over for speeding Thursday — was hit 68 times by the SWAT team members' shots, the examination released Saturday showed.

He also was suspected of wounding a deputy and killing a police dog.

Freeland's death ended a nearly 24-hour manhunt that forced schools to lock down and families to stay indoors as about 500 officers scoured the woods.

The wounded deputy had pulled Freeland over for speeding and became suspicious of his identification. The suspect got nervous and bolted into the woods, officials said.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said he was not concerned by the number of shots fired.

"You have to understand, he had already shot and killed a deputy, he had already shot and killed a K-9 and he shot and injured another deputy," Judd said by phone Saturday. "Quite frankly, we weren't taking any chances."

Ten SWAT officers surrounded Freeland on Friday as he hid beneath brush and a fallen tree in a rural area. Authorities say he raised the gun belonging to the deputy he had killed, prompting nine officers to fire.

"I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that's all the ammunition they had," Judd said. "We were not going to take any chance of him shooting back."

The SWAT officers who shot Freeland have been placed on paid administrative leave, standard procedure in all police shootings.

Also released Saturday were autopsy results for the deputy, Vernon Matthew Williams, 39, which showed he had been shot eight times. He was not wearing a protective vest, but shots hit him in his right leg and behind his right ear, among other places.

Diogi, his German shepherd police dog, was also killed. The dog had been shot once in the chest.

Authorities said deputy sheriff Doug Speirs, also 39, was fired at several times and shot once in the leg. A sergeant and an officer from the Lakeland Police Department were also fired at, authorities said.

Hold Your Nose and Cross Your Fingers

He was insufferable as a Congressman, he's been an even slimier eel as a Senator.

Accoring to this New York Times business blog post, it appears that Chuckie Schumer has got his sights on the post of Senate Majority Leader. If he obtains this post, he'll have a much bigger media spotlight from which to spread his bile and slander. Ugh.

Wow!

You may have heard about this meteor on the news. I had just stepped outside to enjoy the warm spring night when this meteor lit up the sky. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The meteor was captured on this police officer's dashboard camera:

Obama's the Best ...

... at coddling enemies and alienating friends.

In fact, he's even managed to anger his biggest fans -- the mainstream media -- notable for their fawning coverage of Obama and willful blindness his prevarications (ever see anyone call him on his numerous broken promises (e.g., no lobbyists in his Administration, healthcare debate on C-Span, five-day waiting period before signing legislation, etc. etc., etc.).

But, check out this piece in today's WaPo (my emphasis added):

Obama's disregard for media reaches new heights at nuclear summit
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, April 14, 2010; A02

World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow.

In the middle of it all was Obama -- occupant of an office once informally known as "leader of the free world" -- putting on a clinic for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.

The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama's eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: "I'm going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session."

Reporters for foreign outlets, admitted for the first time to the White House press pool, got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they're cracked up to be.

Yasmeen Alamiri from the Saudi Press Agency got this lesson in press freedom when trying to cover Obama's opening remarks as part of that limited pool: "The foreign reporters/cameramen were escorted out in under two minutes, just as the leaders were about to begin, and Obama was going to make remarks. . . . Sorry, it is what it is."

Alamiri's counterparts from around the world wrote of similar experiences in their pool reports. Arabic-language MBC TV's Nadia Bilbassy had this to say of Obama's meeting with the Jordanian king: "We were there for around 30 seconds, not enough even to notice the color of tie of both presidents. I think blue for the king."

The Press Trust of India, at Obama's meeting with the Pakistani prime minister, reported, "In less than a minute, the pool was asked to leave." The Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent found that she was "ushered out about 30 seconds" after arriving for Obama's meeting with the Malaysian prime minister. A reporter with Turkey's TRT-Turk went to Obama's meeting with the president of Armenia, but "we had to leave the room again after less than 40 seconds."

Even the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, was more talkative with the press than Obama. Michelle Jamrisko, with Japan's Kyodo News, noted in her pool report that Hu, at his session with Obama, spoke to the Chinese media in Chinese, while Obama limited himself mostly to "say hello to the cameras" and "thank you everybody."

Obama's official schedule for Tuesday would have pleased China's Central Committee. Excerpts: "The President will attend the Heads of Delegation working lunch. This lunch is closed press. . . . The President will meet with Prime Minster Erdogan of Turkey. This meeting is closed press. . . . The President will attend Plenary Session II of the Nuclear Security Summit. This session is closed press."

Reporters, even those on the White House beat for two decades, said these were the most restricted such meetings they had ever seen. They complained to both the administration and White House Correspondents' Association, which will discuss the matter Thursday with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

The restrictions have become a common practice for the Obama White House. When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu came to the White House a couple of weeks ago, reporters were kept away. Soon after that, Obama signed an executive order on abortion, again without any coverage.

Over the weekend, Obama broke with years of protocol and slipped off to a soccer game without the "protective" pool that is always in the vicinity of the president in case the unthinkable occurs. Obama joked about it later to Pakistan's prime minister, saying reporters "were very upset."

In "bilateral" meetings with foreign leaders, presidents usually take questions, or at least trade statements. But at most of Obama's, there were only written "readouts." Canada: "The president and the prime minister noted the enduring strength of our bilateral partnership." India: "The two leaders vowed to continue to strengthen the robust relationship between the people of their countries." Pakistan: "President Obama began by noting that he is very fond of Pakistan."

Finally, away from other leaders, Obama took reporters' questions for 20 minutes. They were tough and skeptical questions that punctured the banal readouts: pointing out that the nonproliferation agreements weren't binding, noting China's equivocation on sanctions against Iran, and pressing Obama on the failure to curb North Korea's weapons. The Post's Scott Wilson asked Obama if he would call on Israel, which skipped the summit, to declare its nuclear weapons.

"I'm not going to comment on their program," Obama said.

Not surprising. But it's still important that the questions are asked.

Leah Ward Sears for Supreme Court?

ABC's Jake Tapper is saying this morning that former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears is one of the candidates being considered for the U.S. Supreme Court. I think that could be a good pick. Why? I think she's probably liberal, but I don't think she's a radical. Actually, my only knowledge of her is a recent op-ed (and pasted below) she had in the Wall Street Journal. However, I was very impressed with her honesty and integrity. So, while it's a given that Odumbo is going to nominate a liberal, I'd much rather have a liberal with some integrity than some knee-jerk radical who's out to promote their particular ideology.

How About Those Tomato Sandwiches . . .

What does a former chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court do when she's mistaken for the restroom attendant?

By LEAH WARD SEARS

Every March, I am invited to give a fair number of speeches in honor of Women's History Month. Having served as the country's first African-American female chief justice, I suppose one can say that I now own a slice of history. What strikes many people as particularly noteworthy is that I earned my stripes in Georgia, the deep South.

These speeches always force me to think of my own journey, sandwiched somewhere between how far women have come and how far we still have to go. The road for black women remains especially long.

I think back to the time when I was 23 years old and fresh out of law school. To celebrate the merger of my prestigious law firm with another, I attended a luncheon at an old private club in Atlanta. I was the only woman of color in the sea of lawyers present, and I felt like I had finally made it.

During the lunch I excused myself and went to the ladies' room. As I was leaving, another much older white woman tried to hand me her hat assuming, I guess, that I was the restroom attendant.

Growing up in Georgia, I've learned that the Southern way to handle such gaffes is to act as though they never happened, to jump to the subject of tomato sandwiches or the like. And that's just what I did. "I'm a lawyer; I'm having lunch here," I murmured. And without uttering another word, the lady handed her hat to the other black woman in the room—the one who was actually the attendant.

I'd like to think that scene wouldn't happen today, that times have changed. But a decade later I was at the Cloisters at Sea Island attending a swanky cocktail party. This time I was a Georgia Supreme Court justice. An older woman approached me. "The next time I want you to make sure you put more ice in my drink," she said, mistaking me for the cocktail waitress. I collected myself and said, "I'm Justice Sears," emphasizing the title, "the server is over there." And then, more talk of tomato sandwiches.

Something similar happened just two years ago, after I had become chief justice. I was walking with my children at yet another resort on the coast when a lady pulled over and hollered, "Hey girl, where's the spa?" Stunned, I directed her to the wellness facility, but this time I was seething with anger because my children were embarrassed.

I, like many women, tend to turn on myself when such faux pas occur. "Was I laughing so loudly she assumed I was the help?" I've asked myself. "Were my clothes too loud or cheap looking?" I've pondered.

I recently stepped down from the Supreme Court after 17 years to re-enter private practice, and many people are confused about how to address me. To be honest, I'm very fond of my first name. And perhaps if everything was right in the world, calling me Leah would be just fine. But I tend to ask people to call me Chief Justice Sears or Justice Sears because it's the same courtesy they automatically afford a retired male jurist, particularly down South. For instance, it was always "Judge Bell," even long after the U.S. attorney and former judge retired, never "Griffin." When I retired many people were suddenly confused. Why?

When gender and race-based—with me, it's impossible to separate the two—slights have occurred over the course of my career, I've always tried to remember the words of my friend Jean Young, an accomplished educator and the late wife of former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. "You have to forgive and forgive and forgive," she always said, "and then you have to forgive again. Otherwise it will destroy you."

Tomato sandwiches? It may sound trite, but it works. Especially when I consider the many women—and men too—black and white, who endured their own indignities and even harm so I could go to any college I wanted and pursue any profession I chose.

Ms. Ward Sears is a retired chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and a partner at Schiff Hardin LLP in Atlanta. She also serves as a fellow in family law at the Institute for American Values and is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.

The Camel's Back

Even though fewer people are paying taxes, the tax burden is increasing. Obviously, that means less people are paying more taxes. At some point, this will break the camel's back and those remaining taxpayers are going to "opt out" or, as depicted in 'Atlas Shrugged', they'll go on strike and refuse to keep subsidizing the "looters".

Mark Steyn lays it out for us:

Income tax payer an endangered species
By MARK STEYN
2010-04-09 10:09:50

We are nearing the climax of "tax season." That's the problem right there, by the way: Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas tree lights on Dec. 26, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in, and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months' time.

And yet, for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It's a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes – state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it's national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don't ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it's just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from "No taxation without representation" to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn't redistribution – a "leveling" to address the "mal-distribution" of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, D-Kleptocristan, put it the other day. It isn't even "spreading the wealth around," as then Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it's an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered "poor." United States income tax is becoming the 21st century equivalent of the "jizya" – the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the nonbelievers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it's harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That's partly what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all-Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe – in search of new infidels to mug. Don't worry, I'm not so invested in my analogy that I'm suggesting the Obama-Reid-Pelosi shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, pretty much everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and long ago figured out all the angles: Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. In the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late 40s collect disability benefits. In the United Kingdom, 5 million people – a 10th of the adult population – have not done a day's work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.

America has a ways to go to catch up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it's on its way. Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don't pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

And what's to stop this trend? Democracy decays easily into the tyranny of the majority, in which 51 percent of voters can empty the pockets of the other 49 percent. That's why a country on the fast track to a $20 trillion national debt exempts half the population from making an even modest contribution to reducing it. And it's also why the remorseless shriveling of the tax rolls is a cancer at the heart of republican citizenship.

Pace Max Baucus, this isn't about correcting the "mal-distribution" of income. What Mal Max is up to is increasing dependency. In the newspeak of Big Government, "tax cuts" now invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a "tax credit" reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to. With Obamacare, we've now advanced to the next stage – "tax debits," or additional punitive confiscation if you decline to live your life in accordance with government fiat. Obamacare requires you, upon penalty of law, to make provisions for your health care that meet the approval of the state commissars. Unfortunately, as they discovered after passing it, the bill didn't provide for any enforcement mechanisms. But not to worry. The other day Douglas Shulman, commissioner for the Internal Revenue Service, announced that, if you fail to purchase the mandated health insurance, he'll simply confiscate any tax refund due to you in from your previous 12 months' employment withholding.

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon, 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go? When you think about it, that 53 percent of American households prop up not just this country but half the planet: They effectively pick up the defense tab for our wealthiest allies, so that Germany, Japan and others can maintain minimal militaries and lavish the savings on cradle-to-grave entitlements. A relatively tiny group of people is writing the check for the entire global order. What proportion of them would need to figure out the game's no longer worth it to bring the whole system crashing down?

©MARK STEYN

Odumbo One Liners

The liberals are asking us to give Obama time. We agree . . . and think 25 to life would be appropriate.

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's' new Obama Value Meal?
A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.

Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?
A: A fund raiser.

Q: What's the difference between Obama's cabinet and a penitentiary?
A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.

Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?
A: America!

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.

Q: What was the most positive result of the "Cash for clunkers" program?
A: It took 95% of the Obama bumper stickers off the road.

Bring on the Tea Party

Great op-ed by Kevin O'Brien of the Cleveland Plain Dealer

Kevin O'Brien: Who's afraid of a little Tea Party? Everyone, fortunately
By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer
April 08, 2010, 6:01AM

Democratic officeholders should be afraid.

Republican officeholders, too.

For many a year now, officeholders of both major parties have worked hard to earn the distrust of ordinary Americans. It appears that they finally have succeeded.

If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so inattentive. If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so trusting. If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so damnably nice, the country would be in a better position to manage its finances today.

But when have Americans not tried to look for the good in every situation? When have we not been slow to recognize the need to deal with forces, foreign or domestic, aligning against our best interests?

Better late than never, a lot of ordinary Americans are waking up to the sobering reality that there really is no one they can trust. Not Democrats. Not Republicans. Not government. Not corporations. And certainly not corporations in league with government.

Hallelujah.

The people who are angry today are more in tune with this nation's founders than ordinary Americans have been in decades.

The United States has an intricate system of checks and balances, and a government structure based on a separation of powers, and a Bill of Rights that safeguards the rights of states and the rights of the people precisely because the greatest collection of political talent and philosophical insight ever assembled on this continent -- and maybe anywhere on this planet -- looked at the concept of government and said, "We need to make a really small cage for this thing, then be careful not to overfeed it."

We seem to have lost the care-and- feeding instructions about a century ago. We let government out of its little cage and it has been consuming everything it can lay its paws on ever since. In the last 45 years, it has been on a real binge, and in the last year and a half, it has taken bigger bites than a lot of people thought possible.

Ordinary Americans who care about freedom are finally getting a clue and -- horrors! -- they're hollering at members of Congress. That's right: Nice, trusting, formerly inattentive Americans are getting in the faces of the political class and calling them names.

Big (Joe Biden expletive deleted) deal. If members of the political class are too tender to endure a little well-earned rudeness from the people whose hard-earned money they like to "spread around," then they ought to get out of politics. Maybe their successors will find the voice of the people less irritating.

A very, very few ordinary Americans are going so far as to threaten members of the ruling class with physical harm or property damage. That's not fine.

All that does is damage the cause of the people who are loudly but peaceably petitioning their government for the redress of a growing list of very real grievances.

It also allows politicians on the left, including a president who now taunts opponents of his new health care law every time he speaks, to cast themselves simultaneously as victors and victims.

Finally, threats from the right allow the left to lump every proponent of individual liberty, self-reliance, limited government and limited government spending -- the Tea Party movement, in general -- in with nuts who might actually do some harm.

Don't doubt for a second that the left is hoping desperately for someone to step all the way out of line. They thought they had their man -- and early news reports said they did -- when Joseph Stack crashed his Piper Dakota into an IRS building in Texas.

As it turned out, Stack proved to be a Marx-quoting lefty -- the wrong flavor of nut.

So the left has to settle for a little name-calling of its own: "ignorant," "racist," "homophobes," "hooligans," "extremists." The list, as you know, goes on and on.

It's bunk, but it's the script.

Tea Party folks are just patriots worried, with good reason, about the future of the country they love. They're vocal and they're inspiringly unaffiliated.

They scare the hell out of both political parties, because they've embraced distrust.

The Democrats fear them because they see through the left's empty promise of utopia in exchange for freedom. The Republicans fear them because they're pushy and because they're loyal to their principles rather than to a party.

They make everyone uncomfortable. That's healthy.

Some liberal Catholics are thinking: It's payback time, Ratzinger!

This is the best article I've read on these latest attacks on the Pope. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is the main impediment to the spread of the culture of death. So, the Church must be attacked and the media is all too willing to assist in the attack.

ObamaCare Making You Sick?

Here's the antidote.

First it was the Prius ...

"This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II -- and that's change you can believe in."

Mark Steyn: Dark dawn of deemocracy
By MARK STEYN

2010-03-19

On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.

California has run out of money, but it hasn't yet run out of things to regulate.

For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they'll be bureaucrats from Sacramento's Condom Enforcement Squad.

The committee will also make recommendations on whether the "adult" movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors' surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you've ever been in the filthy Clostridium difficile- and MRSA-infected wards of Britain's National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.

One can make arguments for permitting porn and banning porn, but there isn't a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who'll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for "Debbie Does The Fresno OSHA Office."

Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That's 16,500 new IRS agents, who'll be needed to check whether you – yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens – are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to "deem" into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that's change you can believe in. This is what "health" "care" "reform" boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez's group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off-Broadway.

Barack Obama, a man who not so long ago had time to jet across the world to make dreary Olympics-losing speeches about how his kind of town Chicago is, has now postponed his presidential visits to Indonesia and Australia in order to make sure "health care" passes this week – or, at any rate, is "deemed" to have passed, which is apparently the way a quarter-millennium-old constitutional republic does things.

The president, his press secretary informs us, regrets having to postpone his trip for three months, but "passage of the health insurance reform is of paramount importance." Whereas Australia isn't.

The visit had already been pared back to the bare minimum – a quick refueling stop in Canberra, with a speech to Parliament and a grip'n'greet with the Governor-General and the Prime Minister. Maybe the administration could simply "deem" the visit to have occurred, Photoshop a souvenir snapshot and stick it in the mail to their eminences. In much the same way, the Deemocrats are deeming their health bill to control costs rather than actually controlling them. Medicare doesn't reimburse doctors the cost of treating the patient; it reimburses what the bureaucracy "deems" it to have cost. In a deemocracy, this works. In real life, it's more problematic.

Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power."

Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That's all he knows and all he's ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who's never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who've demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama's Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. What it knows is government, and government's default mode is to grow, and grow.

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation – or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they'll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don't have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you're entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can't. There isn't enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you'd be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.

Whatever is "deemed" to have passed in the next few days doesn't end the debate but begins it. If you're sick of talking about health care, move to Tahiti, because in the U.S. we're going to be talking about it until the end of time, or at least until the Iranians nuke Cleveland.

It isn't difficult. We need less government, with smaller budgets, fewer agencies and vastly reduced numbers of public-sector union employees on less-lavish remuneration. I'm confident the California Bureau of Condom Regulators can be retrained as porn-movie bit-players and once again make a useful contribution to society. But, if you're not in favor of shrinking government, you're voting for national decline, remorseless and ever accelerating.

Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It's appropriate that it should take banana republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it's about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. Maybe regulators should roll a giant condom over the Capitol before it fatally infects the rest of us.

©MARK STEYN

(Pseudo)Intellectuals and Society

Here is a great interview of Thomas Sowell on his latest book, 'Intellectuals and Society'. It's more than thirty minutes long, so make sure you allow yourself adequate time to watch it -- twice!

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More Hubris in Action

Great editorial from yesterday's Investor's Business Daily

Dems Double Down

Posted 01/20/2010 06:53 PM ET

Health Care: Will the administration seize the moment of Scott Brown's victory to work out real solutions, or will it follow Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over the cliff? Or is it just about government control?

Before Sen.-elect Brown became the Scott heard 'round the world, House Speaker Pelosi was asked what his victory in the bluest of blue states would mean. "Certainly the dynamic will change depending on what happens in Massachusetts," she replied in a bit of an understatement.

The dynamic has changed, yet the Democrats, as the country song goes, apparently don't know when to hold them and when to fold them.

"I heard the candidate in Massachusetts, the Republican candidate, say 'Let's go back to the drawing board,'" Pelosi told reporters in California on Monday. "There is no back to the drawing board. . .. We will have health care one way or another."

After the 1994 GOP tsunami, largely due to the failed attempt at HillaryCare, President Clinton wisely chose to work with the people's representatives. Rather than fight ideas that weren't his, he co-opted them, such as welfare reform.

He went on to a second term and, in cooperation with a GOP Congress, had budget surpluses on his watch.

Somehow we doubt this administration will choose the course of cooperation and go back to the drawing board, as it should, and open the closed door. There should be no Cornhusker Kickbacks to the Ben Nelsons or reprises of Mary Landrieu's Louisiana Purchase. Those lawmakers sold their political souls to be the 60th vote to close debate and now there are only 59. They lost Tuesday along with Martha Coakley.

Polls show that Americans have seen the future of the medical overhaul and know it won't work. Government-run, single-payer health insurance hasn't succeeded anywhere on this planet. They ask why their government is pushing solutions it must know can't work, slicing and dicing monster bills just to get something that will pass.

Perhaps it's because it's never been about health care. It's been about nationalizing one-sixth of the economy and making as many people as possible dependent on government. After all, the idea of a health care overhaul began with a lament about the uninsured, whose numbers changed with the political wind, and ended with a 2,000-page, $2.5 trillion hash that would leave millions uninsured.

We were never told why exactly the finest health care delivery system in the world had to be destroyed to insure those who choose not to buy coverage or can't afford it. What about lowering insurance costs by letting people buy plans across state lines? University of Minnesota economists showed that interstate insurance sales could cover an additional 12 million Americans.

Mandates on insurance plans also increase costs, and the average state imposes 38 mandates, according to the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon . These mandates have made private insurance too expensive for many. The Congressional Budget Office says state regulations boost premium costs by 15%.

There are simpler ways to deal with health care issues than through the Democrats' proposals. We could use health savings accounts to provide portability between jobs and create a financial incentive to stay healthy. We could enact real tort reform as some states have done, in the knowledge that lawsuits cure no one.

Pelosi et al. might try to ram the Senate bill through the House, but it's doubtful many wavering congressmen will fall on their swords. Let's address the doable, one issue at a time, such as the uninsured. Let's go back, as Scott Brown says, to the drawing board.