“Bad Crazy”

“Asking a billionaire to pay same tax rate as a Jew… uh uh… janitor” –Barack Obama (H/T BreitbartTV)

The Obama Downgrade, Alphabetically

This one is by Bret Stephens at the WSJ (H/T: HillBuzz) and contains an entry for every letter of the alphabet. I’m just going to quote a few of my favorites, but you should read the whole thing.

A	is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%. Wasn’t Obama supposed to make the Arab world love us?
D	is for—what else—the federal debt, which grew to $14.3 trillion this month from $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008. D is also for the dollar, which has lost almost half its value against gold since Aug. 2008.
E	is for energy. The average retail price of a gallon of gas hovered near the $1.80 mark when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. It has since more than doubled. E is also for ethanol, the non-wonder fuel the U.S. continues to subsidize to the tune of $5 billion a year.
G	is for Guantanamo, which remains open, and for Gadhafi, who remains in power, and for Greece, which offers a vision of America’s future if we don’t reform our entitlement state.
I	is for Israel, a Middle Eastern country the president claims to support even as he routinely disses its prime minister, seeks to shrink its borders and—why not?—divide its capital. I is also for insane, for all the Jews who vote for Obama’s reelection next year.
J	is for jobs. In November 2008, president-elect Obama promised he would create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. By October 2010 the economy had shed 3.3 million jobs. For the seventh time, he’s now claiming to have shifted his attention to creating jobs.
M	is for Mexico, a country that manages 5.4% unemployment and 4.2% annual growth even as it fights a war against the drug cartels. Obama, meanwhile, is arming those cartels.
Q	is for QE2, the most disastrous experiment in monetary policy since Fed Chairman William Miller’s low-interest rate policy crashed the dollar in 1978. There is talk of QE3 coming soon.
T	is for taxes, which Mr. Obama would like to see raised for “millionaires and billionaires”—curiously defined as people making $200K and up.
X	is for Liu Xiaobo, an example of what a deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize looks like. X is also for Xanax, likely to be remembered as the drug of choice of the Obama years.
Z	is for zero, which is the likelihood that one of the current GOP hopefuls will defeat Mr. Obama in 2012. I hope this is wrong, but I fear it isn’t.

(Comments in red by yours truly.)

Just Because Low Taxes Cause Terror in THEM…

(From Hope n’ Change Cartoons. RTWT.)

I for one am sick and tired of being called a terrorist (which is the massively-coordinated MSM/Democrat talking point du jour) from people who are afraid to call actual terrorists “terrorists” … Not to mention by people who actually associate with actual terrorists (Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, just for starters). Sarah Palin points out that “if we were real domestic terrorists, shoot, President Obama would be wanting to pal around with us, wouldn’t he?” It’s disgusting to claim that people who simply want the government to act with responsibility and restraint in regards to the budget and our civil liberties are “terrorists” and “holding the nation hostage” (especially from the so-called self-described “party of civility”), and only serves to prove that Gerald Seymour had it backwards when he said that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

After listening to Democrat politicians and the Democrat propaganda wing of the mainstream media continue to paint any opposition to higher taxes, higher spending, higher debt, and their Glorious Chairman Obama as “violent,” “extremist,” “racist” and “terrorist;” I think we can be forgiven to be a little leery about Obama’s latest strategy to combat violent extremism. (H/T: WZ)

Local communities, not Washington, are best suited to counter violent extremism, according to a new national strategy the Obama administration took more than a year to produce. The strategy pointedly does not focus on threats from Muslim extremism.

Of course not. And I doubt very much if it focuses on SEIU thugs or Ayers types either.

Is ObamaCare Mandate a Tax?

Obama did make a promise (already long since broken) not to tax the middle class, and he most likely knows far more about man dates than I do, but still…

Washington Examiner — This afternoon, the Fourth Circuit panel considering the Commonwealth of Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare has asked for supplemental briefs from all parties related to the arguments about the federal government’s constitutional powers of taxation. This may mean that the court is setting itself up to rule that the penalty for not purchasing insurance under Obamacare is, in fact, a tax and not a penalty at all, and that therefore the court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case. This would make the Fourth Circuit the first court in America to buy the Obama administration’s argument that Obamacare’s individual mandate is, in fact, a tax. Every other court to hear an Obamacare case – including those that have upheld the law – have rejected this line of argument out of hand. (H/T: C2)

How do you tax nothing? They can tax income, they can tax property, they can tax sales, they can and do tax a large variety of purchases and transactions. They tax just about every activity and item in existence. But how do you tax the lack of a purchase? How can you tax a transaction that never occurred, a product that was never purchased? Whether it’s a 5% tax or a 100% tax, it’s still 5% or 100% of zero dollars spent on zero transactions for zero gain. Taking money from people who choose not to subject themselves to death panels is a penalty, pure and simple. A pecuniary punishment for not submitting to Obama’s Glorious People’s Health Care (a subsidiary of Soylent Green, Inc.)

I don’t buy it. Can I be taxed for not buying their bullshit?

Tax Refund Link

I’ve already mailed out my tax returns (federal and state); I want to get my refunds before they decide to stop sending out checks and start issuing IOUs instead. (Well, my state hasn’t done that yet, but you never know… nor do we know how much of a delay a shutdown of the federal government will impose on refunds being sent out.) Anyway, for my reference and yours, here’s the official IRS “Dude, Where’s My Refund?” site which can give you an estimate as to when you can expect to receive your money – assuming, that is, that you overpaid the government and have money coming back. Your state may or may not have a similar service available. And, just because it’s a classic, here’s this video again:

Not Such a Wilde Idea

Oscar Wilde famously quipped that “Work is the curse of the drinking class.” Maryland nanny-staters are working to elevate taxes to that position as well.

Baltimore — …It’s called the “Dime a Drink Tax,” and it would hit all alcoholic drinks, if Maryland’s legislature approves it this year. … “Alcohol excise tax is a win-win for the state. They provide much needed revenue, and reduce alcohol consumption and related problems,” said David Jernigan, Johns Hopkins professor.

I don’t know about that. The current reign of fascist nanny-state tax hikers have been far worse for my health, stress, and sanity than any amount of alcoholic drinks I may have had in recent years. Ironically, those same Democrats (who in Maryland did not take the major 2010 midterm hit that most of the rest of the country enjoyed) make me more likely to need a drink.

But an increase at restaurants and bars may not be such a good thing. Good times stopped rolling during the recession and business coming back now is still viewed as fragile. “We’re still in this economic recession right now, and anything more is going to take people out of restaurants in Baltimore and Maryland. And that’s not good for the economy,” said Bill Irvin, Kooper’s Tavern. The tax would also hit retailers, upping a six-pack by 60 cents and wine and spirits by a dime a serving.

Well, you can always trust the Democrats to snatch recession from the jaws of recovery. It’s almost as if they’re doing it deliberately…