While eating a late lunch today, a mandatedly-inexpensive lunch, mind you, due to the MIA invitation to dine at the Orchid office, I read a nice little article at the National Review.  One man’s thoughts about various and sundry things about the current state of our dissed-graced nation.

While nodding my head in agreement at his points, a little ball dropped into a little hole, followed by a little “click!” and a realization:

Today’s most vehement Demon-crats hate Rush Limbaugh because he is SUCCESSFUL.

Not only is he successful, but he is successful without being beholden to anyone, let alone to the government (read:  favors from politicians), for his success.  One of those self-made men.  You know, kinda like our Founding Fathers.

Ok, so some of you may have already come to this realization on your own, but I find it explains a great deal about what’s going on in and around the White House. 

Anyway, scary idea, that of independent thinkers, when what you need is utter dependency from the masses in order to put your personal vision, your “great plan” in place.  Worse is when you have an independent thinker with a big mouth exercising our basic right of free access to a microphone and saying things that apparently, at least according to the ratings, an awful lot of people want to hear.

I said before that I’d never listened to Rush Limbaugh until his address to the CPAC.  Frankly, main-stream media-driven curiosity is what drove me to park my butt in the den in front of the television, but in all honesty, it was his words that kept me there.  Words that rang clear and true and – much to my surprise – matched the very same things I’ve been saying for a long time.

And I realized that all along, regardless the stated political affiliation of the candidate I checked off on a voting ballot, I’ve always been a conservative. 

Gosh, it’s so nice to be out of the closet.

And it’s even nicer to find that there are more and more and – much to the vehement Demon-crats chagrin and despite the ever-increasing pace of their tap-dancing spin machine – even more people who think like me.  People who are looking at this country and looking even more closely at our elected representatives and wondering just what the hell is going on.  People standing up and questioning the blatant hypocrisy and the sheer stupidity that belches out from both ends of the Beltway like a drunk after a big Mexican dinner.

The bad news, the sad news, is that we put those idiots there.  But the good news is, like Bill Cosby once told his kids, we can take them out and replace them.

Every single one of them.  Donkey’s asses and elephants alike.

In the meantime, speaking of donkey’s asses, I’ve heard tell about a statement that, “Rush Limbaugh is no Bill Buckley.”  I went a’searching and can’t help but wonder what those brayers are smoking?  The National Review’s cover story for September 6, 1993 was all about Rush and about former President Ronald Reagan gladly passing on the torch to Rush as the “Number One voice for conservatism in our Country”.  Rush Limbaugh was a regular contributor to the National Review.  Which was founded by…?  I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

William F. Buckley.  Who liked Rush Limbaugh.

Most interestingly (meaning, most ironically, considering current circumstances) I came across this tidibit about good old William F.:

Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic Party convention.  In their penultimate debate on August 28 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the Chicago police and the protesters at the ongoing Democratic Convention in Chicago.  After Buckley responded to Vidal’s argument by stating that Vidal’s position was “so naive” and saying of the protesters “some people were pro-Nazi”, Vidal called Buckley a “Crypto-Nazi”, to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered.”  (Wikipedia)

Any wonder Rush considers him a mentor, may the gods rest his Conservative soul?

People are such fascinating critters.  After an evening out and about doing those terribly normal “middle class” things that we “middle class” do, I came home and opened the online news.  I tell you, it’s a big night when forced to choose between reading an awful lot of people whining about the “surprise ending” of the…ahem…reality…ahem…television show, “The Bachelor”, and reading an awful lot of people still whining about Rush Limbaugh.

What did Rush do now?  Well, apparently he was a little disrespectful to Senator Ted Kennedy.  Something about naming the national health care plan as a memorial to the man.

Guess we shouldn’t confess that we used to fondly call old Teddie the “swimmer”, but have recently changed his nickname to “bob”?

Heh….

Ok, so we still think Ted Kennedy is a heartless, lying, murdering bastard for his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.  But that pales in newsworthiness comparison to a slam-dunk of his most popular pew-warmer by none other than the righteous Reverend Wright when he apparently had a hallucinogenic flash of truthfulness:  “Barack’s name ain’t Jesus.”  Well, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!  We have ourselves a weiner here.  Welcome to reality, Reverend.  We hope you enjoyed your stay here.  Come back again sometime.

Then there’s Hilary Clinton’s attempt to top her boss in diplomatic gift-giving stupidity.  Perezagruzka?  Peregruzka?  What’s an opechatka between friends?  Of course, those are our hard-earned tax dollars at inept work.  Would someone please remind Mrs. Clinton that what we’ve been trying to do for years is to keep Russia from pushing the button?

An amusing, though sadly rhetorical question was posed by Noel Sheppard in a Foxnew blog:  “Do you think media would have tried to capture former President Bush’s image without a pane of glass blocking his face if he brought a teleprompter everywhere he went? Or would they have done their best to make him look foolish for doing so?”  Guess that Ivy League education continues to pay off.  At least we know the President is comfortable around technology.  So does this remind me of Pigpen and his blanket?

Speaking of pigpens…seems that when Senator Harry Reid failed to get the short bus…errr…failed to shove the Omnibus bill through a smaller-than-anticipated hole in the Senate, he ended up in Nancy Pelosi’s office and things became rather “ugly” as they argued about what to do next.  They were so loud that staff members, relegated to the hall, could hear them. 

If the President and his press secretary arguing with a radio show host, and the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader swearing at each other in the middle of the night in front of the staff after just the first 47 days is any indication, the next 1,415 days ought to be quite amusing.

But eventually this glam news becomes tiring and it’s off to something with a bit more substance.  I’d say with a bit more bite, but prefer to not be reminded of the austerity that grips this particular small residence as tightly as it is gripping the residences of millions of other Americans.  Michelle Malkin outlines the current state of this austerity, aka non-spending, quite nicely.  Though of course such outlining must, in all fairness – since all of us are about fairness and balance – show the other side.  That is, the cocktail parties and Wagyu beef being served up under the auspices of the perennially-summertime Orchid office.  Paid for by our hard-earned tax money, of course.

I tell ya, it’s so hard to keep up with all this change.

I received this in an email tonight and thought it bears discussion because, well, because some people…ok, Obama supporters just don’t get it.  Sure, this smacks like something that Snopes will eventually tackle, but what the alleged writer and the person who forwarded it (and that person will multiply exponentially over the next few days) just don’t understand is this.

From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 1:36 PM
To:
Subject: Where can we find clients like this?

I’ve seen a lot of dumb news reports in my life, but I’m not sure anything can quite match this one from ABC News.  The premise of the report is this: Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on people who make more than $250,000, so the reporter has gone and found people who earn a little more than that sum who plan to decrease their income so that they come in underneath the magic line.

Now, the obvious objection here is that the tax code doesn’t work that way.  A tax increase affects the marginal dollar that a person gains.  That’s means only every dollar over $250,000 is taxed at a higher rate.  Obama is not proposing a tax system whereby somebody who goes from $249,999 to $250,000 suddenly becomes poorer.  Nobody has ever enacted a tax hike like that in the history of the United States.

That doesn’t stop ABC News’ intrepid reporter.  This story has to be read to be believed:

President Barack Obama’s tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more — has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it’s just by a dollar.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law. …

“We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00,” she said.

“We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama’s tax plan,” she added. “Why kill yourself working if you’re going to give it all away to people who aren’t working as hard?”

The attorney says that in order to decrease her income she’ll have to let go of clients, some of whom she’s been counseling for more than a decade.

“This means I’ll have to tell some of my clients we can’t help them and being more selective in general about who we help,” she said. “I hate to do it.” …

Dr. Sharon Poczatek, who runs her own dental practice in Boulder, Colo., said that she too is trying to figure out ways to get out of paying the taxes proposed in Obama’s plan.

“I’ve put thought into how to get under $250,000,” said Poczatek.  “It would mean working fewer days which means having fewer employees, seeing fewer patients and taking time off.”

Oh my God, the stupidity.  The article then quotes a financial advisor who explains the way that tax brackets rates work, but then quotes a right-wing business professor and the subjects of her article fulminating about class warfare.  Pretty clearly the reporter started off on her mistaken premise, found some subjects who shared her ignorance, and then came across a financial advisor who gently corrected her.  But, instead of nixing the collosally uninformed article, or writing a different kind of article (“Rich Morons Decreasing Own Income Due To Lack of Tax Code Knowledge”) she instead plowed ahead with her initial premise.

This article is obviously an outlier, but it is an extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon.  Clay had a good post about how Politico’s Jeanne Cummings has turned into a sounding board for right-wing economic notions.  And Matthew Yglesias had a good point about how the media massively overrepresents the perspective of the rich in reporting and commentating on the tax debate.  (It has framed Obama’s plans as a tax hike when the vast majority of Americans will experience it as a tax cut.)  Sadly, I think the next few months are going to bring us a massive surge of sympathetic and/or uninformed coverage of the tax debate from the perspective of the wealthiest segment of America.

 

Someone is deliberately missing the point.  This is not about tax “stupidity”, it is a matter of principle.

Why would anyone work hard to increase their income only to be forced to give up an even bigger chunk of that hard-earned income to pay taxes for things they don’t want/need/approve of/benefit from?  If they have the luxury of keeping their income in a lower tax bracket, if they realize that life is more than having lots of “stuff” and are willing to make do with less, then may the gods, goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and the Great Pumpkin all bless ’em.  Of course, these are often people who employ other people – like accountants, for example – so who’s really going to be hurt by a forced tax increase, even if it is a bracketed one?

To think there’s anything even remotely fair about “forcing” people to earn more just so they can be taxed more – even through such thinly-veiled attempts to embarrass them by calling them “uninformed” and “morons” – speaks to some nasty sort of servitude mentality.  Which is right in lockstep with Socialism, don’tcha know?

Forget about sending these deliberately stupid, obviously Democratic accountants to the corner.  Let ’em go stand in the unemployment line with the rest of Obama’s supporters.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for the New York Times over the years; the last big drop came with their continual and unabashed sucking-up to the new administration in some lame attempt to keep themselves from the verge of extinction.  So rarely do I bother reading them any more.

But sometimes a link will lead me to peruse their electronic pages and today I found a truly pathetic article there.  It speaks volumes to me about the wicked state of the financial industry in this country when there is actually a company, DCM, that calls on the families of dead people asking them to pay the dead one’s debts.

Folks, these are debts which the families have absolutely NO legal obligation to cover.  Yet the saddest part is that a lot of well-meaning individuals do pay them. 

Now it’s no longer a secret.  If you die and there no estate against which a bill collector can file a claim, that’s their tough luck.  It’s one of the risks they take in doing business.

Let me type this really slowly one more time, just so we’re all clear on this:

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY THE BILLS FOR A DEAD PERSON OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET IF YOUR NAME ISN’T ON THEIR DEBT.

They say you can’t get blood out of a stone.  Remember, you can’t get money from a dead person, either.