Month: September 2011

Shocking News: Secretaries Don’t Pay More than Buffett

Mark Noonan10 Comments

Yet another liberal lie disposed of  – from the AP:

…There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that’s less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent…

Doubling up on the dishonesty is the fact that Buffett routinely takes advantage of every tax break he can – and, indeed, has on-going disputes with the IRS as it claims Buffett owes more than he paid.  The bottom line is that the “millionaires pay more than secretaries” is a lie while the actions of people like Buffett prove that the call for a tax hike isn’t to make the rich “pay their fair share” but to allow Obama to more heavily tax the upper middle class (remember, in Obamunism, “millionaires and billionaires” start at $200,000.00 per year for individual income earners).

All part of the scam, at any rate.  Buffett makes his money off of the current, corrupt way of doing business.  If it weren’t for our Byzantine tax and regulatory codes and the ability of billionaires like Buffett to grease the palms of politicians, Buffett never would have made his money – certainly no where near the billions he currently has.  Buffett is a liberal financial shark who grows fat not out of creating wealth, but by siphoning it off from the productive by means of financial shennanigans.  But this does give Buffett a vested interest in the status quo…if the liberal State is swept away, so will Buffett’s ability to maintain and grow his horde.  And not just for Buffett, but for a host of such economic parasites.

So, come up with bogus stories claiming that secretaries pay more than billionaires, help Obama increase taxes on “the rich” which really works out to tax hikes on middle class people while the Buffetts of the world are unscathed…and finally hope that all the class warfare rhetoric and actions helps Obama get re-elected so the gravy train can keep rolling along.  That is all this was ever about…and it is all it ever will be about until we turn these cretins out.

 

Lightsquared Scandal: More Attempts to Influence Testimony

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From the Daily Beast:

LightSquared, a wireless network backed by billionaire Democratic donor Philip Falcone, could beam broadband Internet everywhere—but some military officials fear it could interfere with critical GPS signals. Now, as The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake exclusively reports, two U.S. officials allege the White House tried to influence their testimony to rush key testing, to LightSquare’s benefit..

…On Monday, a second witness, Anthony Russo, director of the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, told The Daily Beast that he too was asked by the OMB to insert the 90-day timeframe into his testimony before the House Science Committee, but he refused. The hearing originally was scheduled for Aug. 3, then rescheduled for Sept. 8.

“They gave that to me and presumably the other witnesses,” he said. “There is one sentence I disagreed with, which said that I thought the testing could be resolved in 90 days. So I took it out.”…

Are you grasping all that, liberals?  In service of a billionaire who is a Democrat and a donor to the party, the Obama Administration tried to smooth things along even though the US military and other agencies had grave questions about the risks of the new wireless project.  Do you begin to understand?  Does it start to dawn on you that all your liberalism is merely a cover for the Ruling Class to gain power and wealth?  They’ll throw  you a bone of “gay rights” or affirmative action, but the real program is just power and wealth…

I doubt you’ll get it.  For ages you have been propagandized that it is we Republicans who do that…and, to be sure, you can find the odd Republican here and there willing to sell out to corporate interests.  But not like this – not in a systemic fashion where everything is for sale.  And the base of the GOP is firmly against this “crony capitalism” and wishes for a restored, genuine free market in which well-connected corporate bosses aren’t able to suppress competitors and gain government privileges.

More and more it looks as though the Obama Administration – in pure, Chicago-style politics – as put a “for sale” sign on the United States.  While Pelosi and Reid ran Congress, there was no oversight at all…and that is why it is only now, 8 months after the GOP took the House, that it is all coming to light.  We all expected Obama’s liberalism and we feared the Chicago Way…but even I didn’t suspect that Obama and his cohorts would be so crude and grasping in these matters…that they would act no better than a Chicago ward boss.

Now more than ever it is vital that Obama be defeated next year…this is already bad enough, but imagine what it will be like if Obama is re-elected and never has to fear the voters again?  It will become a corrupt free-for-all and our national inheritance will go to the highest bidder.

UPDATE:  Rep. Issa to hold hearings on these screwball loans and the general Obama Administration practice of trying to pick free market winners.

Obama’s Great Service to America

Mark Noonan19 Comments

We actually are fortunate to have him as our President – he has made liberalism toxic.  Victor Davis Hanson runs down the ways and then concludes:

…Had McCain been elected, or had Obama proved a canny Clinton triangulator, we would never have gotten out of the bipartisan rut of massive borrowing, growing government, higher taxes, and unionized public employee regulators. But with Obama as the great liberal deliverer and with the masses scared to death of Him, the next president will inherit an America in catharsis. The future is uncertain, but at least now, after our cauterizing, we have some sort of chance to return to the old principles that might save us.

Carter made liberalism a dirty word.  It wasn’t until 2008, with Obama, that liberalism was rehabilitated and people could actually call themselves that and not be laughed off…we had forgotten.  We had, that is, forgotten Carter…just how lousy he was and just how destructive liberalism is.  But now we’ve had Obama applying it to America and we’re falling apart…and people are noticing.

Revolution is coming – just as Carter’s liberalism allowed us to usher in the Reagan Revolution, so will Obama’s liberalism herald the Second American Revolution.  And this time I think we’re going to win so big that the liberals won’t be able to stop us, at all…always remember that Reagan was stymied by Democrat control of the House.  He couldn’t ever go all out…in 2013, the next Republican President might have such a large Congressional majority that we can steam roller through whatever we please…and after the Obama dose of liberalism, the people will be eager to back any plan for radical reform.

Everyone does have a purpose – and perhaps Obama’s was to destroy liberalism?  Time will tell…

 

Why the Palestinian Authority is Failing

Mark Noonan11 Comments

If you ever wonder why the PA is now pushing Statehood and essentially causing all sorts of trouble, you need look no further than this Bloomberg news story:

…Last week, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank identified the authority’s financial crisis as a danger to the state-building program which Fayyad’s administration has led over the last two years.

In the last three months, the authority has twice failed to pay salaries to its 150,000 employees on time  and in full.

The success of the state-building plan was one of the reasons cited by Palestinian officials for their decision to go to the United Nations, despite U.S. and Israeli opposition…

The story, itself, is about how Saudi Arabia is pledging $200 million to the PA – missed in the story, because it is an MSM report, is the real issue:  the Palestinian Authority has 150,000 employees.  There are 4,000,000 or so Palestinians…to put it in to American terms, this is the equivalent of us having 11,250,000 federal government employees; right now, there are about 3,000,000 federal employees.  Even if you add in the military, you get nowhere near the proportion of government employees to population of the PA.

What this tells us is that the PA is nothing more than a con job…a way for corrupt oligarchs and appartchiks to latch themselves upon a population and live well.  All that talk of Palestinian Statehood?  All the rancor and blood and gore and mess?  Nothing but a means to an end – and the end is a bunch of people who don’t do a lick of work getting fat off of others.  I’m deadly serious here…we are not faced with a movement of national liberation, but by a group of thugs who want money they didn’t earn.

The main thing to remember about the state of the world today is that in all lands there are people who have figured out how to gain un-earned wealth.  Our liberals think in terms of rich people like corporate CEOs and the like…and they actually do have a bit of a case, but they blow it by not realizing that the corporate CEOs are only a tiny number, at most, of all those living off those who produce wealth.  Here’s a small list of those living off the work of others:

Activists of various stripes (some call them “community organizers”, race-baiting grievance-mongers, Wall Street gamblers (as opposed to actual investors), college professors who let others teach their classes, union bosses, trial lawyers, education administrators, most welfare recipients, layers of corporate and bureaucratic paper pushers who do nothing to help an actual person, most of the people manning NGOs, departments of higher education which don’t produce things like doctors and engineers, probably well more than half the people on disability…and a host of dictators and hangers-on around the world which have fastened themselves on various populations.  They don’t work; they don’t earn their positions (gaining them by favor or by blood); they don’t do anything worthwhile for the whole, human race…but they live well; always vastly better than the general run of the population they live amongst.  The Palestinian Authority is just another one of the scams…a put on using the words of liberation and nationhood to sucker fools in to handing them money and power…and using theft and murder to maintain themselves and gain more.

It is high time we stopped falling for this nonsense…the Palestinians could have State-hood next week with generously drawn borders and massive amounts of financial aid to build their economy…but as long as the Palestinian leadership is made up of thieves, murderers and con-artists, we’ll get nowhere.  They don’t want a functioning State for the Palestinian people to live and build in…if that started up, there’d be no place for the current leadership.  So, they’ll just keep up the wickedness (and why not?  It got their leader a Nobel Prize and themselves well paid sinecures in government) and hope that we keep being suckers, forever.  Same thing with all the other people causing mayhem, misery and murder around the world…they are just after personal power and wealth that they cannot earn in a free society by offering something useful to their fellow citizens.  The sooner we wake up to what they are and start laying stripes on their backs, the quicker we can have peace.

And then we can turn to the con artists in our own land…no need to be quite that harsh as they haven’t actually murdered anyone…but it is high time we stopped kowtowing to their pretensions and their whines and started demanding they pull their weight.  The world will always be a place of sorrow and trial…but no need for us to make it worse by allowing others to take advantage of us.

 

 

Perry Wades in to the Israel/Palestinian Issue

Mark Noonan8 Comments

From the Jerusalem Post:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry will hold a press conference with American and Israeli-Jewish leaders in New York on Tuesday in which he is expected to address the upcoming deliberations at the United Nations, MK Danny Danon (Likud), said on Saturday night.

Danon, who will participate at the press conference, said he would ask Perry ahead of the conference to adopt the initiative the MK is advancing to annex Judea and Samaria in response to the unilateral Palestinian moves at the UN…

That does sound like a reasonable plan to me – if the Palestinians are going to do things without relation to the desires of Israel, I see no reason why Israel shouldn’t work the same way.  Palestinians get their UN-sponsored State, Israel gets Judea and Samaria.  Fair trade, if you ask me.

On the other hand, the Palestinians can get title to Judea and Samaria…all they have to do is make peace with Israel.  Real peace – not a sham where they speak words of peace in English for the MSM and then shout “death to the Jews” in so many words in Arabic back home.

Outside of that, it is about time that Perry and the rest of the GOP field started to really differentiate themselves from Obama foreign and defense policies.  Obamunism as an economic policy has been bad, but Obamunism as a foreign policy has been a disaster.  It is best if you are respected and loved in the world. Failing that, respected is good.  In the final analysis, if you can get respect or love, then you’d better be feared.  Right now, no one fears us, respects us or loves us.  We hit the crest of a wave of power and influence in mid-2003 and its been downhill since then…courtesy of the American left which first sabotaged Bush, and then ensured that Obama went from bad to worse in foreign policy.  And terribly sorry, liberals, but killing bin Laden doesn’t make up for it.

We’ve got Iran on the march to nuclear weapons and starting to interfere in neighboring States; Islamist governments look to take control of both Libya and Egypt; the Assad regime in Syria is maintaining itself in power; Turkey is becoming overtly anti-Israeli and bidding for leadership of Islamism; Russia is throwing spokes in our wheel at every opportunity and China is building a military to challenge us in the western Pacific.  We’re in a pickle and it’ll be ten years of hard work before we can restore our position.

In this, Perry has picked out the right cause – the extinction of Israel is a goal of all American enemies…be they open enemies like the Islamists or disguised enemies like European bureaucrats seeking to degrade the United States to secondary power status.  Israel is hated – anti-Semitism is on the rise; the only thing in favor of backing Israel is the fact that backing Israel is the absolutely right thing to do.  By so doing we lay down the marker…we draw the line in the sand and say, “not one bit further”.  Here, we fight, if necessary.  Here we shout defiance at the world and tell them that for Americans basic, human decency still calls the shots…we won’t allow another Holocaust; we won’t surrender the Jews to death in order to buy a half decade of peace for ourselves.  From that firm base, we can then go forward to rebuild the rest of our global position…surrender it, and we’ll soon find ourselves completely isolated in a world of enemies gathering for the kill.

So, good for Perry and I hope the rest of the GOP field follows suit.

 

The Kook Left Raises its Banner

Mark Noonan28 Comments

From the Washington Times:

President Obama’s smooth path to the Democratic nomination may have gotten rockier Monday, after a group of liberal leaders, including former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, announced plans to challenge the incumbent in primaries next year.

The group said the goal is to offer up a handful of candidates from various fields and areas where the president either has failed to stake out a “progressive” position or where he has “drifted toward the corporatist right.”

“Without debates by challengers inside the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, the liberal/majoritarian agenda will be muted and ignored,” Mr. Nader said in a news release. “The one-man Democratic primaries will be dull, repetitive, and draining of both voter enthusiasm and real bright lines between the two parties that excite voters.”…

For some, this is just a chance to be extra-pure liberals…Obama hasn’t toed an entirely socialist line (ie, he hasn’t instituted a dictatorship and simply enforced socialism, law and constitution be hanged), and so they are going to prove to themselves that they are true blue.  On the other hand, there are cynics who know that if there is a kook left challenger to Obama it will allow Obama to shift right and still hold the base.

Unless someone like Hillary breaks ranks, none of this will amount to much.  The Democrat machine will ensure overwhelming Obama victories in the primaries and caucuses but the fact of kookism on the march will allow Obama to position himself in what he (and his MSM sycophants) will call the center…able to point right and left and say, “I’m the one who has a reasonable, balanced approach”.

It won’t work, of course…the kook left won’t be able to gain traction and neither will Obama ever appear reasonable.  People have tuned him out – no one is terribly interested in what he has to say.  We’ve got a long, miserable road to travel to get rid of Obama…all through it will seem as though Obama is doing this, that or the other thing.  But, in the end, the race will resolve itself upon the Reagan Question:  are you better off than you were four years ago?  If the answer is “no” for a majority, then Obama will be beaten.  Kook left challenges and attempts to appear centrist won’t matter at all, in the end.

 

The Results of Obamunism!

Mark Noonan15 Comments

From Gallup:

Three years after bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers jolted the U.S. economy into economic turmoil, job creation has rebounded from post-collapse lows, but economic confidence and consumer spending remain within the ranges seen in 2009. Gallup finds underemployment and unemployment essentially where they were a year ago…

All the trillions of borrowed and printed dollars – what did they get us?  Nowhere – in the larger sense, we’ve just marked time since 2008.  Oh, sure – we did “stop” the crash.  But we stopped it in mid-air; the crash still has to finish.  And now after devaluing our currency and piling up $4 trillion in additional debt, we’re going to get the rest of the crash we should have had three years ago.

Congratulations, Keynsians!  Heck of a job there, Barry!  All you’ve managed to do is make things worse.

Here Are the Palestinians

Mark Noonan17 Comments

Do you really want to know what the Palestinians are like?  Do you want to understand what sort of leadership there is?  What sort of public attitudes are encouraged?  Well, here ya go – from Palestinian Media Watch:

The Palestinian Authority chose the mother of 4 terrorist murderers, one of whom killed seven Israeli civilians and attempted to killed twelve others, as the person to launch their statehood campaign with the UN. In a widely publicized event, the PA had Latifa Abu Hmeid lead the procession to the UN offices in Ramallah and to hand over a letter for the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

The official PA daily reported that she launched the UN campaign last week, and noted that she is the “mother of seven prisoners and of the Shahid (Martyr) Abd Al-Mun’im Abu Hmeid.” However, the paper did not mention that 4 of her imprisoned sons are murderers…

These are the people the Israelis are supposed to make peace with?  This is an indication of a sincere desire to live in peace with Israel?

The reality is that the Palestinian leadership believes they will win it all, eventually.  From being an exiled terrorist group chased around the world by Mossad they have been allowed to become permanently domiciled in parts of the West Bank and in Gaza…who, 30 years ago, would ever have imagined this?  And, so, in their mind’s eye, where will they be 30 years from now?  So, naturally, they choose the mother of murderers to present their petition for UN recognition…using murder and mayhem has got them this far and there is every indication that more murder and mayhem will get them farther.

It is time to force these people to be reasonable…give them a week to declare, in Arabic in letters delivered to every single Palestinian, that they recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, that they renounce the “right of return” and that Jerusalem is the undivided capitol of Israel…and if they don’t do it, announce that for each week they don’t, 1% of currently occupied West Bank land will forever be denied them.  And if they do go 100 weeks refusing, then start taking 1% of the land they current own, week by week, until they agree.  And if 200 weeks go by and they still don’t agree, then start kicking them out of the West Bank and Gaza and transferring them to Sinai and Jordan.

I know, harsh – but how are we to reach those who choose the mother of murderers as their symbol?  Someone name for me anything the Palestinians have said or done which indicates a sincere desire for peace.   We have to force it out of them by letting them know they are beaten and that their future, as a people in the West Bank and Gaza, can only come about via cooperation with the Israelis.  Or we can just drift along and let them, murder by murder, slowly take over the whole of Israel.

The Obama Plan: Raise Taxes and Fake Spending Cuts

Mark Noonan52 Comments

From the AP:

…The president on Monday will announce a proposal that includes repeal of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, nearly $250 billion in reductions in Medicare spending, $330 billion in cuts in other mandatory benefit programs, and savings of $1 trillion from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said…

…Key features of the proposal:

–$1.5 trillion in new revenue, which would include about $800 billion realized over 10 years from repealing the Bush-era tax rates for couples making more than $250,000. It also would place limits on deductions for wealthy filers and end certain corporate loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies.

–$580 billion in cuts in mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion in Medicare and $72 billion in Medicaid and other health programs. Other mandatory benefit programs include farm subsidies.

–$430 billion in savings from lower interest payment on the national debt…

According to the linked article, 90% of the Medicare cuts will be in the form of reduced payments to providers – and while beneficiaries are expected to pay more, they won’t pay until 2017…in other words, not until after Obama finishes his putative 2nd term.  How much you want to bet that once the providers scream – and/or start refusing Medicare cases – that the cuts never materialize?

A trillion dollars of the “cuts” are from not fighting in Afghanistan…in other words, not money already appropriated and now cut, but a mythical figure placed on the table bearing no relation to what might actually happen in Afghanistan.

Lower interest payments on the national debt?  Fine – that’ll work until we hit 16 or 17 trillion in debt and our bond prices go “Greek” on us.

This proposal is nothing but a crock of political horse manure.  For cynicism it is hard to beat. We’re on the brink of economic and fiscal disaster and Obama comes up with a plan which doesn’t fix the budget and doesn’t help the economy.  All it does is provide him with some MSM/DNC talking points in his effort to make the 2012 campaign about Congress rather than himself (the tax hikes won’t fly and the spending cuts will be resisted by his own party…so when the plan fails to pass, Obama can say, “I tried to do it, but those dratted  Republicans stopped me!”).  The United States can go drop off a cliff…Obama has more important things to do, like getting re-elected!

2012 really can’t get here fast enough…and it won’t work, Barry.  We’re all on to the scam.  Twist things as much as you like – go ahead and go through your motions.  We’re still going to crush you and liberalism next year.  We’ve all had enough of this garbage.

HAT TIP:  Mish’s

German Banks Need $175 Billion

Mark Noonan1 Comment

From Reuters:

Germany’s 10 biggest banks need 127 billion euros ($175 billion) of additional capital, German newspaper Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported, citing a study by economic research institute DIW.

The paper on Sunday cited Dorothea Schaefer, research director for financial markets at DIW, as saying the ratio of banks’ equity capital to balance sheet total needs to rise to at least 5 percent.

A source said this month that the International Monetary Fund has estimated European banks overall could face a capital shortfall of 200 billion euros…

And from what I’ve heard, German banks are the healthy ones…you get to France and Spain and you start to find banks with really bad finances.

Bail outs and free money and borrowing and printing…all to keep Greece from defaulting and thus spinning the Eurozone down to destruction.  And what has it all accomplished?  Greece is still going to default (in a real sense, Greece already has…but the official announcement hasn’t been made by the Ruling Class, therefor the MSM doesn’t admit it, either) and once-stable economies – like Germany’s – are also being ruined.  All they did was throw good money after bad…it would have been better if Greece had defaulted two years ago.  Just as it would have been better if back in 2008 no one had stepped in to “save” the global financial system.  Sure, it stopped a Great Depression…but only for a little while.  We’re still going to get one.

It would be the irony of ironies if Germany’s financial plight proved the final trigger for the collapse.  The Germans – with long memories of pre-WWII financial troubles – kept their financial house in order.  To be sure, Germany’s welfare State is just as unsustainable as any in Europe, but at least the German’s had a handle on it…and Germans remain highly productive workers so they are at least generating wealth to pay their bills.  Not so in the rest of Europe…elsewhere, you do have the welfare State (often more generous than Germany’s) but without anyone willing to do any hard work, at all.  Now Germany threw her weight behind the irresponsible European Union members and will pay a price for being generous rather than realistic. The really bad news is that if Europe does fall apart, I bet dollars to donuts that the lazy parts of Europe will blame Germany…welfare bums don’t like it when the spigot is cut off and they tend to blame those who hold down a job.

HAT TIP:  Mish’s