Jerusalem is in Israel

Mark Noonan30 Comments

In spite of what some might want us to believe – from Jewish Journal:

Jerusalem: To be or not to be part of Israel. That’s the question that White House administrations have tiptoed around for decades.

The State Department neither recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital nor views the eastern part of the city—captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently annexed—as part of Israel. But Congress passed a law in 2002 that effectively recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Presidents have been caught in the middle, cautiously balancing their pro-Israel rhetoric against longstanding U.S. policy.

That’s exactly where the Obama administration found itself last week after news reports revealed that the White House quietly had removed all references to Jerusalem as being part of Israel from a collection of photos on its website…

It is amazingly cowardly of us to not just recognize historic and current reality – Jerusalem is the capitol of Israel.  To all intents and purposes, it always has been and always will be.  Its been 44 years since the Israelis liberated the eastern section of Jerusalem from Moslem misrule and it is high time we just bit the bullet and did the right thing.

But we can’t do that!  It would offend Islam!  Yeah, and our failure to recognize Jerusalem as part of Israel has won us just so many friend in the Moslem world, right?  Get real – there is nothing we can do to make them hate us any more than they already do, while a course of forthright action will at least instruct them that we are people of courage and not to be trifled with.  Recognize the Israeli liberation of Jerusalem..and throw in the Golan for good measure.  Time to end this silliness and start acting like we’ve got a backbone.

Liberal Proposes to Finish Off Los Angeles

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Bankrupt?  Municipal services decaying?  Everyone who can leave moving out as fast as they can?  Then here’s your liberal solution…raise taxes!  From Bloomberg:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chief of California’s largest city, called for sweeping changes in Proposition 13, the nucleus of the nation’s anti-tax movement.

The state’s perennial budget crises could be eased by as much as $8 billion a year by removing Proposition 13’s limits on tax assessments for commercial property, Villaraigosa said in a speech to the Sacramento Press Club today. He also urged new taxes on services such as legal representation that he said might yield as much as $28 billion a year…

In the “give credit where it is due” spirit, I have to say I agree with the proposal to tax legal services.  It would be the most effective means of killing of liberalism’s most effective means of gaining power.  They use lawyers to subvert America day in and day out – lay a 90% tax on legal fees, and that will come to a screeching halt.  Of course, given that trial lawyers are a mainstay of Democrat fund raising, you can expect such a proposal to go nowhere…but, it is still a good idea, and we should think about putting it in the GOP platform along with the “wealth tax”.

Aside from that, Villaraigosa’s proposals are just economic suicide.  Los Angeles and California are suffering from the inability of Californian’s to create wealth.  The block to such creation is California’s insanely burdensome tax and regulatory environment…Villaraigosa proposes to increase the burden.  And he wants to do it in lieu of cutting back the worthless, wealth-destroying California bureaucracy.

I guess they just don’t learn – from Obama right on down to mayors like Villaraigosa:  all liberals can ever think to do in a crisis is raise taxes and keep spending.  We have the answer for that – and we’ll give it November next year.

Warren Buffett Wants His Taxes Raised

Mark Noonan114 Comments

From the New York Times:

…Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot…

First off, Warren, if you really want to kick in a bit extra, then why did you have your team of lawyers and accountants (I’m sure you’ve got them) work the system so that you only paid an effective tax rate of 17.4%?  It is no problem for you to pay more – just take fewer deductions.  Or, if you want, just cut a billion dollar check to Uncle Sam.

Of course you won’t do that – not for you to just step up to the plate.  That wouldn’t advance your true cause here…keeping Big Government going through a round of tax hikes which might, indeed, take a little more from your annual income, but which will mostly hit people of far less wealth than you.  Because, dear Warren, you know better than most the truth…for all the billions you have, your wealth is chump change compared to the hundreds of billions held in smaller amounts by the people who make 200k or more per year.

Liberal financial sharks, like Buffett, thrive in a system of fiat money, government-subsidized debt and Big Government graft.  If that system comes to an end – via bankruptcy – then the Buffett’s of the world might have to get a real job.  You know, produce actual wealth  in order to make money.  The thought is too horrifying to contemplate.  So, rather than see their milch cow go down, they write Op-Eds in the New York Times which will then be cited by liberals as justification for higher taxes:  “see, even someone as rich as Warren Buffett wants a tax hike!”.   Sorry, Warren – too bad, liberals:  we’re on to the scam.

I propose a way to test this willingness of Buffett and other bazillionaire liberals to pay taxes.  Rather than hiking income taxes, why don’t we tax wealth?  I propose a 5% tax on all wealth in excess of $5 million.  Total it up for us, Warren – how rich are you?  Forbes says you’re worth $45 billion.  This means we want $2.25 billion from you next year.  And the year after.  You’d better hope your investments hold up, huh?  I know you were hoping for a “soak the middle class” tax hike which also might have cost you a measly million or two more per year (easily made up, of course, by some bit of sharp financial practice elsewhere), but I want to really tax the rich…I want a couple billion dollars from you.  Every year.  You do that, and I’ll agree to a general income tax hike.

Cross Posted:  Noonan for Nevada

Obama Feels the Heat

Mark Noonan9 Comments

From Obama’s Magical Misery Tour:

 

Yesterday, at work, I took a call from a customer and after relatively quickly disposing of the issue at hand, I was treated to a 30 minute lecture on how Obama is ruining our nation.  I, naturally, could not comment on this – as an official representative of my employer, it was not for me to engage in partisan politics, regardless of my personal views.  So, I just kind of let it wash over me and after the customer had got it off the chest, I ended the call.  This wasn’t the first such unsolicited anti-Obama rhetoric I had received.

I don’t think in all my life I’ve ever come across a President who has so greatly angered so many.  While there are those who still worship at the shopworn altar of The One, the bulk of the people can be classed two ways – those who have tuned Obama out, and those who are going to crawl across broken glass on their knees to eject him from office next year.

In this, the massive build up of Obama during the 2008 campaign – which Obama gleefully joined in (remember, the seas were going to start to recede?) – has boomeranged on the President.  He was sold to the public as the answer to all our hopes and dreams – the cure for all that ailed us.  It was an impossible standard to measure up to…and Obama’s problem is not just that he didn’t measure up to the hype (really, the lies…everyone who pumped him up in 2008 knew darn well he wasn’t what they claimed), but that he didn’t even come close.  In addition to this broken dream there is also the growing public perception that Obama has nothing but contempt for the American people (in this I think the majority is mistaken…he doesn’t know enough about us to have contempt for us; he appears just plain and simple ignorant of how life in America outside the government/academic bubble is lived).  It makes for a poisonous stew…and it is reflected in Obama’s cratering approval rating.

In sum, Obama is in deep political trouble, and I don’t know how he gets out of it.  We’ll see what he does – and what the GOP does.

Poll: GOP Holds 7 Point Lead in “Generic” Ballot

Mark Noonan15 Comments

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, while 37% would choose the Democrat instead. The GOP’s lead is up five points from a week ago, the first full week survey since Congress and the president agreed on a spending cuts deal to raise the federal debt ceiling. Last week’s two-point gap was the narrowest lead Republicans had held since mid-May.

Republicans have led on the Generic Congressional Ballot every week since June 2009, leading by as much as 12 points and as little as two…

Liberals were happy with a Gallup poll of adults last week showing a 7 point Democrat lead…but a poll of likely voters is always better, and from what I can tell the Gallup sample was heavily over-weighted for Democrats.  Got to keep one thing in mind as we approach the House contest in 2012:  if the Democrats win, it means Nancy Pelosi is back in the Speaker’s chair…this will always motivate GOPers and GOP-leaners and discourage Democrats and Democrat-leaners.  And this is over and above the advantage the GOP will gain out of re-districting…people just don’t like Nancy Pelosi and other than corrupt hacks and fools, no one wants her holding the gavel, again.

Additionally, this poll continues to show something astounding – a long-term GOP lead in voter support on the Congressional level.  In all my life, I’ve never seen anything like it.  I put it entirely down to just how much TEA Party is injected in to the GOP…the more TEA, the more support.  The only thing which could really ensure a GOP Congressional loss next year is if we ditched the TEA Party.  Always remember that the Democrats want the GOP to break with the TEA Party because the Democrat leaders know that the TEA Party is where the GOP strength is.  Pelosi and Reid want more Specter, less Rubio…and which do you think will propel the GOP to victory?

That all said, don’t get cocky, GOPers…we’ve a long, hard fight in front of us and we have to be fully prepared if the Democrats choose to lie, cheat and steal their way to victory.  Ready to counter it, ready to overcome the pain and anger we’ll feel when they dump the refuse on us.  Get ready for the political fight of your life – something you’ll tell your grand children about.

Financial Crash, The Sequel

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From Gonzalo Lira over at Zero Hedge:

…Now, I used to write for the movies—I can tell you the secret to writing a good sequel: Use the exact same elements, the exact same story structure—hell, even use the exact same lines!—but make sure the sequel is bigger: Bigger sets, bigger explosions, bigger stars, bigger everything—a bigger bang for the buck.

2011’s The Sequel is certainly going to deliver that bigger bang—because it’s a lot bigger than 2008: The total sovereign debt of the PIIGS is about €3.1 trillion. That’s 20% of the eurozone’s GDP—just the PIIGS, just those five, forget about France, Belgium and the UK, which if added up easily doubles that €3.1 trillion figure.

Compare that to 2008, when the total toxic assets the Federal Reserve wound up having to buy amounted to about $1.5 trillion—about 11.5% of the U.S.’s 2008 GDP.

In other words, the current situation is over twice what 2008 was—and might wind up being four times the 2008 price tag. And that’s just the nominal value of the toxic debt at the core of the current situation. We have no idea what the total value of the indirect exposure via derivatives is going to add up to.

So! We’ve seen that we’re structurally at the same place we were in 2008: Unpayable debts held by a fragile financial sector, with massive indirect exposure by way of derivatives that no one has bothered to tally up and regulate.

We have furthermore seen that—like all good sequels—2011 is going to have a bigger bang: We currently have more debts on deck than in 2008, at least twice as much, as a matter of fact…

Do read the whole  thing – Lira is figuring September/October for the big meltdown, perhaps triggered by a major bank failure in the Eurozone.  Doesn’t matter what the trigger is of course…the fact is that the crash is already all set to go, it just takes an unmistakable exposure of just how bad it all is for the next financial crash to bury the world under a mountain of bankruptcies.  As I keep saying, there is too much debt in the world to be paid back…its not a matter of if we’ll crash, but of when.

 

Liberalism’s Pervasive Racism

Mark Noonan76 Comments

They just can’t stop gnawing that bone – from the Washington Post:

With House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) announcement Thursday of her three appointees to the bipartisan debt “supercommittee,” the panel’s 12-member roster is complete. It represents a broad range of ideological views, from House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) on the right to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on the left.

But the group’s membership is marked by a problem that has plagued Congress — a lack of gender and racial diversity…

This just gets so tiresome – it doesn’t matter what a person’s sex or skin color is – all that matters is what they believe and what they do.  I wouldn’t care if the entire panel was made up of differently-abled trans-gendered persons of color…as long as they were patriots who had America’s best interests at heart.  The problem is not a lack of sex and skin color differences, but the fact that the liberal members of the panel – black, while, male and female – are rigid, left wing ideologues who only care about getting Obama and the rest of the Democrats re-elected.

This liberal racism just goes too far these days…everything is based upon skin color or sexual identity.  No one is allowed to broaden their mind and look at things from a different point of view.  We’re to have the “black view” or the “woman view” or the whatever view…no way that I, as a white man, can look with sympathy upon a black man, no way that he can do the same for me.

Utter rot – complete racist nonsense.  Way past time to end this sort of garbage.  America no longer has any place for people to play racial politics…and that is another thing we’re going to have to fight to end through the 2012 campaign.

Out and About on a Monday Morning

Mark Noonan33 Comments

War in Libya Update:  It is still going on, you know?  Oh, you forgot?  Good:  that is just what Obama wanted you to do.

Associate Press report:  China’s policy of slaughtering unborn children is good!  No, really, since a lot of kids are being killed, those who manage to survive have more money spent on them!  So, let’s go kill even more and make the world a better place…

Bachmann would re-instate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Gloom and Doom Update:  Eurozone is doomed.  No, not just Greece, but also Italy…and then France.  It’s not just me, boys and girls – lots of people are seeing the end of the current global financial system.

Hitchens on the London riots putting blame squarely where it belongs – on our Ruling Class which has made a hash of everything.

Rasmussen:  people still think Obama sucks.

Harry Reid:  the TEA Party will fade away.  Yep sure will…as soon as Harry and the rest of liberalism is on the ash heap of history.

DNC Chief: Obama Doing Just Swell

Mark Noonan7 Comments

From The Hill:

President Obama’s reelection effort is in “remarkably good shape,” the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) asserted on Sunday.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), the DNC chief, said that she doesn’t think the president’s bid for a second term is in trouble…

Uh, yeah – whatever:

HAT TIP:  Gateway Pundit

More Guns, Less Crime

Mark Noonan12 Comments

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Virginia’s bars and restaurants did not turn into shooting galleries as some had feared during the first year of a new state law that allows patrons with permits to carry concealed guns into alcohol-serving businesses, a Richmond Times-Dispatch analysis found.

The number of major crimes involving firearms at bars and restaurants statewide declined 5.2 percent from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, compared with the fiscal year before the law went into effect, according to crime data compiled by Virginia State Police at the newspaper’s request.

And overall, the crimes that occurred during the law’s first year were relatively minor, and few of the incidents appeared to involve gun owners with concealed-carry permits, the analysis found…

An armed population is a free and safe population – also, a more well-mannered population.  This is just natural.  If we’re armed, we can’t just be oppressed at will.  If we’re armed, criminals think twice about committing crimes.  If we’re armed, everyone minds their manners because they’d rather not accidentally insult someone who is carrying a gun.  Neatly stated by John Wayne in The Shootist:

I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.

In the end there are only two types of people who don’t want an armed population – people who just don’t understand freedom and tyrants.