Category Archives: Open Thread
After spending two days at the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street campout, I have yet to encounter anybody with a serious platform, or to glean any coherent sense of why they are there. The terminal vagueness which is the hallmark of the demonstration was best articulated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in 2004’s Team America, in which a disgruntled and effusive Tim Robbins puppet complains that, “the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money.” This is a sentiment I have heard repeatedly from attendees, almost verbatim. It is always accompanied by derisive gestures toward the skyscrapers towering overhead, whose construction, I am informed without irony by the union members who have now got in on the action, is a source of well-paying union jobs.
If you put a floor at their current marginal tax rate of 35%, the government would obtain $37 billion more dollars. That might sound like a lot, but it amounts to just 2.5% of the 2009 $1.5 trillion deficit (which is the red line shown). If you increase the floor to the pre-Bush-tax-cut marginal rate of 39.6%, the additional revenue grows a bit — to $66 billion, or 4.5% of the year’s deficit.
Conservatives traditionally resist government intrusion into the home and personal lives of American citizens: Liberals tend to welcome the guiding hand of government into every facet of modern life. This is one of the fundamental differences between Liberalism and Conservatism. During the GOP Debate, Rep. Bachman called Governor Perry on his issuance of an executive order in 2007, requiring all girls in Texas to receive Gardasil unless a waiver was signed by her parents. Gardasil by Merck, prevents infection of the more common strains of human papilloma virus. These particular viruses, once established, can initiate http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/277093/gardasil-and-gop-henry-i-miller, as well as cervical, anal, vulvar, and vaginal cancers. The vaccine Gardasil prevents the infection and consequently prevents the associated diseases.
Earlier today, a few of us Tea Party “sons of bitches” decided to call on the “debunked” progressive propagandists at Media Matters for America (MMFA) to ask them to produce their latest IRS 990 form–the tax document that non-profit organizations are required to file annually with the IRS to maintain their tax-free status.
Unlike other tax-exempt organizations that make their latest IRS filings easily available at their own websites (such as the Media Research Center, for example), MMFA apparently wants the public to find that information for itself. Since the most recent available IRS 990 filing from MMFA covers 2009, we decided to see if they had any more recent information to provide us.
This should be Obama’s Dukakis Tank moment, when pure bravado exposed the very perception of weakness the candidate hoped to overcome.
Is there anything worse than a candidate who tries so hard to be something he is not, to fake it so hard that it hurts to watch?
Apparently, Pres. Obama’s bus has detoured for a town hall in the Land of Oz:
“I don’t think we’re in danger of another recession, but we are in danger of not having a recovery that’s fast enough to deal with a genuine unemployment crisis for a whole lot of folks out there,” Mr. Obama told CBS News Senior Business Correspondent Anthony Mason. “And that’s why we need to be doing more.”
President Barack Obama’s campaign expects to raise tens of millions of dollars less this summer than it did in the spring because negotiations over the nation’s debt limit forced Obama to cancel several fundraisers.
“I’m the Senate majority leader — why don’t I know about this deal?” Reid demanded as soon as the budget director walked into the historic Mansfield Room for a meeting with Senate Democrats, according to a lawmaker who witnessed the exchange.
Ryan vs. Obama….KO in the first.
Obama wants to bring this to the American people so he wouldn’t be afraid to debate someone like Ryan right?
Has Obama ever given a bravura performance at a press conference? No wonder he goes three months or so without doing them.
Today he mentioned a tax break for corporate jets six times. He didn’t mention that he signed legislation preserving the tax code provision into law, or that the grand total of the savings of ending that tax break would be about $3 billion over ten years.
