Tag Archives: morality

Progressive Cooperation and the Fiscal Cliff

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In last weekend’s interview with NBC‘s “Meet the Press,” President Barack Obama said this with a straight face, according to The Wall Street Journal:

Singling out the two GOP legislative leaders, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Mr [Mitch] McConnell of Kentucky, the president added that “Congress has not been able to get this stuff done.” The reason, he said, is “not because Democrats in Congress don’t want to go ahead and cooperate, but because I think it’s been very hard for Speaker Boehner and Republican leader McConnell to accept the fact that taxes on the wealthiest Americans should go up a little bit, as part of an overall deficit reduction package.”

Really?  Based on what theory must “taxes on the wealthiest Americans…go up a little bit?”  The revenues collected won’t amount to walking around money compared to your budget deficits.

Democrats want to cooperate?  What was the Senate vote on the fiscal cliff spending solution (albeit for only six months) which the House passed last September?

What were the vote outcomes on the Federal budgets the House passed each of the last two years?

What were the Senate votes on any of the 40, or so, jobs-related bills passed by the House and sent up to the Senate in this Congressional session?

What were the deficits contained in your own budget proposals which you sent to Congress in each of the last three years?  Oh, wait—most of the Democrats (yourself, only, excluded) did cooperate on these: you couldn’t even get a single vote, Democrat or Republican, on any of those “budgets.”

Where are your Democrats on entitlement reform or on spending cuts—real ones, now, not reductions in growth rates that you masquerade as cuts, to occur some time in a nebulous future?

What was it you threatened to do in your 2013 inaugural and State of the Union speeches if you don’t get your way on taxes?  Oh, yeah.  You said

[you] would use [your] inaugural address and [your] State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

You berate Republicans for acting against 98% of Americans by holding out for no tax increase on the remaining 2%.  Yet you’re ready—anxious—to blow up our economy and gravely harm honest, hard-working Americans because, having already gotten 98% of what you claim you want, You’re greedy and want more.  Where’s your cooperation?

Where is any Democrat’s cooperation, Mr Obama?  You’ve offered no evidence to support your assertion.

NLMSM Strikes Again

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Just two days before Christmas last week, The Journal News kindly advised all readers of the locations of gun owners, and of the locations of their unarmed neighbors, in the two New York counties of Westchester and Rockland.  The JN‘s Putnam County outing is pending.

They write, with an absolutely straight face, in justification of this invasion of privacy:

Anyone can find out the names and addresses of handgun owners in any county with a simple Freedom of Information Law request….

So they thought they’d do the home robbers, second-story men, and leftist anti-gun kooks a civic favor by outing these private citizens themselves, and save those others the trouble.

The good citizens of New York know better, and they object to this arrogant abuse of journalistic”…practice.

One objected:

Do you fools realize that you also made a map for criminals to use to find homes to rob that have no guns in them to protect themselves?

Another

You have just destroyed the privacy of these law abiding citizens and by releasing this list, you have equated them to that of sex offenders and murders.

And another:

These are law abiding gun owners, they are no danger to anyone except for criminals.  And with this information you have made them targets for both criminals and anti gun lobbyist who i am sure are going to treat them like monsters.

And another:

Tom King, president of the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, said the release of additional pistol-permit information [beyond the currently releasable name and address] would endanger gun owners, some of whom have valuable collections of weapons.

You’re giving a shopping list to criminals.  Does it matter if you own 47 guns or you own one gun?  Everybody likes to think that someone who has all of these guns is evil, that there’s some nefarious reason they have all these guns.  There are collectors.

And another:

Paul Piperato, the Rockland county clerk, said he’s always uneasy providing it.

You have judges, policemen, retired policemen, FBI agents—they have permits.  Once you allow the public to see where they live, that puts them in harm’s way.

Only a fool thinks judges and law enforcement personnel don’t have a plethora of enemies.

And there’s the hysteria and illogic of the anti-gun folks.  Jackie Hilly, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Executive Director, insists

You don’t have more success with more guns.  You certainly don’t want our schools turned into armed camps.

Never mind that armed guards, or teachers or school staff trained and armed, don’t make the schools “armed camps.”  This is just an hysterical exaggeration.

Never mind that, presently, we give more protection to our banks and the money therein than we do our children.

Never mind that when the bad man comes and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.  Absent an armed presence at the scene of the murders, the killing just goes on until the police can, finally, get there.

Never mind, even, that guns are not involved at all in one-third of mass killings.

The Journal News, though, in all of its wide-eyed innocence, is careful to point out that their reporter

Dwight R. Worley owns a Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum and has had a residence permit in New York City for that weapon since February 2011.

But his dot isn’t on the map of gun owners and of unarmed homes that the NJ so kindly published.  Oh, wait—Worley isn’t in the counties he outed; he’s in NYC.  How convenient.

Merry Christmas

The Obama Fiscal Cliff

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Here is a table of the effects of the Obama tax increases that will follow from President Barack Obama’s drive to put us all over the fiscal cliff.  The data are compiled from a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Category

Income

Post-Cliff Tax Rate

Tax Rate Increase from Pre-Cliff

Tax Dollar Increase from Pre-Cliff

Remarks
Unemployed Person Under $10,000 8.4% 55% $159
College Student $10,000-$20,000 7.5% 38% $308
Lower-Income Working Couple $20,000 – $30,000 5.5% 9,809% $1,423 From $15 refund to $1,423 tax payment—loss of Bush tax cut 10% bracket
Retiree Household $30,000 – $40,000 5.1% 42% $540
Higher-Income Professional $150,000 25% 25% $6,662 This also represents just under 25% of the total increase from the Obama tax hike
High-Income Couple $350,000 29% 20% $13,847 Loss of the AMT and higher dividend and cap gains taxes
Very High Income Households $1,000,000+ 39.7% 24% $254,637 Total share income taxes paid by these earners actually goes down due to the disparate impact of the Obama tax increase on the lower incomes

Obama’s Plan B desire for going over the fiscal cliff is going to hurt the least among us—the antithesis of our country’s Judeo-Christian imperative—and it makes his Evil Rich relatively better off.

Mass Shootings

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In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, school massacre, there’s been a push to reapply a ban on “assault” weapons—whatever those are; not even the military has any such.  The term is purely legalist, cooked up in the back halls of Congress, and subject to change with the winds of political convenience.

One of the excuses used for this foolishness is one that Peekskill Mayor Mary Foster repeats:

We have seen a proliferation of these tragedies after the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004.  We cannot allow this to continue.

Let’s look at some actual facts.  The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel published some of those just last August.  The graph below is built from their data, which cover roughly 35 years—from 1976 through 2010.

Note:   Mass shooting defined by the FBI as the shooter killing four or more people in a single incident (not including the himself), and typically in a single location.  Data compiled from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program by James Alan Fox, criminology professor at Northeastern University; US Census Bureau; Journal Sentinel research

Hmm….  Pop quiz time, and no peeking below: who can identify from this graph the period of effectivity of the “assault” weapon ban?

I didn’t think so.

The ban ran from 1994-2004.  The incident rate during that period is the same as the rates both before and after.  The number of victims per incident varies wildly—but is unchanged, in average or variability, over the same three periods.

Maybe it would be better for concerned communities to put trained, armed guards on duty in locations where there are masses of people—like schools and shopping malls, maybe.

Maybe it would be better for folks sitting in leadership positions—like, say, Mayor Foster—to think with their brains, rather than their emotions, and to consult some actual data.

Good Faith Negotiations

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Here’s another example of good faith, Progressive style.  This occurred in the failed fiscal cliff “negotiations:”

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr Boehner told the president, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table.  What do I get for that?”

“You get nothing,” the president said.  “I get that for free.”

It’s certainly true that a number of chuckleheads, as one Republican participant called them, let themselves be confused into thinking that voting to preserve the present tax rates for 99.8% of Americans was the same as voting for a tax increase—even though the Great Grover Norquist had given permission for such a vote.

But the fact is, that President Barack Obama has been discussing in bad faith all along: he wants the cliff.  With the cliff, he gets tax rate increases all across the board, he gets to gut Defense spending, and he gets to blame Republicans for the economic and security disaster that will result—all Progressive dreams.  And that blame is as important to Obama’s ego as are the tax increases and the Defense cuts.

It is unfortunate that the GOP has chosen to be complicit in this shameful affair, but there it is.  They’ve emasculated themselves with an idiotic civil war, and they’ve rendered themselves impotent for the next two years.  Look for the Progressives to retain control of the Senate and regain control of the House in 2014, and to retain the White House in 2016.

Had the Republicans been able to pass Plan B in the House, those chuckleheads would have achieved three things: they would have voted for the present tax rates for nearly all Americans, they would have put the onus on the Progressives—as Speaker of the House John Boehnor (R, OH) put it

[T]he president will have a decision to make.  He can call on the Senate Democrats to pass that bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history

—to come up with an honest counterproposal.  And put the failure of the negotiations squarely on the shoulders of the Progressives in the Senate and the White House.

Now, Republicans don’t have anything at all for the debt ceiling debate other than an understanding of how to fail.

Congratulations, guys.